Visual Jazz

Down a dirt road in Solon is a cluster of buildings amidst trees now gathering energies for their annual transition into spring. One of those buildings is the studio of painter Abby Shahn, another her home. Both are chockful of art and energy. And it’s clear that transition is constantly afoot in Shahn’s world.

She can work small, and does—over a dozen 12-by-12 paintings line one long wall in the studio. All of them contain circular movements, awash in colors, these more muted than the mural-sized A Field of Blackbirds she unrolls and tacks on the wall, an egg tempera on paper. The blues and reds, the yellows, are brilliant, the composition complex and celebratory, although she is often motivated by challenging political or societal events.

Currently she paints with oils, often creating large triptychs, and although she loves the reds, she misses the blues of the egg tempera. Her paintings have been reproduced on the covers of the Beloit Poetry Journal, one of the most prestigious poetry publications in the country, and on collections by individual poets.

The daughter of two well-known artists—Ben Shahn, who made a significant mark on the art world both as a painter and a photographer, and Bernarda Bryson Shahn—Abby Shahn grew up in New Jersey. A stint at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture introduced her to the corner of Maine she would call her full-time home by the end of the ’60s.

Putting boundaries around Shahn is impossible, both in art and life. She is a painter, a performer, a DJ, a collector, a compulsive consumer of the news, a gardener, a learner, and a human who values community, large and small. She has been part of the In Spite of Life Players for 20 years, putting on a topical play in a gravel pit in West Athens every Fourth of July, and has been a DJ for WMHB, Colby College’s radio station, for just as long.

Abby Shahn’s paintings have been described as “evocative, rhythmic fields.” Critic Ken Greenleaf writes that, like a highly skilled jazz musician, she creates order, coherence, and emotional resonance out of chaos. Her work is in the collections of Colby College Museum of Art, the Walker Art Museum at Bowdoin College, the Farnsworth Art Museum, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington, DC, among others. A long list of solo exhibitions includes the June Fitzpatrick Gallery in Portland, the Davistown Museum in Liberty, and the Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, as well as the Hinkley and Brohel Gallery, Midtown Galleries, and the Shepard Gallery, all in New York City.

You grew up in a family in which art and politics held sway. What was that like?
I didn’t know that we were different from other people. Whatever your life is, that’s what’s normal . . . Listening to what’s happening with the election the other night, I was reminded elections were like the Super Bowl in my family. We paid attention, talked about them.

What about the art part?
It was overwhelming. And I was a little dreamy and shy. I spent a lot of time outside around a nearby brook. I didn’t become an artist until I left home . . . I began to realize I lived in a visual world, and that my consciousness was around seeing. You know, my view of things is that the past keeps changing. That’s one of my theories in life.

What do you mean?
You don’t really remember whole narratives. You remember little flashes, and what you do, I think, is piece them together. The impulse to make narrative is really deeply human.

In your paintings, are you piecing together narrative in the same way?
Usually, although it’s not that manifest to other people. I’m not sure that’s such a great thing. It’s just the way it is. I was really upset after Hurricane Katrina. I kept obsessing about the fact that when there’s a hurricane, the wind comes from here, the rain comes at this angle, and the trees are blowing at another, and I don’t know why, but I kept seeing these little crosses, and the abstraction of that phenomenon catches both the literal picture and the emotion of the circumstances, the bigger human and political story.

You’ve said that your subjects are the visual world, your interior life, and what’s going on in political events of the day. Do they all interrelate?
Yes. You know how the feminists had this thing, the personal is political. I think the political is personal, too. Political events affect us in a very personal way, and when it’s in my work, it chronicles what’s on my mind.

How do you work?
God knows what’s happening when you work. There are all sorts of questions about making a picture, getting the sort of pattern or balance, the composition, the right emotional tenor.

What do your eclectic interests as an artist mean from a commercial standpoint?
I feel like if you go to the edges of yourself, that will be the product—that’s the real delimitations of yourself. Sometimes in the marketplace people want you to be more reliable in a sense.

Why did you shift to oil paint?
My things are getting pretty thick for egg tempera—it’s basically a transparent thin medium. I’d been thinking about oils for a while, and then a friend went to Marden’s in Portland and they had an art supply store sell out and he had all this oil paint in his trunk. I gave him $50 and he bought me some, too.

You work in other media, too.
Yes, I’ve been making these mixed media globes and I make art books. And the found photos—that’s a thread that continues to amaze me.

Your dad’s photos back in the ’30s and ’40s were part of the social documentation of the times. It’s interesting that you’re preserving a self-documentation of the 20th century with these photos you’re collecting.
I agree with you. I find these in yard sales, auctions. And sometimes they are actual throwaways in that they are out of focus or double exposed. In this digital age, we’ve lost those. People are composing and cropping and fixing images. These found photographs are people chronicling their own lives and their view of their lives was much less desolate than other people might see it. They defined themselves by their vacations, what they saw, by who they loved.

You’ve said you have an obsession with the news.
I do. I just printed this out this morning [she lifts a sheaf of papers]. I’ve always followed it, but now with the computer and a subscription to The Nation and The London Independent . . . The weird thing the computer did­—and it surprised me—it led me to books. Just finished a book about the Moors, when the Jews and Muslims and Christians were all getting along. Fascinating. And just as I think we culturally have African roots, I think equally we have Arabic roots. That’s new for me.
 
You like collaborations.
I do. I’m doing a collaboration with a potter, painting the pieces. It’s like what the Incas used, and the Greeks, too. I like the range of colors, earth, red, ochre, black-and-white. A limited palette. And I met these young musicians in Belfast that are wonderful. Jammed with them and maybe something will evolve out of that. Neither Fang [artist and partner James Fangbone] or I are great musicians, but we’re so ignorant that it makes it possible.
 
That’s the beauty of it.
It is. Visually, I want to talk to people
like that.

Your painting has often been described as having a non-Western feel to it.
I think that comes from music. We’ve been doing a world music radio show for about 20 years. I play a lot of African stuff. I believe we’ve got blood predecessors and we have cultural ones. Not to think that a white American has ever experienced being a black American, but the music has permeated our souls—jazz, blues, rock and roll. At some point I began to look at African art.

Yet here you are in rural Maine.
Yes. I love this land, these people, my neighbors. At some point I almost felt a little guilty—here I am reading about Africa, why don’t I just go there? Then I decided it was really a part of Maine culture to sit here in the winter and read about faraway places. Sitting in your armchair, reading, going into the dream space in some way is a big part of Maine life.

How does living here influence your art?
We have a strong community of crazed artists here, and that’s always a part of making art, bouncing off of other artists. Sometimes we collaborate, letting the boundaries blur into something fuller. It’s a very rich life.