Marie Bourget

I met Marie Bourget at an opening for a group show she was in at Reaves Gallery. Fascinated by her research endeavors to find translations of Walt Whitman poems, we arranged to follow-up... which is when I discovered that we had more in common than a willingness to embark on esoteric research projects: 

Growing up in Southern California, Marie Bourget dreamt of being a fashion designer. But when she showed her designs to a neighbor who taught art at UCLA, she was deeply discouraged:

“I was so humiliated that I didn’t even draw anything for years”

A year later, her family moved onto a farm in Northern California, as her father pursued a childhood dream in agriculture. Over time Bourget resumed her drawing and her family was supportive of her creative pursuits, but only to a point:

“Both of my parents were very creative people. My father actually started sculpture in his retirement years, and painting […] They encouraged me in my art, but not as a career. They were very practical-minded”

Instead, she was encouraged to study subjects like science and math, which led her into the world of high-tech finance. Meanwhile, she continued to fill sketchbooks:

“I was CFO of a public company and I would be doodling and drawing. So, when I started painting full time, anyone who knew me then said, 'Well I'm sure not surprised because you did it every minute!'" 

Eventually, she decided that she needed a life change and left her company to move to France. But she found it more difficult to extract herself from the business world and was called back into duty a couple times:

“Artwork is much closer to my heart than [finance] work […] I worked with a lot of people, especially men, who just wanted to get ahead and wanted to really make money, and I was kind of [ambivalent]”

After leaving the business world yet again, Bourget recalls telling an artist friend in a cafe in Paris that she wished she'd gone to art school. Encouraged by her friend, Bourget approached the Parsons School of Design in Paris, but was asked for something she didn't have at the time.... a portfolio:

"This was a Friday and they said, 'Come in next Wednesday with a collage, a self-portrait, a perspective drawing and your sketchbooks.' So, I just kind of panicked, not knowing what I should do. I can still remember sitting in front of a mirror drawing a self-portrait"

Bourget was admitted and earned a degree in sculpture, where she constructed a number of wood pieces. She attributes her interest in sculpting from wood a bit to family tradition and a bit to and a bit to her taste for challenge: 

“My grandfather was a carpenter and my dad had done a lot of carpentry and fine woodworking. I just loved something about putting pieces together, figuring out how to use the material, how to make wood do the things you want it to do […] and also I think it was to get over the fear of using all those saws”

After graduating, Bourget worked in Paris for a year before returning to California. Without the resources to create sculpture immediately available, she struggled at first to begin anew:

“When I moved back from France to the US, it was such a big change and I had a one-year old son [...] I got into my new studio and was like, ‘Oh, yikes! What do I do?’ So, I actually made something into tiny squares - a painting - and I told myself I would fill a square a day”

Using this technique, designed for overcoming writers' block, Bourget transitioned from sculpture to painting, emulating the versatility of her favorite artist, David Hockney. She began creating mosaic-like paintings, with tiles that could be assembled in multiple ways:

"I did a lot of things using a grid, but the actual grid was pieces [...] I had some that were probably up to 40 pieces, hung as if it's a painting, but each piece hung individually with a little bit of space so you could rearrange them as you liked”

With the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Bourget was inspired to explore a culture that she had some exposure to, but was unsatisfied with her level of understanding

"Having lived in France where [there is] a lot more exposure to Arab culture [...] I thought, here we’ve invaded this country that most Americans know nothing about, including me "

Not knowing how to read or speak Arabic, she began an extensive quest to find translations of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. She began to paint excerpts of Whitman's poems in Arabic with elements of Islamic design. She has since found that Whitman’s style of ecstatic poetry was similar to Arab poets:

“Walt Whitman was kind of the great equalizer, was anti-war and, to me, that quintessential American poet"

Similarly, Bourget found that poetry and calligraphy had an elevated importance in Arab culture. She enjoys the script so much that she often ponders the balance between the meaning and the shape of the words she has chosen, even creating a piece that reads “Form versus Content”:

“I was thinking: how much is really the form - because I think it’s really beautiful - versus how much is the content”

Such has been her visual journey through Islamic and Arabic motifs, but the message she would have for viewers is beyond the surface:

“It’s not always black and white. We have these kind of [ideas] where, ‘we’re good, they’re bad’ and [it's not that simple]”

To that end, she has mixed the geometric patterning of Islamic design, which is non-figurative by definition, and the geometric patterning of American quilt-making. Though she realizes the context may be lost on some viewers, she nonetheless enjoys the aesthetic:

“I’ve always liked geometric things”

Watch the Arteaser Calendar for future shows with works by Marie Bourget

John Haines

I met John Haines in his painting studio in the Noonan Building during Open Studios in October. My return visit for this interview to his blacksmith shop next door, however, involved tip-toeing over broken glass and industrial debris, my path lit only be the glow of my blackberry. Eventually, I made my way into Haines' shop, where I recieved a brief introduction to blacksmithing. Talking about different flame temperatures and the black body properties of the forge reminded me of physics and chemistry class, illuminated in a new context.

Born upstate New York, John Haines' family moved to Texas before settling in Northern California. Having always enjoyed drawing, Haines traces both his creative and technical talents to his parents:

"My father is an engineer - his degree is in flow dynamics, which is actually all that stuff about heating and cooling [....] but he also used to build boats, sailboats. [... My mom] was very crafty, so I think a lot of the making things and the spark came from her"

Growing up in Palo Alto, Haines recalls seeing contemporary paintings, like Jackson Pollock's "Lucifer", in the homes of classmates, some of whom had avid art collector parents. But Haines' knowledge of the art world was still limited and he did not yet see himself in it:

"By the end of high school [...] I had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought about sailing or illustrating. I loved drawing. I had no idea what to do about it"

After a year at a junior college, Haines went to Los Angeles with a friend whose godfather happened to be the abstract expressionist painter Sam Francis. Haines spent a summer fixing a boat owned by Francis and Frank Gehry. As Francis' assistant, Haines was then able to start attending Otis Art Institute, which represented an edgier art school scene in Southern California:

"Sculpture was dead, cause this was '82. Painting was the big deal, so the painting studios were just jammed and I couldn't handle it. So, I started doing sculpture cause the sculpture garden was just empty - it had a big outdoor beautiful sculpture garden [...] I started working with metal out there. I had no idea what I was doing and I remember the tech telling me back then, 'Oh, you should check out blacksmithing'"

Without really knowing it, Haines began using basic blacksmithing in the process of building other sculptures:

"I would go down to the train yards and I would pick up pieces of metal and create these works. As I was working I realized that I needed connecting pieces that weren't the shape that I had found, so I started to manufacture [them]"

After graduating, Haines spent about a year traveling in Europe, doing a lot of drawing:

"Most of the artists I knew of had done time in Europe and there was all the background around that and I just had to go"

When he returned to the states, Haines stayed with friends in Santa Cruz and carved out a business making stretcher bars for customers on the Peninsula and painting and drawing in the evenings. Most of his time, however, was spent carving stone at Cabrillo College:

"I loved that subtractive quality. The carving is just the amazing thing. I can go either way - I can go subtractive or additive. Right now, it's kind of hard to do both because they're both incredibly time consuming."

There was a metal shop next to the stone carving yard, so Haines continued to dabble in metal and developed a collection of hand tools. But the Loma Prieta earthquake literally shook Haines out of complacency:

"That was the last day I ever did stone carving. Not because of trauma, but because that was the end of an era [since] the school closed down for a while [...] I never to even got to finish the sculpture [I was working on that day], so that was this traumatic end to a beautiful period"

In the aftershocks of Loma Prieta, Haines left Santa Cruz and ran Sam Francis' studio in Palo Alto for a few years before going back to Europe, this time more settled in Florence. His lengthier stay in Italy is reflected in his interest in the transavanguardist Mimmo Paladino's assemblage on painting. With limited space, however, Haines mostly worked and painted, but he was able to begin exploring some combined metalwork and painting:

"I did a little bit of bronze casting [...] for the beginning of the hybrid pieces. They were bronze plaques that fit in the middle of paintings"

As Italy faced serious economic challenges, Haines returned to the Bay Area in 1996 and ended up in Santa Rosa. Looking for work, Haines took a job at Waylan Smithy, a blacksmith shop in west Petaluma on a farm with twenty-five years of soot on the floor. Run by master blacksmith, Toby Hickman, the shop was true to the industrial heritage of blacksmithing:

"I came in one morning and he came up to my face and yelled at me. He goes: 'Why are you here?!?' and I said, 'Cause I love metal' and he goes 'That's the only right answer!' and he just turned around and goes, '8 o'clock tomorrow!' and he left!"

While at Waylan, a project for the San Francisco restaurant, Boulevard, introduced Haines to Art Nouveau and Victor Horta. When Hickman sold his business, Haines worked with a colleague from the shop for a while, but moved to San Francisco after he was able to secure his current workshop at Pier 70.

"I started doing the hybrid pieces in Santa Rosa, just kind of touching on them. I started doing some larger paintings with metal in the middle [... Hanging sculpture on the wall] makes it a little more accessible for people [...] There are very few people who actually have pedestals in their home"

When he had to move to a smaller painting studio, Haines began gravitating more towards his metal work, with which he can also maintain a commercial practice. But his lifelong passion for drawing continues to drive his sculptural conceptions and his unique combinations of painting and metal:

"I feel like I'm really still on the front end of it "

See John Haines' work at SOMArts Cultural Center through December 27.

Kent Roberts

I first met Kent Roberts at an opening at Space Gallery, where he was showing a couple pieces along with fellow SFMOMA employees. On my most recent Open Studios weekend tour, I visited Roberts in his appropriately located studio in the Pier 70 shipyards.

Growing up in Albuquerque, Kent Roberts' early creative efforts often involved building vessels:

"[T]he space program was happening which really intrigued me. I even made model rockets that my Dad and I launched out in the desert"

Although he was also interested in art, he followed in his father’s footsteps and got his college degree in engineering. There, Roberts learned to appreciate certain methodologies:

“I like that idea of how to think, or the process of [...] scientific or engineering thinking. There’s a way of dealing with problems”

When his draft number came up after college, Roberts joined the Navy. After two years of service, he used his GI grant to go to the San Francisco Art Institute:

"I had already studied engineering so thought I would give my other interest a try"

Early on, he gravitated towards the detail and process oriented painting style of photorealism. But he has since embraced sculpture, broadening his scope of materials and using them more as tools to solving a larger artistic quest:

“I don’t try to stick with a medium. I just try to choose something that’s appropriate for the work […] because I’m not an expert in any of them, I know a little about all of them”

Meanwhile, Roberts had gotten involved in hanging and installing art in galleries and he now heads the installation team at SFMOMA. Like his own sculpture work, the varying nature of the contemporary exhibits he installs presents unique challenges:

“It’s exciting working with the art, putting the art up, and the best part is working with the artists [...] I worked with Richard Serra and we had a thirteen thousand pound lead sculpture, that’s molten lead, that we had to melt in the middle of the night […] or Matthew Barney, we had to pour all that Vaseline into a big mold”

Working with vested third parties is a reality for the numerous public sculpture commissions he has been awarded. Concerns about potential issues such as graffiti, safety hazards, and misuse of public space all need to be factored into his creations:

“They have all these worries and […] it gets in the way of the art, but to get the commission you have to solve those problems”

For an upcoming commission for the Moscone Park, Roberts originally proposed a monument to the location as a refugee site after the 1906 earthquake. Ultimately, he won the commission, but for a boat-like design that reflected both modern and historical elements of the location:

“I try to do pieces that are about the site somewhat, or at least fit with the site”

Indeed, a number of his sculptures have nautical elements:

“When you’re sitting on a boat for two years, maybe it kind of seeps in [… but] it’s not the sailing part, it’s the making of the ship”

Going back to his engineering roots, Roberts is largely focused on the process of creating his sculptures. But he considers the display - for which his public commissions are explicitly designed - to be an important element in the artistic process:

“I like people to see my work and hear what they have to say about it. I think it’s important that people see art. I mean, if nobody’s looking at a piece of art, to me it doesn’t exist”