© 2003 by Stephanie Lee Jackson

    About twelve years ago, in San Francisco, I ran into my friend Joél Bradley on the bus.  Joél, who stands five feet tall, was wearing a pumpkin-colored hat twice as big as her head, with a baseball-style brim and a balloon-shaped pouf that increased her height by about a foot and a half.  Serene and garrulous under the hat, she chattered merrily on for the duration of the bus ride, I forget about what.  The thing that impressed me, which has stayed with me all these years, is that she had obviously been wearing the hat ALL DAY.  I tell you, it was orange, that hat, it was poufy, it was unlike any hat I’ve seen before or since, and she had been managing an entire department all day in it and was wearing it home.  Do you know what I mean?  It wasn’t wearing her.

    Once, during a critique in a painting seminar at the San Francisco Art Institute, I used the word “brilliant,” and was immediately pilloried.  (The work of art I was referring to was not the one being critiqued, which may have been part of the problem.)  Seemingly as one, the P.C. police descended.  “What does THAT mean?!!!  There’s no such thing!  I don’t believe in genius!  That’s so elitist, oppressive, fascist, reactionary, my God don’t get me started.  What do you MEAN by ‘brilliant’?  Please.”

    Well, I told them what I meant by ‘brilliant.’  I told them about this guy I used to go to college with, Chris Ware.  He drew comic strips.  He drew them every day--had a regular strip in the Daily Texan and a full-page color version on weekends.  He had an intimate knowledge of the history of comic strips, of obscure classic strips that only serious collectors know about anymore.  His drawing styles were varied and masterly; he experimented with form, with philosophy, with space and time and the dark side of the human soul.  He invented vast intricate landscapes with his pen, abandoned houses mapping the human psyche, drew characters that were sad and zany and pathetic and true, wrote reams of satirical copy that only an obsessive would read, in a dead-on parody of penny-comic-book style.  Not only that, but he made art based upon his comic strips--kinetic toys, dolls, huge paintings, installations, 8 mm film strips--once he spent an entire semester building a gigantic wooden doll house, a replica of the house in the strip.  Watching him, reading the strips, I used to think he had some deeper plan which would be revealed in a final, orgasmic, end-of-the-year spread; finally I realized that this wasn’t the case.  He just did it.  He just put down, daily, whatever came. 

    “THAT’S what I mean by ‘brilliant,’” I told my seminar, which had been critiquing a couple of paintings that portrayed, somewhat vaguely, Charlie Brown and Donald Duck.  “I don’t mean to put these down, I’m just having trouble taking them seriously.”

    “Oh,” said the seminar, and changed the subject.  Chris Ware was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.  My feeling was, about frickin’ time.

installation detail, Libby Pace, 2003

    As a healer who is also an artist, and an artist who is also a healer, I walk a thin line.  I became a healer because of a generalized, unconditional love of humanity which channels itself through my hands while I am working.  And I am passionate about art; I take its power very seriously.  I believe that such a thing as greatness exists.  It is not so much produced or analyzed, as apprehended.  Greatness will knock you down, shake you to the soul, make you cry, laugh hysterically, change your religion.  To deny greatness is to put art at the service of the ego.  To deny greatness is to trivialize the human spirit, to try to make all human endeavor equal, and equally worthless.

    On the other hand, I believe that all human beings have greatness in them; it’s just that we all shine in different media.  Joél Bradley used to say that she was an artist without a medium.  On the day of the hat I realized that Joél’s medium is life; every moment with her is a seamless experience of performance art.  Her hat was brilliant because it expressed her core, casually, within her life rather than apart from it. 

    Healing, for me, is about wiping away the sludge that conceals the light at every person's core.  It is not about taking the sludge and elevating it to the status of High Art, which is why, with all due respect, ‘art therapy’ gives me hives.  But that’s another essay. 

    So, what’s all this about ‘Healing Arts?’  A guy I met at an opening, a hip freelance curator, told me, “Bad name.  Change the name right now.  Make it something ordinary, like ‘The Venue,’ so you don’t offend anybody.” 

“No, the name stays, I have a vision,” I said. 

“A vision, you mean like with God and angels and shit?” he asked. 

“Yes,” I declared, firmly. 

Another girl, Muire, chimed in, “I told my shrink that when I hear the angels whispering to me, I do what they tell me to do.  My shrink screamed, ‘you’re schizophrenic, you need serious medication, I can’t believe you said that,’ and on, and on.”

“I knew there was a reason I liked you,” I told her.

“I’ve gotta go,” said the hip freelance curator.

"Two of Three," Chris Smith Evans, 2002

Yes, I have a vision.  When I moved to New York, eager and unemployed, I went diligently in and out of galleries in Chelsea, Soho, the Village, the upper and lower East Sides, and Williamsburg, chatting with proprietors, taking notes, planning to start my own art magazine.  I went to galleries that were paying $10,000 a month in rent, had $45,000 price tags on their paintings, and generously provided one case of Rolling Rock beer to their patrons at the opening.  I eavesdropped on people with intelligent, thoughtful, character-worn faces, having unbelieveably fatuous conversations.  My incredulity crystallized upon seeing the Brice Marden show at Matthew Marks in the summer of 2002; two gigantic galleries, the size of half a football field each, full of ten-foot paintings depicting random, neutral, unexcited scribbles.  They had no color, no composition, no texture, no line quality, no resonance, no passion.  They were lame, lame, lame. 

This is ridiculous.  I walked into the room, gave one 360 degree turn, a deep sigh, and left again.  Most of the other gallery patrons seemed to be doing the same.  What is this about?  It’s not that we “don’t get it.”  I think we get it all too well, on some level--this is not about subtlety, wisdom or sophistication--it is about pure ego.  It is about ‘artists’ who do not bother to master a craft, ‘dealers’ who do not bother to learn to see, patrons who wait for somebody else to tell them what to think.  It is about critics who are so cowed and professionally neutral that they don’t call it for what it is.  It’s a scam which is unworthy of the name of art.

But there is great art out there, an avalanche of it.  I found it on the sidewalk in Soho, in the form of Chris Evans selling her small, simple, glowing paintings, bundled up in a muffler and bubbling with an irrepressible river of stories.  I found it in Libby Pace, who at the age of thirty-five is a master glass engraver, glassblower, versatile and disciplined installation artist, and who says things like, ‘a nerdy white guy with glasses is just not a professional ‘hey baby-er’,” in a charming Tennessee accent.  My old co-conspirator Kristin Calabrese took enough time off from painting her giant museum-quality paintings to curate an entire salon show and plot a room-sized installation.  In fact, I thought these people were out of my league, and here they are, working their tails off and spreading the name around.       

So, “Healing Arts,” as a name, sounds pretty kitschy.  It sounds like some boutique in Santa Fe with brightly colored pictures of Indian shamans on the walls, and crystals all over the place, and maybe a Keene Eyes painting of a little girl holding a butterfly.  Or, God help us, it sounds like an ‘art therapy’ center in California, with clay and finger paint all over the floors, and primal screams resonating in the halls.  Well, so be it.  Because “to heal” in its Latin root means “to make whole,” and in my energy and enthusiasm, my disgust and hubris and naïvete, that’s what I mean to do.  “Healing Arts,” as I see it, is not a spa with art on the walls, nor is it a gallery with massage therapy in the back room.  It is my attempt to bring all that light into a ball and let it blast into the heart and mind and body and soul.  It is the uncovering of love. 

"Blue City," Stephanie Lee Jackson, 2002