Colleen Dunn Bates Interview for Hometown-Pasadena

Colleen: Okay, here you go. But first, do you have any shows or events coming up? And is any of your work visible to local residents? (i.e. at a local museum or gallery)


Not currently. The gallery that represents me, is in New York, Littlejohn Contemporary I was in a group show at the Armory called Bugology in 2006 and in another at the National Museum of Art in Gdansk that year, and donated artwork for the Art Alliance Auction every other year but my works have been quiet and modest for quite a while. When I'm quiet, that's when the most is really going on.

Colleen: How did you end up living in Altadena?

Well, I'm not living in Altadena, quite. We are in the second to last house on our street before the border between Pasadena to Altadena.

My partner and I moved to Pasadena in 1985. Which, funnily enough, was exactly 100 years after my great, great grandmother moved to Pasadena from Chicago. And the house we lived in on the corner of Madison and California, wasn't far from where she'd lived on Oakland Avenue, a couple of blocks south of Glenarm. I didn't know this, at first. Not for a few years. Because when she made the move, my great grandfather was already on his own and wanted to stay in Chicago. But his daughter, my grandmother remembers visiting her grandmother, here and going to the races at Santa Anita. And my great aunt gave me the specific addresses and names and photographs.

Colleen: I understand you're working on a painting of the Corpse Flower, which just finished an extremely rare bloom at Huntington Gardens.
What drew you to paint that?
After visiting the first bloom in 1999, nearly, every day, I started thinking about the painting. On a trip to Thailand, we rode through wilderness and a little in the ocean, on elephants and I had just learned about pygmy elephants. When I got home, the painting got underway. I had to put it aside for some years to work through some problems and now I’m finishing it, just as the descendant of the first Arum bloomed.
All my paintings have numerous points of interest...some intersect logically and some illogically. As a naturalist, a painter, a gardener. And as an anthropologist informally, of course.

Flowers have been my primary subject.
When people line up to see the blooming of a plant...in lines so long they go all the way out the parking area, down Allen past California...that's extreme interest. It's like a pilgrimage. And I was one of the pilgrims. This plant produces heat! It could easily be in Alice's Wonderland.

Size. And the truth is stranger than fiction. The real world is more amazing than the imaginary world.
Most flowers draw us in, intimately. We look at them.
This one is so large we can relate to it with our sixth sense, proprioception. We relate with our whole being. We aren’t just looking at it, we’re sharing its space. It’s the size of a human adult, sometimes much bigger.

I'm interested in portraying perception in paint----portraying light, texture, atmosphere concave and convex. And I'm interested in how our minds process what we see, our primacy, our core selves.

It all comes down to
"Who are we, where do we come from and where are we going?"

Again, it's useful to know the strengths and weaknesses in any system, and analogy is both a strength in comprehension but also a potential dead end.
While the Arum titan isn't the largest flower, but an inflorescence within the spadex----that's a technical difference, it still looks like a very large flower...and that's a good start. If we learn through analogy, as I believe, then how things seem----how they appear----what they remind us of----tells us much about ourselves and our world. It tells us how tied we are to our genetic impulses and our parochial presuppositions.
Amorphophallus titanium. Well, just look at the words, there. There is amorpho and phallus. In Latin it means, something like misshaped or oddlyshaped or shapeless phallus. (To which you might add, wearing an upside-down skirt by Fortuny or see the rounded gathering of the bride’s dress in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini painting)
But Amorphophallus, that's a scientist's choice of names. Imagination is useful in art, religion and science. There's only so much empiricism you can take, only so much in any thinker. Still, scientists are trained to think past their initial visceral responses. If the rest of us could enjoy the greater pleasure of understanding how to think past sensational responses we could make the world a much better place. I think it is becoming an imperative if we are to save ourselves from ourselves.
Part of that ability comes from learning the various processes.
Consider for a moment, the difference between homologous features and analogous features. Homologous means there is a common inherited root for similar features, for example, the wings of a bat the hands I'm typing this with and the hooves of a horse derive from shared ancestry. Whereas, analogous features or characteristics are similar in appearance and/or function and derive not from shared ancestry but evolved independently. Wings of birds, wings of insects and wings of bats...those are analogous features.
So, the phallic shape of the Arum, is a simile.
But people will take appearances and run with them, won’t they? The rhino horn and this huge, phallic plant are both regarded as aphrodisiacs based upon visual similarities and do not, except as perhaps in the power of self-deceipt make an effective substitute for Viagra.
I'm interested in people's fascinations. I'm interested in the intersection or interdigitation of science and religion.
When the Arum first bloomed just as one millennia ended and another was set to begin, there was a fair amount of attention---well, I should really say there was more than the usual attention, peculiar to this country, I might add, in the end of the world, otherwise called, The Rapture, Armaggeden or the end times. There was a greater need to keep a clear head. To not pursue destruction. To disinvest in this evil perversion of selective Revelations.
When the Catholic church's sale of indulgences so upset Luther that the Reformation got underway, there was a breakthrough of skepticism. The pope was distracted and Luther lived. This opened the door a crack toward reality. In Holland, the trappings of "popishness" were taken down or white-washed. Science began to form.

There is something about the image that has periodically come under attack by religions. It’s a sort of my way or the highway.
How threatened should I feel about one of the Ten Commandments saying not to paint anything when religion is such a powerful stimulant of violence? Why does one religion feel the need to blow up or tear down the symbols of another? Why is it terrible to dance around a golden calf but coming to gaze in reverence at a lamb with a cross crooked in his foreleg while standing upon a pedestal...that's virtue? Why?
If you refine the question to its niceties, you might say that images are fine so long as a person doesn't worship them. But there are paintings, that I revere. There are painters who are so elevated in their gifts that I feel very worshipful toward them. Many of us do.

I suspect you’ve noticed, as I have, that the news carries stories rather regularly of people seeing Christ on a grilled cheese sandwich. This is a door to rendering. Seeing animals and beings in the clouds and stars is a very old pasttime.
Think of it. Think of our ancestors...35,000 years ago. They were us. They had the same brain power.
See them gathering together in a cave in the south of what we call France, See the light from their fire casting flickering shadows across the walls and if you spend all your daylight hours earnestly, and intently trying to see an auroch or an Irish Elk or something else to have for dinner, your brain will present you with their forms, at night, in the shadows of a flickering bonfire cast across an uneven wall or burnished on your retina. And you would have wanted to share what you saw...make it more apparent or describe the hunt. You would have taken a piece of charred wood and drawn upon the wall. You could have used it as a professor uses a blackboard or a butcher explains the location of different cuts of meat. It would bolster the conversation and give it the added dimension of the magic that is painting. We should all be pinching ourselves at our great fortune for all the efforts of those who have gone before us to expand and improve the pool of knowledge and find the answers to so many questions.

It is one of those curious things about people. We often are happier, more comfortable, with the feeling of knowing something, than being open to actually learning something. It takes a receptive mind. Ego can get in the way of drawing and it gets in the way of understanding.

Colleen: You are an artist, not a scientist, but much of your work displays a fascination with botany and animal life. Did you have training in the natural sciences? Or are you just an observer?

Simply put, I’m curious. Science is how we understand nature. And nature teaches us science. It’s reciprocal, like painting. And as we’re a part of the natural world, it helps me understand myself and the sometimes mystifying behavior of others. My paintings go hand in hand with the natural world and cultural evolution.
I discovered that when I paint in detail, information I’d hear or think about became attached to whatever part of the painting I was working on. At first it was the Gulf War pilots that were taken prisoner by the Iraqis. And that had no intended bearing upon the painting----but each time I see that part of the painting, I see the pilots’ faces.
It operates a little like other mnemonic devices. Emotion, increases the attachment.
So it’s important to feel the enthusiasm. Singing a song is powerful as it connects both sides of the brain: the melody and mood on the right side, the words and rhythm on the left. Do that over and over again with others in a beautiful and inspiring place, it’s disarming and mnemonically powerful.
After that first experience of mnemonic discovery I was eager for more. I let the enthusiasm of whatever I was studying suggest the flower and its subject. But it had to come at me in a surprise. And it had to be at least a three-part connection, a mental coalescing. It would be an illumination or communication or illustration coming from something in my garden or in the natural world.
And it had to include something fascinating in science I’d just learned that was revving up my enthusiasm together with the story of a saint whose story connected. Oftentimes, as I worked, listening to science books on tape or the history of religions or other interesting pieces of information, the image would expand or more stories would add to the painting’s information. So, in my saint and science series, each painting has a saint whose story, attribute or specialty fits with the science.
I’m not trained as a scientist, formally. But I study all the time and I’ve learned a great deal by teaching myself. I think it’s always been a part of my basic nature.

Take it from Richard Feynman who observed that most students in a class learn by rote rather than comprehension. When he died the words on his blackboard were,

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

My print series takes a title from Francis Bacon,

“Experiments Useful for the Cure of Mens’ Minds.”

In the time of Francis Bacon, the word “experiments” was mostly synonymous with experience. So the act of doing a thing, working it out for yourself, is so much more powerful than having it explained to you. The natural world, if you are observant enough and have learned some basic principles of logic, testing and comprehension, will explain itself. If you paint from the painting of another painter, you are getting into their mindset, to some extent as musicians do when they play someone else’s composition.
Too much emphasis is put upon formal education. Self-education done well, can often accomplish much more than passive education. I don’t mean solipsism----I mean taking in information you didn’t start with in the first place.
It bears remembering that Shakespeare, da Vinci and James Murray, and many other “greats” never got far in their formal education past elementary school but Murray went on to speak more than 12 languages and was the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary----all through teaching himself. Self motivation is powerful.

I wouldn’t like to suggest that I’m in the same lofty atmosphere as Shakespeare or da Vinci or Murray, and I do have a college degree, but you can learn an enormous amount by studying on your own. And the rewards are greater. Painting is a conversation, a reappraisal, an improvement, a hesitancy, an erasure and a modifier. If you aren’t learning from the painting you’re working on, then you have fallen into a kind of manufacturing mode. Listening to essays of natural science while painting keeps the left side of the brain busy so the right side can get on with painting…but the two sides are connected, obviously, and so the ideas connect to the painting.
Colleen: Your blog says that one of your favorite books is Adam's Curse, written by a geneticist who argues that men may be in the process of becoming extinct. Why is that book a favorite?
Because it is brilliantly and entertainingly written and sheds light on questions that seemed unlikely, ever to be answered.
You may remember that Thor Heyerdahl, set out to demonstrate that the Polynesians could have migrated from South America and he sailed a raft from South America to Polynesia to do it. But in Adam’s Curse, we learn how the advance of science into genetics solved the mystery conclusively.
Not everyone has the attention span to read this book and fully take it in but it is very accessible if you make a bit of effort and answers many fundamental questions. Consider the painting by Gauguin, "Who are we, where do we come from...?" It is the most basic of questions. And through DNA testing, it was found by the author of Adam’s Curse, Bryan Sykes, that the Polynesians are rooted maternally, to Taiwan. Paternally, they have Taiwan ancestry, as well but there is also a lot of European in them, thanks to the European sailors who visited and sometimes remained on the islands. The DNA that comes exclusively from the father, the Y chromosome is passed, father to son, father to son, father to son...thousands of years back in time. Genghis Khan didn’t know the scientific method when he was sowing his seed among thousands of women. But genetic testing demonstrably confirms the claims of some of his ancestors. His Y chromosome was sown far and wide and appears to be concentrated in the area between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And there seems to be a bit of his personality passed along with it!
The Icelanders have a strong Viking presence in their Y chromosomes, unsurprisingly, but the maternal line, traced through their mitochondrial DNA gives evidence of women from Ireland and Scotland.
And behavioral traits we associate with Genghis Khan and the Vikings; ruthless raping, pillaging and conquering...in short the manliness of men, seems to match their Y chromosomes’ success over the Y chromosomes of other men. And with it, though there's no proof but a strong whiff of possibility, these behavioral traits may have been passed along, as well. A certain shortage of empathy, in some cases. The same trait might be seen in elephant seals, elk or moose. One big male inseminating many females.
Yes, men are becoming extinct...in a way and very gradually. You can read the book and find out why----because it can’t be explained in a paragraph. They’ll not go soon or quietly. Still, it would be nice to have many fewer wars and fewer murders. It would be nice to have less raping and pillaging. It would be nice if women had a bit more power so they can help to bring the world’s population into check.

Colleen: Where do you like to go around here to get into the natural world?
My garden. It’s the ideal counterbalance to hours of painting and I can realign in a very short span of time. Working in the garden teaches me more than walking through a garden, somewhere else. My second choice, I’d say, is a walk through the neighborhood. Because I like to go without much planning. Learning while walking has a power all its own. You don't have to go far to witness the natural world. We have raccoons, skunks, parrots, coyotes, cougars and there was even a bear prowling through this neighborhood the other day. And I saw a peacock, once. But I love the Huntington Gardens.
I think almost nothing matches the joy of Highway One. Big Sur! The whole of the Coastline, all the way up is enthralling, exhilarating. If I can’t be hiking the Alps with my cousins, or snorkeling in Hawaii or helicoptering over an erupting volcano, the Huntington and my garden are still quite wonderful. That’s in part why my paintings, my small paintings, show the daily dramas of events in the garden. It’s all around us. Virgin births and battles, cloning, cuckolding, transmutation.

Colleen: And where do you go to escape it?
As a friend once said, Sometimes Nature is a little too natural.

I like prowling the canyons of Vroman’s, walking the grounds of Cal Tech or hearing a lecture, there. Camille’s in South Pasadena is a favorite and for coffee, Euro Pane, Busters or Jones. Playing games is better than going to a movie because I like good conversation. I love going out to eat. I suppose the Athenaeum is at the top of my list of favorite places to eat if we’re not at one of our homes. But I like Vertical, Mijares, Madeleine’s or the bar at the Huntington----excuse me, Langham, Hotel.
Of course, well----it's not possible to escape the natural world, really. We're part of it. Hard to forget. -------Jacquelyn McBain

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