words to live by

To continue with this idea of developing a life practice, recently I spoke with the artist, illustrator and blogger Lisa Congdon. We chatted about how she approaches her life as a maker, her relationship to blogging, and coming to terms, publicly, with a history of anxiety, amongst other things:

Let's start with this idea of how you approach your work. You have both an illustration and art practice. Do you see a split between the two or do you consider them part of the same sensibility?

I think in general I approach them with the same sensibility—by that I mean that I try to approach all my work with the same sense of passion and wonder. I know that might sounds sort of syrupy but if I didn't, I'd be bored and unmotivated. I do try to infuse my own creative spark or personal aesthetic into everything I do. Sometimes it's hard because some of the illustration work I do is repetitive and not exciting or not what I would make if left to my own devices. So there is a tension between what I do for money and what I do for pure creative expression. I'm always trying to work that out. I think many illustrators struggle with this.

Lisa Congdon, Sunrise, 2011

I like the hand-drawn, personal and folk art aspects of your work and I’m wondering how you square this aesthetic with your subject matter? We’ve talked previously about how the singularity and the simplicity of your work can be real to yourself and strong in intention, even if sometimes it can be construed as feminine or used out of context.

Once someone told me my work was "cute"—and at that very moment my heart sank into my stomach. That is the last thing I am trying to convey. I actually think a lot of my work is rather dark and mysterious (at least my paintings and some of my drawings). I am certainly drawn to things that are perhaps feminine or sweet—folk pattern, textiles, flora and fauna, for example. I use lots of pink and soft colors in my work.

But that is not the whole of my work, obviously. There are many other dimensions. I am also drawn to the words of thinkers and writers and spend a lot of time hand lettering and sharing words that inspire me. Sometimes those quotes end up on "inspiration" blogs with other quotes (mostly in bad fonts laid out on sunrise photos).

So, yes, I am constantly walking this line of sweet and feminine, and that's hard for someone who doesn't want her work to come off that way, at least in any intentional way. In the end, I try to make work that speaks to me, and then put it out into the world. You can't really control what happens to it after that, how people perceive it, who your audience becomes. So you have to sort of let it go.

Lisa Congdon, Hand Lettered Quotes, 2012

Thinking specifically about the Hand Lettering pieces, what is it that draws you to these statements, which approximate the language of self-help and personal development? 

I have always been a seeker of wisdom and peace of mind. Maybe it's because I'm the kind of person who always feels just a little bit anxious or not quite grounded. Not in any extreme way—I'm just always feeling a little insecure about my life, my decisions, my path. Maybe we are all that way to a certain extent.

So looking for wisdom—about life, and love, and work, etc—is part of what keeps me as grounded as I am and gives me comfort. I began reading books and collecting inspirational sayings many years ago, some of an Eastern spiritual nature and some just from writers and thinkers I adore (Mary Oliver and Cheryl Strayed, for example). In 2011 I began a hand lettering practice in earnest, and much of what I chose to hand letter were statements (quotes or excerpts from poems) that I found comforting or challenged my preconceived notions about life—reminders for living a good life, being kind to yourself and others, taking risks, that kind of thing. I find them very helpful.

Lisa Congdon with Maria Popova, The Reconstuctionists, 2013

I’m interested in what the practice and process of making is to you. You came into a professional creative life late, but it seems that the act of making was something that you always had. How did you come to terms with your creative self?

Yes, I have been making things since I was a little girl. My mom is an artist, so I grew up in a home where making was always happening. My mother is 75 years old and she is still a working textile artist, showing and selling her work. So I've had a good influence.

That said, making (in any of its iterations) was never something I thought I was very good at or that I necessarily had the genes for, so I never pursued it as a young person. I remember when I started drawing in my mid-thirties, it was the first time in my life I drew, except when I was forced to in school. My sister, who had always been much more artistic than I had growing up (and who is also now a professional creative), said to me, "I always wonder where that comes from, that one day you can pick up a pen and just start drawing. Was that always inside of you? Or did it just appear?" I really don't know the answer to that question.

But what I do know is that once I started to draw and paint, I couldn't stop. Would that have happened earlier in life if I had been pushed or encouraged more? I am not sure. I think part of what drives my work is my life experience, so coming into it later is something I am actually grateful for.

Lisa Congdon's studio: the Inspiration Wall

At what point did you start self-identifying as an artist?

Only about eight years ago. I was about 37. I got my first show ever. A small and not prestigious gallery in Seattle contacted me. I had barely anything in my portfolio. My work was so crude at the time. I was still floundering and experimenting, I was so far from finding my voice or having much technical skill.

But somehow being asked to show my work made me feel like a legitimate artist, as opposed to a "hobby crafter" or something like that. Sometimes the cart has to come before the horse. I identified as an artist far before my work was solid or very sellable. But at the same time, if I had not gotten that gallery break and begun to identify as an artist, I may not have worked so hard to find my voice and solidify a body of work that would allow me to make a living from it.

Lisa Congdon, A Collection a Day, 2011

You have annual projects: collections, hand-lettering, The Reconstructionists, and I’m interested in these as an organizing principle/structure, but you have also talked about them in terms of personal projects and 'lets find out about me' (I love that idea).

I think because I am a seeker of wisdom, I learned early on that knowing yourself, pushing outside your comfort zone, trying new things, is enormously important (while often very scary). So for the past several years, I have been embarking on these yearly projects around areas of interest so that I could get better at something, learn more about something I was interested in, or share parts of my life with others.

I find the discipline of daily or weekly projects really great structure for my right-brained tendencies to procrastinate or daydream. Also, because my blog has a large readership and so there is built-on accountability, when I embark on a project and post it on the Internet, I know people are paying attention, and that leads me to follow through. Think about how often we try things and don't follow through! Daily, right? So when you follow through and create something every day or every week, it feels good.

Photo: Caroline Lee

One area that I’m currently interested in is life practice, or in your blog, “Life Outside the Studio”. Could you share a little of your experience with anxiety, and how you had built coping strategies for this, ways to relax into your life and even out that work life balance.

One of the things I write about, or have begun to come out about on my blog over the last year, is how I've dealt with anxiety since I was a kid. The "Life Outside the Studio" section of my blog is really just stories about my life that have little to do with my work, or are not directly about my work, per se (my work and life are so linked that it's hard to separate them). And so in that section I talk about stuff like managing my workload and my anxious tendencies, and I also talk about other things like my relationship, friendships, family, pets, adventures. I write about these things as a form of release or a way to get my head around them.

So in a way, the blog is a strategy for coping and relaxing into my life. For example, this past Spring I had a nervous breakdown because I had taken on too much work. I got to process that on my blog. I don't worry too much about who is reading it, because I do it mostly to make sense of what is happening in my life and the choices I make. My blog has become this place for me to be public about mistakes I've made or things I wish I'd done differently, and changes I want to make as a result. Right now my focus is on work life balance. My career as an illustrator took off two years ago and I have burned out. So the focus now is: How can I learn from that? How can I continue to do what I love for a living but also create space for relaxing and not working? Writing about that is really helpful.

Lisa Congdon, Hand Letter Quotes, 2012

What is the practice of blogging for you? We’ve talked about it in terms of diaries and discipline, but also of blogging as your 'happy place'.

Yes, my blog is like my little heaven. It's this place where I get to talk about stuff that is on my mind (and who doesn't like to do that?!?), what inspires me, my work, projects I've spent a lot of time on, my life, people I love. I don't have comments or advertisers on my blog so that I can keep it about what I want, stuff that is important to me, without worrying about anything else.

And finally, we ask everyone that we talk to for their well list: the films, books, people, websites, blogs, etc., that they look at, find useful and which have resonated with them in some way. What are yours? 

Favorite writers: Mary Oliver, Anne Lamott, Cheryl Strayed, Adrienne Rich, Pema Chodron.

Best books I've read lately: Tiny Beautiful Things, Lost Cat, The Wisdom of No Escape, Grace, Gone Girl

Favorite websites/blogs: The Equals Record, Brain Pickings, The Jealous Curator, Door Sixteen

it has to begin somewhere, why not here?

As what follows is an overly long interview, I’m going to start with a slightly short intro. Susan O’Malley is an artist based in the Bay Area and uses the materials and interactions of everyday life to create works invested with hope, optimism and humour.  She was formerly a Curator at San Jose's ICA. As you can see, I could speak to her for days.

Me: One of the reason’s I started Joe’s Daughter was because I was interested in the possibilities of applying curatorial thinking outside the conventional art world. Curating, for me, is a way of giving permission to look at the visual and written language of a subject, to be sensitive to, and sample from, the discussions that are around us, to work in a spirit of collaboration and creativity, and to problem-solve, create narratives and bring together people, information and things.

I always had an affinity with Harrell Fletcher’s approach to his own art practice. His comment that just calling himself an artist means he can make a territory of his own definition: ‘I make the structure and organize the project, but local participants fill in the content.’ I’m curious about whether you can operate in a similar way as a curator.

So I want to start this discussion with the idea of a shared brain! You and I are both curators who are in transition. You recently left the ICA, San Jose, where you worked in exhibitions, to become a professional artist. I recently left the Wattis Institute to work in a different context. And for me, this brings up the idea of how you square the curatorial side with your artistic side?

Photo: Daniel Garcia

Susan O’Malley: I’ve always been drawn to the contradictions and tension of holding together multiple identities: being part this and part that, shifting from one status to another, feeling caught in-between and never really at home in either.

I went to school in the late 90’s when programs in Identity Studies were just starting in major universities. I spent many hours wrestling with my identity as a Mexican Irish former Catholic woman who grew up in white suburbia. I resolved that I am all these things at once and also the gray area in between – which for me can be a place of great potential and energy.

But back to my curator-self and artist-self. These are two roles I play and have played and I imagine I draw from both of them in different ways in the endeavors I pursue. It hasn’t been until recently that I decided to really nurture and commit to my artist self. It needed my attention and I couldn’t ignore it anymore. For me, being an artist is about becoming and exploring the gray space. I imagine some curators are able to explore this territory in their curatorial work, but for me it makes more sense to call myself an artist in this pursuit.

Susan O'Malley, Inspirational Signs, 2012. Digital prints installed on billboard. ArtMoves Festival, Poland. Image Courtesy of Artist and Romer Young Gallery, SF 

We’re both moving into the territory of happiness, psychology, self-care, whatever we want to call it. I’m interested in this idea of how the art world does, or doesn’t, create a space for investigating the subjects of happiness, personal wellbeing, positive psychology, all subjects that could be seen as lesser to traditional art concerns and yet which seem to occupy a significant aspect of public and personal discussions. How do you approach this?

Artists have been making work about happiness, empathy, love, suffering etc. for a very long time – so I think the issue you bring up is more about the art world’s skepticism of the language and aesthetics surrounding self-help and happiness.

And it makes sense to be cautious of this territory – it’s a business that has been associated with quackery, frauds, and disingenuous people preying on the suffering of others. Here in Northern California we have remnants from the 60’s hippy culture that can be cringe-worthy. But I also think the anxiety is not just about that. I do think there is insecurity in investigating these concerns in Ivory Tower circles. Maybe it’s post-modern detachment. It’s easier to not care than care; and more fun to be critical than find solutions. There is pleasure and power in being above it all.

Exploring ideas about happiness, mindfulness, self-love feels right to me. I know I have to follow this road right now. I can’t concern myself too much about its status in the art world until it becomes necessary to push back at it.

Susan O'Malley,  A Healing Walk (This Beautiful Moment), 2013. One of nine wood signs installed along nature trail, Montalvo Arts Center. This project was supported by Lucas Artist Program at the Montalvo Arts Center. Image Courtesy of Artist and Romer Young Gallery, SF 

Which begs the question, how is it possible to occupy the space of happiness without inviting in the 'naffness' of it; to take seriously a subject that has connotations of fluff and can be associated with something essentially feminine.

It is possible to occupy the space of happiness seriously and relate it universally because it’s a timeless human pursuit. We do this by being honest and stupid and funny and loving and human.

Something else that we share is the personal narrative that threads through our work, and for both of us this can take the form of our mothers. Though Joe’s Daughter takes in many different things, at its core is a relationship between a mother and a daughter. In your own work, I am interested in pieces such as My Healing Garden is Green and One Minute Smile, in which you invite your mum into your artistic practice.  How did you mum respond to being part of your art works – the public and performative aspect of this?

To be honest, I don’t know how she feels about the public aspect of this project. I don’t have the kind of relationship with my mom where we unpack the meaning of things or go into the details of our feelings – it’s far more intuitive and unspoken. And she is my mom, and I know her deepest wish is the happiness of her children.

I was very sad when we started this project, and so was my mom. We were living together at the time we started the project, which was the day after she was diagnosed. When I asked her if she wanted to make art with me for a show, she didn’t hesitate. In her “yes,” I understood she trusted me. She knew what she was doing was going to be part of a public art exhibition. We knew that she wasn’t going to be able to write and communicate much longer and there wasn’t much time. I feel that she was thinking about my Inspirational Signs  in her notes – the texts were as much for me as they were for others.

Susan O'Malley, One Minute Smile, 2013. Excerpts from text-based performance. Image Courtesy of Artist and Romer Young Gallery, SF 

My husband had a writing teacher at CCA, Cooley Windsor, who used to say, ‘Show some skin.’ He kept stressing that his writing needed more of him in it. And yet, sometimes I feel that there can be a tendency to over share, to show not some skin but every crevice and crack. And I wondered where you sit on that scale. I don’t see you work as necessary biographical, although it can be linked to events in your life, but I do see aspects of it as very raw, emotionally and personally.

I love the idea of ‘show some skin.’ This is how I interpret it: locate what feels uncertain, scary, dark and use that as fuel to create. The work I make begins out of my own confusion and questions. Sometimes working with others enlightens this pursuit, and hopefully relates it more universally.

OK, so lets talk about specific shows and pieces, and particularly your current show at the Montalvo Arts Center. What for you is the space, or process, that is happiness? How did you approach this commission?

Here’s my confession: I actually have a hard time with the word happiness. Just the shape of the word feels contained, specific, plastic to me. I feel more invested in the messy process of life; a range of emotions which includes moments of joy along with sadness. This, to me, is my happiness.

Both of the projects I created for the Happiness Is… exhibition are invitations to be present in an in-between space - to walk up a hill in A Healing Walk or rest on the floor in the gallery for A Space (for you).

Susan O'Malley, A Space (for you), 2013. This project was supported by Lucas Artist Program at the Montalvo Arts Center. Image Courtesy of Artist and Romer Young Gallery, SF 

In that show you created spaces for pausing, the healing walk that you mentioned, and listening to dreams; you give a place for happiness in everyday life and create pieces in which art connects us. I’m interested in how you work with the ordinary world and communities, which could be defined as the social practice aspect of your work.

I do see my work in the realm of social practice. The work often begins with an interaction with others – I have given pep talks, asked for advice from strangers and organized healing walks in nature. Sometimes, like in the Pep Talk Squad, the conversation between myself and another person is the work. Other times, I rely on the back-and-forth with others to develop material for the creation of a new work, like in the Community Advice project.

Those print pieces, Community Advice, take on a language of self-help, of aphorisms and mantras. How were these pieces generated and received? How do you position them within the public space?

For Community Advice I interviewed a few shy of 100 people and asked: What advice would you give your 8-year-old self? What advice would you give your 80-year-old self? I designed ten different letterpress posters based on these conversations. Sometimes the poster text is verbatim from an interview; other times they are an amalgam of many. These works have had a life of their own and have been posted in public spaces from Palo Alto (where the project was commissioned) to Connecticut.

I’m currently working on several text works that will be displayed in public for a project called Moment by Moment (this is with the folks at The Thing Quarterly). I’m thinking of the works as visual mantras for the urban dweller, off-kilter, open-ended public service announcements. I see them as invitations to pause and introspect. The words convey my wish for how things could be if we paid closer attention. It’s as if I’m saying, “it has to begin somewhere, why not here?”

Susan O'Malley, Community Advice, 2012. Letterpress posters. Image Courtesy of Artist and Romer Young Gallery, SF 

You have just opened a show in Dallas titled You arrive my life begins. Could you outline a little of what that show is about for you.

The show is about gratitude and love, a shout-out to anyone willing to pay attention and to be present on the other end of the work.

And finally, we ask everyone that we talk to for their well list: the films, books, people, websites, blogs, etc., that they look at, find useful and have resonated with them in some way. What are yours?

Books: Advice columns by Cary Tennis (Since You Asked) and Sheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things); John Kabat Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living and others; Mating by Norman Rush

People: Linda Montano. All the teachers in my life – especially Jon Rubin and Larry Sultan at CCA. I always got so much out of every meeting with them.

Films: Happy Go Lucky and most of Mike Leigh’s work; Errol Morris documentaries; Miranda July’s films – The Future was weird and lovely, but You, Me and Everyone We Know is my fave

phew! thanks!

WOW, thank you!

Finally, finally, just one more thing, I'd suggest also having a look at Susan's blog, particularly this on giving care and this on actions for happiness and healing.

happiness is

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of talking with the artist Christine Wong Yap on the subject of positive psychology, how optimism (and pessimism in turn) have become a framework for her artistic practice, and the current exhibition Happiness Is… at Montalvo Arts Center. Christine works across a range of media, including sculpture, installations, and works on paper,  to create works that have the potential to elicit happiness, while investigating the science behind and complexity of such a pursuit.

Me: You create pieces that explore states of optimism and pessimism. What led you to explore psychology as basis, or framework, for your artistic practice?​

Christine Wong Yap: I've always been interested in psychology, though my earlier work focused on the social aspects of it—public space, consumerism, and so on. Then I took grad school (2005-7) as an opportunity to re-invent my practice from the ground up. At the time, that meant making work that embodied the anxiety and shittiness of mundane life. It was very pessimistic, and about a year later, I decided to start making work about optimism. Even then, the work became very much about my ambivalence between optimism and pessimism, how each can be necessary, or how objects can be mirrors that reflect viewer's own perspectives.

Can you talk a little about the current 'Happiness' show at Montalvo? I understand that its part of a series of shows titled Flourish, about how artists explore subjects of wellbeing.

Happiness Is... is a group exhibition curated by Donna Conwell, featuring almost all new work by myself, and fellow California College of the Arts alum Leah Rosenberg and Susan O'Malley.

​Happiness is... at Montalvo Arts Center

Over the course of several months, we collaborated to create the exhibition. Since I live in New York, it was crucial that I was in residence at Montalvo's beautiful Lucas Artists Program residency, so that Susan, Leah, Donna and I could work together in person and in the space. We talked a lot about color and stripes, and how colors can inspire delight, and our colors both consciously and unconsciously influenced each other. We also thought about how pleasure overlaps with happiness, but pleasure can be marked by time and signify loss or deflation, and how pleasure can be simple while happiness can be complex.  

The show features sculptures, installations, light works, drawings, and site-specific participatory projects, and is on view through May 31.

With Joe’s Daughter, I’ve become interested in ideas of participation, the handmade, everyday materials, and of personal expressions of positive emotion, each of which comes together in your work in pieces such as Irrational Exuberance Flags.  My concern for these subjects comes from ideas of connectedness, but I wonder what draws you to them.

I love how mundane materials can inspire or convey "irrational" expectations, emotions or experiences. I had a realization that if I associate pessimism with the everyday and the mundane, and optimism with the transcendent and rare, I was giving much more weight to pessimism by accepting that it is ubiquitous. I wondered, what would happen if optimism and the positive was everyday, was ubiquitous? 

​Christine Wong Yap, Irrational Exuberance Flags, 2013

So I started working with discount store materials, playing with very simple transformations, so that the colors and materials could be everyday as well as exuberant. I was thinking a lot about class, and how everyone loves to decorate, and how I would not want to draw distinctions between objects that give people joy or a sense of self or of home based on how they're made or manufactured.

I love to use simple techniques, so that the result is less about me as an artist, but more about what viewers bring to the experience of interacting with the object. With the flags, I also enjoy the feeling that I'm working in an old domestic tradition—that flags are something that people designed, made, and displayed for themselves. 

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, my favorite positive psychologist, writes about "symbolic ecologies" in the home, which remind you of who you are, your accomplishments, and goals. While I used to disdain materialism wholesale, I now think about how cherished objects can inspire sentiment and even personal growth, and am very interested in thinking more about things, what they say, and what they say about us. 

​Christine Wong Yap, Give Thanks, 2011

I was particularly drawn to the pieces that encourage, or engage, with the act of making oneself or someone else, happy: Give Thanks or The Great Balloon Giveaway. How have you approached gesturing happiness, and the issue of connectivity that this can imply?

People who feel connected to others also feel happier themselves. Giving feels good. Expressing gratitude is a method for increasing subjective wellbeing. 

In a way, these projects are excuses to have people enact these exercises and well-being strategies. For example, Give Thanks takes the gratitude journal exercise and makes it physical, collective, and public. In The Great Balloon Giveaway, I was also thinking about cognitive linguistics and embodied experience—looking up, giving balloons to strangers, seeing color circulate Lake Merritt—and how this activity might subtly shift experience towards the positive.  

Trust or skepticism are manifested anytime a viewer encounters an object, or one person with another.

I’d like to talk about the Ribbon pieces: of how aphorisms can be used to will states of positive mental wellbeing. There’s a joy within your work, and a conceptual rigour and approach, but without that cynicism that could enter into it, and that affirmations also can be charged with. Although there are those words ‘Irrational’ and ‘earnest’ in some of your titling. What is your position on the more satirical, or more derided, aspects of the subject of happiness?

​Christine Wong Yap, Ribbon Texts, 2011-12

It is very easy to ridicule the search for happiness. It doesn't help that people are often mistaken about what they think will make them happy, as Sonja Lyubomirsky explains. It is also unfortunate that people's definitions of happiness vary so widely—a common understanding is pleasure, an experience that comes to you from outside stimulus, something that cannot be cultivated. Lasting happiness is much bigger than fleeting pleasures. Further, positive psychology is an empirical field that seeks to describe, not proscribe, what makes people happy, and it's regrettable when it is mistaken for pop psychology, positive thinking, or self-help.

One aspect that I’m curious about is this idea of the language in this field–how do you find people react to ideas of, and the language for, happiness and positive psychology. Are these subjects taken ‘seriously’ within the context of the art world. How do you as an artist take on that language and its connotations?

Johanna Drucker has written about the academy's outdated association between criticality and oppositionality. I have certainly been surprised when contemporary art audiences assume that my works are skeptical or intended to ridicule self-help. It's interesting how sincerity can arouse suspicion. What kind of habit is skepticism of sentiment?

When people assume that happiness is just pleasure, they think it's frivolous and simple-minded. But one of the goals of positive psychology is to study and reveal the complexity of happiness. The Positive Signs series of drawings is an attempt to share such research and rigor.  

​Christine Wong Yap, Positive Signs: United Theories, 2012

How has your position on happiness shifted? Or how is it shifting? 

For a time, I wasn't sure how much more I could mine this terrain. But when I attended the International Positive Psychological Association's conference in 2011 with the support of the Jerome Foundation, I realized that positive psychology is a growing field. The research on happiness will continue to develop and change. Moreover, the intersection of positive psychology and the arts is nascent. There is vast potential. I may expand my practice to other, related themes, or yet dive deeper into more specific facets.

Christine Wong Yap

Montalvo Arts Center