Working On Gallery
Vol. 7 - No.2
Guest Writer: Susan Preston
Guest Editor: Francesca Preston
Opening Statement: Naoko Fujimoto
Guest Editor: Francesca Preston
Opening Statement: Naoko Fujimoto
WEAVE is a theme for the Working On Gallery Vol.7. For this volume, I am focusing on writers and artists who weave elements into their creative community. Those elements could be family relationships, neighborhood activities, or academic interpretations. Either way, one thread tightens and makes us stronger like a universal cloth. |
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Francesca Preston is a guest editor who introduced her mother, Susan Preston. Francesca asked several creative process questions to her mother. Sharing creative processes with one's own mother is such an amazing moment. For a long time, my mother did not understand; perhaps, care about what I do as a poet. Now, she comes to my field study for my translation projects. We shared a creative process together, and she cleaned archeological sites if the objects were under weathered leaves. She said, "Thank you for becoming inspirations to my daughter." Creating art, borrowing Francesca's words, like looking for underground water, is feeling for something we can’t see. There are many relationships between daughters and mothers, but some share and tune into this indivisible stream. |
SOMETHING MIGHT COME OF IT
The Journals of Painter Susan Preston
Essay by Francesca Preston
Essay by Francesca Preston
I grew up with an eccentric mother. 'Eccentric' literally means 'out of the center,' like orbiting around a different sun. Not your standard route. Although my mother, Susan Preston, did normal things like pack lunches and look for ticks in our hair, she was also growing into her real life as an artist, a painter, an inward-outward thinker. By the time I was 20 she had made her way to the prestigious MFA program in Painting at Mills College, under the mentorship of master Hung Liu. I knew she was good. When I saw my mother's early paintings, divorced from canvas and firmly rooted in paper, they glowed with wax and ink and stepped-on markings. They contained characters and faces familiar in their strangeness, expressions that seemed to say, "Been there, done that." My mother grew up in a ghost town, and it shows. Ancient knowledge uttered in slang, dialect, stolen coin. When I came home I'd always see my mother's journals laying around the house, and in them were drawings that sometimes "became" paintings, or expressions she'd play with till a new meaning was born. My mother's art began in her journals. And her practice continues, documented in nearly 40 years of notebooks, stacked haphazardly and intermingled with shopping lists, agenda from farm meetings (my parents have operated an organic farm for 50 years), and quotes from all sorts of books. I value the journals not only for what they document, but what they are -- tactile evidence of a moment in time. Hundreds of moments. |
Susan Preston's writing and art are being celebrated in the book In Ghost Time, to debut by summer of 2025. Her paintings are the stars, but her journals are the shaggy underbelly, and I contribute an essay about them, "Lean in Closer," for the book. I wanted to share a taste for Working on Gallery, along with some quotes from my mother, which I solicited in bits and pieces over the holiday season. I asked her about her early journal process; why she's so drawn to outlaws; and Caravaggio, among other topics. When did you begin keeping a journal?::: I was 24, teaching school in the tiny town of Graton, CA, and living in a cabin next to a cow pasture. I would ride my bike down the thin dangerously windy road to the Occidental Library to pick up my pre-ordered copies of Anais Nin's dream journals. They were a happy revelation. My first dreams were written in college essay books. It pleased me that the cows wearing cowbells sometimes woke me up in the night allowing me to sleepily scribble down my dreams. All that alone time in my cabin with my dream journals gave me to understand that we have a multitude of selves, that the inner life rivals the outer in importance. What's your deal with outlaws?::: I came from a large Italian American family and I remember when my great-aunt Mary's son Joe, the town postmaster, was caught pilfering cash from the post office to pay off a gambling debt. He went off to jail and I felt ashamed, like our family had a scar, one that could be seen. |
From the Grimm's Fairy Tales, which my father sent me, I was introduced to the Frog Prince, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, trolls under bridges, and worst of all, bodies that were hacked up into pieces. Sometimes I transferred these stories to my bedroom. I remember a troll who lived under my bed, and a mean billy goat. Perhaps we often invent our own outlaws when we are young -- I don't remember that they worried me. Much later, as a married woman in Dry Creek Valley, I would go to the smallest post office imaginable. High up on the left wall were the Wanted Posters -- they became a source of fascination. The outlaws often had "AKAs" that were brilliant, imaginative, and tricky. I wondered could some of these be underground poets. My favorite name was Dwight Orlando Birdsong. Soon I was writing poems and tiny stories about these people. In a sense some of these outlaws became my people. Can you talk about Caravaggio?::: Well, he was a bad-ass, of course. Once, when you were little, we went to Southern Italy, and there was one Caravaggio painting there. I asked all of you if you could go away for a couple of hours, so I could just sit and look at it. I wanted to see the darks and the lights. And I wanted to understand Caravaggio - how his hot temper affected his painting. |
What do you mean?::: Well, he killed a man over a tennis match. He was impetuous and impulsive in life. You can see the pieces he painted were often about Medusa, violent struggles, things like that. I love the painter Giotto so much. And Caravaggio was the opposite of Giotto. I'm drawn to Giotto, but I felt I needed to understand how somebody could be so quick on the trigger. I think there's something about, if you're making art, you might want to have an edge to it. So in a way Caravaggio was my edge. The words The World's In Color Now (above) were about his use of dark and light, intense chiaroscuro. The paintings are in color, but if you actually look at them they're mostly blacks and whites. I said Knock Three Times because it's like I'm on the other side of the wall from Caravaggio. I'm protected by that wall. I wouldn't want to be too close! Tell me about this 'a little anger in your sugar bowl'..::: Well, I think that as a woman I don't want to be walked over. And I think the world will walk over a woman very easily. One of the ways we can keep that from happening is to be a little spiky. Pretend you've got spikes all over you. I mean, you don't have to be that way all of the time. But like how animals can change form when they need to? Like that. |
I like the idea, in painting, of having a little spikiness about me -- or else I'd get sucked into the culture. A protective device. Do you have any last thoughts, or advice for young artists regarding keeping a journal?::: Well. I am an idea person. I love to read. I love to take notes. I need to have books so I can write in them. The journals capture all kinds of things... sometimes quotes from books, sometimes conversations and questions you hear out in the world. I realized while going through my old journals that I occasionally took an unfinished one, and started writing in it again years later! So, they're not chronological. For a young artist, I think you'd need to keep journals for 2 or 3 years maybe, so the journals can start communicating with each other. But - that's just me! Keeping journals is similar to when you're a kid trying to catch pollywogs... Sometimes you do, and sometimes you don't. But if you're keeping a journal, and you get it down really fast, something might come of it. |
Susan Preston lives in Dry Creek Valley near Healdsburg, California, where she and her husband Lou began an organic farm and winery in the early 1970s. Preston works on and with brown paper bag and foil with inks, acrylics, dirt, river water, rabbit skin glue, olive oil, charcoal, and black tea. Metaphorically eschewing traditional media, she often defaults to more pedestrian substances and techniques: rubber mats, buckets of water, a cast of antique laundry irons and a flight of overnights help hold the images in place and flatten them to a patient, breathing stillness. She received her BFA from Sonoma State University and MFA from Mills College in 1996, where she was also awarded the Jay DeFeo Award for Excellence. Her work has been shown at Southern Exposure, Smova, Bouchon Gallery, Berkeley Art Center and Studio Barndiva among others.
Website: SusanPrestonInGhostTime.com. (forthcoming)
Instagram: @susienotserp
Website: SusanPrestonInGhostTime.com. (forthcoming)
Instagram: @susienotserp
Guest Editor:
Francesca Preston is a poet, essayist, artist, and editor based in Petaluma, CA. Her interests tends to straddle the space between writing and art, and for that she owes much to both her parents. Her work has appeared in Fence; Feral; Fron/tera; The Inflectionist Review; LEVITATE; Phoebe; RHINO, and other venues. She is the author of a chapbook of poems, If There Are Horns, and a hybrid microchap of poetic interviews from the ghost town of her mother's family, called This Was Like I Said All Gone. Francesca offers poetic inspiration via her popular winter month-long missives, dreamcap.
Website: francescapreston.com
Instagram: @francescapreston
Francesca Preston is a poet, essayist, artist, and editor based in Petaluma, CA. Her interests tends to straddle the space between writing and art, and for that she owes much to both her parents. Her work has appeared in Fence; Feral; Fron/tera; The Inflectionist Review; LEVITATE; Phoebe; RHINO, and other venues. She is the author of a chapbook of poems, If There Are Horns, and a hybrid microchap of poetic interviews from the ghost town of her mother's family, called This Was Like I Said All Gone. Francesca offers poetic inspiration via her popular winter month-long missives, dreamcap.
Website: francescapreston.com
Instagram: @francescapreston