Ghost Letters: Letters to the Spirits of Deceased Artists by Alison Weld
Listing of Letters

Ghost Letter # 1    Dear Willem de Kooning
Ghost Letter # 2    Dear Willem de Kooning
Ghost Letter # 3    Dear Willem de Kooning
Ghost Letter #4    Dear Bill
Ghost Letter # 5    Dear Hans Hofmann
Ghost Letter # 6    Dear Hans Hofmann
Ghost Letter # 7    Dear Hans Hofmann
Ghost Letter # 8    Dear Stella   (Waitzkin)
Ghost Letter # 9    Dear Stella
Ghost Letter # 10    Dear Stella
Ghost Letter # 11    Dear Stella
Ghost Letter # 12    Dear Stella
Ghost Letter # 13    Dear Stella
Ghost Letter # 14    Dear Stella
Ghost Letter # 15    Dear Chaim Soutine
Ghost Letter # 16    Dear Chaim Soutine
Ghost Letter # 17    Dear Georgia O'Keeffe
Ghost Letter # 18    Dear Joan Mitchell
Ghost Letter # 19    Dear Meret Oppenheim
Ghost Letter # 20    Dear Jackson Pollock
Ghost Letter # 21    Dear Claire Moore
Ghost Letter # 21    Dear Claire Moore
Ghost Letter # 22    Dear Claire
Ghost Letter # 23    Dear Claire Moore
Ghost Letter # 24    Dear Elaine de Kooning
Ghost Letter # 25    Dear Chaim Soutine
Ghost Letter # 26    Dear Chaim Soutine
Ghost Letter # 27    Dear Clyfford Still
Ghost Letter # 28    Dear Clyfford Still
Ghost Letter # 29    Dear Mr. Still
Ghost Letter # 30    Dear Lee Godie
Ghost Letter # 31    Dear Amedeo Modigliani
Ghost Letter # 32    Dear Bessie Harvey
Ghost Letter # 33    Dear Bill Traylor and Hawkins Bolden
Ghost Letter # 34    Dear Hawkins Bolden
Ghost Letter # 35    Dear Emilio   (Emilio Cruz)
Ghost Letter # 36    Dear William Hawkins
Ghost Letter # 37    Dear Stella
Ghost Letter # 38    Dear Stella
Ghost Letter # 39    Dear Stella
Ghost Letter # 40    Dear Stella
Ghost Letter # 1


Dear Willem de Kooning,
I'm still working. I'm still working, although I am an under-known, still-emerging artist in the early years of old age. My hair is grey and my chin is no longer firm. I'm not yet a spirit or ghost though I sometimes feel like one. Childless, my art is my biology. Your Women are my biology. The biology of 20th century anguish. Your Women are my favorite ancestors. My own body of painting is my nuclear family and my extended family, my cousins and aunts, my children and grand-children. My early works are ancestors, my great aunt or great-great grandmother. My layers of oil paint are paleontological striations of geological time. And they are also human. They are thought made physical. Emotive and also palpitating.
Art is my natural world. My own painting as well as the art I embrace and make part of my own being. While I do not see glorious skies or beauteous forests daily, I do experience the abstract-scapes and marks of one of my canvases. I feel its rich impasto between my toes much like mud or sand. I walk through the image. I breathe in the color. It fills my lungs and my veins, pulsating through my system. I revel in painting. I believe a painting's surface to symbolize the life force that comprises our unique histories. I believe a painting's surface to be a film of consciousness. I think color is magnificent. It can be ugly. It can be decorative and pretty. It can be shy. It can be bold. My colors are my words. Painting seriously and communing with tough art is as profound as a religious experience that for me cuts across denominations, races and maybe even nations. It is my escape from trivia. I believe serious art to be solely about the big poetic and philosophical issues of life now.
Mr. de Kooning, forty-seven years after my freshman year of art school, I'm still working. I'm working furiously. Yet also precariously, because I respond to the foundation you laid more than sixty years ago yet am working now in a time when my earnestness and passion are being challenged by works with a vapid, silly and ironic touch that your works revealed to me to be superficial and academic, that to me are not intuitive enough to call artful. I somehow learned as a young artist, frequenting galleries and museums, to call this light touch illustration because it reads as preconceived or predetermined rather than flowing from the unconscious in a moment of creation when one forgets the rules of aesthetics and even the subject, when you are an elastic hand and mind, challenging learned techniques, disregarding visual habits and theoretical dogma. But Mr. de Kooning, has it been satisfying to send your masterpieces' s ghosts to today's art fairs? How do your oeuvre's many ghosts define superficial now? How do they recognize the significant? Was intuition your dogma and how would your ghosts define today's? Yes, just what is today's dogma? Please share your ideas with me as I am not really sure myself what today's dogma is. I realize that we all have our unique definitions of intuition or dogma but as I just said I learned what intuition was from your Women series. And by just painting.  Your take on my issues with today might surprise me nonetheless. Shock me. We artists need shocks to keep our edginess. Actually, we all need challenges, artist or not, no matter the field or age.
Mr. de Kooning, I'm fervently adding to your heart felt aesthetics trying to maintain its relevance to today. I'm still working even though I attended art school in the early 1970s when my professors were not teaching much technique and concentrated solely on the prevailing Minimalist and Conceptual philosophies of the previous decade without giving us a firm awareness of the visual principles unique to our own time. I was too afraid in my teens and twenties to admit that I did not draw from life as you were trained to do. In fact, I didn't render at all. But then you gave up rendering in order to create works with pure existential power. I began as an art student in 1971 believing in your anxiety-ridden search of twenty years earlier. This month I have met two younger women who stopped working as artists. And I asked myself what determines life-long commitment to one's practice in times of little or no interest in your chosen medium or society's antagonism to one's personal beliefs? Is commitment to one's work different for each artist, each family background, each delicate psychology? Yet, nonetheless, in spite of my own imperfections, I'm still working. As you know, Mr. de Kooning, it is not easy.
Did you read Sartre and Camus? I haven't since college. But your gestures and surfaces suggest to me that you have read them. From my beginnings as a teenage art student in the mid- sixties, I loved and respected the abstract expressionists. I felt that the school of Ab Ex should outlive me, born during its dominance, and last hundreds of years. Yet I didn't consider myself to be traditional. Ab Ex was so tough and poetic, revealing complex psychologies of both creator and viewer in abstract ways. I've been painting abstractly on my own, first in New York City, then just minutes away in Hoboken where you used to live and for twenty -six years in Jersey City, the bordering city south of Hoboken, and across the Hudson River from the World Trade Center. Knowing that you had lived in Hoboken was so important to me as a poor young woman in her late twenties. It was good for my weak self-esteem. If you had lived in Hoboken so could I. It was so close to Manhattan-did it matter that Hoboken and Jersey City were in another state? I was a shy artist when in my twenties. I couldn't afford to take slides of my painting. I was earning 9,000 dollars yearly working on a National Science Foundation grant at the American Museum of Natural History on Manhattan's upper west side, as a vertebrae paleontology laboratory assistant, after my first several months in New York City earning much less than that, and I loved painting with Lascaux acrylics in spite of their exorbitant cost. I couldn't afford to buy a new pair of jeans and wore the clothes my parents gave me at Christmas. Actually, the two white polyester shirts I wore as a volunteer supervisor with long black skirts were gifts from them as well. I generally shopped at the Salvation Army, something I had been doing throughout my art school days. I was not as dedicated a painter-only painting several large pieces yearly. However, they were painstaking to paint-using disposable chopsticks, instead of brushes or palette knives, with acrylic mixed with gel medium. I believed that because I was painting with disposable chopsticks that Chinatown's frenetic pace that I loved so much with its visual excitement of the fish markets and grocery stores, dense with brightly packaged cans and jars, would somehow be imbued into my neo expressionistic paintings on plastic shower curtains. I knew abstract painting to be about the elusive, our psychological response to society as well as ourselves. I was talking about my gender and my gender's history, incorporating domestic materials in the male dominated art world I was in. I did not have a credit card and paid for my art supplies with a check. I did not eat much and did not buy many groceries or think about having well balanced meals. I never bought chicken or fish for dinner as I do today and had just one frying pan in the kitchen as well as a coffee pot. I was living the life of a starving artist without having set out to do that. It was just that I had not acquired many skills when in art school. I had learned how to think and to see but had not yet been employed using those talents.
At age 65 I am still working against the fashion of the day, Mr. de Kooning. I'm also part of your international family of those artists and connoisseurs deeply and profoundly in touch with your spirit and aesthetic soul. Thank you so much for your worldly and existential vision. Yet Bill, it does not get any easier for me to confront the daily struggle of visceral creation and thought made plastic and material after decades of working.
" Just paint" your spirit screamed at me yesterday. Your spirit is right. I feel that because I am an unknown artist painting without regard for the coolness espoused now that I have freedom as you did. I too respond to an inner conviction. A solitary endeavor usually but for paintings' ghosts, paintings I respond to and paintings I create myself. I find a profound spirituality in nature and yearn to interpret and suggest this Darwinian life force. I doubt you saw your works as figures or landscapes either. But before I end this letter, I'd like to tell you something about my time in Hoboken.  Thirty- seven years ago, when I saw or spoke to someone from my art student years, usually while walking on Washington Street, Hoboken's main thoroughfare of small stores, restaurants, and pizza places, that runs north/south parallel to the Hudson River, directly across from Manhattan, after a period of not being in touch, I was asked more than once, "Are you still working?" We both understood that the life of an artist was hard. Would we continue to work? Gallery affiliation wasn't ever mentioned as we were still young and seemingly insignificant relative to the powerful art world of investment and overarching fashion and theory. Galleries were not looking to the MFA programs as they are today. Young artists had time to develop their vision and their craft. When I was asked that question I always remembered the lecture we were given my first year of art school when we students were all told that only 2% would remain involved in the art world, whether international artist, college professor, public school teacher or even art supply store clerk. I wasn't daunted by the statistics and during my undergraduate years at the SUNY College of Art and Design at Alfred University I dedicated myself to being an abstract painter following my interests and my inner voice. My male professors said that we were in a lull time for art and that my predominantly female class would very likely not have any great artists in it. They did not have any faith in our girl minds. Nor did they imagine their female students' distinguished futures. They said that they wanted us to lead the lifestyle of an artist if not actually create a body of work that contributes to world culture. They also said that we girls would have two children each and raise them rather than become important woman artists. In 1971 I felt I had to make a choice between having a family or creating a serious body of work and exhibition history, unlike today when a young woman artist can have both. In spite of this lack of confidence in my future, at eighteen and nineteen, I already believed that I would create the strongest body of work by listening to my personal beliefs and that I needn't follow the latest dominant style or fashion. I formed this independent ideal in rural upstate New York, away from New York City's art world scene, surrounded by farms nestled around small villages. I am still grateful today for those few years of unquestioned passion and my belief in limitless possibilities for my artwork despite the lack of support from the all-male faculty, despite the lack of any female artist role models besides internationally known Georgia O'Keeffe. While I was aware of Helen Frankenthaler's painting she was not a role model as I did not know enough about her life to satisfy my neediness for older serious artists to fill the role of aesthetic mothers or sisters. I did study for several weeks of my first summer at Alfred with the potter, Barbara Tiso, but I rejected the world of pottery for a life of painting so I, nonetheless, was quite alone. I yearned for female support. I was interested in a life of painting. Because of that, I looked at both painting's history as well as contemporary life for inspiration. I believed in the validity and the importance of my individual psyche and soul. Even in 1972, these were unfashionable beliefs for someone my age. Older upper-class students felt that your search, de Kooning, wasn't valid for me-it was considered wrong and incorrect for a young woman to be transfixed by your Women series. I was expected to think that you were sexist and a misogynist. But you are still speaking to me, across generations and genders. I love your mark and gesture, their passion and humanity. Their speed of intuition. I have not felt insulted by your women's wide mouths or big breasts. I have felt affirmed existentially. But I am fascinated by life forms for they speak of evolution, the intangible and the bodily. Organs and life forms are profound. They are our foundation. I see flesh with idea. I see time and history in your anatomy.
Willem, I'm still working. I'm still working, although I am an under-known, still-emerging artist in the early years of old age. My hair is gray and my chin is no longer firm. I'm not yet a spirit or ghost though I sometimes feel like one. Childless, my art is my biology. Your Women are my biology. The biology of 20th century anguish. Your Women are my favorite ancestors. My own body of painting is my nuclear family and my extended family, my cousins and aunts, my children and grand-children. My early works are ancestors, my great aunt or great-great grandmother. My layers of oil paint are historic yet are mine. They are thought made physical. Emotive and also palpitating.
Art is our natural world. I feel a work's materiality between my toes much like mud or sand. I walk through the image. I breathe in the color. It fills my lungs and my veins, pulsating through my system. I revel in painting. I believe an oil paint surface to symbolize the life force that comprises our unique histories. I believe a painting's surface to be a film of consciousness. I think color is magnificent. t can be ugly. It can be decorative and pretty. It can be shy. It can be bold.  My colors are my words. Painting seriously and communing with tough art is as profound as a religious experience that for me cuts across denominations, races and maybe even nations. It is my escape from trivia. I believe serious art to be solely about the large statement.
I've wanted to create metaphors for the self since my beginnings as an art student. I went to Alfred to become a potter but almost immediately doubted that pottery could give me the deep fulfillment of painting. In 1981, six years out of Alfred, new to Hoboken after two years in New York City, I didn't paint every day. I wasn't yet a serious and committed artist with my yearly goal today of constant painting, drawing and immersion in my sculptural juxtapositions. I was more enamored with New York City's museums than the galleries and never imagined that my own work would be represented in a gallery or museum one day. I couldn't afford to drink wine with dinner and spent little time eating. Often, I would buy a gyro on the way home for my dinner or a slice of pizza. I was always telling my parents that NYC was a good place to be poor. After I began working at the American Museum of Natural History I was given complimentary admission to all other museums in the city. I was a life drawing model at the Art Students League on 57th street my first year in the city while also working part time weekends and evenings supervising the AMNH museum volunteers at the information desks.
But to backtrack, in Alfred's rolling hills, I rarely thought about the power of the Pop aesthetic or that Pop had stopped the flourishing of Abstract Expressionism, as I said, the school I most deeply respected. I didn't think about Pop in Hoboken either. I passionately believed in Abstract Expressionism's validity and importance and I yearned to create works extending and continuing anew its fervent vein while changing Ab Ex so that it spoke to my time now. I believed in abstraction as a symbol for complexity. I thought abstraction talked about the relevant without illustrating it. I loved the visual world much like others loved their religion, their families, their personal passions. I worshiped the visual. I wanted to change the tenor of the art world. I believed that the abstract expressionist painters were still important in 1971, twenty odd years after their dominance. I believed in the power of tough painting. I didn't yet understand irony--at that young age. I did not yet know that irony would be an essential element of my future work-an element I now think is needed to convey to my viewers that individual soulfulness and external society are a part of life, that the contrasting of visceral emotion and kitschy material culture describes life's pulse, whether psychologically or more superficially. I loved the paintings by Clyfford Still, Arshile Gorky, Helen Frankenthaler, in addition to yours, Willem, I regularly visited at the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. I felt these to be powerful works for they were imbued with aesthetic soul and passion, and a firm belief in the significance of color, gestures and marks. They gave me sustenance and I identified with them as a young artist. I identify with them still today as an older artist. Since adolescence, I had accompanied my mother on her art excursions to Buffalo from our home in suburban Rochester. I continued to visit the Albright Knox Art Gallery during my college years and to deepen my love and respect for my favorite artists' works. We also visited the Memorial Art Gallery, the University of Rochester's art museum, regularly. The Memorial Art Gallery did not have my favorites of the Albright Knox but had their precursors--including a fine Arthur Dove as well as a beautiful and delicate Georgia O'Keeffe. I still visit both museums today with great anticipation, to see the sources of my beginning inspiration that opened up a world of thought and creativity.
Thank you, de Kooning. Your vision means so much to me. You give me courage to be who I am in spite of the dominant figurative mode that threatens my belief in abstraction's power. I hope you have gathered by now that art is my life calling as well. I am not interested in status or wealth. I am not an art star and most likely will never be one. I am interested in vision and compulsion, inner needs and philosophical and spiritual awareness as your oeuvre is. I see meaning in color and surface, gesture and mark. I see much meaning in the obscure, difficult metaphor. I'll write again. Woman and Bicycle's ghost invited me over for a late afternoon drink next week. Would you like me to send slides to your ghost first? I'm not very adept at sending jpegs unfortunately. Forgive me for my digression. I'll concentrate more on my time in Hoboken in my next letter and when I visit your masterpiece's ghost at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Thursday.
Sincerely,

Alison Weld


Ghost Letter # 2
Dear Willem de Kooning,
I'm writing to say that when I consciously saw a pink and yellow canvas of yours-at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina- I immediately thought of Claire Moore's admonition to me 41 years ago against using pink and yellow together in my first graduate school critique. In spite of the fact that I had grown up regularly visiting the Albright Knox Art Gallery's Gotham News in which pink and yellow figure prominently, I had not absorbed this signature de Kooning element into my visual awareness. I did not understand what Claire Moore was saying. It seemed so arbitrary. Yet your Women series was too much of an historical milestone in American art for me to contend with. I also saw a Pollock drip painting with the colors pink and yellow across the gallery from Woman and Bicycle on Thursday when I met its ghost for a drink. Could an unknown female artist abstractly use those two colors adjacent to each other and not be derivative of de Kooning or Pollock? Well, as you saw in my photo scans and slides I am not an expressionist like you and as my painting has no basis in rendering, it is impossible for me to knowingly mimic your masterful passages. And I do not have your anxiety-ridden surfaces-I quietly contemplate when I paint. I am interested in the awestruck visceral, not woman or landscape.
Thank you for letting me call you Bill, even though I am not a friend nor part of your generation. The ethos of Ab Ex has been challenged far too long-since my years as an art student in the early 1970s. Actually, since the 1960s when I was just beginning to be interested in visual culture as my future realm in life. It hurts me deeply. In college, I remember discussions with other older students after class, which depressed me, about the utter lack of validity of a personal vision because we were primarily controlled by politics, gender, race and class. I believe that culture creates community, that it's as important for humankind as the political world. Culture bridges difference. It is humanist. It is sublime. I force myself to think about politics by reading The New York Times, The Nation, or watching the News Hour. Yet I do not believe that politics and painting were a good couple. I am part of a community of artists and connoisseurs. What did my poetic, visceral metaphors for life have to do with governments and political realities? Is there also a life force in the political world-I hope so. When I think of the history of many politicians I thought of corruption ruining ideals, power rather than the heart felt values so important to my life as an artist. Painting answered and also raised profound emotional questions in me. I felt in touch with my own god. I felt in touch with history. I felt in touch with humanity when at work in the studio or when contemplating the finished work. I felt in touch with Nature. I felt in touch with meaning. I understood more clearly my own psychology. I worked against the dominant grain when I lived in Hoboken. And still am nearly forty years later.
During my early years in Hoboken I worked at the American Museum of Natural History making molds and casts of fossils. My imagery changed somewhat after beginning to work in the vertebrate paleontology lab, becoming inspired by the fossil dinosaurs and turtles of my daily life. Figurative elements crept into the work, a slight change from the abstract-scapes of my first few shower curtains. The paintings also became more textured with a complex surface. Because I painted with disposable chopsticks I wove thin skeins of acrylic paint over one another. During business hours I spent some of my work week preparing fossils using fine tools to remove the matrix under a magnifying glass with most of the time spent making molds and casts of fossil turtle specimens. I saw a relationship between the layers of matrix in a fossil specimen and the layers of paint in one of my paintings. I thought my paintings were about time. I felt that viewers of my work, if patient enough, experienced filmic time when viewing my surface with the final image resulting from an endless layering of history, emotion, thought and consciousness. I found the work of being a lab assistant interesting though I worried about using the polyester resin for too many years. I wasn't extremely worried about the health hazards because I was employed as a curatorial assistant on a National Science Foundation grant and knew that the grant was coming to an end in a couple of years. But it was ironic that my job gave me health benefits while also exposing me to health dangers on the job.
When the grant was nearing its end, after several years making molds and casting fossils of the Meiolania, I resigned, and I started working at Rutgers University in Newark as a gallery assistant. . In spite of my meager earnings I was glad that I worked part time because I had become a general partner in a studio loft building and needed to work on the building during the initial year of demolition and renovation. I had received a state grant for my shower curtain paintings so that I had the money for my art supplies and also received a bequest from Dr. Louis Wolf, an 83 year old volunteer from the American Museum of Natural History who was like a second grandfather to me, and had the several thousand dollars needed to become a general partner. My maternal grandfather, Duncan Cameron, had died before I was born and I had already lost my father's father, Charles Beane Weld, when I met Dr. Wolf. Dr. Wolf was such a supportive friend, introducing me to classical music at Lincoln Center as well as theater always with fine dinners beforehand. I ate endive for the first time with Dr. Wolf preceded by filet mignon with bearnaise sauce, quite different than my usual piece of pizza or peanut butter and Progresso white clam sauce over spaghetti. I usually ordered the same entree concert after concert. Endive was my dessert. It was delicious and a luxury to a young artist as was the filet mignon. We attended the Mostly Mozart concerts for a few seasons. We listened to Emanuel Ax. I felt in touch with history when listening to the music. I learned that painting was not all of culture.
After the year of the building renovation was over I began to paint with oil paint rather than acrylic mixed with a gel medium. I started my Striation series, less figurative than my fossil turtle imagery but still related to the concept of filmic and paleontological time. However, I was building up the layers with oil and a cold wax medium to create the imagery. At this same time, I was promoted to the position of part time gallery curator as I had helped write a successful grant for exhibition programming and had five big shows and five small shows to help organize for the year. The gallery director approved everything I did but gave me a lot of freedom. It was an exciting job for a young artist. I met the artist George McNeil who had been recommended for a show in the main gallery space. I visited McNeil in Brooklyn and we looked at early works as well as the works he was going to show which were based on the landscape. McNeil opened up our landscape series in the summer of 1985. The New York Times critic Michael Brenson reviewed both McNeil and Melvin Edwards in Gallery 2 in its national section. I was ecstatic as were McNeil and Edwards.
Three years later, as an artist employed at the New Jersey State Museum, I looked for artists who embraced my catholic ethos and were the mediums for something larger and greater than themselves. Artists with whom I would develop a close bond, Stella Waitzkin (1920 - 2003) and Miriam Beerman (born 1923) were greater as artists than their position in the art world, a world provoked by the high stakes of power and wealth, a world that largely ignored them. Their bodies of work were powerful and absorbed their personal distress into visual significance, interpreted and transformed into culture, that distinguished realm of the intellect I believed in so strongly. Anxiety became visual force in both Stella's and Miriam's works as well as my own. Their work gave me much courage in my attempt to be a transmitter, a creator of visceral meaning. We three were all part of the realm that I called visual philosophy. We were visual philosophers. I was deeply satisfied with this important endeavor. We weren't creating to match our works with furniture and draperies as a visitor to my studio was interested in doing. We were all serious believers in the visually powerful, the visually necessary, in our artwork as a life mission. Though of course we felt satisfied by each acquisition gracing a home in spite of our serious, ambitious frames of mind. Yet the marketplace was secondary to my primary need of visceral visual creation.
I have always wondered why Stella and Miriam were so important to me? Was it solely because of the intensity of their work? Were they predominantly role models or were they substitute mothers, the mothers of my choice? Mothers who were visionary artists, flaunters of society, unlike my late mother who was politically liberal, socially conservative, the mother of six and the grandmother of eight and a landscape painter. To me, her landscapes of her summer home in Lubec, Maine were the antithesis of her forceful Calvinist personality -they were idealized beauty filled with sentiment and love of a place sacred to her. She did not often express any sentimentality or love directly to me. Emotions were just not a big part of our relationship. Like so many artists, her personality was unlike her body of poignant landscapes. She was critical and tough while her small paintings were subtle and delicate. Was I attracted to Stella and Miriam because I rebelled against my mother and father's strict morality while still in college? Stella and Miriam were not in any way like my parents. I was intrigued by their bohemianism. They were so comfortable with it. Stella's plates were chipped and her wine was more often than not turned to vinegar. I didn't think that they heard the internal voices of anger and judgement that I still remember from thirty-six years ago. Or was I really transfixed by their body of work--Stella's beautiful and visionary installations crowding her small Chelsea Hotel apartment and Miriam's expressionistic, moral history canvases that filled her large suburban home as much or maybe even more so than by Stella and Miriam as women? I could not imagine them separated from their bodies of work. I could not imagine them as solely women. They were great women artists. Stella and Miriam were both expressionists although Stella's work was less filled with angst than Miriam's, more poignant, almost verging on the sentimental. Miriam's painting looked backward to the late nineteenth century of Van Gogh. As well as being in a dialogue with mid twentieth century Bacon. Whereas Stella's was firmly grounded in Ab Ex in spite of the fact that she cast nineteenth century object d'art and leather embossed books.
I have always gotten as much substance and emotional support from a body of work, its ambitious ideals and beliefs, as from the individual creator. If I respected the body of work I could easily forgive the personal weaknesses of the artist. If I did not respect the work I could not easily forgive an artist's personal flaws. Artistic greatness redeemed one as it allowed me to transport myself into an introspective, ethereal realm. Serious viewing of art results in forgiveness for the self-absorption needed to create, for overly critical perceptions of one artist to another. Nonetheless, in spite of their self-absorption, my celebrities are visual artists. My celebrities are works of art. My celebrities are visual poignancies and also tough. They are not necessarily glamorous or rich. Nor am I.
Alison Weld


Ghost Letter # 3
Dear Willem de Kooning,
Thank you for seeing my show of diptychs in 2003 at the Robert Steele Gallery. When Robert Steele visited my Jersey City studio and said that he wanted to represent me and immediately asked why I wasn't in a good gallery I was ecstatic that my slide package had actually resulted in his studio visit to my studio and my having my first real gallery representation. Robert Steele is self-assured. I enjoy his opinions and respect many of his shows, especially the Aboriginal artists from Australia whom he worked with closely. He shows painting and sculpture that are modernist rooted contemporary works, both figurative and abstract. He rarely shows photography and has an international stable of artists. I am one of several New York artists, though my studio is actually in Jersey City. In New York City there are many galleries promoting their individual aesthetic. Not all influence large groups. Not all wonder whether to join the wave of the most recent trend. Many artists are loners, working against the tide. In 1979 when I moved here I felt alone without much company in that as I have said I believed in the significance of my individual response rather than in the overriding power of the threatening art world. I still don't feel a part of the art world even though I quietly contribute to it. I do feel lonely. Did you Bill?
Alison


Ghost Letter #4
Dear Bill,
In the 21st century do you think the art world is faltering? Very few believe, as I do, that abstraction embodies a unique religion. Only very few paint with ecstatic fervor and violence. Many consign passion and fervor to art history. Do few paint expressionistically because few can? Now living with what to me is the alien realm of much of the younger generation, I understand what Anita Shapolsky meant when she told me that I knew how to paint like the first generation. I too see an utter lacking of conviction and struggle, of seriousness of intent. Though I must be wrong about their lack of seriousness. Definitions of the serious have changed though. Bill, I am quite old. Please help me. However nonetheless, I'm still working. I'm still working, although I am an under-known, still-emerging artist in the early years of old age. My hair is gray and my chin is no longer firm. I'm not yet a spirit or ghost though I sometimes feel like one. Childless, my art is my biology. My different series of works represent my life phases. My own body of painting is my nuclear family and my extended family, my cousins and aunts, my children and grand children. My early works are ancestors, my great aunt or great-great grandmother. My layers of oil paint are filmic striations of geological time. And they are also human. They are thought made physical. Emotive and also palpitating.
In 1995 because I expanded my studio so that I had the entire floor I became more dedicated to my painting. I was able to hang ten paintings at a time rather than just a few. My building partner Bob Smith had moved to England and asked the painter on his floor, Kit Sailer, to buy him out. In the process of Kit buying Bob out, I bought Dan Kadish, the abstract painter on my floor, out as he had moved back to the family farm in Vernon NJ after his father, the sculptor Reuben Kadish, passed away and had no need for a studio in Jersey City. Charles and I took advantage of the expanded space immediately. Monday through Thursday I met Charles outside of the Exchange Place PATH station at six o'clock p.m. and we drove straight to the studio. We cooked our dinner on a hot plate and drank a glass or two of wine while looking at works that were installed on the western side of the floor, my new space. I began painting after dinner, a bit after 7:00 p.m., and worked for two or more hours. This gave me another eight hours of studio work each week. I yearned to paint thirty hours weekly but probably painted twenty odd hours at the most. I was disciplined about my schedule and had several good productive years of ambitious painting. I loved violently transmitting my will to the work in front of me. The emerging artists of my daily museum life, engrossed in their arduous uphill climb and struggle to attain a higher stature in the art world, did not acknowledge me as an equally serious artist, as an artist who worked in a museum rather than teach the craft of their medium. My distress at this fueled my gestures and marks. In the studio I was transforming insecurity about being a serious artist and anger at my lack of recognition into beauty. I taught concepts through juxtaposition of artworks, through seeing their similarities and differences. I felt that even some of the more accomplished artists thought of me mostly as someone who was helping them achieve a small step towards their ambitious and what I imagined to be unrealistic goals rather than also reaching out and becoming involved with my whole self. This lack of acknowledgment made my life doubly difficult for I had the struggle of my own painting life as well as what I perceived as condescending dismissal. My self-esteem was not great enough to cope easily with this difficult and harsh world. I organized and interpreted visual culture because I was a serious artist myself, because of deeply felt religious like beliefs. I was not interested in the promotion of careers. Promotion was not my intent though it may have been a result at times as my exhibitions were always reviewed in The New York Times. I doubt critics like the concept of promotion either. Promotion and deeply held beliefs seem antagonistic with each other and more appropriate to an advertising agency.
At work I was exposed to many unknown artist members of the American Abstract Artists, from around the country. A group of artists I generally found to differ from my sensibility. The late Zoltan Buki, my boss and the curator of fine art, had asked their artist members to donate a work to the collection because the museum had examples of the original members' work. Some artists donated. I subsequently was exposed to works not organic whatsoever. I couldn't help wondering what Zoltan really thought about some of the donations. He never confided in me his value judgements. Each day at work seeing this geometric abstraction increased the fervor of my own postmodern yet expressionistic vision. I was glad my vision wasn't geometric. I didn't see eye to eye with the museum's aesthetic. Yet I loved the work of arts administration despite some of the artists I dealt with required that I have a degree in psychology which I did not. Trenton was one hour and ten minutes by train with the delays which were regular. I had received a nice raise from my position at Rutgers Newark which I considered payment for my arduous commute. Yet ultimately my passionate immersion in visual arts proved to be beneficial, despite any difficulties I may have had. I learned from the weak as well as the strong artist. I viewed visual art all week long in studios, galleries and museums. I actually was quite fortunate and privileged. I continued to learn how to see and think visually. The visual world delighted and fulfilled me thoroughly. Material culture filled my soul. I lived immersed in a world of visual culture all seven days of the week.
Charles read on the western side of the studio when I painted. We couldn't see each other because the stairwell divided the floor into two spaces. I hadn't painted in front of anyone since graduate school and was glad that there was a stairwell between us. I did not want to lose concentration. Though Charles is also my studio manager. Charles stretched my pre-primed linen for five years and stretched my upholstery, fake fur and vinyl fabric I used for my juxtapositions.
In early 1999, I left my dual identity after ten years at the New Jersey State Museum and five years at Rutgers University for the quiet life of being a painter in my studio during the weekdays rather than the weekends of the previous fifteen years. After fifteen years of working in the art world, I knew a small group of serious artists. I still knew Stella Waitzkin and called her often whether at the Chelsea Hotel or at her home on Martha's Vineyard where she had an outdoor studio where she worked in resin-furiously, she said, painting extremely quickly fighting the speed of the resin's chemical reactions. I also still knew Miriam Beerman-fifteen or so years after first meeting her in 1984. Miriam was about three years younger than Stella and until recently worked nearby. Miriam was interpreting and responding to the Holocaust, whether tangentially or more closely, during the fulfilling years throughout our relationship.
Alison


Ghost Letter # 5
Dear Hans Hofmann,
I was a soul mate of one of your former students, the late Stella Waitzkin of the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. Stella studied with you at your school in Provincetown.   I wanted to tell you our story. Here it is:
I first was introduced to Stella Waitzkin's work, The Filmmaker, when I was working part time in the Robeson Center Gallery, now called the Paul Robeson Galleries, at Rutgers University and was a young artist living in Hoboken, New Jersey. And after seeing just one small example of her work, I was anxious to meet her and to see her studio, and did so just a few weeks after the New York Public Library's Center for Book Arts anniversary exhibition closed. The Filmmaker was poignant without being sentimental, expressive while also introverted in its tone. Jane Freeman, a New York painter I knew at the time, had told me that Stella's son, Billy, had died just about a year earlier and that Stella was still mourning her deep loss. Jane knew Fred Waitzkin, Billy's brother.
Stella's environment was a cross between the Victorian, the humanist and the religious. Her libraries evoke intellectual history yet they are also spiritual. I thought her environment was an evocative memorial to Billy and wondered when she had started it. I didn't ask because I didn't want to make her remember his death during our initial meeting. Not that she ever forgot his early death. I would find out twenty years later that the title of her environment was the Waitzkin Memorial Library.
I noticed immediately that Stella at 64 didn't wear black, the color of choice then for artists in New York. Neither did I. Or at least not very often. Her clothes were colorful, loose and baggy and stained with polyester resin splotches. She sat in contrast to her small yet ornate living room environment of floor to ceiling library shelves of death masks, books and clocks-all cast in resin and essentially rooted in Abstract Expressionism. Stella's work looked like it was created with ease, created without any struggle, though I knew that most likely wasn't true. I have always been intrigued by the abstract expressionist artists of her generation who recorded their interior selves and had been doing that since Ab Ex's hey-day sixty-eight years ago when Stella began to paint her self-portraits, quietly beautiful works. I deeply responded to the elusiveness of one's inner being made plastic and concrete through the painting process. While Stella had since chosen the metaphor of a book as a container for her inner self, the floor to ceiling bookshelves of her living room were mysterious and nostalgic. The books were created with a light touch and an ethereal quality. Stella was a poet of visual language. Her living room was powerful, obsessive and dense, with peculiarly emotionally laden objects. It reminded me of my belief that the visual arts were as spiritual as organized religion. Sitting on Stella's couch, gazing at her overcrowded environment was the spiritual substitute for me of being in church and sitting quietly on a pew looking at the painting of Jesus Christ on the altar. When I was growing up in the United Church of Christ I had always wanted to replace the painting of Christ with one of my own-abstract yet soulful paintings. I believed my work to be mystical and that most would understand this. I was deeply happy to meet Stella Waitzkin, as she had achieved my early goal of creating significant, mournful works. I didn't know at the time that she would become a significant artist friend who was like family. That she would be someone I loved as much as I loved her life's creation.
That first day, Stella treated me with graciousness and served an array of snacks. A thin person at 29 on a tight budget, I ate voraciously the snacks that Stella set out on her bench in front of her couch. This was very different than making molds and casts of fossil turtles. I had found my several years in the fossil world to be inspiring but this was even more inspiring than paleontology. I was excited meeting a visionary and accomplished artist living out her convictions in a small apartment in the Chelsea Hotel. I looked forward to organizing more exhibitions and when I could to including her work. She had thirty odd years of work from which to choose and I knew that her works would inspire our gallery audience, both students on campus and the Newark and Greater New York community. While this appointment was for my first show I ever organized, I was confident that I would have more exhibitions to do after such a formidable beginning. Books as Sculpture would be a success. I vividly remember the long red coat I was wearing the day I met Stella. Clothes were worn symbolically back then for I had two roles I played in the art world-I was a part time gallery curator at Rutgers University in Newark as well as a part time painter with a studio in Jersey City. When I was representing Rutgers, I often wore a skirt and blouse to let the artists I was about to meet know that I was seriously looking at their work, in spite of the fact that I was a practicing artist myself. When working for Rutgers I was not paint splattered. I thought that the artists I visited would immediately know because of my conservative and clean clothes that I was there to consider only their work and that I had left behind my concerns with my own painting. Of course, one never leaves one's issues behind, whether those of one's painting or one's psychology. At age 30 I hadn't yet begun to be intimidated by what I believed was a dress code for New York artists as I would be in my forties when I was more ambitious about my painting and wondered if my style affected perceptions of me. I looked much like the academics on campus rather than a young aspiring artist. I still followed my western New York instincts and mixed colors in much the same way as I did in high school or today on the canvas. I chose the few pieces of clothing I had because I liked color in much the same way I chose cadmium orange and red and cobalt blue when at Pearl Paint, New York Central or Utrecht. My clothes were wide ranging in their palette just like my works. My color instinct ran deep, whether painting or shopping. I didn't know at the time that for almost twenty years I would receive ongoing emotional solace by sitting in front of Stella's installations. I walk through her imagery. I breathe in her color. It fills my lungs and my veins, pulsating through my system. I revel in her environments. I believe her density of feeling to symbolize our shared histories. I believe her individual books to be a film of consciousness. I think her cast objects to be poignant. They are ugly at times. They are decorative and pretty. They can be shy. They can be bold. Her castings are her words. Creating seriously and communing with tough art is as profound as a religious experience that for me cuts across denominations, races and maybe even nations. It is our escape from trivia. While I also receive spiritual solace from my own painting, I don't always receive that depth of emotion when viewing a work yet I deeply respect a myriad of artists here now and from art history. I've been seriously looking for forty years.
Over the twenty years I knew Stella I learned that Stella the person and Stella the artist were two distinct things. Stella did not in any way act like a spiritual being though I found her works to be as profound as a minister's teachings. She was not a philosopher though I thought her works were visual philosophy. Her installations achieved an impersonal stature transforming her personal response to her chosen medium into cultural artifacts of our time now as well as our past, allowing me to forget the frailties Stella had as an individual. For nineteen years I loved quietly sitting on her couch transfixed by her installations but when talking to her about my personal psychology I often felt the judgmental attitude of an authoritarian towards someone younger and consequently I felt less confident than I should have as a woman of my accomplishments for days after seeing her. She sometimes made me aware of the thirty odd years between us when she issued opinions about my emotional self. When talking about my painting and her sculpture, we were usually on a loving and more nurturing ground. Did Stella's perceptions stem from the fact that she was older than my own mother? Your former student, Mr. Hofmann? A friend of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning? An artist who had been working decades longer than I had? Or was Stella without the usual doubts and insecurities universal to most artists I knew? I, at times, over the years became hurt by Stella's comments and made even more insecure than usual because I felt that Stella was insightful and a seer. Was I just different in the way I treated my friends having been raised as a reserved protestant with New England and Scottish roots rather than a bohemian Brooklyn raised artist 33 years my elder? Stella has told me that in the Chelsea, the installations compete with Stella herself, overpowering her as a force, sometimes making her visitors forget she's there and more importantly allowing me to forgive her for her occasional judgmental comments that I perceived as dismissive. Stella knew she made bold comments and often apologized to me by saying that she didn't edit what she said. But then again, I didn't like her comments describing her reasons for having used the book as a poignant metaphor for consciousness either. I didn't think “words were lies” as she did. People have lied at times though. Her commentary seemed so much more ironic and superficial than the actual artwork. Was Stella embarrassed to be such a spiritual and sincere artist? Her defenses never really clouded my understanding of her work.
How did you, Mr. Hofmann, contribute to her idiosyncratic oeuvre? She mentioned studying with you that first visit and said that you always muttered nebba when you looked at her work. But she never told me that one class you ripped a painting in half and also turned it upside down. Her daughter-in-law Bonnie told me that story. So now I am able to understand why Stella turned my paintings upside down the one visit she made to my Jersey City studio. I was always the visitor to the Chelsea Hotel. Her visit to Jersey City irked and puzzled me as I had been painting seriously for some time and had previously been a gallery artist at the Susan Schreiber Gallery in Soho but today, years after her death, I realize that I too have been touched by your teaching. And when I would proudly show my 4 x 5 transparencies to Stella she would look at them upside down and sometimes backwards, grinning and smiling, much to my discomfort. Stella seemed elated and ecstatic during the studio visit-I now think remembering her Provincetown days at your school. When she passionately turned over work after work, she had the force of a tornado quickly making silent judgements about my painting, rushing about from painting to painting.
I saw your 1990 exhibition at the Whitney Museum and love looking at the two paintings on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art whenever I am in the Museum. The Rizzoli monograph proudly sits in my Ab Ex book collection and I gaze at the plates when I take a break from organizing jpegs of my painting. I don't know what you would think of my juxtapositions. Stella liked them. I've been trying to subvert and alter the male dominated Ab Ex school by enlarging the whole with feminine and domestic culture.
I'll send slides in my next letter. Or maybe just color xeroxes. I hope my story wasn't too much. Do you remember Stella? Enclosed is a snapshot.
Alison Weld
Ghost Letter # 6
Dear Hans Hofmann,
I thought I'd send you these reminiscences about Stella. As teaching was such an important part of your life, I'm sure that your students were important to you and that you still care about them and their oeuvres. And as I'm a contemporary painter continuing to hew my own path and paint emotionally, I wanted to introduce more about my life with Stella to you.
"Make it look easy. Make it look gross." Stella said when looking at one of my transparencies. Had you said that to her? I've always wondered.
I have always felt that I was in touch with Stella's soul more so when gazing at her works than when having a conversation with her. Was that because she had a somewhat defensive attitude with people, both friends and family as well as with artists more successful than she that she did not personally know? Yet her works overpowered Stella herself. They are just soul bared. Made with a lyrical and light-hearted touch that was obsessive. But the personality of one's artwork and oneself is often opposite one another. Her installations are magnificent; stripped of any inconsistencies. When Stella created an installation, she reached a state that could not be touched and that was beyond my criticism. It is a state of knowing. To achieve that state was my goal as a young painter. I yearned to create works that were both personal and impersonal simultaneously. I yearned to create objects that provoked a visceral, gritty meditative state in the viewer. And that still is my goal today. Joy resulted after months of turmoil and anxiety were transformed into objects of visual quality and spirituality.
To get to the living room environment of Stella's Chelsea Hotel home, we had to walk by the smallest kitchen I had ever seen down a narrow hallway densely installed with her artwork and old photographs. The living room was mesmerizing, not just Stella herself. The living room had an oriental rug on the floor with two old upholstered chairs facing her library wall installation. Behind the couch on the 23rd street side of the room was a white wall five foot high on top of which stood a long row of what Stella called wedding books and prenuptial agreements. The books were all made out of solid polyester resin and were opaque (wedding book) as well as translucent, (prenuptial agreement) looking almost like glass when the sun streamed into the apartment. The books were purely visual objects. They had no words. As I relayed in my first letter to you, Mr. Hofmann, Stella said repeatedly that "words lie" but, ironically, she chose to make installations of libraries nonetheless. There were paintings that were precursors of Abstract Expressionism on the east wall hung surrounded by her signature environment of bookshelves dense with polyester resin sculptures. The couch faced a major work, Details of a Lost Library, which was the width of the south living room wall-about fifteen feet. Details of a Lost Library was poignant and nostalgic while also exerting a strong formal presence. It was evident that Stella was firmly grounded in the plastic laws of painting you upheld and preached, Mr. Hofmann, and made decisions based on color and gesture, line, opacity and transparency. The west wall of the living room had another large installation of books, though it did not extend to the floor as Details... did. I sat on her soft couch and looked at her obsessive and over-crowded environment with awe and respect. I was excited and inspired. The Filmmaker had not prepared me for her visionary environment. I was transfixed and felt an overwhelming surge of a deep aesthetic love for this unpretentious creator of visions.
Your aesthetics, Mr. Hofmann, are deeply invested in Stella's idiosyncratic work. Her work shares affinities with Edward Kienholz of almost fifty years ago as well. Her library shelves push and pull, moving formally and idiosyncratically from top to bottom shelf, allowing the mind to rest before being pushed onward through the visual and emotional journey. Each individual book pushes and pulls within the small and intimate frame of the book.
I am very happy to have known well one of your students! Had I known that her way of responding to my painting had been influenced by your teaching methods, I would not have been as puzzled by her frenzied actions in my studio. I would have realized that her response was grounded in your school of painting, with an approach to looking not of my time. I'll write again soon. Would you please send a laser print of work you are currently supporting? Or a snap shot. Many thanks.
Yours sincerely,
Alison Weld


Ghost Letter # 7
Dear Hans Hofmann,
I wanted to continue to tell my story of Stella Waitzkin:
Perusing Stella's living room, I noticed a small white and black sign that read "These books are paintings." I immediately thought to myself that having a sign in one's studio was a smart and easy way to impress your work's philosophy upon your guests. Should I too have a sign? My sign would mention soul and emotion transmission, traits that the art world has made me almost embarrassed to believe in so fervently as I do. It would be easier to support these principles by having a sign. Yet my poetic titles for my painting were the equivalent of Stella's signs. I titled each of my works metaphorically, naming the work much like naming a baby, giving an identity to each work. Hot Zone, Self Reliance, 100 Lives of Earth, Death's Breath, Loss of Faith on the Road to Madagascar were some of my signs.
Stella was a painter who became an installation artist after having been a performance artist during the Vietnam War. Her sign was right. Each book was first a painting and was resolved on its own before it became a unit in a library wall. I read the shelves as color and texture, image and gesture, as if reading a sentence, moving from left to right. Stella's color was usually light in its value. Sometimes jewel-like, sometimes muddy. She transformed the style of gestural abstraction into evocative monuments to poignancy and emotion. I absorbed Stella's work very easily, identifying with it as something I loved and respected from my very first visit. I never had any doubts. She was a fierce expressionist while also being nostalgic and Victorian in her sensibility. Her works were feminine while also having an impersonal non-gendered grandeur. Her environment was monumental.
As a thirty year old painter I was ecstatic to sit and talk to an older woman artist. During the course of our conversation I found out much to my delight that Stella had also studied at Alfred University. She asked me to remember to bring color transparencies of my work to our next appointment. I was working on a painting series inspired by my recent job in the Vertebrate Paleontology laboratory of the American Museum of Natural History. For three years I had assisted Dr. Eugene Gaffney, making molds and casts of a fossil turtle. My abstracted turtle imagery was expressionistic, textural and somewhat odd, reflecting Chicago's quirky sensibility as much as New York City.
I learned a lot about Stella's aesthetic during the first appointment and knew that I would keep in touch while on my excursions into Manhattan to look for work for the Paul Robeson Gallery's active exhibition program. The director of the gallery was also a figurative sculptor, Stuart White. As he also taught sculpture I was left with much of the curatorial work. I felt lucky to have an interesting job which put me in touch with significant and usually under known artists. And I liked Stuart very much. He was intelligent and silly at the same time and a good person to work for. After work I often visited his studio in his home and looked at what he was working on. His works were figurative and narrative, blending elements of Americana such as duck decoys or paintings reminiscent of 19th century landscape with surreal plaster life size nudes set in tableaus or diorama like settings.
When I got back to the gallery the next day I told Stuart that Stella Waitzkin's work spoke with eloquence. We both wanted romance and spirituality to be alive in 1984. We were happy about this discovery of a serious under known artist. As Stuart's sculpture was also romantic and quirky itself, he supported my desire to show Stella's work. I told him that Stella's touch was ethereal and her color sense was lyrical. I was quietly swooning with excitement over meeting an older and accomplished artist and I thought one without any self-absorbed pretensions of grandeur. I thought that it was especially wonderful that Stella and I were both responding to the New York School, though I am a postmodernist accepting more than one school of art having begun my art practice during the time of aesthetic pluralism. I remember being excited that she had studied with you. I don't know why it has taken so many years to write.
Yours sincerely,
Alison Weld


Ghost Letter # 8
Dear Stella,
Do you remember telling me at my 50th birthday lunch with you that I "am searching”?  You were so right on—at age 65 I am still searching—searching for a visual response to my time now as well as a response to the continuum.  A search can take place in the studio.  A search can last forty-five minutes or it can take place over a year long period.  Your comment that I was a "virtuoso painter and an excellent writer" intrigued me at the time. Do you remember my quick response of an incredulous " Stella!!"? I knew I wasn't a virtuoso for it is hard for me to paint. I've always thought virtuosity implied facility rather than depth. I know I am deeply involved with essence now, as well as with essence of the past as you also were. I wondered about your response to my work, exactly what prompted such a description.  I never really accepted your comment as representing your feelings or insights. Your body of work did that for me.  I loved you so deeply and I knew we were soul mates. I'm so much more confident now about who I have been. I now accept myself both as a painter and as an intellectual with a visual eye. It has taken a long time for me to believe that it was valid for me to be an intellectual. The bohemian myth as a role model for an artist is no longer embedded in my psychology. You understood and loved both sides of me. I'll never forget the times you said 'I love you' instead of goodbye. And asked, 'aren't you my daughter?' But I was your daughter in less painterly ways-I called weekly to discuss your daily life as well as to be in touch with your more profound inspirations. I never lost my faith in you, Stella. Realistically however, I was poor for so long and couldn't afford much paint or wine, did not smoke, and wasn't very bohemian. I was just poor. You were bohemian and I yearned to be Stella. I too wanted to have chipped plates and not be bothered by them. I loved your free spirit and your youthfulness.
Alison


Ghost Letter # 9
Dear Stella,
In such a cool culture and time, in such an anti-intellectual country, what made us believe in our emotional statements as significant? While our subjects vary widely from a poignant and mournful library, to the "divided self" we share a belief in emotion, whether the poignancy in your oeuvre, or the abstract toughness in mine. We both look hard and interpret with both joy and anxiety. We both revel in color, gesture and image, whether abstract or figurative, whether responding to the syncopation of music, a transcendental atmosphere or wild birdcalls. Did Jackson Pollock's response to you, Stella, that he thought of the sky when he painted strike a chord and gave you courage to be a poet of visual culture? I never asked what you thought of Stella because my mind drifts as I paint, ranging from insecurity and tension to calm philosophical musings. Did you think of Billy? Tony Fruscella? Or just furiously work with the medium against the clock?
Your seriousness Stella inspired me and made me feel secure in my own postmodern expressionism.  It helped me continue to be soulful-not intimidated by the current fashion. I was glad to commune with a philosophy that was greater than we both were. Not make art about the small situation, the unimportant attribute. I know we both look for varying tenors of the visceral. I know we don't paint with ease. Yet I want the painting to read as an organic object that looks as if an idiosyncratic God were responsible for its existence. I'm not interested in prowess or gamesmanship. I want the painting to look furiously willed into being. Struggle remains. I don't like the superficially accomplished. I'm not impressed with most technique. I hate works that illustrate. I want to reveal what it is to be sensate. Is there no room for my "earnest relentlessness"? No room for a Clyfford Still today?   
Will I have your resiliency? You were somewhat bitter. Are your ghosts still somewhat bitter? Your work proves that you deserve more renown and acknowledgment. As a young artist I yearned to achieve recognition from external sources because I needed the affirmation that I could not easily give myself. I often felt despair and alienation from the powers of the art world and from the hipper artists of the scene. Today I've overcome that yearning and feel at my best when I paint and create. Today I'm productive.
Alison


Ghost Letter # 10
Dear Stella,
I love you with all my painterliness. Our painterliness. We both bought art supplies instead of clothes or fine wine. Art supplies, not temporal pleasure in spite of my belief that cuisine is integral to culture. I would much rather spend money on paint, strainers, panels, animal skulls, fake fur, artificial flowers, India ink pens and colored pencils. You were right about my one day having a guilty conscience about my costly art supplies. To be a painter requires money. Paint is expensive. Materiality is costly. I consume paint. I know why the Abstract Expressionists used cheap house paint so as not to end up with an expensive color underneath and completely covered up by a less costly color. But because I believe in surface as a metaphor for history and consciousness I listen to the painting and ignore my budget. I still remember the freshman year lecture about using good quality supplies from the very beginning of one's career. We were instructed by John Wood, the head freshman foundation professor, to use good quality paper, paint and canvas because he felt that one cannot predict when one reaches the level of art. When new to New York City, I didn't spend as much money on supplies but I regularly visited the 57th street galleries after modeling and walked up Fifth Avenue to the Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, always stopping at the outdoor Strand kiosk on the way. I didn't have much money but every now and then bought a used book about art history. I looked at Renaissance, mediaeval and aboriginal art more than contemporary. Working full time prevented me from roaming through the city but allowed me to paint large works as I had when in Chicago. I was young and I never worried that having a full-time job in the vertebrate paleontology lab would be hard for me as a serious painter. I wanted health benefits and wanted to be able to afford better supplies. I wanted to earn more than my meager salary of $63.00 weekly. Having a history of epilepsy, I needed health benefits. I hadn't been seeing a neurologist regularly and thought that I should as I had been diagnosed as a temporal lobe epileptic in second grade by Rochester's best childhood neurologist, Dr. Wilbur Smith.
I had over-medicated myself the previous year during the last semester of graduate school by being forgetful and doubling up on doses of dilantin. I saw triple images of everything prompting me to go to the doctor. I was so over medicated that I gave the office receptionist the wrong phone number and it took almost a week for them to reach me about my dilantin level being triple the amount it should be.
When I was in Alfred I identified with Van Gogh as another epileptic artist, also heart felt, also a colorist, actually a pioneer colorist I looked to with aesthetic love. This was my beginning of an aesthetic family-an epileptic painter just like I was.
I'll try to be an iconoclast as you were holed up in the Chelsea with your romantic and idiosyncratic vision. You never seemed as bitter as you could have been about not being recognized Stella.
Alison


Ghost Letter # 11
Dear Stella,
I thought of your title of your found object piece, a grocery store shopping cart filled with discarded works. The Final Insult. And also wondered whether I had awkwardly stumbled on the very reason you didn't show very often--was it to protect yourself from the insults that are unavoidable in the smaller, under-funded galleries. Let me explain: When I was younger, Charles and I rented a Ryder truck so that we could transport four large diptychs from my Home Economics series to Seton Hall University for their summer show. The group show of just a few artists was arranged by an established not for profit gallery that did not have their own truck or staff for art handling though they did help out towards the cost of transportation. The director of the gallery had called me up and asked that I be in the exhibition and told me that my image would be on the card. He was persuasive and convinced me to be in the show. Of course, I was happy to have a work of mine on the invitation! I had not been sure whether I should be in the show because this gallery was devoted to the regional beginning artist, with very few having gallery representation in Manhattan as I had. But nonetheless I am not a household name. I'm still emerging. Stella, you weren't a household name either.  I wasn't sure whether it was good to be the strongest artist in a group, and I worried whether it would hurt my reputation --but I didn't know whom to ask. While I was glad not to be perceived as the weakest in the exhibition, I worried about my painting being surrounded by weaker art that was not as accomplished. But few organizations were asking me to show. I was in that awkward realm of having achieved some success but not enough. Should I only show at the Robert Steele Gallery every two to four years where all the artists are without question more or less equals? I like to keep my resume active and I haven't decided like some of my peers to stop showing locally. New Jersey both benefits and suffers from being so close to Manhattan. From being part bedroom community just minutes away yet also part suburban and farther away rural. The art scene isn't as concentrated as that in Brooklyn. Barry Schwabsky had left the country and no longer wrote criticism for the NJ section of The New York Times. I was very fortunate to have gotten a review from him in 1998, one of his last reviews for the NJ section.
Stella, let me describe the mayhem: the University staff had started to paint offices adjacent to the show and had moved the desks from the offices in front of two of my paintings. While nothing was damaged the show had been advertised. I wasn't embarrassed anymore about picking up my work early because of my vacation schedule. I was now embarrassed about their lack of professionalism. I didn't mail out many invitations. I mailed to my friends in the university's area. I was glad to pick up the work without noting any damage but thought that the University was extremely inconsiderate with a total disregard for me. After working for ten years in a regional museum with a bifurcation between union staff and curatorial staff, I very easily became exasperated with the painters taking precedence over the artists or the intellectuals. The insult to my integrity was so familiar. Jersey. It was easy to forget that I could never have afforded my large and beautiful studio elsewhere. Artists don't have negative thoughts about having a loft here as it's so convenient to the city. But there are dealers who have said that they won't travel here.
While I'm writing you Stella I'd like to tell you about another insult at another not for profit gallery. This time in Manhattan. Several years ago at the Educational Alliance, a not for profit gallery and school in NYC, mothers wheeled their strollers into the gallery every morning when they were dropping off their children for daycare. I happened to arrive early one day to visit my exhibition. It was transformed from a contemplative environment to a community of young families. Again, nothing was damaged except my pride. But the strollers made me feel my insignificant place in Manhattan. I have devoted my whole life painting spiritual yet tough works. Was I supposed to stop because I was still emerging? Was it too much to ask for the respect given to other mystics? Would strollers ever be left in an altar in a church or synagogue? I believe a gallery is just as sacred. Even an alternative, not for profit space removed from the marketplace. And crucial to society's development in more intangible ways. My community is important as well albeit a community of decades of visual objects. I was able to persevere in my studio, making tough decisions and not accepting the easy solution to a problem but I was still not filled with ample bravado and assurance. I thought that if I were in the midst of the current fashion that I would have more courage and bravado. But then again, maybe I wouldn't respect myself for following the trends rather than being a trend setter. With my expressive mark and my stretched fake fur I believe I am making an original statement while respecting history and today's mass culture. I've loved kitsch since I was a graduate student in Chicago. I used to visit the Salvation Army stores throughout the city with friends searching for the cheap plastic of earlier decades or 1960s tawdry dresses constructed of glittery material. While my own painting did not yet draw upon my days of thrift shop searching it now forms the basis for my uses of fake fur today. But I've digressed, Stella, from my experience of an insult.
Alison


Ghost Letter # 12
Dear Stella,
I was afraid that having gallery representation would adversely affect my painting because I have been painting on my own and against the dominant grain for so long. Because my works are bold I forget that I am actually a postmodernist and not an abstract expressionist. And generally feel that I am without peers. But my first year of representation was very productive, both on canvas and on paper. I began a new series of oils prior to meeting Robert Steele and several months after our studio visit began a new series of acrylics on paper. I've been showing in New York City since I was thirty-four but have never been given a contract by a gallery and never thought I was a priority. I showed with Eric Stark at his first gallery in Soho and afterwards with Susan Schreiber and then with Anita Shapolsky. I always felt that my work was respected more than I was. I don't look like a New Yorker and my Anglo features make me appear traditional and conservative. As a young female art student, I was told that my prettiness would be a liability to my career. But I pierced my ears anyway and began to wear earrings after moving to New York City. I didn't think that the male art professors at Alfred were the final word about my life. But from today's perspective I wonder whether the professors at Alfred were talking in code about my being a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant? At least I am Scottish the critic Vivien Raynor told me.
When I stop working on a painting, mulling it over, unsure as to whether it is finished, it nags at me if it is unresolved as if I had a bad conscience. My Scottish Presbyterian grounding does not let me keep a weak painting around for more than several months. I look and look, slowly understanding my response of dislike or discomfort. If I change my mind about a work after I have had it photographed, I don't let that affect my decision to change the piece. The wasted outlay of money bothers me a little but I rationalize it by saying that being a painter these days is financially a losing proposition anyway.
Alison


Ghost Letter # 13
Dear Stella,
Your works are containers of memory. The memory of Abstract Expressionism in New York City and jazz uptown. You truly integrate the feminine gesture with your personal history. I love the way you speak with a vernacular language yet are clearly involved with large questions. In your constructed walls of the 1980s and 1990s you balanced your belief in the importance of visual flight with your handling of concrete, plastic vocabulary. Why did you say that all you were doing was " filling holes"? I always felt you were doing so much more than you admitted to me.
Both Wreck of the UPS and Details of a Lost Library function as abstract points of color within the accumulation of hundreds of cast books. I see both installations as metaphors for the universe, a wry reflection of cultural history. Fish specimens rather than color planes. Brilliant and autobiographical. What would Hofmann say to you about your impure impulse? To see your work, it is obvious that more is more and that less is not more. How welcoming to see such a lack of the minimalist ethos. Both works read as memorials to those not living. Each book reads as a saintly relic-a reliquary of memory and deed. A catharsis and the embodiment of your soul made into artifacts. However, your gestures Stella are small-you never worked in sweeping strokes. I see each book as a hand-held object. I love the faces embedded in your works--fossilizations of family, friends, and nature eerily portrayed.
Don't use your intellect if you want to paint were thoughts I heard daily for years. I'm not sure where or how I absorbed this prejudice but Stella you saw through it, appreciating both my painting as well as my writing. You were ahead of me in your understanding. You achieved a state of knowing, as an artist and a person. To achieve that state is my goal today.
Thank you,
Alison


Ghost Letter # 14
Dear Stella,
Your presence was felt by your family and friends the night of the opening of your 2005 retrospective at the Robert Steele Gallery in Chelsea.  When I had my show with Robert of ten diptychs some fifteen years ago, you were already failing but managed to eventually take the 23rd street bus there for which I am grateful. The gallery was open but still finishing minor construction and unfortunately it was noisy the day you visited my show so you did not stay long. But you have been in Robert's space.
Your retrospective was not as densely presented as the works in your home. Stanley Bard visited. So did Aldona Gobuzan and Gertrude Stein. Anita Shapolsky had a condominium meeting she couldn't miss. Your family. Josh with his new girlfriend. Tom Otterness. Jonathan Goodman. Ron Morosan. Jim Pernotto has left the city and is in Ohio. Judith Childs. It was very crowded. Robert sold two works. Many of your friends said that you would have held court. Fred said that you would have said that "exhibitions are shit". But then children of artists see their parent's dark side unlike their artist friends who commune with the work rather than the dark personality. A mother who is an artist is first a mother to a son or daughter with their art assuming a secondary importance relative to the profound experience of parent/child. In contrast, your artwork nurtures me. I find it primary. Your body of work instilled in me a deep love and respect for you Stella. Had you been a bad mother? I do not know and do not have the emotional investment of your son Fred. You weren't dark to me. I dismissed your personal failings for your talent took precedence.
It was a new experience seeing the works against a clean white wall on an industrial cement floor with new shelving. I saw the death masks and faces, the gesture and color clearly. Your decisions were apparent. Your work shone Stella. Fred and Charles had arranged for Ken Mandel to make a short video of the Chelsea Hotel. Fred narrated, speaking with poignancy about your life in the Chelsea. Gertrude Stein mentioned Billy to me and how he lived on 14th street near her and was involved with drugs, ignoring your overtures and kindnesses. Gertrude mentioned that after Billy's death that you became very mystical as well as secretive and that Billy acted like he was in his 20s though he was in fact ten years older. I never realized you were searching for Billy's soul when you went to India. But I have always felt that your works' mournful quality were inspired by his early death.
Alison
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Ghost Letter # 15
Dear Chaim Soutine,
I wanted to introduce you to the work of Miriam Beerman who was my close friend and mentor for twenty years. Miriam’s painting descends from yours. Like the environments of Stella Waitzkin, Beerman’s works are containers of memory–historic, monumental and personal. She is a painter whose works throughout her long life have addressed issues of Jewish persecution while also evoking the unconscious in visceral and moving ways. I believe that her painting indicates that she is a soul mate of yours, Soutine, as well as Goya, Van Gogh and Francis Bacon. She is in her mid-nineties.

I still remember receiving a package of her slides in the mail one day when I worked at Rutgers. The slides looked accomplished though they were of works on paper and she was interested in a small solo show in what Stuart White and I called gallery II, a small gallery off the Paul Robeson Gallery’s (formerly called Robeson Center Gallery) large and beautiful main space. I called her up and made an appointment to visit her studio in her home. I was immediately confronted with large oil paintings haphazardly propped against the walls with small works hung throughout the living room. Why, I thought, did she send me works on paper? The paintings were visceral and expressionistic. I knew immediately that I had met an artist as important as Stella Waitzkin was to me. Mr. Soutine, if you see the spirit of Hans Hofmann please ask him about his former student, the late Stella Waitzkin who has joined you both in your ethereal yet powerful states. I absorb all of you ghosts; I embrace the spirits of masters past as well as of artists today. I believe your souls are imbued into passages of paint and color. You are still speaking. I listen and respond to you all. You have not died as long as someone is receiving your vision now. No artist dies completely. Actually, no one dies completely. Culture is not the sole memory of humanity. Yet it is significant.

Yet Beerman was less abstract in her approach than Stella. But like Stella, she had forged a signature image. Miriam’s paintings are bold, thick textured objects. It was clear from my very first viewing that she painted with love and conviction. She paints with smaller brushes than I do and the surface is organic and reminiscent of clods of earth, in spite of her bold and dissonant color, rooted in Van Gogh. Beerman paints cadaverous and tortured people and beasts. Her work is a relentless soliloquy to anguish and anxiety. We both believe in the visual object as a symbol for complexity. We both think color and surface talked about the relevant without illustrating it. I loved the visual world much like others loved their religion, their families, their personal passions. I worshiped the visual. I, like Miriam, wanted to change the tenor of the art world. I believed that the abstract expressionist painters were still important in 1985, thirty odd years after their dominance. It was evident that we both believed in the power of tough painting.

That first visit she also showed me large portraits of artists, her soul mates and muses: you, Soutine, as well as Giacometti, Renoir, Cezanne, Joseph Beuys, and Van Gogh were the subjects of large canvases stamped with her longstanding interest in metamorphosis, life and death. It was immediately evident, Mr. Soutine, that on a daily basis she addressed harsh reality and thought about the reduction of humanity to ash and bones. How painful to be inspired by humanity’s history of intolerance, hatred, and aggression. Yet Miriam has also been inspired by poetry since she began as a young painter. Her sister gave her large volumes of poetry that she memorized as a girl of twelve. She is a poet of the profoundly grotesque. She works and reworks the painting until the work is an embodiment of her unique consciousness itself, as well as an embodiment impersonal and global in its meaning.

Your show at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan was very inspiring. After you visit Miriam’s home/studio in I predict that you will enjoy knowing her. I hope that I didn’t send you too much material. I know how busy you are with your own life and career but as an elder statesman please understand my excitement about Miriam Beerman’s painting. Mr. Soutine, when you visit I’m sure you’ll think that your descendant has surpassed your expectations of the future of painting. Though of course Miriam’s seriousness and anxiety-ridden surfaces are now being questioned by the dominance of illustrative imagery.

Sincerely,

Alison Weld
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Ghost Letter # 16
Dear Chaim Soutine,
Compared to her powerful and masterful paintings, Miriam appears seemingly insignificant, dressing in a nondescript way--tee shirts and pants in dark colors. She is sometimes as brutal in her spoken commentary as are her works. She does not talk about politics though her works are political. She speaks spontaneously and quickly, in contrast to her lengthy and tortured visual dialogue with each canvas, drawing or artist book. Clothes are unimportant to her yet over the twenty-three years I knew her she never wore anything that would distract one from her work. Miriam also has gray hair. She cuts it herself. Indian bedspreads covered her couches in her living room for the early years of our relationship. She had the painting Oswiecim in her dining room for several years–she worked on it there for several years and it was on permanent display perched on short log pedestals. After our first visit in 1984, I remember thinking that she was a sincere, unpretentious person. I’m sure you’ll agree. Her painting storage occupies the sun porch adjacent to the living room where her paintings will be propped against the walls and Miriam and her student assistant will pull out work after work. I spent several hours just looking and responding each visit I have made. So will you, I’m sure. Her canvases are great. Her indecision and her inner turmoil over her chosen subject result in tough paintings and drawings. Like the other artists I have known, I notice a dichotomy between artist and their creation, between an individual’s biography and their body of work. It is somewhat like the dichotomy of my diptychs where the internal impulse affects and contributes to the external. The external requires an impersonal mind set during decision making though my private psychology controls the signature vision.

At the time of my first visit to Miriam’s, I had just started to help write the grants for the gallery and help plan out the year’s thematic approach. Stuart and I met with one another before the grant writing to discuss the shows. We decided to organize a year of the landscape followed by a year of the figure as we were in a college environment and wanted to introduce basic elements and subjects of visual art to the students. I was looking forward to Miriam’s work being in The Brutal Figure: Visceral Images exhibition. Rutgers Newark had a gallery with a tight budget so I very rarely borrowed blue chip art from the most powerful top galleries as that required professional art handlers to secure the loan. Generally the artists were lesser known–in that cocoon like emerging artist state that often lasts for an entire lifetime. It has with Miriam. It did with Stella. In spite of the fact that their work sold for serious prices. Will I always be an emerging chrysalis?

Sincerely,
Alison Weld
P.S. Miriam gave me this statement she wrote about her painting. I thought you’d especially like it
“Even though visual ideas are outside the realm of words, certain key words continually come to mind as themes: metamorphosis, grotesque, demonic, comic. Ideas of morality, such as good and evil, which have dominated art for centuries, are also part of my concerns. My paintings and my other works reflect larger mythological ideas that go beyond a specific sense of time. Symbolic suggestions in the imagery are both ancient and modern.”


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Ghost Letter # 17

Dear Georgia O'Keeffe,
I'm sending you my words about my college years at Alfred because of the bones I collected while there. I still have them. I never found your signature cow skull. Mostly deer and cow vertebrae as well as a cow pelvis. I thought of your painting when working with the fossil dinosaurs and turtles at the American Museum of Natural History. I thought of you, years earlier, Georgia, when I decided not to have children while still in college and to dedicate my life to art-to my own painting as creator as well as the role of assistant curator, writer and connoisseur. I decided that I wanted to live a life that was thoughtful, emotional and critical every day in the studio or while viewing art in galleries and museums. Here are some thoughts about being a young and idealistic art student. I yearned to create works that were both personal and impersonal simultaneously. I yearned to create objects that provoked a visceral, gritty meditative state in the viewer. And that still is my goal today. Joy resulted after months of turmoil and anxiety were transformed into objects of visual quality and spirituality.
Walking and talking to my closest friend, Sarah Schantz, through the village and the countryside of Alfred, where I am today, I regularly discussed the transmission of integrity to the materials. I felt with my philosophy I was on my way to achieving a signature statement and would eventually assume a place in the contemporary art world. I didn't know at the time that my philosophical musings and my search for integrity would allow me to be employed as an artist in the museum world and nurture those whom I thought deserved recognition for their personal visions. I very much believed in a personal integrity that communicated across cultures and looked for integrity's transmission in other student's works while in school and in my Hoboken and Jersey City years in my peers' works. I believed that I, even if a beginning artist, understood what visual integrity felt and looked like. I was in training to be an artist since I was quite young. My mother exhibited her painting at the Memorial Art Gallery's outdoor art show, the Clothesline Art Show, every year. It was a highlight of the year for me. I liked the art and exhibiting artists more than our treat of cotton candy, unusual for a girl my age. I was happy to be my mother's daughter. I was proud. Art was the one area in which my mother treated me with a special kindness and possibly even some respect. My father did not understand the arts that deeply and my mother enjoyed my company and intellectual stimulation in my newly chosen field.
Being isolated in Alfred was conducive to developing my own vision and aesthetics as there were few distractions other than the maturation process of young adulthood. There were no museums or galleries off campus to distract me from my serious quest to create my own signature style. Time was what I had, along with the natural world of beauty and space. I was passionate about my collection of deer and cow bones, weathered from the harsh climate of the long winters of Alfred and I worked in the studio until late evening daily. I was working on paper with pastel and approached the paper by slowly musing before I made each mark. These works were visual prayers. I prayed for universal peace when I made each delicate mark with the pastel and saw each floating image inspired by a chicken's spine as an individual country. While I did not produce that many works as a student I produced imagery that even after forty-five years I yearn to create again. The essence of what inspired me then in rural New York state still inspires me even though I've had thirty years of urban life as my primary experience. And now, in my mid-sixties, I have been able to move back into the countryside, living in upstate New York’s Adirondack Park, with a studio surrounded by a hayfield.
The life presence underlying our biology even now inspires me to create visceral imagery I believe to be reflections of our world. Art is my natural world. My own painting as well as the art I embrace and make part of my own being. While I do not see glorious skies or beauteous forests daily, I do experience the abstract scapes and marks of one of my canvases. I feel its rich impasto between my toes much like mud or sand. I walk through the image. I breathe in the color. It fills my lungs and my veins, pulsating through my system. I revel in painting. I believe an ethereal paint film to symbolize the life force that comprises our unique histories. I believe a painting's surface to be consciousness itself. I think color is magnificent. It can be ugly. It can be decorative and pretty. It can be shy. It can be bold.  My colors are my words. Painting seriously and communing with tough art is as profound as a religious experience that for me cuts across denominations, races and maybe even nations. It is my escape from trivia. I believe serious art to be visual philosophy; visual poetry; visual prose.
At Alfred we were exposed to the philosophical basis of contemporary visual art but were never advised to try to be part of the dominant mode. There were many graduate student glassblowers and potters on campus setting the tone that art was both an old tradition as well as being current and hip to the latest art world fashion. Iridescent glazes were very popular on campus while I was there yet the potter's wheel was such an old tool. Was this tension between the old and the new the beginning of my interest in dichotomy? Of our "divided self"? We created our works in a small village yet I was ambitious. And wanted my painting to be seen by many. My future arena I saw as world-wide. I dressed in thrift shop clothes as my parents had my younger sisters at home to support. I wasn't at college to meet a future husband and impress my peers with my dress and style. I was there to see if I could make the grade and become a serious artist. Alfred didn't teach many techniques. My professors expected us to know how to swim. I was expected to produce meaningful statements that had power. I thought that a favorite professor was Socrates and that I was his student Plato. Lectures given to us were awe inspiring. We were participants in culture's greatness. The concept made the difference. Skill and accomplishment were sure to follow with time and hard work. Today I look at works with technical assurance and am generally disappointed by their lack of significant philosophical meaning. I find so much work to be insipidly decorative and academic. At Alfred I was taught to think by the lectures of the photographer, John Wood. While it was the newest program of the school, I didn't sign up for video. I wasn't aspiring to be part of the new wave. I "looked backward to go forward".
Georgia, when new to New York City, four years after receiving my BFA, I spent my afternoons after work looking at Sienese painting transfixed by its beauty and its fervent belief. I wandered the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I viewed religiously a wide range of cultures and thought this was substantive grist for my vision. Resiliency and faith were needed to maintain my path, in spite of little respect for a young and poor artist from society, to balance the necessary self-criticism. I've learned that the process of creation is a see saw of alternating conflicts and resolutions throughout one's life. Painting doesn't get easier for me. It is still a challenge. Yet I ultimately felt that it was a privilege to speak forcefully, while remaining independent and reflecting my own time and most importantly hybrid thought. I release myself with each new work from my myriad of ghosts.
I look back to your beginnings for strength and support today. I must ask your spirit whether you were as intolerant of Andy and his followers as I am now? An intelligent guess would be yes. Judging from your oeuvre. It is evident that neither one of us begins with a visual preconception more important than the painting process of call and response. Your imagery is less important than process and love of the visual elements.
Going to art school in the country was formative for me, as formative as my childhood years of walking and hiking with my father. It was the grandeur of the art world that drew me to New York City. I wasn't worried about being lonely in such a large city. Yet Chicago had not prepared me for New York City. As a young artist new to the city I wanted to meet older artists with bodies of work under their belt. I was afraid that my being a very distant cousin may not mean as much to you, my early role model, as it did to me, just an emerging yet very serious artist.


Alison Weld


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Ghost Letter # 18

Dear Joan Mitchell,
My Home Economics works of 1994-2006 are both sincerely and somewhat ironically responding to Ab Ex. They have been called by critics ironic because I think it necessary to discuss the lack of the visceral in today's fashionable art by incorporating both expressionism with the decorative, not forsaking authenticity though not allowing serious abstract painting to exist in its ivory tower. Though I'm not sure you'd approve this impulse to juxtapose my oils with stretched panels of fake fur, " vinyl like stuff", upholstery or painted artificial flowers. I'd like to give you some background as to my development so I'm excerpting some pages from a memoir I have been working on since 2003. I'm still working. I'm still working, although I am an under-known, still-emerging artist in the early years of old age. My hair is gray and my chin is no longer firm. I'm not yet a spirit or ghost though I sometimes feel like one. Childless, my art is my biology. Your gestures and marks are my biology. The biology of the 20thcentury. Your gestures, colors and marks are my favorite ancestors. They are my sisters of choice. My own body of painting is my nuclear family and my extended family, my cousins and aunts, my children and grandchildren. My early works are ancestors, my great aunt or great great grandmother. My layers of oil paint are visceral striations of geological time. And they are also human. They are thought made physical. Emotive and also palpitating.
Even though I am an abstract painter, I think of my work as a visual diary. A diary of my unconscious. A diary of my responses. A diary of tangible form and color without words. I understand the meaning of a metaphor. I make meaning. My first works at Alfred were abstract symbols for organs floating on what I believed to be a metaphysical field. I thought of them as interior and exterior maps. I drew symbols for body parts and believed that my personal mark was crucial to inner awareness. Being an abstract painter was essential to me. I wanted to do nothing else but express my inner self. I believed that aesthetic soul was necessary. My late father, Paul Woodbury Weld, was an internist at the Rochester General Hospital and I had been exposed at meal times to daily conversations about health and disease. He was not interested in culture and did not attend church with the rest of the family. He had contracted polio the year I was born and was disabled so could not participate in sports with any of his six children. He did throw horse shoes and play croquet-his only sports except for hiking in the mountains. While my mother, Mary Jean Cameron Weld, painted she had first been trained as a nurse and was able to have an active voice while talking to my father about his work. Their serious attitudes about their personal interests revealed to me how to be serious and ambitious about my painting.
The painting process, even after forty-five years, is a daily discovery. Painting grows meaning, much like a gardener. I paint bones and skeletons, organs or turtles, cellular forms, pistols and stamens seeking to emote. I believe in a physical sensuality, a materiality of the object, and I see consciousness in imagery that you can touch and caress with your eyes. What made me believe in the power of the visual to speak profoundly? The ghosts of painting and sculpture, ancient Haniwa, or clay fragments of a food preparation bowl. How did you discover your imagery throughout your years of painting, Joan? "Just paint" your spirit screamed at me yesterday. Your spirit is right. I feel that because I am an unknown artist painting without regard for the coolness espoused now that I have freedom as you did. I too respond to an inner conviction. A solitary endeavor usually but for my ghosts. I find a profound spirituality in nature and yearn to interpret and suggest this Darwinian life force as you did so beautifully. I see and experience the biology of 20th century anguish daily. I doubt you saw your works as landscapes either. Art is my natural world. My own painting as well as yours. While I do not see glorious skies or beauteous forests daily, I do experience the abstract scapes and marks of our paintings. I feel their rich surfaces between my toes much like mud or sand. I walk through their imagery. I breathe in their colors. Visual art fills my lungs and my veins, pulsating through my system. I revel in painting. I believe an oil or acrylic surface to symbolize the life force that comprises our unique histories. I believe a painting's surface to be a film of consciousness. I think color is magnificent. "It can be ugly. It can be decorative and pretty. It can be shy. It can be bold." My colors are my words. Painting seriously and communing with tough art is as profound as a religious experience that for me cuts across denominations, races and maybe even nations. It is my escape from trivia. I believe serious art to be solely about the big issues.
I'll write again. I wanted to let you know my response to your retrospective at the Whitney. I went several times and loved the works. It was good for New York to see such passion. It was also good for New York to see nature- based work-New Yorkers have a hard time appreciating the transcendental sublime in Nature-concentrating much more on people--and I for one prefer impersonal Nature. Thank you, Joan, for your ambitious interpretation of it.
Sincerely
Alison Weld


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Ghost Letter # 19


Dear Meret Oppenheim,
I think of your fragile and wry work often. For the past four years I have been creating floor pieces composed of material, both fake fur and upholstery, pelts, skulls, rocks and shells, and at times painted linoleum tiles or wood panels. Seeing so much of your work in Bern at the Kunstmuseum was so exciting, so meaningful. I identified with your quirky sensibility and believed that your work represented the female experience, despite the fact that you were one of the boys. To me, your work captured a female essence, an essence of imposed frailty transformed into strength. I identified with your quirky juxtapositions of unlike materials and of unlike meanings. I thought of my floor piece, All but Death can be Adjusted, when I saw Masked Flower with its organic base of a tree trunk, so brown and sensuous. Just as I was only aware of Georgia O'Keeffe as an art student, not yet exposed to many of art history's women artists, I was within several years aware of your fur lined tea cup and saucer. I saw your signature work on one of my early trips to the city from school and never forgot it. I fervently wished that I had created it-so poignant and so female. So subversive and so sexy. So meaningful. Such play and intelligence. I now play with ideas about mortality and sexuality, artifice and nature, male and female, gendered elements as well as those non- gendered elements shared by us all. But for quite a while I too just wanted to be one of the boys- a serious painter, working with earth tones and non-decorative color. I too decided not to have children. You, Georgia and myself- all of us serious about being childless. You both speak to me in more than one way- as visual artists and as women. Very few women deny motherhood as integral to their life. Thank you for being an early supporter of the right of a woman to be equal to a man rather than solely a nurturer and caregiver.
Meret, I'm still working. I'm still working, although I am an under-known, still-emerging artist in the early years of old age. My hair is gray and my chin is no longer firm. I'm not yet a spirit or ghost though I sometimes feel like one. Childless, my art is my biology. Your Masked Flower is my biology. The biology of 20th century play. Your fur lined teacup and saucer is one of my favorite ancestors. My own body of painting is my nuclear family and my extended family, my cousins and aunts, my children and grand-children. My early works are ancestors, my great aunt or great great-grandmother. My layers of oil paint are surrealistic striations. And they are also human. They are thought made physical. Emotive and, also, palpitating. They are abstractions.
Sincerely,
Alison Weld


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Ghost Letter # 20
Dear Jackson Pollock,

I respond with love for your enveloping work. I remember first seeing your monumental painting almost fifty years ago when visiting NYC from college. Your work gave me hope, in spite of the fact that you were killed driving drunk–I too “wanted to live large” as you had and paint with broad sweeping gestures and serious physicality. I wanted to hew an American path and join my ancestors “slugging it out in cold water flats of the existentialist 1950s” reliving their “triumph of American painting”. I also don’t have any children. My family of choice, both child or grandchild, live on the walls and in the storerooms of Museums. So do my grandmothers and grandfathers. Childless, my art is my biology. My early works are ancestors, my great aunt or great, great grandmother. My layers of oil paint are paleontological striations of geological time. And they are also human. They are thought made physical. Emotive and also palpitating. When choosing to become an artist in 1971, my first year of college, I felt estranged from my family of origin. I didn’t think pleasure was sinful as my mother did and subsequently had no interest in Calvinism for I was happy to be part of the social revolution of my time. I wanted to think abstractly and live a life of interpretation, not recording reality, responding to passions and idiosyncratic ways of being. I wanted to wear paint-covered clothes and sneakers daily.

Because I love the natural world of the mountains or country I never feel as if I have been a city dweller for most of my life. While the multi-culturalism of my urban life informs my abstractions I have never lost my interest in the organic world. But Mr. Pollock, I really wanted to tell you about my involvement with a high school friend of yours, Reuben Kadish. I was a neighbor of his oldest son, Dan, in Hoboken and as I was working in the gallery at Rutgers University in Newark and subsequently at the NJ State Museum in Trenton I presented Reuben’s work twice. The first time I showed Reuben Kadish’s work was in The Brutal Figure: Visceral Images show in 1986. We showed two large clay heads in the center of the gallery–right in front of the two paintings by Miriam Beerman. Two New Jersey expressionists. Reuben also lived on East 9th Street in Manhattan, not far from Cooper Union where he had taught. Reuben and I never had a closeness as you two had –we never bonded as artists and curators so often did--though I heard that I gave him the best show of his life–at the State Museum. I was probably too young for Reuben, an authoritarian I thought, to respect me, too protestant looking and too friendly with his son Dan whom he felt too conservative. I remember being told that my prettiness would hurt me in the art world as an art student. It may have with Reuben. He reminded me of my intimidating male professors. He sent one of his younger assistants to see my solo show at Susan Schreiber’s project space. His assistant told Reuben that he would not be interested in my work and did not have to go see the show. My work was described as School of Paris which puzzled me as I had never really looked to Paris for inspiration. I accepted Paris’s advances but really began with their successors. I have always thought that Reuben meant School of Paris as a dismissive insult. But today I am reading a book on Hans Hartung , though as much as I like Hartung, I don’t think that Reuben was being magnanimous. I believe I understood him correctly. His sculpture was much more magnanimous and humanly open than he was as a person. His sculpture was expansive, expressionistic, and very bodily. It had integrity and was more sincere in its sensibility than Reuben’s sardonic bearing towards me.

My figurative abstractions of 2001are visceral, almost sexual in their nature. Someone compared them to your early work. I also want my marks to throb and pulsate creating composites for primal plant forms, animals and humans. I too think “I am nature.” But your portrayal in the film Pollock wasn’t that of a spiritually oriented person as I believe artists are, no matter what their chosen style or personality. An accomplished artist, Reuben didn’t seem to behave with any social consideration for me–I imagined his complex disdain. He never thanked me for his great retrospective or told me he liked it. But in spite of my discomfort with him he was an Abstract Expressionist. My favorite realm of art. How do you reconcile a great artist and their damaging actions? Their accomplished oeuvre with their destructive personal relationships? Enamored of Stella’s and Reuben’s work, nonetheless I had observed Stella’s difficulty with her daughter in law, and been told about difficult times with her granddaughter. I knew Dan has suffered being his father’s son. He was never accepted by his father as much as he wanted to preserve Reuben’s work, Reuben never bestowed his approval on Dan. Was it because he was divorced from Musa Guston? Ironically, Dan suggested I show his father. I like Dan very much. But then I am personally aware that artist’s families of origin are not necessarily attuned to a difficult life spent striving to achieve greatness in visual culture and favor a familial life as their chosen priority.

I’ll write again–after I reread my catalogue essay about Reuben and look at my collection of Pollock books.

Alison Weld

P.S. In my 20s I first formed my belief in the importance of the New York School’s painting and I stubbornly think that it is still a valid school for contemporary practitioners. Valid for me as well as others. All styles are grist for creation. I’ve never believed that styles become invalid as inspiration and source material for an artist. But I certainly didn’t respect all styles or periods of art. Yet it wasn’t important to me that my chosen style be the dominant currency of the time though this belief made the daily insecurity of being an artist harder for me to bear. Abstract Expressionism was certainly defeated by the ironic Pop aesthetic still so dominant now. Many consign its ethos to history, to the past. Yet I for one do not.


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Ghost Letter # 21


Dear Claire Moore,
You were among the first few older woman artists of my life. Thank you! We met in September 1977. I also met Lee Godie that fall yet she was not an advisor as you were to me. I very soon thought that you were tough and articulate and representative of New York City, my future home. Do you remember telling me not to use pink and yellow together our first critique, my second week in Chicago. Intimidated by your criticism, I didn't ask why I shouldn't use pink and yellow together. You never mentioned de Kooning's palette. I had decided after Alfred University that there were no rules. But you had rules. I was afraid to work in the school's studio for two weeks after the first crit-but upon my return to school when you welcomed me back I realized how kind but firm you were about your aesthetics. In 1971 the professors at Alfred were proud not to give rules for creation. But you did. To someone intent on moving to NYC, you spoke with the city's authority and well known self-esteem. But nonetheless, I continued to use color without any rules and pink at times is next to yellow in my paintings. The only de Kooning I had ever seen at the Albright Knox Art Gallery I didn't remember as being predominantly pink and yellow. I had not looked at the Art Institute's de Kooning yet.
You didn't ask whether your comments were responsible for my absence. It was evident that you had more self-confidence than I had and I wondered whether I eventually would be self-assured about myself as well. I looked backward in time more so than at the latest movement. Yet because I felt so unimportant, I thought I would be imposing if I called you Claire so it was not until I was working at Rutgers University four years later that I reestablished contact.
Once I reestablished contact, I only visited you twice in your studio apartment in Westbeth, the artist's cooperative in the west village and eventually I included your small works in The Self Portrait: Tangible Consciousness show. But I loved our telephone conversations. They were the highlight of my afternoons at the gallery. I talked with you for what seemed like an hour, gazing at the current show at the same time. Your works were not what I remembered from your artist's talk at the school and had become more straightforwardly figurative but there were still words from your dreams. Yet you never told me that you had bone cancer until nearing death. Instead, you discussed your own work and art in general. Your chunky figures in outer space were ironic, metaphysical landscapes with non sequiturs. Your drawing was deft and assured with a quirky and beautiful color sense.
In spite of the difference between our chosen styles of painting I felt a deep warmth for you, Claire, as an older woman artist. Not a mentor like Stella and Miriam were for twenty years whose works would transfix me, your work nonetheless affected me. As a woman in my early thirties I wasn't yet as completely enamored by my elders as I would be several years later. At the time when I included your work in The Self Portrait: Tangible Consciousness I was more interested in the efforts of my own generation than the artists your age and was not yet feeling oppressed by the international postmodern style of illustration. I was including video with painting and sculpture at Rutgers and was proud to be forward thinking. I didn't know that almost twenty years later I would be sorely tired by the dominance of video art. I never thought then that painters would be a minority of the art world. Painting was so important to me. The painting department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago had been the largest department of the graduate school.
I still remember having a bowl of vegetable soup with you for an early dinner one studio visit. I even now regret that I didn't have the $300.00 for a drawing but it was hard enough for me to afford my own art supplies let alone purchase a drawing from another artist.
Your painting did not differ much from your cool and wry personality, and was unlike the unrelenting sincere tone of my own work. I didn't relate to your painting then as passionately as I related to Stella's and Miriam's years later. I wish I could see your 1980 works from today's perspective. Can you send me some of your 80s images via email?
Yours sincerely,
Alison Weld


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Ghost Letter # 22
Dear Claire,

You were my favorite advisor of my two years in graduate school. I loved your ėlan and you were a cosmopolitan role model for me, new to city life after having lived for six years in small villages. I remember the slides of your works inspired by your dreams–basically minimally abstract with passages of words and phrases interrupting and punctuating the pale color fields. The male professors in the department were not as congenial as you were to me, a young and idealistic art student who knew very few techniques. I remember letting you know I was interested in moving to New York City after graduation.

Well, in September of 1979 I flew to New York City with thirteen boxes of belongings and a reservation at the Hotel Earle in the Village, a hotel I had stayed in with Lisa and Nancy, two painting graduate students you may remember. I was constantly getting lost in the Village as the streets were not structured in a grid system as uptown was. I didn’t think I should spend money on a map until I had a job. I had saved my financial aid of $1,300.00 to pay for the down payment of an apartment as well as food. I met my roommate Andrea through NYU’s roommate board and we moved to Astoria on the subway. We made several trips, carrying the boxes the several blocks from the Ditmars Blvd. subway stop to our small apartment, then turning around and getting more boxes. Most of the boxes contained art supplies or small paintings from my last semester of grad school. Andrea and I only stayed in the apartment for six months before she decided to move back to Colorado. I found another apartment in a different neighborhood in Astoria, with a better room for my studio for it was not carpeted. The floors were old and worn, perfect for my work environment. I was not worried about damaging them and losing my security deposit. Andrea was a painting student at the Art Students League where I modeled. She had actually suggested that I work there. She waited tables in midtown and I thought led a lonely life. I liked my second apartment in Astoria better than my first. I liked living on my own in a big apartment building in which the bedroom was my studio. A two-room apartment with a large kitchen, I used the living room as if it was a studio apartment. I had a single bed that I also used as a couch. I didn’t have a television but did have a radio. I enjoyed listening to the radio when I painted. I bought a white metal folding chair for the studio and moved it back and forth between the studio and my living room though I usually sat on the bed.

I’m sorry I lost contact with you Claire even though I moved to New York City only two years after your visit to the School. Shy and reserved with a long history of self-doubt, I did not feel enough like a real artist when I was painting in the living room of my first Astoria apartment to give you a call. Plastic covered the wall to wall carpet. This was not my image of a studio and was not like anything I had experienced in my years at Alfred or in Chicago. When I first moved here my anxieties about the New York art world were very strong. Immature, I was unable to separate gallery success from what I believed to be art, successful or not. The power and money behind Soho was daunting to someone living on sixty-three dollars a week. My heart palpitated when I walked south on West Broadway in Soho, at that time the center of the international art world, and I only felt somewhat self-assured in my small Astoria studio. The chilly demeanors of the gallerinas intimidated me greatly. But nonetheless I’m still working.

Sincerely,

Alison


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Ghost Letter # 23


Dear Claire Moore,

I thought I’d write you again. Your painting, Claire, is so different than mine and consequently with my insecurities about my painting I felt insignificant compared to you being much younger and not yet sure of myself as an artist. I also worried whether I also was a New York artist. I wasn’t sure whether decades of exhibiting in Manhattan was the determining factor. Did one have to live within the exact confines of New York City? I’ve wondered repeatedly whether Hoboken and Jersey City were excluded even though they were only five minutes from the Holland tunnel? I sometimes laugh at such thoughts, knowing the NY Metropolitan area as large, expanding across state lines and political divisions. I also felt lesser because you were part of the generation who matured with the Abstract Expressionists and had worked on the WPA. And you were also a divorced painter as I was. My paternal grandmother was still alive. Years later, I would worry about losing my close soul mates Stella and Miriam as they began to age. But in the early 1980s I was still settling into my New York life. Whereas you were firmly ensconced in Westbeth and in the June Kelly Gallery.

Your painterly narratives of outer space I still remember as poignantly capturing your fear of death while being humorous caricatures, belied by their serious tone. The painting, You ask, Am I Afraid? was on view during our last visit. I immediately grasped its meaning though you had not yet mentioned your ill-health to me. I knew you were contemplating your death. I felt so young. I felt alone.

Actually your work may be the only narrative based painting that I have been personally involved with, tending to shy away from narratives, forgetting them easily and only remembering the color, surface and gesture of the image rather than the story line. But I am not a formalist in spite of my immersion in abstraction. I love the crude and visceral much more than the refined and sophisticated and often equate an abundance of skill with a facile mindlessness. I’m interested in guts and soul. As I have said, I don’t render from life. Yet even though I had no interest in rendering myself, nonetheless I was not completely secure as an abstract painter. I had little facility. Was I insecure because I didn’t render? Could I be an abstract painter without any involvement with rendering for a lifetime? Yet in spite of these incessant questions about Eurocentric methods, looking at rendering made me feel completely disinterested. Instead I build up an image from surface and substance, color and mark, evoking existence, and emotion. I want to be able to look at the image time and time again. I want to suggest natural principle and look to the land, the sky, internal organs and biological forms.

As my first graduate school advisor you never mentioned that I may have to paint at all hours–on the weekends, arriving at the studio as early as 7:30 sometimes. I still work in the early morning hours. When I expanded the studio in 1995 so that I occupied the entire floor I began to paint at night. I did that for five years. I had lived for seven years in the state and knew what striving for recognition from Manhattan was like. I was searching for painting’s soul. I was searching for painting’s intellect. I was looking for painting’s emotions. My paintings mature after long periods of struggle and exasperation, inspiring in me awe and love. They are my children and they are a profound part of me. Just as your daughter is a part of your life. I didn’t have a daughter. Yet, I’m still working. I’m still working, although I am an under-known, still-emerging artist in the early years of old age. My hair is gray and my chin is no longer firm. I’m not yet a spirit or ghost though I sometimes feel like one. Childless, my art is my biology. Your words excerpted from your dreams are the biology of 20th century culture. They too are my sisters of choice. My own body of painting is my nuclear family and my extended family, my cousins and aunts, my children and grandchildren. My early works are ancestors, my great aunt or great great grandmother. Your layers of oil paint, Claire, are evocative striations of psychological time. Wry and also human. They are anxiety made concrete and material. Revealing and also palpitating.

Alison


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Ghost Letter # 24
Dear Elaine de Kooning,

You were secondary to Bill. I didn’t want to be secondary. I was too insecure for that role. I also sacrificed motherhood for a life of painting. This was our choice. I decided to watch my younger sisters have children not knowing whether I would be a good aunt to them: Sarah Goodman. Evan Vaczy. Julia Vaczy. James Goodman. Eliot Cary. Caroline Vaczy. Cameron Sands. Grace Sands. I never wanted my painting to be less important than the needs of people. I felt I was answering needs through creation of serious work. I didn’t want my painting to be secondary to my husband or children. I wanted it to be primary. Yet I wasn’t painting solely for myself. I felt I was contributing to the world through my visual eye and my passion. I liked my time somewhat. I disliked much about time, thinking that celebrities and athletes took precedence over the artists or poets, farmers or the seemingly insignificant person. I knew I was creating works that I believed were needed by society for its emotional and psychological welfare. I believed that painting soothed and queried, confirmed and questioned. I thought that my creativity was a serious and spiritual activity, no matter how bodily or organic my imagery. I felt that art centered one’s being, enabling one to lead an emotionally and aesthetically profound and healthy life. And ironically when I did finally become involved in a relationship, where I wasn’t as successful as my husband, my work, both in the studio and in the museum, expanded greatly and developed great impact and difficulty. I was intellectually challenged. My aptitude at writing and thinking increased. But we wouldn’t have children, only our professions and our passions.

Alison Weld


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Ghost Letter # 25


Dear Chaim Soutine,

I’d thought I would write to you today about Stella and Miriam. Stella’s and Miriam’s works are both expressionistic yet dissimilar. Both oeuvres are of equal significance to me. I have never favored one body of work over the other. I am given solace and restfulness while viewing one of Stella’s installations. With Stella’s work my mind dreams peacefully, expansively. I dream contentedly. I find Stella’s work to be religious. It is a contemporary interpretation of Catholic ritual and spiritual awe. It is also escapist. Yet while viewing a Beerman I cannot dream. Her paintings are so over determined. They profoundly disturb. They are over wrought. But nonetheless they are beautiful, sublime and speak of humanity’s difficult history.

Stella never talked philosophically about her work or of other artists. She maintained a mysterious persona. Miriam doesn’t reveal much about her personal self either. Their frailties seem unimportant when viewing their accomplishments. I learned through my museum work that art was a difficult avenue to pursue. I was always the understanding and gracious one with those I visited as I understood how hard it was to be strong in the face of a market driven art world. I learned that the world was a tough place for all non-blue-chip artists. I usually empathized as I was also under known. Your seriousness Stella inspired me and made me feel secure in my own postmodern expressionism, cooler than yours I thought. It helped me continue to be soulful–not intimidated by the current fashion. I was glad to commune with a philosophy that was greater than we both were. Not make art about the small situation, the unimportant attribute. I know we both look for varying tenors of the visceral. I know we don’t paint with ease. Yet I want the painting to read as an organic object that looks as if an idiosyncratic God were responsible for its existence.

I got to know Miriam Beerman well through organizing her retrospective for the New Jersey Artist Series: Contemporary Arts The New Jersey Context in 1990. For almost a year I visited weekly to look at her painting and talk about their motivations and her life experiences. It was the best day of my week, besides my studio days. An intellectual suffering from depression, she continues to immerse herself in interpretations of violence and evil nonetheless. Jamie Fuller, a minimalist sculptor, saw Miriam’s retrospective in 1991 and remarked that the work was too emotional. Is that why Miriam is relatively unknown? Are they too European for Americans, too rooted in Van Gogh? Do they produce too much anxiety in the viewer? When she paints it is always from the viewpoint of the tortured, though her love of paint, color and surface both tempers and alters its impact. She loves the victims of evil. Her late paintings are paint laden. Each painting exorcizes the haunting anti-Semitism of her youth in Rhode Island she confided to me one day. Miriam’s self-portrait, The Pink Skull, Self Portrait with Muse, is repulsive beauty itself. Areas are both bright and dark, boldly and heavily confronting death. Miriam looming, a dark animal and a skull are all archetypes and muses for victimization, anxiety and soul. For instinct and morality, compulsion and desperation. She pets the aggressor, confronted by the pink skull nearby without looking at it. Horrific.

Alison


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Ghost Letter # 26


Dear Chaim Soutine,

Miriam told me over lunch one day that her works are inspired by “illness and depression, anxiety and political victimization”. Yet she firmly and quietly says that she has the soul of a poet. Her peaceful home allowed her to concentrate on history of an horrific nature. She had few external tensions in Upper Montclair. Her green house was on a tree lined street with big homes–from the early part of the last century. Bushes with swarming gnats surround the front porch much of the spring. Her spacious kitchen is from the 1970s with avocado green cupboards that remind me of my bedroom in high school. Her home is well worn with stains of oil paint throughout, leading you up the two flights to her painting studio. A bedroom upstairs is reserved for her collages and installations.

I love Miriam’s big questions about history. Her love of color and surface speaks of beauty, intangible and fleeting yet also very physical. Beauty as powerful as her subject of horrific death in the Holocaust. She is surrounded by her large canvases, propped against walls, covering the fireplace mantel of the living room, jamming the entrance to her kitchen. Her imagery of suffering is incongruous to her idyllic and quiet surroundings. Miriam’s portrayed victims are also Miriam herself. Yet I have never been able to see the comic in anguish or the mythological in Miriam’s imagery. I do see the demonic of our wars and the existential grotesque, rooted in the tragedy of human frailty. She has coalesced morality with the sensuous and hedonistic school of Ab Ex. Her works scream and shout. A political and anxious consciousness is present.

Regards,
Alison Weld


PS

I thought I’d continue to tell you about Miriam Beerman and myself. Once, I received a package of Miriam’s slides and reviews in the mail from Miriam’s son, Bill Jaffe. He asked for my commentary on the package. I was surprised to see that the slides were so unorganized and were not even in chronological order. I called Miriam immediately and offered to organize her slides for her in return for one of her artist books. During the weeks of organization, Miriam confided to me that she has never organized her slides and has never kept a slide of each painting in a master notebook as I do. I found her lack of organization to be astounding. I found it relaxing to make stacks of identical slides pulling from an array of slide sheets taken from her table piled high with partially filled slide sheets; boxes of slides, some empty and some never even opened, and loose slides scattered all around her big home, so different from my small apartment in Jersey City. It was peaceful to take a day off weekly and use my mind differently.

During these several weeks of organization, Miriam and I discussed our philosophies about painting and what we were struggling with that week. Being childless, I believe that art provides profound spiritual and psychological nourishment in as important a way as family. Yet we did not only speak of visual philosophy. I also discussed my insecurities about my place in the art world causing Miriam to giggle, something I had never heard her do in the 20 odd years I had known her and I was glad that my own dilemmas about wearing black and looking like a New Yorker provided her with some relief from her own preoccupation with evil.

My paintings are metaphors for biological states and organic impulses and the abutting fabric panels are metaphors for culture and society. My paintings are autobiographical. The sometimes crass, sometimes beautiful juxtapositions are rooted in my daily life of area streets and peoples. Thank you, Soutine, for listening.

A. Weld


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Ghost Letter # 27


Dear Clyfford Still,


In 1966, I thought, as a girl of thirteen, when I saw the book of thirty-three of your paintings, as well as a gallery of your works at the Albright Knox Art Gallery, and still think now, that your important works completely supplanted organized religion. As I have mentioned to other ghosts here, I was raised Congregational in the United Church of Christ and as a high school student was active in the church but never believed in the virgin birth or that Jesus Christ was the only son of God. I did not believe in a personal Christian God and did not often pray. I turned to the world of art instead. I wouldn't be writing and giving sermons in the ministry as I had dreamed, despite my disbelief, but I would be pursuing visual consciousness and would be creating meaning. Even at age thirteen I was serious about my response to the world, whether my response to your abstractions, Mr. Still, or my early attempts to draw and paint.
I was a cultural Christian being third generation Scottish and Scottish-Canadian American on my maternal side and thirteenth generation Anglo-American on my paternal side. But I could not believe in Christianity though I tried again and again. For me, looking at significant art and beginning to create my own was a much more powerful spiritual experience than attending the church. Going to Buffalo's museum in 1966 and spending contemplative time with your paintings was formative. At the time, I had never been out west but had been raised spending one month each summer in the Adirondacks. I was familiar with awe-inspiring expanses, transcendental skies and 4,000' peaks. So I immediately identified with your expanses that weren't decorative whatsoever. In 1979 when I began to paint on my own after finishing graduate school I used chop sticks instead of brushes and eventually palette knives in my rather feeble attempt to be both primal and avant-garde though I don't remember thinking of your jagged passages of ugly color then. They were just an unconscious part of me.
The forces of the natural world were my muse. Looking at an abstract expressionist work still gives me the same emotional response as being surrounded by nature as it did forty odd years ago. I understand Pollock's comment to Hans Hofmann that "I am Nature" completely. In the galleries of Manhattan, its museums, or my studio, I feel awe and am prompted to believe in an impersonal God, a belief formed by years of viewing paintings with a toughness as well as a reverence or respect and years of joyous bird watching. I don't see just blue birds or robins when birding. I watch hawks and northern shrikes aggress upon the smaller songbirds or field mice, reminding me of my own experiences at work, whether painting furiously and aggressively out of a visual muddle or being the victim of judgement and interpersonal politics. I see ephemeral beauty. Swooping flight inspires my gestures. Even though I do not depict external reality, I surround myself with old and weathered bones and taxidermy. I respond to the broad natural forces I find so inspiring. I am interested in psychic and spiritual identity. I find profundity to be essential to art. I believe. When painting I am both unaware and ultra-sensitive to the visual. I yearn to transcend the world's hostility, both personal and global, when painting or when looking at painting. I want the painting to transport me to a state of inner consciousness-to help me understand my place and my response to the world in a myriad of ways. I'm interested in significance, in big ideas and the small detail as well. Each day in the studio I am in touch with meditation and struggle. My philosophy about culture and history is I strongly believe pertinent to today. I make each mark with faith in the unconscious, intuitive response. I believe that I transmit consciousness. I only have a vague preconception for the work aside from the struggle and searching for significance during the process of aesthetic and emotional self-discovery. I romantically think that I continue a long American tradition. I imagine Emerson's Over Soul to be imbued into significant art, whether your monumental painting, your peers' works or I believe my own. I call the over soul the life force. As I said, I, like Hofmann, also see importance and aesthetic food in nature. I see it in emotive and visceral abstraction and not as often in today's figuration. In de Kooning's women. I believe that both you, Still, and de Kooning are relevant to 2018, not relegated to the de-sanctified, the historic or the passė. I see it in Miriam Beerman's harshness wedded to emotive beauty that gives hope in horrific moments. I see the over soul in Stella Waitzkin's environments, rich with passion and poignancy glancing backward.
Mr. Still, did you read Emerson? Or did you just understand him? When I was younger I didn't read much. But today I paint, read and write. I'd like to tell you more about my life a little bit in my next letter.
Sincerely,
Alison Weld


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Ghost Letter # 28
Dear Clyfford Still,
In 2001, I was at an opening at Anita Shapolsky's brownstone gallery uptown and the underknown abstract painter Sy Boardman, 1921 - 2005, then an 80 year old painter in her stable of artists, quietly told me that in the 1960s that all the New York painters felt that Pop would be over in two years. Sadly, forty years later, Pop's irony is still with us and visceral tough work is not respected as it was previously. Yet, I do incorporate both Pop material culture and tough abstraction in my diptychs. I believe irony can be relevant because too often the tough (as opposed to the commercial), is overshadowed. Mr. Still, what happened to our need to record our inner beliefs? And what happened to our desire to view these recordings, these interpretations? I, for one, crave them. Why do we accept popular sentiments rather than an intuitive assimilation of difficult issues into visual power objects, of socially concerned issues imbued in visual form and elements? Is the belief in form lost? The touch of illustration is not seen as secondary anymore. Why do most not integrate social content with serious form?
But I mention the Anita Shapolsky gallery to you, Mr. Still, as Anita represents the Ernest Briggs estate-one of your students from your California days. Briggs is my favorite of Anita's stable of artists. I'm pleased to have exhibited my paintings with his work there.
Alison Weld


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Ghost Letter # 29
Dear Mr. Still,
In September 1979 I moved to New York City from Chicago after finishing graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and began to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art every Wednesday between part time jobs. I saw your exhibition. More than once. And a volunteer from AMNH who was a friend, Ellen Friedman, gave me the catalogue. Twenty-five years later I visit the Clyfford Still gallery for long periods of time. I still look at Ellen's catalogue. The gallery is generally quiet with only a few people moving through. Most don't appear to understand the art movements of the twentieth century. Yet sometimes there are others who also sit quietly for a long time and muse.
You wouldn't approve of the dominant mode in New York City today. Even I'm estranged. I'm 65 but see myself as far older than my years, even though I’ve used fake fur and artificial flowers as points of contrast rich with meaning about life today. Because I believe that visual art should be a power object to be revered I am quite alone. Today being an artist is seen as an avenue to wealth and status more so than a serious hermetic calling. So many of our country are superficial in their interests-sports, sexuality, youth rather than introspection or philosophical questions. But my communion with art connects me to the past, the present and the future. Awareness of culture creates community. The visions of one person become the awareness of many.
As Charles says to me, "Irony is cowardice." I believe in making brave paintings.
Alison Weld


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Ghost Letter # 30
Dear Lee Godie,

While I am certain that you will not remember me, I met you in the autumn of 1977–at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Columbus in Chicago—where a crowd of art students had gathered around you and your small paintings. I stopped and listened to the more extroverted students talk to you about your work. I’ve never forgotten you and had a work of yours in our living room. It hung next to a Cindy Sherman for several years–two portraits of women. I’m sorry that I haven’t written sooner–almost forty years have passed and I am now in my mid-sixties. Let me tell you my story and why I treasure our acquaintance.

I was young and Chicago was the first city I had lived in. The city made me uncomfortable and I needed the comfort of knowing older women. I was told that you lived in single room occupancy hotels, storing your paintings in the train station lockers. I looked forward to passing you on my way to the graduate school. I would stop and listen to you and peruse your works. You had the reputation of being difficult and I thought you made judgements about your collectors. Didn’t I have to convince you that I was worthy of buying a work? This was my first exposure to a self-taught artist and more importantly to an artist who maintained her art in spite of her marginal life. You looked very intensely at the students gathered around you. I still remember your penetrating eyes. My paintings were very different from your crayon and black pen drawings of movie stars but I identified with the idiosyncrasy and straightforward quality of the imagery. They seemed so honest, without regard for anything outside your vision. I wasn’t interested in you because you led a marginal life. I liked your work. I felt that you were as important as the trained Chicago artist and have always wondered about your influence. What did you think of the late Roger Brown? What did you think of Karl Wirsum or Jim Nutt? You were my professor’s champion. While I haven’t looked at much Chicago Imagism these days in New York City I see your work every day, Ms. Godie. Thank you for the intensity of your star struck imagery. I love your sincerity. I’ve never believed in the wholesale irony so prevalent now and laude you for not ever being influenced by it.

Sincerely,
Alison Weld


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Ghost Letter # 31
Dear Amedeo Modigliani,

I’ve seen two retrospectives of yours–the first at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and the second at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. Your figures–so fragile and emotional, beautiful and poignant, are still with me. As a young artist just graduated from SAIC and new to NYC I modeled nude–not for a master like you but at Art Students League on 57th street. I don’t think there are any poignant images of me at 26. I modeled mornings from 8:30 am - 12:30 pm or so. On Wednesdays I supervised volunteers at the American Museum of Natural History till 9 pm. On days I was not painting during the afternoon I would go to galleries on 57th street, Madison Avenue or walk up 5th Avenue to the Frick Collection or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I also went to MOMA. I loved Picasso’s Guernica. I especially loved Brancusi’s installation of several works on a large platform.

I had begun to model in the nude while an undergraduate student at Alfred University. Because I was so idealistic about striving to be an artist I never believed that any of the students would look at me sexually. I thought of myself as a problem to be tackled, and didn’t focus on being undressed in front of strangers. My first day of nude modeling at The Art Students League was also my first experience of morning rush hour on the subway. I was so petrified by the crowded car that I froze right in front of the open doors. And just stared inside at the crowd. A tall black man near the door pulled me in so that I wasn’t blocking the entrance. After what felt like quite a long time, I managed to shyly thank him for his quick thinking but was overwhelmed by the sardine like environment of the early morning subway the whole ride to 57th street. This was my New York welcome. My insecurities about adjusting to New York were affecting my self-esteem. The subway was much more frightening to me than posing in the nude. Actually, I’ve never completely gotten used to the subway. I rode the elevated train in Chicago and did not know whether I would be able to live comfortably in New York City.

While modeling at Alfred University I generally took short poses for one or two minute gesture drawings but at The Art Students League the teachers draped me in patterned materials and set me in front of wall papered walls for hour long poses. If I took a break from the pose I had to remember it. It was a challenge to pose for as long as I possibly could before my arms and legs fell asleep. Modeling is boring. Some days each minute felt excruciatingly long. I usually daydreamed about my work back in my small studio and felt much more avant-garde than the students who were painting those Matisse-like paintings. Occasionally the student’s works were a Modigliani. With elongated neck and a facial expression oozing quiet sentiment. I saw very little originality of vision during my year of modeling. With all the fabric draped over me, with only partial nudity I was never embarrassed. I felt that the students were sincerely involved with trying to capture me. I didn’t worry about being nude at the time but today I wouldn’t undress. But then again, I now carry the extra weight of an older woman. While I always liked and responded to the heavy-set models as a student, today I have no desire to be a heavy model myself. Assuming challenging poses that aggressed upon the art student because of the foreshortening was fun because I thought it would result in more abstract paintings. I began to model in September soon after arriving in NYC. By the time winter arrived, modeling became more uncomfortable in that the classrooms were cold and drafty. Posing for four hours without any clothes was hard. The teachers would sometimes find heaters but even that was not always enough to make me comfortable. Art Students League classes started early so that I had the afternoons for painting, something I did not have when I started working full time. There were several ballet dancers who modeled. Their posture was rim rod straight. I always thought that because of their formal poses they were less interesting than the rest of us who were not dancers. Modeling was a steady income for me and allowed me to rent an apartment and buy my art supplies. I only bought a small bag of paints and medium each trip to the supply store. I never thought that there was a divide between the figurative art students at the League and myself–an abstract painter. But Modigliani–in Chelsea these days I feel the divide.

Alison Weld


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Ghost Letter # 32


Dear Bessie Harvey,

I still remember your yellow pantsuit with matching turban you wore when we visited your studio in your small cottage in Alcoa, Tennessee. And that was the day we acquired Pastures of Green. Bill Arnett thought that you had seen my striation series from the mid-1980s when he saw Pastures of Green in Jersey City. I remember your dealer, Shari Cavin, telling me that she mailed my card to you. But I didn’t ask you whether you were aware of my Striation Series as I have never thought that the self-taught artist works in a vacuum which is a popular belief. Your signature sculpture without an overtly political theme takes its place with the great. Thank you, Bessie. Your greater body of work proves that sometimes the abstract spiritually created work is more important as art than the illustrative. But I am in a minority of the art world believing in the spiritual. Creating seriously and communing with tough art is as profound as a religious experience that for me cuts across denominations, races and maybe even nations. It is our escape from trivia. I believe serious art to be solely about the big poetic and philosophical issues of life now. I thought that in your best work that you were in touch with God, Bessie. I may not understand the Africanisms of your oeuvre but I understand their objecthood and their power as art and cultural material. Have your ghost contact your northern supporters of the diaspora inspired works you so easily made. “Make it look easy, Make it look gross.” You made your faces beautifully compelling. I walk through your imagery. I breathe in your color. It fills my lungs and my veins, pulsating through my system. I revel in your sculpture. In the mouths. In the eyes. Thank you, Bessie Harvey.

Alison Weld


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Ghost Letter # 33
Dear Bill Traylor and Hawkins Bolden,

What is authenticity? Is it power of intention or thought? Power of intuition. Power of philosophy. It is visual. It is visual philosophy, no matter the chosen style. I look for the power of authenticity’s transmission from artist during creation to the art object, whether mine or yours. I look for an authenticity of that transmission’s form and structure, color and surface, mark and rhythm. I look for an authenticity of emotion. Authenticity requires a call and response between artist and object. It cannot be predetermined.

Found throughout art history and today created by a wide range of peoples. It is pervasive and passionate belief. All artists are taught by the inner self; answering to personal thoughts and responses that result in something bigger and more encompassing than their seemingly insignificant makers. It is world culture. I believe visual creations to be films of consciousness. I believe visual elements are quietly magnificent. “They can be ugly. They can be decorative and pretty. They can be shy. They can be bold.” They are my words. How does the sense of integrity or authenticity differ from artist to artist because of their chosen style? The rigorous honing of form and idea, the poetics of economy, is evident in your works, Traylor, or its opposite–that of accretion, the poetics of accumulation, is evident in your sculpture, Bolden. You both were visual poets of your particular historical moments, seen either in your depiction of southern life, Mr. Traylor, or made evident through your use of societal detritus as a metaphor for harsh reality, both personal and national, Mr. Bolden.

Seen in felt emotion, an essential element of authenticity, taking a myriad of forms and faces ranging from the quietly reticent to the obsessive and almost violently constructed. You record your existence, whether additive or subtractive in your approach. I see existential marks made physical. I see probed consciousness. Circulating centrality, whether the clustered accumulation of holes piercing round metal discs in your sculpture, Bolden, or the subtle and economic movement throughout your drawings, Traylor, that describes a globe, a circle, an encompassing space. Both examples of the circular suggest an underlying philosophy. Both suggest a universal authenticity of spirit. Both reveal that you were visual ministers of your idiosyncratic realms, a long lasting, tangible realm that is art as idiosyncratic religion, idiosyncratic religion as art.
You both are tough and abstract in your approach to image-making in spite of an underlying narrative that prompted the creation of your abstractions. I thank you! I love to revel in your works, my escape from the world’s trivia. Were they also your escapes?

Sincerely,
Alison Weld


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Ghost Letter # 34


Dear Hawkins Bolden,


I’m glad that I finally met you twenty years after I first saw your sculpture at the Cavin - Morris Gallery in Manhattan. And a year or two before you passed away at age 90. Have the older ghosts welcomed you into your ethereal world? For quite some time I have looked to your work for solace. It gives our home greatness. Your sculpture’s simplicity and crudeness speak to my soul. You prove that academic training is immaterial and can get in the way of profound and primal meaning. Blind since youth, you nonetheless created sculpture more powerful than that made by many able and trained artists. Your ‘scarey crows’ I see as sculpture rather than protective devices in your yard. Your work protects my soul and spirit from a myriad of “vulgar and banal” forces. Your forceful and repetitive hole drilling and tying of hose and leather straps become symbols of human strength, perseverance but also vulnerability. To experience your work is also to experience what it means to be human on the most essential level. Each strap and pierced hole is a signifier of self, transcribed through touch and feel. I’ve always seen your work as existential. I’m sure that each hole made was symbolic, intuitive or not, a personal as well as formal element.
To meet you Mr. Bolden after two decades of believing in your work nurtured my belief in you. You didn’t talk a lot to us. You mentioned your late brother and that you didn’t drink or smoke. I found your work much more powerful than your reticent personality. What did you think of my presentation at NYU celebrating the American Folk Art Museum’s anniversary of their Contemporary Center?

Alison Weld


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Ghost Letter # 35


Dear Emilio (Emilio Cruz),

I was greatly saddened by reading your obituary in The New York Times. I didn’t realize that you had pancreatic cancer. I immediately wondered why I hadn’t heard when I went to Kenkeleba just a few months earlier. Stella also had pancreatic cancer. I worry about my pancreas. But artists don’t die completely. Your works are tangible testimonials to your being, to your intellect. Yesterday I looked at the Robeson Center Gallery catalogue with your beautiful works reproduced in color. Joseph Campbell must have been proud to have been your teacher. Didn’t you tell me that you heard him lecture while he was at Columbia University? Ten years ago, I listened to his taped lectures in the studio while painting. I thought of you then. I’ll never forget the innumerable times I called you from the Museum. You were wonderful to me–even though I was interrupting your painting–or was I a welcome diversion from it? Your paintings “look back to go forward”– occupying an idiosyncratic realm–part ancient and partly of the moment. Your pastels are as great as your oils. How ironic that I have known well two artists who deal with metamorphosis of the animal world? Miriam Beerman and you both. Metamorphosis is not a timely interest. Your hybrid animal’s spines are so sensual. Their skeletal rib cages are as full as those of an opera star when singing. Your animals struck the poses of taxidermy specimens living and breathing now. Just as your essence Emilio is still very much here. You are still breathing.
Alison


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Ghost Letter # 36
Dear William Hawkins,

I love being alone with your painting, sitting and deeply responding to your back and forth moves. When I spend time looking at your work I forget my dislike of the market driven contemporary trends. Your Jackson Pollock sky and your rearing horse are essential forces and spirits. Your works are tangible testimonials to your being, to your intellect. Your works nourish me. They too are fossils of history. They too are musical nuances, moving pulses. Rearing Horse makes me give thanks–for my own body of paintings as well as for those by artists I love and respect whether I know them personally or not. Your expressionism and your regard for the natural world challenges the bourgeois and the tired.

Let the visceral shine. Let color speak. Let figures be abstracted. Let horses rear. Let painting be abstract. Let the spiritual artwork dominate. Thank you, William Hawkins!

Alison Weld


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Ghost Letter # 37


Dear Stella,


I loved communing with your environment sitting on your couch and conversing about your works. Over twenty years, how many times did I do so?  I wonder.  I do so today but I am communing with smaller shelves and small sculptural objects.  Communing with the installation at the 2017 John Michael Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin was a return to life decades ago.  I was filled with love for you Stella.  During your lifetime, your work overshadowed you.  Your works transformed you into an artist of long-standing time.  You will not be forgotten.  You did tell me that your works “made people forget that you were present.”  Today your presence is undeniable.  Yes Stella, you are still speaking.  Your installations speak with much sensitivity.  Sensitivity resultant from decades in Manhattan, from decades of your commitment. You did not follow fashion.  You followed your own concepts, with a serious intent. An undeniable intent.    An original intent.  I remember you telling me that your libraries were a result of having a grandfather and great – grandfather who were intellectuals.  Jewish intellectuals, you said.  Yes Stella, you and your grandfathers are still speaking.
A library shelf is a wealth of thought.  A library shelf is a wealth of form.  A library shelf is a wealth of movement and sightlines.  A sightline may be active because of palette.  A sightline may be a caress because of tone.  Yes, a library shelf is a wealth.  A wealth of order.  A wealth of structure.  An ordering, a structuring.  Your library shelves are silent.  Your library shelves are silent prayers.  Silent operas.  Stella, you also were a virtuoso.
Your castings of faces are poignant.  Your castings of faces are imbued with a love.  Your castings of faces are the subjects of sightlines.  A pausing they are.  They pause poignantly.  A pause created.  A pause of quiet love.  A pause loved silently.  Your castings of faces are autobiographical.  They are historical and of an age.  A silent chorus.  A silent script.  Yes, a silent prayer.
Alison
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Ghost Letter # 38
Dear Stella,
You are still speaking. You are speaking through both visual prose and visual poetry. You are speaking quietly yet are speaking with much force.  Yes, you are still speaking. You are conversing with those from a wide range of places. Stella, you are still speaking.
Nuanced emotion is evident.  Nuanced color is evident.  You are evident.  Your library shelves speak a nuanced language.  Your small pieces speak with much largesse.  Your colors are your words.  Your castings are your essays.  Are they your mysteries?  Are they of the theater?  They are still speaking.  They are still singing.  They speak of family—the family of abstraction.  The family of thought made physical.  The family of surface as a film of consciousness.  Yes, Stella, we are of the same family.
A casting may be a portrait.  A casting may be of natural history.  A casting may be of literature.  A casting may be caressed lightly.  It may be imbued with respect.  It may be imbued with love.  A casting may be quickly made.  It speaks to the world.  It speaks to us both.  Yes, you are still speaking.
Thank you for your body of work.  Thank you for giving me an awareness of your thought.  Thank you for giving me an awareness of your soul.  Yes, I thank you Stella.  I thank you for the risks you took.  I thank you for your mastery of abstraction.  A figurative abstraction.  Yes, a figurative abstraction.  Figurative abstraction may be of a painting.  Figurative abstraction may be of sculpture.  Your sculpture is painterly, each shelf has sightlines, moving from bottom to top while speaking of the history of books, the history of writing, the history of visual language.  All language is of your abstract books.  All language is of your abstraction. Russian spoken by your grandfather and great-grandfather; English spoken by your own family is of this abstraction.
I first met you Stella when I was 30 years of age. You were the oldest artist with whom I was acquainted. Your paintings or self-portraits were intermingled with your castings.  You spoke eloquently.   You spoke quietly yet firmly.  Yes, you allowed your sculpture to speak. You are still speaking in 2018.  I am now 65 years of age. And I am still working.  I’m working religiously in the studio creating pure abstractions.  I am trying to capture the soulful light of the hayfield that now surrounds my studio, the spiritual expanse of a hayfield without thinking of that when painting.  Yes, I’m still working. I am working furiously as I am in my early years of old age.  I am not yet a spirit or ghost as you are, Stella, though I sometimes feel like one.
You speak to me Stella.  Silently and forcefully.  With beauteous fortitude.  With beauteous power. With beauteous resilience.  The resilience of abstraction.  The resilience of light.  The resilience of color.  The resilience of emotion.  Emotive and palpitating are your book shelves.  Emotive and palpitating are your works of sculpture. Yes, you are still speaking fifteen years after you became a spirit ghost. Fifteen years resulted in your sculpture being acquired by seventy museums. Yes, you are speaking forcefully in 2018.  Thank you, Stella.
Alison
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Ghost Letter # 39


Dear Stella,
In conversation you were often raucous.  You were often shrill.  You were often blunt and explained this by saying you did not edit what you said.  You did however edit your library shelves.  You did write your silent books with talent. You did write your silent books with ease. The libraries’ silences are of a loud force, however quiet the tone.  The libraries revealed more about your being than your words.  Is that why you often said “words lie”? Your color did not lie.  Your color revealed a depth of character.  A depth of emotion.  A depth of mastery.  Yes, a mastery. Stella, you were a master.  When in conversation with your library shelves, the works master the viewer. You are still in control, however silent you may be.  Yes, your library shelves are the opposite of your personality.  They are visual prayers.  A visual beseeching.  Their personality is majestic.  A majestic solitude.  A solitary viewing.  A humbling viewing.  To view your library shelves is a religious experience. It is a spiritual experience. I thank you, Stella.
Your works inspired my body of work.  I measured my work up against your oeuvre.  Your work’s emotional tenor supported my painting’s emotional tenor.  I considered your work Stella rather than what was on view in Manhattan that was antagonistic to my belief system.  I thank you.  I thank you deeply.  Knowing you enabled me to have profound insights and thoughts.  Knowing your work enabled me to redeem my insecurities about my place in the artworld.  Both you and Miriam Beerman were the artworld I most respected.  Both of you born in the 1920s, thirty years and thirty- three years before my own birthing in 1953.
Yes, I thank you Stella.  I thank you Miriam Beerman.  Each creation of mine thanks you both.  Stella Waitzkin.  Miriam Beerman. Alison Weld. Yes, we all dedicated our lives to expression.  We all dedicated our lives to beauty.   We pulled beauty out of psychology.  We pulled beauty out of history.  We sat ourselves down in the realm of interpretation. Interpretation was our daily Starbucks cup of coffee. Interpretation began our days.  Interpretation ended our days. It was our lunch.  It was our dinner.  Yes, a life of daily creation.  Creation as a prayer.  Creation as a response to history.  Creation as an assertion of gender.  Creation as genealogy.  An emotive dwelling. A dwelling of intellect. A dwelling of politics.  Thank you for the visual.  Thank you for the cerebral.  Emotive silence.  Emotive wealth. Emotive necessity.
Alison
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Ghost Letter # 40
Dear Stella,

Does Wreck of the UPS’s ghost have any advice for us artists still here and still under recognized, still serious, ambitious and disappointed as you were? I can only imagine how Wreck’s ghost feels at the work’s early lack of recognition. Daily, it is hard to come to terms with one’s exclusion, wondering why you have not yet stopped working because of your relative lack of success when in the studio and nightly when sipping a glass of wine mulling over your lack of sales, collections and exhibitions appropriate for your level of achievement. Are the relationships among artists rooted in competition as well as support? Is competition necessary for tough creation and thought? Is competition necessary for support among artists? Do the older and middle generations of artists resent the young, and is this resentment grounded in the tradition of the avant-garde artist replacing the previous school and de-sanctifying the establishment? Stella, I for one do not believe that styles become completely obsolete–that is why I have deeply appreciated Miriam Beerman’s mastery of expressionism or your Ab Ex libraries. I did not think expressionism or Ab Ex were consigned to history. I do not think that we all have to be postmodernists.
I pull beauty out of pain as you did. Haven’t we all Stella? Haven’t we all Miriam? Introspection and pain prompt and propel us to create. In spite of this, I’m still working. I’m still working, although I am an under-known, still-emerging artist in the early years of old age. My hair is gray and my chin is no longer firm. I’m not yet a spirit or ghost though I sometimes feel like one. Childless, my art is my biology. Our biologies. Our bodies and minds. But Stella, I wanted you to be aware whom my artist friends are I now have a dialogue with about our work. I queried them about their inspirations knowing that your work inspired me as does Miriam Beerman’s. I asked if they had an artist from the last century who spoke to them as you speak to me. We are all still working, although we are under-known artists many whom are, like I am, middle aged. We are not yet spirits or ghosts. Our inspirations are the biology of 20th century culture. The biology of history. The biology of the future. We are all still working. Though we often feel like spirits or ghosts. Our body of works are our children. They are our biology. Our materials are striations of thought. And they are also human. Our materials are thought made physical. Emotive and also palpitating.

Art is our natural world. Our own painting as well as the art we individually embrace and make part of our own being. In our studios we walk through the image. We breathe in the color. It fills our lungs and our veins, pulsating through our system. We each revel in our chosen medium. “It can be ugly. It can be decorative and pretty. It can be shy. It can be bold.” Our mediums are our words. Painting seriously and communing with tough art is as profound as a religious experience that for me cuts across denominations, races and maybe even nations. It is my escape from trivia. I believe serious art to be solely about the big poetic and philosophical issues of life now.

Thank you, Stella Waitzkin. Thank you, Miriam Beerman. Thank you, Willem de Kooning. Thank you, Clyfford Still. Thank you, Hans Hofmann. Thank you, Meret Oppenheim. Thank you, Joan Mitchell. Thank you, Lee Godie. Thank you, Chaim Soutine. Thank you, Jackson Pollock. Thank you, Amedeo Modigliani. Thank you, Claire Moore. Thank you, Eva Hesse. Thank you, Emilio Cruz. Thank you, Georgia O’Keeffe. Thank you, Bessie Harvey. Thank you, Elaine de Kooning. Thank you, Bill Traylor. Thank you, William Hawkins. Thank you, Hawkins Bolden. Thank you, Reuben Kadish. Thank you, Hans Hartung. Thank you, Ornette Coleman.  Thank you, Louise Bourgeois. Thank you, Walter Anderson.  Thank you, Anonymous artists. Thank you, Paul Cezanne.  Thank you, Kazimir Malevich. Thank you, El Lissitsky.  Thank you, Vasily Kandinsky.

I am still working. We are all still working.

Alison ​