My Art Story
Julie Bernstein Engelmann
December 22, 2001
The Web gives each of us freedom to tell our story. As a copy-editor on the side, I find the difference between Web and print fascinating. Just like in Star Trek where they have no need for money, I find it hard to stretch my mind around freedom of length. I can tell my personal story with no concern for whether you, I or anyone else thinks it's worth the paper.
I was lucky enough to have a mother, Norma, with a great eye for art. She decorated each house we lived in like Architectural Digest, and collected real artworks and carvings. One favorite painting was low on a shelf so I studied it as a toddler, and I loved all the colorful dabs of paint. One day when I was about four a miracle struck. I realized the painting wasn't just color, there was an arm, a belt – why, it was a man dancing and spinning. I ran to tell Mom, but of course she already knew. Mom was a docent, and we became acquainted with a number of artists because she would sometimes buy their work.
I was lucky to have a father, Richard B. Bernstein, whose world-renowned work in chemistry and participation in conferences gave Mom the chance to drag us kids to countless museums in the United States and Europe. My parents' two interests stamped my career.
I was also lucky to have a shy older sister (now an accomplished psychiatrist) who spent her hours learning to draw – and teaching me. Art classes were "what we did" in the summer, besides swimming. Mom devoted a large kitchen wall to our creations.
But that was too easy, so I went into the sciences in college. Halfway through, my father started teaching at Columbia University in New York City, so I transferred to Barnard College and, after a reality check with my heart, switched my major to art. What a blast of luck that this gave me the chance to study with Milton Resnick, the living, breathing abstract expressionist still alive when his friends Willem DeKooning and Jackson Pollock were gone.
Resnick didn't waste time assigning anything in class, telling you what paint to buy or anything normal. You just hit the canvas with the paint and went for the alive moment. I wish I could convey the wisdom and presence that exuded from his every pore. I barely knew him, but to me he was an art saint.
My father was what I call a science saint. He lived it completely – the meaning of science and chemistry so filled him, and he so aligned his life with this truth, that he seemed to embody the spirit of science. It was palpable around him, and he was vividly inspiring to every scientist who knew him.
Milton Resnick was the same way with art. He gave me one high ideal I strive for in every piece: that the space holds together. There's something tactile about this ideal – that if I held the painting space in my hands, it might buckle and blow, but it would not fall apart. When I see paintings that fall apart, I can't bear to look at them.
After graduation in 1979, I worked as a textile colorist for two years, then in a software company, and productively painted large, inspiring abstractions while New York City beat me up. For some reason people can't move out of New York.
A burglary in 1984 finally gave me the momentum to move out west, which I had always dreamed about – settling, in exhaustion, in Salt Lake City because my sister was there. I talked my way into a job at the Salt Lake Art Center and then at a contemporary gallery.
Eventually it dawned on me that my art was going nowhere, and that this stalemate was probably why people who are serious about making art go to graduate school. But why go to graduate school if not to one of the best? My father was now teaching at UCLA, so I fortunately lined up a job with the Getty Art History Information Program and Museum in Santa Monica, and planned to work there until I got accepted into one of the California graduate schools. I even toured the schools to see which I preferred. Little did I know. Oh, so little did I know. I can just imagine my slides coming through those art professors' hands. With thousands of accomplished, sophisticated applicants for tens of precious openings, my floaty, pleasing canvases must have been the first, easiest, most laughable slides to reject.
One evening Dad went to a party and met a professor from the UCLA design program, which happened to exist under the umbrella of the art department at that time. It turned out the design program needed graduate students that year, and I could study with all the same teachers as the painters. Well, maybe it was undignified to go in the back door, but what an opportunity! Because of my longstanding interest in the tactility of materials and the patient process of sewing and fiber, which jars me into new ideas, I found a place – an awkward one – in the fiber program.
Trying to straddle the two conceptions, studying under forefront fiber professors whose talents I couldn't use, and forefront art professors whose aesthetic (raw and avant garde) had no room for me, the vitality drained out of my work.
I struggled like a compass in a magnet shop for well over two of my three years in the program, until late one night in my studio I broke down in tears. Why was I hating what I loved? I tried to remember my original joy in discovery. And it came welling back.
The first thing I created was "Couch Painting–Allowing Cycles to Rest" – a sunset picture sinking into a pillow with chunks of decrepit materials floating off to make way for something new.
Thus began the whole basis for my MFA show – how to combine the images I loved (2-D illusionary space) with the materials I loved (3-D tactile reality) into a "space that holds together." I don't see a lot of artwork that can successfully – or artfully – bridge those two ways of seeing. (Some constructions by contemporary artists who have followed Joseph Cornell come to mind.) None of my professors argued with that pursuit, and I successfully earned my MFA degree in 1989, a year before the design department was severed from the art department.
Then came a personal cycle change. In short succession, besides graduating, I became a cleric in Eckankar, my father died, I got married, my husband and I moved across the country and, a year later, our first child, Amber, was born. Indiana, Pennsylvania is a small university town (IUP) where Chip was to pursue a Ph.D. in English. I did freelance graphic design, but was too meticulous to make money.
About the time I asked God what to do, along came a job to design the catalog for a new vitamin mail order company. Shortly before the catalog was ready to print, the founder had his own "conversation with God," and decided to sell the business – for cheap. After acute deliberation, and knowing this path would derail my art career (and, as it turned out, Chip's academic career) for years, I decided to return to science, buy the business, and take the challenge. It's a point of view my father had instilled in me – that the gemstones of experience are worth far more than the coins of safety.
For whatever it was worth, our business, Vitamin Discount Connection, became significant in the vitamin industry, considering its size. It seriously influenced the marketing appeal and the lowering of prices for supplements through catalog companies. We were among the first to create an online Web shopping cart (1996) and health search engine (1998). By then we were managing 18 employees and had our second child, Shane. My art output consisted of one painting a year: our catalog cover – which, ironically, got much greater exposure than paintings I had made in "artist" mode. The covers were reproduced in four-color ads in health-related magazines seen by hundreds of thousands of people.
But as the twelve-year cycle came to a close, we had to get back to the things we loved more than management. With much complication, in 2000 the mail order operation was sold, and my husband took back the job he loved: being sole proprietor of our local store, Vitamin Connection (www.vitaconnect.com). His writing, humor and creative freedom have burst back into bloom (www.chipengelmann.com/Sage.html). And as my focus flooded back to art, Chip gave me a loving husband's birthday gift: programming this Web site!
I feel like I'm coming back after a long, strenuous trip. Like I'm smelling the familiar mists in the night air as we reach the lake each summer, when we've been through so much in our lives over the year – and the water is still there, with all its silence and sounds.
(c) 2001 Julie Bernstein Engelmann
