Alia El-Bermani
Anchorlight Raleigh
On Display:
June 1st - July 18th, 2019
Hours:
By Appointment in July
“Grief is a fog that has altered my perception. It’s slowed me, physically impeding movement, blurring my vision. It’s just vapor. It’s just thoughts. It’s just so thick.” — Alia El-Bermani, excerpt from “Like Sound Through Water” artist statement
As we sit in Anchorlight surrounded by her art, we speak of the pain associated with losing a loved one...of the steps we take to make sense of the unexplainable... and of the ways one slowly heals.
Between hard topics, we laugh and we connect around our passion for art and the telling of a broader story. It becomes clear that Alia is one of those people who has the ability to stand present for life, to walk through the hard times and still “find the positive.”
I respect that about her and can see it all in her art...the struggle and grief...the hope and light.
Elizabeth Mathis Cheatham: So it’s nice to be back in your exhibit. It’s as beautiful as I remember! I had the privilege of coming when you gave your artist talk a few weeks back. In it you shared someone you respected told you not to do an exhibit… that grief was ugly and hard and wasn’t sellable. What was your response to that?
Alia El-Bermani: I think in conversation with that person, I said, ‘Ok, I’ll take that into consideration,’ but in my head I was already repulsed by that idea. None of my career—none of my work has been made to please anybody; it’s just not my natural state of being to make work and think if it is sellable or not. If it does, fantastic! That feeds the next body of work. But the work comes from a deep, internal place always, so I can’t deny that. I can’t turn that off, especially with this really personal, major, life-impacting shift that I felt within myself. I didn’t want to deny that. It was an opportunity to honor my mother, to recognize grief and not shy away from it—like our culture kind of wants us to—and maybe help somebody else that may be going through this as well. To show that there is beauty in everything… She had a choice. She chose hospice and she had complete authority over her death, and it was so graceful because of it. I got to be a part of that, and it was an honor to be there for her.
EMC: The whole body of work is around your processing losing your mom, but the paper installation “Vessel” actually represents her. You mentioned she would have had a hard time with this… Why?
AE: Well I think for the past twenty years, maybe even a little bit more, she had worked with the Coast Guard Auxiliary, jumping on and off boats, putting out boat fires, rescuing people; it was her mission for safety. She was the ultimate safety patrol.
To represent her as a capsized boat would be an insult. She would see it as a failing, and she was a strong woman, strong New Englander. She, I think like a lot of us, wanted to be perfect. Yet, I see her body as having failed her, her vessel as having failed her. This was an unexpected illness that came on rather rapidly. It was an autoimmune response, so literally her body gave out on her—so to show that in a metaphorical way was my impulse, despite how she may have felt about it.
What Remains, Charcoal On Vellum & Mixed Media, 36” X 36”
Alia El-Bermani
EMC: Your mother passed in winter and there was an exact date that has a correlation to another piece in your exhibit. Can you talk to that a bit?
AE: She passed on Christmas Day, 12-25-2018. Both my brother and I— he's two years older but we have the same birthday, which is the 20th, we think she held out. She didn't want to impact our birthday. As I was making the square piece titled What Remains, my daughter and I were adhering a nautical chart. I couldn't bring myself to use her nautical charts, so I ordered ones that were replicas of the same ones that she had drawn on and plotted out certain things. With the new charts coming, I didn't know this, but they revise them every so often… As my daughter Sienna and I were adhering them onto the panel, I looked down, and there was her death date, 12-25-2018! It kind of took me by shock. I kind of had to step back and acknowledge some tears and then come to terms with, like 'Okay, the world shifted just a little bit when she passed.' The channels and inlets that she knew so well had to be re-explored.
EMC: When you were with your mom in the end, it took you away from your family for a while, and when you came home you began working on another piece with your daughter.
AE: Yeah. It was really tough to want to paint after this experience with my mother. Painting felt really insignificant, but I wanted to be with my family more than anything. My daughter has got a very busy dance schedule and Sundays were the only day that we could have one-on-one time, so I asked if she'd be willing to pose for me to do a painting. Originally it was going to be a small, one-day painting, but I loved it. It started spurring new ideas, and then over the course of several months, she came every Sunday, let me braid her adolescent hair, and connect with her and be with her and share my ideas about grief with her. She's an incredible, emotionally intelligent young woman, and she was able to tell me what she saw in the work, and she would bring new light to me on what was happening in the work. In grief I was kind of in a fog, and I didn't exactly know what I was experiencing— I was just being it. She had a little clearer perspective.
Fog, Charcoal On Vellum & Mixed Media, 60” X 36”
alia el-bermani
Fog, Charcoal On Vellum & Mixed Media, 60” X 36” (Detail)
Alia El-Bermani
Wake, charcoal On Vellum & Mixed Media, 60” X 36”
Alia El-Bermani
EMC: It's interesting because I've dealt with some grief and have helped other friends walk through it as well, and something they continually say to me is it comes in waves. You're okay, and then all of a sudden, it just knocks you down; it's interesting to see all the references to the water as it relates to that. Was that your experience with grief too?
AE: For this show, it was so soon after my mother, I think I was just in it, completely consumed. I’m waiting for the fallout. There’s a piece of me that knows that jumping into this work, and into this solo exhibition was because it could be a slight diversion. And I accept that. I still kind of wonder, “Am I gonna have a second wave hit me, of grief?’ And I probably will. Going up to Massachusetts in July and laying her to rest… I’m sure that will bring a new understanding of grief. There are things every day that bring it to the fore. It definitely has ebbed a little bit, or at least I’ve gotten more comfortable with living in grief. From the very beginning to now, and the first work to now and having the show, I’m in less of a fog, but there are still things that will cut right to the core.
EMC: There is something, especially about the work with your daughter, that I find myself so drawn to: the windows. I don’t know if there’s this sense of hope or light shining through or connections… can you talk to the symbolism behind the windows?
AE: I think connection is really, really close to what I was hoping for in that piece— to show the fog of grief, the consumption of being flooded by it with the water at the bottom, and then the windows being access to another plane, wherever she is... She was not a believer in any of this; she’s just too pragmatic for that. She would call it “hooey.” For me, I need to believe there’s something beyond and without her telling me stories, I’ve had to come up with my own. Windows became a symbol of a way to access our ancestors. I have an installation idea that I would love to do, would have loved to have done in this space but just ran out of time, but it would have been amazing and it will be at some point…
Adrift, Oil On Aluminum Panel, 60” X 60”
Alia El-Bermani
EMC: That’ll be fascinating... Besides your daughter, there are two other models that you used. This is not a model that you’d ever used before, correct?
AE: The model for the drawings—I have been a figurative painter for twenty years, but in this area for ten. I’ve known all the models in this area for ten years and I can’t help but see them for who they are. My job as a figurative painter, I feel, is to paint the people from the inside out. How I know them, how I perceive them and their stories. But here I wanted to share my internal worlds and thoughts and grief, so I needed to find a model that I didn’t have a deeper connection to, that I felt comfortable placing my own stories onto. She could become the symbol for what I was feeling.
EMC: Would you go to the point of saying she became the symbol of grief?
AE: Yeah. Walking through grief. She was introduced to me by one of my students. Actually, the first time we were supposed to meet, that morning she texted me and said, “I’m so sorry, I cannot come today.” She was worried this was unprofessional, but she said, “I have to go to a funeral for one of my best friends.” And there was a piece of me that was like, ‘She’s really gonna get this work.’ So we met later, and it was just a great connection. She understood what I was going through because she was walking it, too.
Before my mom got sick, I knew I had this opportunity for a solo exhibition and I had started making work for a really ambitious project where I am creating an entire snake skeleton, way oversized, out of cut, folded, and glued paper, which will both be installation as well as a huge painting. But with my mom getting sick, losing time, coming back and not really being in that right head space to jump right back into that project, I wanted to be able to use some of those pieces as another symbol of grief within these works. In the square one to the left—if we are Western, reading left to right—she’s really enveloped by the snake ribs. Kind of consumed by that symbol of grief. In the second one, she’s really baring it on her shoulders, but it’s not quite as present. Finally, it’s still present but it’s not as overbearing as in the last one. There’s a vacancy in her stare, in all of them a little bit, but I think a little less in the final piece.
Vessel, Paper, Cloth, Watercolor Installation
Alia El-Bermani
EMC: Do you feel like you would ever be able to use her again in a different way, or has she so become that symbol of walking through grief for you?
AE: Well, now I’m starting to get to know her, so I’m gonna paint her! She’ll definitely be something else, more of herself in other works in the future. For the other painting, down on the bottom— I call them “sister” paintings— that one is titled Echo, and it’s a self-portrait. I haven’t shared that with anybody and didn’t want it to be an on-the-nose representation of me, but that was the first piece— besides the little study I did of my daughter— that was the first piece I completed for the show. It was really when I was in the thickest, deepest, darkest parts of grief.
EMC: Did you do this one before the one above “Sister”?
AE: Yes, the sister piece above titled Departed was the last one. I had gotten the boat done, all the drawings done, all the big painting, I don’t think I had the 35 foot watercolor done for the installation, but they were all kind of simultaneous.
EMC: Am I right in reading that, especially now knowing that they’re “sister” paintings, that there’s kind of this ascension, this lifting up, or…?
AE: I don’t know. Maybe. As an artist, paintings are mine when they’re in the studio, and they’re yours when they’re on the walls.
EMC: That’s a great point.
AE: So yes! If you see that…!
EMC: I like that answer. That’s nice. That might be a nice way of saying, “No. Not at all.” But I’ll take it!
AE: Well you know, when I’m painting it, I’m seeing the depth. I wanted the deep, dark depth. She told me she wanted to be put in the ocean and images come to mind, like what would she see? Of course, in her mind, she’s not seeing anything. She’s gone. She’s ashes. But I can’t help but think what she would see. It almost could be an installation of duck butts above us, because that would be so fascinating.
EMC: It sounds like she would’ve thought that was funny.
AE: Paper duck butts may be in my future.
Above: Departed, Oil On Linen On Aluminum Panel, 30” X 24”
Alia El-Bermani
Below: Echo, Oil On Linen On Aluminum Panel, 30” X 24”
Alia El-Bermani
EMC: Is there anything that I didn’t ask that you wanted to share about this exhibit that maybe we didn’t cover that was important to you?
AE: Well, I wouldn’t recommend doing a solo show in five months, and especially when you’re going through something like grief. I think— I don’t know how to say it without sounding conceited— but it takes a special person to process both and come out the end with something that’s palatable but also powerful, poignant, and presented well.
EMC: That makes a lot of sense.
AE: And I think, of all the works in this exhibit, for me the best piece is actually on that wall (points to her artist statement). It took doing all of these and ten pages of writing to get to seventeen sentences that I think really are the core of what I was hoping for in processing grief and honoring my mother, and I’m proud of that writing.
EMC: Do you write a lot?
AE: I do, yes. Writing is a daily practice and it is how all of my works become works. Words come to me before images.
It’s just freeform writing and I have to handwrite—I can’t type at all. Eventually, if something is repeated again or it just keeps coming back up somehow in other versions of writing and journaling, eventually a thumbnail will evolve right next to it. That becomes more of the impetus. But it’s words first.
Threshold, Oil On Panel, 64” X 48”
Alia El-Bermani
EMC: Pivoting from your exhibit, I was so thrilled to get your email a couple weeks—or I guess maybe a month ago now, reminding me of the first time that we had met for the Bridget Quinn “Broad Strokes” lecture about women in the arts—a passion you and I both share. In addition to your own art and practice, you founded something that highlighted women artists. Can you talk about Women Painting Women?
AE: Sure. Back in 2009 or 2010— I always get that date messed up—I think it’s 2009, I had just moved here to North Carolina from California, a really thriving figurative community...The nude is unpalatable—somehow—here in the South. As a figurative artist I was feeling a little, to continue the water theme, “anchorless” and discovered blogs. One of my artist friends here knew a San Francisco artist named Sadie Valeri, and on Sadie’s blog she posted about an auction that was happening at Sotheby’s, called “Women in Art.” Not a single female artist was included, and it just created a firestorm of comments. Within that comment section, I said, “You know, we can take this back. Let’s create an exhibition called, Women Painting Women.” She said, “Yes, let’s do that, but a show will come and go, and may or may not have an impact. Let’s see if we can have more of an impact.” She had had pretty good success with her own blog, so we started the blog, Women Painting Women.
Within just a few months— it was March when we started it, by November we were having our first exhibition of Women Painting Women at a gallery in Charleston called Robert Lange Studios. Since that show, we’ve had over a dozen exhibitions all across the world: we’ve had exhibitions in Australia, Scotland, all over the United States… Most of them have been in galleries. There’s this component of working with a gallery that the work has to be sellable. Of course. They need to sell works to keep their lights on, and that’s understandable. But it meant that a lot of the works were being omitted; really strong, powerful figurative works were being omitted because they weren’t necessarily sellable. I really wanted to create an exhibition, an opportunity for artists to make whatever work they wanted to make, as long as it was powerful. So Diane Feissel— the three co-founders are myself, Diane Feissel, and Sadie Valeri. Diane Feissel and myself curated and coordinated a traveling museum exhibition that launched in 2017 called Women Painting Women: In Earnest. The stories that we want to tell, the deep truth.
Because it was in museums, we didn’t have that component of having to sell the work. It could be… paintings of nude elderly women in all their beauty. Something that we shy away from as a society. As a figurative painter, I don’t know why! I just see all flesh as so beautiful. From that exhibition, I will say Women Painting Women has kind of waned a little bit. It’s been ten years now and we’re all ready to put as much effort into our own careers. We’ve helped, I can’t even count, but I know off the top of my head, over 400 artists who weren’t getting recognition. And I know now— one artist emailed me not that long ago, one of the original women who was in the very first show, and then several after, saying, ‘Before that exhibition, I was applying for food stamps.’ Now she’s in three amazing galleries selling out every show, and she doesn’t even have to think about teaching or food stamps; she can just be an artist. To know that I had a hand in helping her is pretty phenomenal.
EMC: Absolutely. There is that balancing act of trying to have that larger impact and then also making sure your art gets the attention that it needs. I understand that needing to shift the focus.
alia el-bermani’s studio
EMC: In addition to creating your own art, you also teach. One, I’d love to hear how that impacts your art, but two, you told me over our first coffee that you do feel that sometimes you get slotted in that educator role over being first seen as an artist and then having other things below that. How do you find balance in that? Is there anything that you’re looking at differently, trying to shift that focus for yourself?
AE: First of all, I love teaching. I absolutely love seeing, just as raising my kids, as with working with 70-year-old students, seeing that spark happen when something clicks and they’re proud, and they’ve done something. I can’t get enough of that. I’ll never not teach. Both my parents were teachers. They may have been teaching how to save lives, but I’m teaching how to draw them!
Teaching is a big part of who I am and I don’t mean to undermine that, but I see myself primarily as an artist. I think finding the balance is tricky, but I’ve made my schedule, so opening up my own teaching studio has been wonderful. I’m not beholden to any other school schedule or any other non-profit schedule. I have one morning class and then two evening classes. Otherwise, my studio time, my daylight hours are mine. That’s been really great for my work and for that balance.
EMC: In creating art—I find this with writing, I struggle with making the time to sit down and do it. Do you create a work schedule for your painting, or do you keep odd hours whenever inspiration strikes?
AE: I know I’m a creature of habit, so I need to make healthy habits to foster my creation. Having my Mondays for teaching, and then everything else during the week is for studio time. I keep those studio hours sacred. The dishes, the family stuff can wait, until I have—in my brain—my scheduled family time. My family has worked around this for so long now, too. I have a lock on my home studio on the inside of the door so I can’t be bothered… It’s important to me and it’s respected within my world.
You know, actually, I shouldn’t say—you had said “keeping odd hours” and I kind of poo-pooed; my nose wrinkled at that. But I do actually. I am an insomniac and I find my writing actually happens in the wee hours of the morning. I wrinkle my nose because I’m thinking, ‘Painting, no, I don’t paint in the wee hours of the morning.’ I know those are not productive hours for me. But they are really productive hours for me to write, because the house is super quiet, and it’s like being down deep underwater in my own little spot where I can just connect.
EMC: That’s so interesting how you said that in such a positive way—being down deep underwater. I think I’ve had this tendency to think of that language as always being kind of suffocating, but actually it can be pretty nice and cocooning.
AE: Yeah. Womblike.
EMC: I like that! I can see that.
AE: I think in all of my life, my work, my experience, I try to find the positive.