 Painting
the World
Suzi Gablik Interview with Jane Vance
Complete version of the interview that art critic
Suzi Gablik published in Resurgence
July 2003 (in an abbreviated version).
A conversation with Jane Vance
AS SOMEONE WHO has written extensively about contemporary art and
the role of artists in society today, I have been engaged for many
years with certain issues. Can art make a difference to the welfare
of communities, and even to the welfare of societies? What is the
true measure of success? Does it depend on external achievement,
money, and an impressive list of exhibitions-all signaling a conditioned
allegiance to art world approval-as we have been taught to believe?
Or is it something else?
The conclusion I have drawn is that true success
is manifested through a certain quality of spiritual awareness and
an ability to live in an interconnected way, with compassion and
responsibility. So imagine my sublime astonishment when I first
discovered that just such an artist was living only a few miles
from my own front door. Jane Vance is an individual who more than
fulfills these criteria-in both her life and her art, she really
puts the great spiritual teachings into action.
Born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina in
1958, Jane now resides with her two children in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Her artistic credentials have not been acquired from the postmodern
culture of academic formalism, but rather from her own ongoing personal
dialogues and interactions with Rajasthani hand-painters, Sri Lankan
cloth-dyers, South Asian jewelers, potters, metal- and stone-workers,
taxi-cab drivers, cremation assistants, monk-artists, the camel
saddle-makers of Pushkar, Nepalese carpet weavers, and Tibetan thangka
painters. In her own paintings, everything is woven together: a
heady, cross-cultural mix of forms and ideas that creates a powerful
cultural and spiritual bridge between East and West, as well as
between tradition and modernity.
Jane is able to weave the experience of others
into the process of her own art through mutual recognition and respect,
and her most unusual ability to make friends and build trust. Jane Vance's work speaks of immersion. It speaks of participation with
the whole heart. To my mind, a consciousness of this order is the
only thing that can lead us away from old patterns of mind based
on radical individualism, and the culture of separation.
Suzi Gablik: When did Tibetan imagery first enter
your life, and how?
Jane Vance: I started going to India in 1985, but not until 1990
did I go to Nepal where I saw Tibetan refugees and Tibetan art for
the first time and I didn't know what I was seeing. I started reading
about it in books and I remember knowing enough about it to start
painting some of the iconography.
So initially you just began by integrating this
imagery with other kinds of painting you were doing? And then it
became more and more of the central focus?
Exactly. It's like being blind, and being in a
room and feeling out the right path, even though you can't see the
ground or the walls or the colour. I was in fact even distrustful
to begin with- of the enormous hybridization, or multiplicity, or
endless number of Tibetan deities. I thought it was unnecessary
and disorganised, and I put up some contest to it all and resisted
it. Tibetan Buddhism's multiplication and endless, infinitesimal
number of deities at first was not clear to me, but it later became
very clear to me.
If this was your initial response, how did it transition
into no longer being the case?
It wasn't reading about Tibetan art that did that.
It was studying the imagery right there, in Kathmandu, in the valley,
and realising that these images were growing up like plants. They
were, each of them, a valid form in a different context, none of
them necessary, and every one like a door. So the excess and profusion
shifted for me into something more like fertility and abundance.
And that happened by living in the environment and interacting with
the people and the culture. I met people who didn't know each other's
particular form of worship, but I saw that those forms were functioning
similarly, and I saw how the people accepted each other's forms.
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