Hollis Sigler, circa 1993

I met Hollis Sigler perhaps in the Fall of 1993 at the Vermont Studio Center (VSC) where I was spending some time as a resident (I subsequently returned there to be on staff for the remaining part of the year--the happiest of times for me).  She was invited to Johnson as a visiting artist--someone who spent a weekend, giving a lecture and providing individual critiques to the residents.  I had previously been aware of her work as I had spent three years going to college two hours away from Chicago, on the other side of Lake Michigan.  I don't remember which gallery it was in Chicago that I had seen her paintings, but I do have memory of a fragment of the talk she gave at VSC.


She spoke incidentally about her diagnosis of breast cancer, but specifically, I remember an image of a painting of hers that she showed--it was a corridor of an inn with multiple doors, opening and closing.  She said that for her, life is like hotel guests entering into their lodging, and leaving soon after, in and out, being born and dying.  She also mentioned the changing of clothes as a similar metaphor.  That was 18 years ago.  Not a very long time ago, not the five thousand years that is the age of the monuments of Egyptian antiquity at Giza, nor the 600+ years that is the Italian Renaissance, nor the 100+ years that is the age of the Modernist "avant-garde".  Just two years shy of two decades.

My Body is No Longer a Temple
1995
Oil on canvas with painted frame
32 x 36 inches
(Hammer Gallery, Chicago)

I don't remember any longer exactly what she said to me during the individual studio visit.  Perhaps it was too elliptical or philosophical for someone who had experienced so little in life.  I remember Pat Steir telling me that the artists that I admired (Goya, Manet . . . ) were all very much about movement of the brush and air and atmosphere, and that what I was painting then, was very much the contrary.  I remember Wolf Kahn trying to humiliate me in front of his large group of followers (some of the other residents at VSC who followed him religiously from studio to studio), enraptured to hear his opinion about anything at all (in essence, he said he hated my paintings).  I remember Bob Barnes concluding that I was an absolutely penniless foreigner . . . which wasn't completely false nor true, but which, I think, subsequently caused a bit of misunderstanding when I was starting the two years I would eventually spend in Bloomington, Indiana.  It was also at VSC that I met Rosemarie Beck, the single most important rencontre I had there.


I don't remember what Hollis Sigler said to me in the white cube of a studio that I had on Main Street in Johnson, Vermont, that Fall day in 1993 (It probably was the month of September or October).  I do remember her warmth, her intelligence, her encouraging interest, and her humanity.


So, this morning, 18 years later, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the idea came to me that I would catch up on news about Hollis Sigler by means of Google.   I found out this morning that she died of breast cancer now over 10 years ago, in 2001, at the age of 53 years old.

* * *

The nude model drawing "association" that I go to regularly had a male model for a change yesterday.  There has been an abundance of female models, but male models have been rare.  So, yesterday, we had a middle-aged man, who might have been a poet or an artist himself but looked like someone who has had a difficult life, a bit worn, the hands and feet of someone who has had to toil, but still proud and alive.  As usual, for the fortnightly sessions on Saturdays, it was a long 3 hour pose with breaks every 45 minutes.  Anyway, the perception of "reality" is a strange thing in such artificial settings as the model that I was drawing at the start of the session, was definitely not the model that I was drawing at the end of the session.  Over the course of the three hours, his body had changed positions, the lengths of limbs and torso had shifted, the angle in which he held his head, though admirably still, had also started leaning to one side . . . so even as one tries to make the drawing as "close to reality" as possible, reality had already changed and moved and there was no way of really capturing it . . . there was no way of arresting or freezing any of the moments along the three hour span of the pose at all.  Drawing from perception is a wonderfully humbling process; one senses the limitations of one's grasp of "reality," of time fleeting, passing, of things changing, of the frailty and incompleteness of the endeavor.  The three hour session was an accumulation of compromises with moving time.

* * *

Re-reading Jorge Louis Borges' Ficciones in a French translation slowly, I found the following reflection in "Funes or memory" (my translation from the French translation): "Funes continually discerned the quiet progress of corruption, of cavities, of fatigue.  He noticed the advancing death, of humidity.  He was a solitary and clear-minded  spectator of a multiform world, each instant perceived with intolerable precision."