Clarity Haynes
Amethyste Rah
2008
Charcoal & paste on paper
46 x 38"
Clarity Haynes
Madeline with Breast Portrait
2002
Pastel
22 x 28"
Clarity Haynes
Jane with Breast Portrait at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival
2003
Pastel on paper
22 x 28"
Clarity Haynes
Bonnie Ann in the Light
2003
Pastel on paper
46 x 38"
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Tom Saettel (TS): We at Leslie/
Lohman were introduced to your work by your former teacher Gilbert Lewis who exhibited with us in 2004. We were stunned by the freshness and quality of your drawings. I’d like to talk to you about your work and about being a lesbian artist. First, I am always curious about why people make art. Why do you make art?
Clarity Haynes (CH): It is a natural part of my life. Paintings are like magic windows. I am so happy when I am painting, even when I’m trying to solve a tough problem. The process of observing and responding to the beauty of the world feels very spiritual to me. Paintings are wonderful—they are like dreams. They don’t have to make sense.
TS: When did you start making art?
CH: I started painting seriously at age 16, when I began traveling to Maine to study with my mentor, Carlo Pittore. Pittore, whose birth name was Charles Stanley, died of cancer in 2005. He was a well-known figure in the international Mail Art movement, along with Ray Johnson and other pioneers of that medium. He was very active in the NYC East Village art scene in the early 1980s, and after moving to rural Maine in the late 80s, he helped found the Maine Union of Visual Artists. Carlo was an amazing figure painter, and it was from him that I acquired the habit of working from life and exploring the human figure in ways that are personal and exploratory. His nudes are so distinctive—I can liken them to Alice Neel and Lucian Freud, but really, they are very much in a league of their own. Unabashed, human, colorful, real. Before he died, he established the Carlo Pittore Foundation for Figurative Art, which will continue to preserve and promote his work and provide grants for artists.
TS: Where else did you study?
CH: I attended the Duke Ellington High School for the Arts in Washington, DC, where we drew every afternoon from the model. I went to a liberal arts college and was led to study filmmaking, because I was interested in exploring art as a medium of social change. I soon returned to painting because I realized that I enjoyed the craft and physicality of it much more than the technical process of filmmaking. I enrolled in a four-year, full-time program at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where I studied with Sidney Goodman, Scott Noel and Gilbert Lewis (who has some lovely gouache paintings
in your permanent collection.) The quality of the education was very high, and the emphasis was on craft.
TS: If you can put it into words, what are you trying to communicate? What are your concerns?
CH: I am at heart a portrait artist. For me, painting is a way of creating a magical, separate space which affirms women—in our connection to each other, and as spiritually embodied and empowered beings.
TS: How has being a lesbian affected your art?
CH: In my stories, women are the protagonists, and they exist in a space that belongs to them. I don’t try to create work that looks self-consciously “lesbian,” but when I do portraits of women, my love for them/us, which is more than just sexual, comes through.
TS: Have you found exhibition opportunities limited to you as a feminist? As a lesbian?
CH: I don’t think that homosexuality in art is an issue anymore in the truly contemporary art world. However, some realist galleries tend to have a conservative bent. There is an unspoken code of acceptable imagery, and I’ve often been told that my women are “too confrontational.” My portraits celebrate women who are unconventional looking—actually, I should say, the portraits are just real looking. We are so used to seeing only representations of women’s bodies that are young, thin or doctored in some way, whether through plastic surgery or airbrushing. I have found portraiture to be a fruitful site for addressing the issue of body image. I love to see women walk up to a piece at a show and exclaim, often with emotion, “That’s me!” Women (and for that matter men) aren’t used to seeing our real selves reflected and celebrated. Though galleries have sometimes had cold feet about some of my stronger work, I’ve never had a problem selling it out of my studio.
TS: You have received significant recognition for your work with the Breast Portrait Project. Can you explain the nature of this project—how it began, and where it is going?
CH: There is a lot to say about that—it has a life of its own! The project, a collaborative work-in-progress, began in 1998 when I did a self-portrait of my torso and found it to be a healing experience. The slow, meditative process of observation and response brought me a new measure of compassion and acceptance for my body. As a female, I’d been used to treating my body as a commodity for most of my life; all of a sudden I saw the spiritual truth there—the humanity, the dignity. I started doing torso portraits of other women, often at women’s festivals and retreats such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, where I have had a booth for about six years. I realized that doing portraits for other women seemed to help them in the same way that it helped me.
The portraits are life-sized, realistic, color pastel portraits of the female torso. We are so used to thinking of portraits as being about the face, which is our mask of identity. But bodies are also very distinctive and idiosyncratic. I love capturing the details that are specific only to that person. Every time I do a portrait, I document the process by taking a picture of the subject with her finished portrait and asking her to write something about her relationship with her body in a book. I put the photo next to the writing and keep the books out at my booths for women to read. They are fascinated by them. Over the past eight years I have done portraits of over 300 women!
I say the project has had a life of its own because I never could have planned it. I didn’t intend for it to become a vehicle for visibility and empowerment around breast cancer, for example. But that’s what happened after a woman named Madeline, who wore an open vest that exposed the hummingbird tattoo over her mastectomy scar, walked up to my booth at the 1999 Michigan Womyn’s Festival and quipped, “Is it half price for a single breast?” Of course I said yes. She went on to become a friend, and to bring many women who had survived breast cancer to my booth to get their portraits done.
These women are often choosing to be activists through this project, being visible and sharing their strength in order to help others. Another survivor, Kathleen, whose portrait I did in 2002 (she has had a double mastectomy), tells the story of being at an exhibition where my work was displayed and overhearing a woman criticize a piece she’d modeled for. The larger-than life charcoal drawing of Kathleen’s torso was aptly titled Breastlessness. The woman, not knowing that she was standing next to the model, looked up at it and exclaimed, “Some people have no shame!” Kathleen turned to her calmly and said, “That’s me.” See, Kathleen actually doesn’t have any shame. The two women ended up having an honest, fruitful conversation. That, to me, is what this project is all about: by telling our stories, exposing what we are taught to keep hidden, we learn from each other. In this way we open our minds to new ideas and unlearn the negative messages we’ve taken on from society and the media. This is social change, and I am excited that artwork can be a real catalyst for it.
A 2003 grant from the Leeway Foundation paid for the creation of 100 self-published copies of The Breast Portrait Book, a selection of writings and photographs of women with their portraits. The book includes breast cancer survivors, transwomen, sexual trauma survivors, pregnant women, old women—you name it. The stories are entertaining, honest and often humorous! This limited edition book has found its way into libraries and public and private collections across the country, and I plan to have a more developed version of it professionally published for the 10-year anniversary of the Breast Portrait Project in 2008.
There are other ways that this work has touched people; I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to travel and lecture about this work at colleges and universities around the country. I’ve also led workshops in self-portraiture which focus on body acceptance for women, which gives them the opportunity to be both artist and model. And in 2003, a documentary video was made which captures many of the stories of women who have participated in this project, with a focus on breast cancer survivors. The video in-cludes footage from women’s festivals, which really brings the project alive for those who haven’t had an opportunity to participate directly.
TS: You recently moved from Philadelphia to New York. How has that affected your work?
CH: I moved to Brooklyn a year ago to pursue an MFA degree in painting at Brooklyn College. I love living here—it’s very intense! I am excited about bringing my work to a wider audience and finding new opportunities for exhibition. I believe that the Breast Portrait Project has the potential to expand and to help many more women. Also, I am using graduate school to explore and experiment. I’ve always loved surrealism, and lately my paintings have been becoming more narrative and whimsical. I’ve been having fun exploring compositional archetypes in art history and revamping them to express my own quirky, feminist perspective. I’ve also been using gouache and watercolor, new media for me.
I’ve found that even when there is more going on in a composition—a story, environments, etc.—that I still treat the figures like portraits.
I think it’s who I am as an artist.
I define portraiture very broadly; it is a rich tradition with a long history, and I like to both come from that and see how I can question its boundaries.
TS: Where can people go to see more of your work?
CH: If you google me, a few websites and articles will come up.
The most comprehensive site of my work is with inliquid.com, a Philadelphia-based arts network.
If anyone is interested in getting
a portrait done or inquiring about sales, I can be reached at clearcraze@aol.com.
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