What Is In A Name?
by Ed Charbonneau
When I signed on for art school at the age of 18, it was with the strict understanding that there would be no math, no second language requirement, and no writing (with the exception of an art history paper here and there). As it turned out, I was wrong on all accounts: 1) simple to complex mathematics plays a role in the construction and installation of artworks; 2) the art world has its own language, and, to the uninitiated, it can be as incomprehensible as legalese or an architectural blueprint; and 3) writing is critical to the development to of my artworks and creative process.
Writing is a form of communication that is not unlike painting or drawing. Instead of tubes of paint, I have words. These words can be moved around and shifted to sit next to each other to form descriptive sentences. Strings of words grow into chunks of text that communicate an idea, a thought, and a concept to a reader. Similarly, art making is about thinking, and it is about participating with thought as a means to communicate visually. The more I learn about the English language and how words function, the less I view writing as different from painting.
When I was young, I did not learn to spell properly. The order of letters and how they formed words did not solidify in my mind. The weekly grade school spelling tests were disastrous for me, and the foundations of the rules of grammar were never set to my memory. My own name actually proved to be problematic: I was in the second grade in 1977, and as a class we were asked to solve simple math equations on the chalkboard. We were also instructed to write our first and last names below our calculations. I don’t remember if I wrote out 72 as the product of 8 and 9; however, I do remember that I could not spell my last name. I had no idea. Up until that afternoon, I had been Eddie C. on all my homework and chalkboard exercises. Suddenly, I had to write my entire surname – - while standing at the front of the class! But all I had was the letter C.
Flash forward to the year 2004 and I’m sitting with a group of graduate students around a small table within the office of the Director of the Graduate Program at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD). We are presently asked to write the phrase, narrative to follow, on the paperwork that we each held. I can differentiate the local color that zoomed by me in the shape of a red fire truck last summer from the hue, value, and chroma of the stop sign near my house that I neglected to stop at earlier today, yet, that day in 2004, I could not recall the number of R’s in the word, narrative.
Nearly 30 years of not knowing how to spell and write had to end.
I had hidden from writing. Not understanding basic grammar and spelling had led me deeper into a hiding space: a place where I would never reveal my deficiency and lack of skill, knowledge, and intelligence. This deception was unsustainable and had to end – - and its demise signaled a shift in my thinking.
I went to work watching School House Rocks videos. I asked friends and family members for feedback on my writing; I had people read rough drafts over and over – - giving me feedback and suggestions for how to make my writing clearer. The School House Rocks videos helped a lot actually (although the Adverb Song still confounds me!). I asked for help, and throughout graduate school I became more confident in my writing skills.
In 2009, I began working on a series of autobiographical short stories. I had been encouraged by friends and family members to write about some of my experiences and adventures in life. Considering this challenge, I created characters that are amalgamations of my friends and family members as well as various personality traits that I possess. I assigned them fictional names with short biographies and began to write about myself from their point of view. I even gave myself a new name, Edmund Callipeaux.
Through these short stories, I have found that the creative process for writing and visual art making are nearly identical. In communicating an idea, words and sentences function differently from visual media, yet the ways in which they are used, and the decision making process involved in their composition, is congruent to painting and drawing. Many of my short stories revolve around rather ordinary topics, such as the recycling of an old refrigerator, or a tour of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Writing from the points of view of multiple characters has shown me that how the tale is told is as important as the anecdote itself. Back in my painting studio, what I have learned from writing informs my painting process as I consider how an artwork’s production generates its visual meaning.
My most recent painting is titled, 507 Paintings. For this project, MCAD intern Nathan Bishop and I photographed the process of modeling monochromatic black oil paint on a canvas while it hung on my studio wall. Oil paint maintains its compliance and malleability for many hours, if not days, before it dries completely. Beginning with an evenly textured black surface, we documented our progress over time while we drew into the wet oil paint using rags to reveal the white primer below. Through these reductive marks, a landscape with trees and a distant horizon was formed. The images that accompany this essay show the landscape shifting and changing while we worked the surface to animate the sun across our imaginary sky – - which eventually set at the western horizon beyond our view. And with day turning to night, we pushed our landscape back into obscurity and the appearance of the painting returned to its monochromatic state.
Perhaps it has been the Adverb Song from School House Rocks that has shown me the clearest path from visual art making into writing. As I try to understand how an adverb can function as a modifier of verbs, adjectives, as well as other adverbs, I have learned that a single word can carry two or more grammatical distinctions, and therefore function in a myriad of ways. This contradicts my prior understanding that there is a right way and a wrong way to write. However, it is exactly how I view color. When a measure of paint is squeezed out of its tube and onto my palette, I have the freedom to use it in any way I choose.
As with visual imagery, the English language does not have a fixed position; it too is dependent upon usage to generate meaning. Words communicate through their sequence and context. Artworks are visual descriptions of thought in the same way that a text is a position from which content is conveyed to a reader. The creative process allows me to change my name, as well as my position, so that I can work from multiple points of view, whether with words or painted colors.
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Short stories self-published as:
Specious Reasoning: Creative Nonfiction Regarding the Life of Edmund Callipeaux
Thanks for this, Ed. You’ve helped me understand the visual artist’s resistance to language as a sort of caption on what does not require a caption. With more macho artists, I’ve sometimes associated this reticence with the traditional belief that “spilling his seed” weakens the man.
Excellent essay, Ed. I’ve followed your written work for a while now, and your painting career for even longer. It’s been exciting watching your writing grow in sophistication and coherence, to match that of your visual art.
I’ve always had a very difficult time wrapping my head around the intellectual process of creating art. I generally work in series, and whenever I’m developing a new body of work I find it helpful to “do” first and ask questions later. I’ll create a few pieces and then step back and deconstruct the process, examining my decisions to better understand why I made them. This invariably reveals facets of my ideas that I hadn’t previously recognized as well as relationships that I may not have considered, and more often than not, determines the way forward. It’s very similar to how I learned to write, and more specifically, how I learned to formulate an argument and articulate it fully.