Do you know who Nicole Eisenman is? I didn’t until this weekend. I got another gift of a Sunday, and was able to do an hour of uninterrupted reading on the couch while listening to music. I chose to make my way through the March 1st issue of The New Yorker, and landed on a profile on the artist/painter/sculptor Nicole Eisenman. I do give a great deal of credit to the article’s writer, Ian Parker, for doing a great job of making visual art come to life through the written word. Not an easy task.
There are many great parts to the piece, sharing how Eisenman works, and has survived and flourished as an artists in NYC. One part of the article that really struck me was Nicole speaking about how in college, after she came out to her parents, her father, who is a psychiatrist and believed that being gay was a mental disease, would write her long letters trying to dissuade her from being a lesbian, to “save her.” It struck as so depressing and heartbreaking. Her parents not accepting her for who she is bad enough, but to think when she would receive mail from her dad, it was just a dense letter to say how awful she was. I can’t imagine what that does to one’s self esteem, and how hard it must have been to move past that.
The other thing that struck me about Nicole Eisenman, was how she moved between different forms of expression. Painting is clearly her main focus, but she is also a sculptor. Then if you pay attention and read between the lines, you learn that she was a DJ for a good bit of time, and blogged, and Nicole refers to many cartoons she has drawn in sketchbooks. She struck me as a person who is continually looking for ways to express, and share, and try new ideas. I admire her ability to stay in creative motion, which now I feel bad that I didn’t know of her before.
