Butterflies cluster and merge into a consuming blackness of gouache, or stream into the light and off the canvas. Welcome to the world of painter Gali Rotstein, whose recent show at Lois Lambert Gallery, Flying Crooked, metaphorized her ongoing process of self-discovery. As forms emerge from the inky void of her paintings, and the chrysalis morphs into the monarch, so Gali's own identity as a creative artist has cohered from a kaleidoscope of a multifaceted, global life.
Rotstein spoke from her home in Encino about the migratory journey that has taken her from a childhood surrounded by the leading lights of the in Israeli art scene, to motherhood, a business career; and finally to the walls of Los Angeles galleries.
Tell me about the name you've given this collection, Flying Crooked.
I'm going to take a somewhat crooked path to answer you.
All of my work is biographical, starting w the first body of work,
Home. What did Home mean to me, I asked, having lived in so many countries and so many places? Then, once I realized I was committed to a life in art, I started rebelling against the constraints put on me by the life I was actually living, raising the child and helping build a business with my husband.
Requiem To A Housewife [a multimedia installation at Lois Lambert in 2008] was
about anger, all that rage coming out as I tore off the old ball and chain. After that my daughter had flown off on her own, and I felt free to call myself an artist, to be an artist 24 hours a day, thinking almost exclusively about art — which of course has its own challenges, as well as being its own reward.
Taking 50 years to get there was what I called Flying Crooked. That's how butterflies fly. When I started to draw them and use them as a central motif, my aunt sent me a poem by Robert Graves called "Flying Crooked". It helped me realize that crooked is in fact a path to get there — flitting from place to place rather than going in a straight line. Because I don't go in a straight line, I flit around.
Tell me more about your use of butterflies. The work I had seen you doing in the last two years was so minimal — flecks of light and strands of pearls fields buried in rich, dark black gouache. Suddenly your canvases have exploded into a riot of butterflies, and at least implied color.
One of my stumbling blocks as an artist had always been drawing. Back in high school, the criteria that I thought defined beying an artist was mastering draftsmanship. But I learned that not only is that not a criteria — think of Jackson Pollock — but that you can in fact learn to draw! I sat down at a insect show at the science museum in Los Angeles and I sat down and really looked at butterflies and drew them and drew them until it really looked like what was there in front of me.
One of the first things I wanted to draw was monarchs. I had seen a documentary on the monarchs on the BBC, which showed milllions of monarchs sleeping on top of each other. Their layered orange and black was mind-boggling, gorgeous. I have always loved visual repetition, and if you look at the black in my paintings you'll see it's an accretion of layers and layers.
Again, the Flying Crooked metaphor: butterflies don't fly in a straight line. It's a long hard flight, but they do it and they get there. But when you repeat and multiply that crooked flight by millions, putting that repetition and those layers in motion, it becomes swarming — think of the monarch migrations, of schools of fish, clouds of starlings, of blocks of traffic turning away from an ambulance en masse.
The foundation of your canvases still seems to be that blackness. What does the blackness tell us?
I like black. When I stared working with gouache, the survace of the gouache was very appealing. I could not resist using the black. Man Ray was a very big influence on me at 16 when I was working in black and white photography. Later on, in the world of punk rock, black was so important to your identity. But the way I use black now has nothing to do with depression or foreboding, but rather of intimacy. It's about the relationship between my work and the viewer. I will tell you whatever you want to know, but you have to listen, to come close, pay attention. I don't want to yell anymore. It's about the way I am liking to work now, more with full attention.
And it is so much simpler! Especially with all the layering I'm doing.
Let's come back to the question of identity, of who you are as an artist, and how you've gotten here. It seems to me your last three big shows have been something of a time-lapse photo of you — finding your identity and grabbing hold of it. Or perhaps flitting towards the gallery, flying through its doors and arriving on its walls.
WIth
Requiem for a Housewife I was angry and yelling —
you have to understand me!! Then I came to a crisis. Once I'd elbowed my way in, and once I'd begun to seriously make the transition from housewife to Artist, I came down with Impostor Syndrome — how the hell am I going to do this again? That's how I found my teacher,
Tom Wudl. A friend of mine, Kimberly Davis, the director at
LA Louver, said, Gali, you don't have to shout. Now Tom is heliping me cultivate the other side of my temperament. I found I was able to paint without shouting. And I saw that it wasn't at the cost of anything — it was a net gain for me as an artist.
Tom helpied me realize you have no control over what people understand, so it doesn't matter! And maybe it has something to do with getting older, but I really care less and less whether I'm understood.
The Flying Crooked show was in March. What are you working on now? Where are those butterflies going?
That body of work was so multilayered — the cutting, the drawing, the painting, the layering, all that stuff. Even those canvases that don't seem to be layered actually are. So many steps! I just needed to simplify, just sit there with a pencil and go as slowly and as accurately as I could. My work has been many-layered and accumulative, but on the other hand, I like milimalism too.
As you say, your canvases are a graceful accretion of so much, the butterflies, the layers of materials under the blackness. Home and Requiem accumulated troves of found materials. What makes you gather all this stuff into your art?
It's a hard question. I don't know why I like so many things, but so many things are interesting to me. So many things are beautiful to me. Whatever is there right in front of me, there is always something in there that looks like art, something I want to use. When I'm showing two years worth of work I want to include everybody, to include all the stories. Yesterday I was with a critic at a studio visit. She was asking the artist who her influences were — who does she like — who rocks her world? I was thinking the same thing of myself — I like so much, like so many artsts. I like a lot because it makes me much happier liking than disliking. I'm much happier walking around saying, "God, I like that, God, I like THAT!!"
And I love cannibalizing my work....if something works I like it to migrate somewhere else. Everything has a way of working together if it's supposed to be together.
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