APRIL GORNIK

APRIL GORNIK

Award-winning landscape artist April Gornik’s paintings and drawings of land, sky and sea are anchored in observed reality and a world synthesized, abstracted, remembered and imagined.

Award-winning artist April Gornik has work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, and other collections. Retrospectives of her art have traveled to museums in the U.S. and Canada. She has shown at the Whitney and Venice Biennales, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Weisman Museum, Guild Hall, Parrish Art Museum, and in Seeing Nature, a traveling exhibition of Paul Allen's collection featuring Monet, Klimt, Turner, Hockney, and others.

She has contributed much to preserve the history and culture of Sag Harbor, leading many projects, including the Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center and The Church.

Mia recently completed a residency, as an inaugural artist participating in The Church’s new program, where she was able to witness first hand the depth of April’s engagement with the community and her dedication to art, not just as a means of self-expression but as a vehicle for bringing people together. She sat down with April in her studio in North Haven.

APRIL GORNIK

You know, I've always liked, since I started painting, particular landscapes, I like to see work as the artist wants it to be seen. I'm curious about the creative process to a certain extent, but I'm much more interested in the effect of the final work. And the underpainting for me is always important because I believe that there is a bit of a thin dimension on the surface of all of these paintings that exists that's a conversation that's going on between the underpainting and what it is eventually subsumed by on the surface of the painting. And it's more or less evident in different paintings that I do. Sometimes it gets almost completely obliterated, but I still believe that there's a little resonance that exists between the final layer of the painting.

I think that no matter how intentional you are in the studio, the work always goes off in a direction that can't quite be anticipated, and the final result is always something that's not quite what I thought it would be. And that's partly accident, and that's partly the reification of the thing itself that almost feels like it's by itself and not by me. It always feels like there's this thing that happens at the end where everything comes together. And I can explain what I do in the studio, but I can't explain why it happens when it works successfully, ultimately.

I usually end up making work from images that I recognize as being important or interesting to me for some reason, and always that pose a certain kind of mysteriousness that make me want to look at them twice or three times. Or, in the case of being the person that makes it, like a zillion as it's happening.

But if a painting or drawing or print is successful, then it should trap that ability to generate questions and responses that I would hope that a viewer would share similarly. And I don't mean the same. I just mean similarly. And their conclusion could be looking at the work. A work that I think is complex enough to be interesting, could be that they find it oppressive or depressing or strange or surreal or very realistic or very peaceful or very happy or very harmonious. I know that the same work can arouse very different reactions in people. And, to me, that is a kind of success, actually, if the work can straddle various kinds of interpretations because I've always thought that great art makes itself vulnerable to interpretation. So, to be able to have enough complexity that can generate a lot of different reactions is to me a big positive. And then there's the choice of unpeopled landscape...why that? It's just my language for self-expression.

❧

I grew up in the suburbs in kind of post-World War II housing. A very Caucasian neighborhood. Most people were Irish or Italian. And I went to Catholic school. And I always liked making art. I always liked it. I just like making things, generally. Then I went to the Cleveland Institute of Art. Low hanging fruit.

But I got restless there and wanted to pursue an interest that I'd developed in conceptual art, and I was very then comfortable hiding in or keeping a bulwark around me of what I was thinking of as conceptualism. And I'm not saying that I understood it. I don't think I really did, but I took comfort in the idea that conceptual art made art smart and it could make it become as good as science. And with science go explanations. And with explanations go excuses or rationales. A kind of orderliness. And one big part of my sense of self-confidence has always been my mind, so getting into an art that would be something that I'd make and I could explain and I had reason and maybe it would be socially impactful in some way. All of that appealed to me immensely. And then, I impulsively applied to the Nova Scotia College after I didn't get a scholarship renewal at the Cleveland Institute. It was just a half-scholarship. And I got accepted, and I just left. But I had one more year to go, anyway. I wanted to go there because they had courses in Marxism and it was very advanced. And I thought, Yes, I'll be very advanced! And then, by the time I had a very nice teacher named Richards Jarden. All the teachers there were about ten years older than the students at the most. And we ended up talking for hours and hours about art and why to make it. And I think we both kind of reached the conclusion that we were both making work that was illustrating texts. Then people weren't really reading Lacan, but they were reading Piaget and Claude-Levi Strauss.

And I was just struggling to make sense of these texts and Marxism and things like that. And then I would make these things that were kind of romantic. And I was all over the place, and it was derivative. And I just kind of realized suddenly that I was doing something that wasn't...

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

It was secondary to the texts, in a way?

GORNIK

It was illustration. I was making illustrations, personally. And then, I went to Europe for a couple of months. The summer after I graduated from there, I came back to Nova Scotia, got a little studio and just started horsing around in it. I got very interested when I was over in Europe in the art of other cultures, African art, Oceanic. And I started thinking about archetypes, and I tried to make work that had symbols in them. And then one day in my studio, I kind of got straight into the idea that it would be interesting to make something that contained light. And an image popped into my head. And I made it. And I actually needed paint to make it. And it turned out to be a landscape.

And then, I've said this story so many times, it's awful to repeat it, but I accidentally made a landscape. But I really liked it. I really liked the idea of making something that had light in it.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And you had fun making it? There was a joy? It wasn't a struggle as much?

GORNIK

It was it was like I was driven. I was in the driver's seat, and I was being driven at the same time. Everything felt very necessary.

ON 100 YEARS OF WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE

Women just generally don't get acknowledged, period. We're still grappling with that. And we never got the Equal Rights Amendment passed, and we're just now really making a big fuss with Me Too about how long we’ve endured harassment and diminishment. How is that even possible? I was in a group called the Women's Action Coalition in the early 90's. The fact that we couldn't get the ERA passed is insane. Although, now as I’m seeing it reintroduced, it should be a true equal rights amendment for everybody. Not just focused on women being equal to men, but a real update to the constitution. We still have things that we need to rewrite.

This is an excerpt of a 7,000 word interview which will be published and podcasted across a network of participating university journals and national arts/literary magazines.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of the The Creative Process.

It's about, can you handle the complexity of these things and, with American Indians, it's overwhelming, for the American public, this terrible tragedy and seeing Indians as part of the 21st century. Seeing Indians who are engineers or contemporary artists at Biennales is hard for people becaue they're always thinking about (not always, but) many of the kind of people who go to our museum. They're coming from a place of guilt and also not knowing how to process things. And so to always see Indians as of the past, which is sort of what happens. We're only Indian as much as we're like our ancestors, is something the museum has always been trying to challenge. And, you know, it's difficult. This is not a good time for complexity and nuance. We're trying to flip the script from the idea of just tragedy, this terrible past, to say, American Indians are part of the 21st century doing all kinds of interesting things. And the connections between American Indians and the United States are profound and deep, and it's not simply an issue of us being victims and the U.S. being the opressor. It's much more complicated than that.

–PAUL CHAAT SMITH · ASSOCIATE CURATOR
SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

I actually assumed in graduate school that I would become a teacher and I've taught in a number of different universities, but it was working with art objects and seeing them in museums like the Metropolitan Museum or The Frick that made me want to go into museum work and ultimately become a curator. So when I was finishing my dissertation and had to think about a career, I applied to a lot of teaching jobs and there was one job that year in America in my specialized field, which was European sculpture, and I was very lucky. But a professional career is a bit of luck as well as predisposition, so I knew I wanted to work in museums, and I was lucky enough when
I was able to find my way here.

–IAN WARDROPPER · DIRECTOR
THE FRICK COLLECTION
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

I think there are certainly social aspects to this because, you know, whether painting a landscape or doing a conceptual piece or large sculpture, I think artists, who are all involved in this creative process, I always say they are almost like bellwethers. They pick up on trends, pick up on anxieties, pick up on things in the world almost before the rest of us do. And artists get up, eat their cornflakes, go to work. They really do. And it's this creative process, which as Chuck Close once debunked and said, "Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us get up and work." It's not always inspiration, but another great quote of his is that he always, anytime he sees a lot of painting like going to a museum, he's always astonished by the transcendent moment when you realize that this is just colored dirt and pigment laid on the surface with what's arguably just a stick. There's such a metaphysical moment when these images are created on a surface. In three dimension, if you're talking about something that has reference in the natural world. In three dimension on a flat surface, it's kind of a head-scratcher to start. So great art has a transcendent moment.

–ALICIA LONGWELL · CHIEF CURATOR
PARRISH ART MUSEUM
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

I think that contact with ancient civilizations is very important because we get to have in our life a third dimension. If we live only in the present, we don't understand what happened many thousand years ago. We don't realize what the development of humanity really is. I think it's very helpful to know history. I don't believe that history can teach for the future, but history can give us another dimension, can make us wiser with more abilities to judge our present. Sometimes we think that we invented everything, but this is not true. The history of human thinking is very important, is very useful for us to know different thinking of other people. At the end of the day, multicultural civilization is also very helpful today. I know, for myself, for example, I concentrate on antiquity, but sometimes I work on other civilizations. Some months ago I organized an exhibition on a very famous Chinese emperor – Qianlong (1711-99). And through this opportunity, I studied a little about Chinese culture, and I found very exciting things. And I can compare these things with our Western civilization. All this is very fruitful because we open our eyes, and we are not going on only one track. There are different approaches in life and different interpretations of the world and of societies.

–DIMITRIOS PANDERMALIS · DIRECTOR
ACROPOLIS MUSEUM
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

The whole thing is to get them to feel like no matter where their background is from, the difficulty they have in their personal lives, the isolation that they feel in relationship to that, that within the art community they are embraced, they are welcomed. All they have to do is just keep getting better at it, but the community is there. I think that something we're all looking for is where we belong.

–ERIC FISCHL
ARTIST
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

When I first started acting, I came to Los Angeles for a one week job. I was with my dad and we went to a production of a play called Fences. And James Earl Jones was the star. And I remember I was just the whitest kid ever from small town New Mexico. I'm sitting there watching this play about a lower middle-class African American man in Pittsburg and his family. And I just remember being so moved, moved to tears at thirteen, fourteen years old about a world that I really knew nothing about. Not even from school, even, but certainly not this feeling empathy for this specific man and wife, and she was peeling potatoes on a rocking chair and monologing ire at his character. And it was so moving. I did think, even back then I recognized the impact that the theater can have on someone that isn't even anything like what they're like.

–NEIL PATRICK HARRIS
ACTOR, WRITER, PRODUCER, MAGICIAN & SINGER
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

Creativity is perhaps the ultimate mystery. I veer wildly between opposing views on it and have different feelings depending on whether the creator is isolated or a collaborator. Gropius said the artist is an exalted craftsman. “In rare moments of inspiration, moments beyond the control of his will, the grace of Heaven may cause his work to blossom into art, but proficiency in his craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies the source of creative imagination." And Steve Sondheim said, "Art is craft, not inspiration." And Rilke mistrusted any artist's knowing participation in his own creative process.

–TONY WALTON
ART & THEATER DIRECTOR · COSTUME DESIGNER
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process