A Conversation with Claudine Bing By Karen Klein Visual artist and art educator Claudine Bing has published her first book. Combining her watercolor monoprints and poignant, evocative words, PAINTING OUT OF SORROW documents her mother’s death and Bing’s subsequent journey through grief to healing, An accomplished colorist, Bing skillfully and thoughtfully manipulates her color choices to express a range of feelings from the dark confusion of loss through the gradual process of regaining the world and its restorative hues and finding her mother’s spirit within herself. Throughout the book, pictures and text fit seamlessly together, beautifully complementing each other as they develop the narrative from Goodbye was no color at all to One days/ saw/the landscape painted/in watercolor washes to you, as a multicolored bird spirit, will fly through my life/again. Primarily a painter, Bing has made the occasional, private artist’s book before — for example, travel journals xeroxed and hand-sewn — but this is her first venture into commercial publishing with a hard-cover book for a wide audience. In the original version she used vellum for the words and interleaved it with the watercolors. But having the words over the images wasn’t perfect because the words didn’t stand out enough. With the help of designer/publisher Ilene Horowitz, she came up with the idea which became the format of the book. Every other right hand page contains text and a small piece of the total image which follows in full on the next right hand page. On each of the left hand pages is the image of a bird, wings outspread, in a bluish-grey wash. As the book progresses, this image slowly descends until the final spread where the bird image near the bottom of the left hand page is echoed in its reversed image on the right hand page, outlined against a backdrop of intense, joyous yellows, oranges, reds, greens, blues, purples — a flood of color. The excellent reproductions throughout do justice to Bing’s deliberate palette. When her mother died in 1992, it “rocked” her. As an only child. “I had no idea before she died how difficult it would be for me. She didn’t have an easy life.” An immigrant, Bing’s mother came to the United States from France during the WWII. She had an arranged marriage which fell apart and she worked as a manufacturer’s rep, a job held only by men at that time. “She sacrificed alot of things to make my life the best it could be: coming to the US, learning a new language, working when most women didn’t work, teaching me to be independent when that wasn’t valued for women. My role model, she valued achievement, but this wasn’t a relationship where we talked about our closeness or what we felt. She was from a muck more formal culture.” But Bing’s mother sometimes spoke to her in French, especially when she didn’t want other people to understand, helping to connect Bing to her ancestry. In the year after her mother’s death, however, Bing lost two other members of her family in France, and they were a small group to begin with. In the book she writes: Hands held across the ocean let go. . . . The Mediterranean villages still hang on the hillside/but the people fall off. Today, the French connection is being restored as Bing’s son has a journalist’s fellowship to spend a lengthy period in France in the upcoming months. Her mother was living in Florida before she died and Bing went there to be with her during her final illness, accompanied by her husband. According to Bing, he “knew how muck she meant to me, much more than I understood.” After her death, she was “completely stuck as an artist. I couldn’t pick up the things I had been working on — large, abstract, paintings and a series of pastels on paper called She Dreams of Her Discoveries. I started those before mother died — cycladic female figures in odd landscapes with symbolic animals, dream-like. They were about female issues and the freedom to go out and discover. I got into this female figure which spoke with animals and birds which are like oracles, some kind of spirit thing that this lone female figure could relate to. This was the beginning of the bird images. I went to the Peabody Museum and drew stuffed animals and birds without knowing why.” This interest in the inner life as projected through symbols eventually made its way into PAINTING OUT OF SORROW, in images of isolated female figures; of birds, some of which metamorphose into the angel of death; and of fish. But during this early period of mourning, she could only go for walks. “Everything seemed grey to me,” she said. These walks are depicted in her book in the following sequence of right hand pages. The text describes the reservoir where she walks and notes, “People walk around it but they don’t talk or greet one another. Each one walks or runs or skips but always alone. It is a city path, hushed and solitary. I walk around the reservoir watching the birds speak.” Bing’s sense of isolation is reinforced by the images. On the text page, the image is of a white bird, flying against a dark, landscape background of deep blues, purples, blacks, with a small bit of magenta. Turning the page, the viewer sees the large image of which this one is a part; it has a female figure which is abstract enough to be suggestive of humans generally, placed off center in this dark landscape with a magenta, red sky laced with black and purple. This sky could be read literally as a sunset or symbolically as an expression of the figure’s inner life of intense pain. White birds dot the landscape, separated from the figure and from each other. The text of the following page is a single line: My days all end in silence. The image, in the lower left side of the page, corresponds to this statement of profound loneliness. It depicts a figure bent over outstretched legs; the rounded arms encircle a drooping head. The following page shows the complete image of the grieving figure; the circling arms now become part of the circles of color which surround the figure, enclosing it in swirls of grey, green, white, and different shades of purple. The drooping head is almost at the center of the page, its position emphasizing the emotional truth of being driven deep within the self, cut off from the solace of connection. I asked her how this experience of terrible loss became a book. She replied that she began to write things down in a journal. “it was very crude; I won’t making art. I had to get rid of the memories of the hospital room and the experience of waiting for the death of someone you love. I was pouring out words and pictures, just weird, a way of venting that stuff. I didn’t think about it for anybody else, didn’t think about color, composition; it didn’t have anything to do with my real work as an artist.” She added, “That’s completely opposite to what I teach, that all of art work comes from soul experiences. I couldn’t think the way I told other people to think. I just thought I was blocked. I didn’t know I was in the middle of a process until I realized that some of these pictures were kind of interesting. Emotionally they talked to me, more like the way you feel when you begin to paint or draw. I needed to do them more indirectly, so I made watercolor monoprints. You paint a zinc or copper plate with watercolor, let it dry and put it through the press on wet paper. The printing lifts the image and reverses it. This reversal began to be important to me. This indirect way of working shifted me from my personal feelings to how things looked or what the next piece should be. I had no idea this was a book. I just kept making prints and writing words along with them. I had done about six prints when I began to feel a narrative emerging that needed to be looked at sequentially. It began to feel like one piece, rather than several for an exhibition, flipped over like pages in a book. I felt this was a story for me and really important to share with other people. I’d never written before, but my oldest daughter gave me lots of support and urged me on to make it a book. Once I decided to do that, I realized there were lots of technical issues alignment, size, word placement — which I had to deal with. I met with a computer artist. Scanning the images into the computer and manipulating the forms made me realize how the book could be shaped. And I guess the turning point towards feeling good came when my youngest daughter got me a necklace of brightly colored beads. Her doing that for me started me back on the journey towards remembering things without pain.” Smiling, she said, “that necklace went into the book.” The process took her over five years and a grant from the Brookline Council for the Arts and Humanities helped fund the publication. During that time, she was also making and exhibiting other works, but of the book she says, “as an artist, I feel this is one of the most honest things I’ve done because it’s so much about me and my journey through grief, yet it’s so very universal. I felt this powerful need to share because so often when we grieve we can’t talk about it. Maybe that’s why it needed to be a book.” This sharing has already started to take place. I asked her how making the book changed her art and she replied “it stretched my visual thinking in a new way. I became much more interested in narrative in imagery. For example, I’m very interested in the May Stevens show and in women artists who put pieces of narrative about their lives or people in their lives into their work. As a younger artist, I separated my life from what I was painting. My work used to be much more abstract and formal and now it’s more figurative and narrative, but the themes of memory and psychological states remain the some. Also now I’ve become involved in marketing and publicity for the book; that’s a new kind of growth and a good thing for women to do.” Bing is Chair of the Art Education Department at Massachusetts College of Art and in her teaching is most interested in making people conscious of their own creative process so they can use it to bring out ideas they care about and find the means to express them. “My emphasis is to allow students this intuitive drifting towards things they like because of the shape or color or what it reminds them of and to help them begin to find images through these things that are meaningful to them and to understand that they are their sources for art. I teach teachers who help young people make art and it's very important that young people feel confident about making art out of what they care about. I try to inspire the teachers to do that for themselves and be excited enough to pass it on.” Her interest in the creative process has led to curating two exhibitions about it. In Artists of Work, the artists included were actually there doing their work. She received a curatorial award for a recent exhibition at the New Art Center in which the artists documented their process through writing, sketchbooks, plans, etc. for such diverse work as public art or fabric art. “I’m always trying to make the creative process visible,” she said. Karen Kline is an artist and writer living in Cambridge. Reprinted from the newsletter of the Boston chapter of Women’s Caucus for Art, 1999.