Artist

WSG 27 Maia Lynch

Feb 06, 2022

Housekeeping: I did have a teeny tiny, but super lovely, get together at Lucie this past Tuesday. So, let’s try again. PUT THIS IN YOUR CALENDAR, people: WSG at Lucie (LINK) March 1st at 8:30 AM.

Next WSG for Valentine’s Day I am interviewing a sexologist, Dr. Carol Queen. Please let me know if you have anything you want me to ask her! I may be doing my first pod cast with her too.

Are you watching the Olympics? If you’re not, you should be! Just when you thought the world had turned into a jaded Negative Nelly, the spirit of the Olympics shows us a global good time.

It seems the press has given Olympic covid news a break and the games are the focus now. I haven’t watched everything, but what I have seen is really fun. It’s ok to sit back and route for your country. Kind of like family. Those are our kids on the ice and slopes. I mean, not anyone’s kids I know, but they are Americains. So, they are ours. And they do us proud! I also find I am rooting for the luger from Latvia and the mogul skier from Japan, the pairs skaters from Georgia (the country), all of the athletes are worthy of our support. They have worked so hard to get and stay there.

It’s easy to forget how fun the two weeks of Olympic watching can be. On the face of it, does watching curling sound fun? Not really. But is it fun? Yes! Hats off to the commentators who make curling fun to watch. That’s my plug for some feel good TV.

Onward.

We are a month into the new year. Are you being kind to yourself? Or, are you being your own bad boyfriend (girlfriend)? What is your interior dialogue?

I can be extremely rough on myself, it turns out. I have gotten better about negative thinking but it takes a village inside my head to balance out the self doubt and that can be weird. I paint and write (art history major). I’ve always done both but started taking it more seriously 12 years ago (late bloomer). Art is a funny thing because the pay is lousy and the praise is spare. But everybody loves art. To keep going, someone has to buck up the ego and in general it has to be you, the creator. If the creator doesn’t believe in the work then who will? (Yes, you can read into that statement as it applies to everyone and everything).

Do most people trundle through life needing to convince themselves that what they spend the bulk of their time thinking about and working on is worthy? I know I do. Why am I doing what I’m doing? Absolutely driven to do it and have given myself permission to pursue both painting and this WSG project. But it’s really hard to justify at times. Doubt creeps in constantly. People in creative fields need to have a sturdy ego. But, you can’t be nasty to yourself all the time and expect your ego to clean up after you.

The ego and kindness to oneself can be improved with intention. For many of us it takes work to like your self (intentional break in the word). Let’s be a “good boyfriend” (girlfriend) to ourselves this year. Have your inner voice say nice and supportive things to you and stop the self criticism. That small step does, in fact, help your positive sense of self.

Maven of the Week: Maia Lynch!

Maia Lynch is a Japanese, Irish-Americain living in Brooklyn, NY with her Korean-Americain husband and their young daughter.

That sentence alone is an American story. I noticed when researching your work that you are referred to as a Japanese American artist. But, that isn't the whole story and it isn’t what you say when you describe yourself. In America we like to sort people into groups. It’s hard to do that when we are made up of more than one group, like you: Japanese, Irish-American. But, if the Irish part wasn't important to you, you would not have mentioned it to me. What are your thoughts about the way critics tend to gloss over your father’s roots and influence? How will your daughter describe her roots?

That’s an interesting point you make, and I don’t know if I have a straightforward answer to that question. I don’t necessarily think of myself as Irish American. I mostly mention it, almost neurotically because “Where are you from?” is a question I have so often been asked wherever I have lived or travelled to. To the extent that I remember being invited to a Tibetan buddhist meditation in Kyoto with a large ex pat following, and during lunch when the question came up, the Canadian monk and teacher took it up as a lecture point in teaching transcendentalism. For a few years after that, it became part of my shtick - I’m neither here nor there, but I’m halfway to enlightenment!

My thoughts are really that I grew up identifying strongly with my mother. It could be because she was the primary caretaker, or also that as a small child I understood her sense of isolation. It was the 1970s, and outside of my father and her own work, she was alone. Though we lived in the same city as my paternal grandparents, we were not accepted into his family in those early years. We also spoke mostly in Japanese together, or a combination of English and Japanese, and though my father was fluent, he was often away traveling for work. It really is now, later in life that I am able to parse out this rather charged confluence of family histories.

I tell my four year old daughter she’s Korean, Japanese, and Irish American, and most recently she told me she’s Chinese, so that’s where we are right now - halfway towards enlightenment? Who knows, it’s 2022 and we currently live in Brooklyn, NY, so I’m hopeful in the coming years she will be able to describe herself in a way that makes sense to her and she will be met mostly with grace.

Were you treated as “other” by the two sides of your family? In a good or bad way?

Neither side was initially accepting of my parents’ marriage, but I have memories of both families treating me with affection and kindness. I would travel with my mother every few years to visit my mother’s family, sometimes annually, and despite the distance and time apart, I felt a very strong closeness to them, even though I don’t know if my maternal grandfather ever recognized me as family. And on my father’s side, for the first several years of my parents’ marriage, my mother was not permitted inside the home of her in-laws. As the story goes, a few years after I was born my paternal grandmother returned from confession one Sunday morning, opened the door to her Brooklyn home, and welcomed my mother in with open arms, never looking back. Thank goodness for the sacrament of confession.

Your Dad was a former Jesuit priest. In what way did this affect your upbringing?

He left the priesthood to marry my mother in his late 40s, so being a Jesuit priest was a big part of his life, as it was for his family. Three of his younger siblings were also Jesuits, and so his leaving was seen as a sort of family crisis, according to my aunt, who also entered religious life early on as a nun. Though his father and grandfather worked for the Herald Tribune in New York as pressmen, he ended up on a very different path, attending the Jesuit run Regis High School in New York City, where he was encouraged to become a Jesuit. Even though he grew up in this working class family in Flatbush, Brooklyn, he would end up having the opportunity to travel to multiple countries and continents, learn several languages, and earn various degrees - I’m suddenly sounding like a promotional ad for the Jesuits. But I think maybe because of his life experience, and his education in theology and philosophy, he was deeply invested in the arts. I remember he was involved with the World Crafts Council for a long time. The World Crafts Council would go on to establish the Museum of Contemporary Crafts on West 53rd Street in NY, eventually evolving into the Museum of Art and Design. He and my mother worked on exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. He worked closely with the Crafts Council’s founder Aileen Osborne Webb, who my mother would refer to as “Webb san.” During those early years in their marriage when my mother had little family support, and when the disruption of my father leaving the priesthood caused rifts in his own community, the World Crafts Council was a generous place. My mother recalls how Webb san would hold me in her office at the museum and lay me on her bed to rest, she was in her 80s then, and would say, “Leave Maia with me, go and take a walk along 5th avenue, go shopping.”

What is it like to be an artist by-trade?

It’s difficult and challenging, and while it offers joy, there are few external rewards and no end in sight. And it’s an awkward thing to tell people this is what you do, for me at least. In that sense, it is similar to the work at the shelter. I had a friend working in sexual assault prevention, and the two of us would always talk about how it was a real conversation killer when you’re meeting a group of people for the first time and they want to know what you do - and immediately you’re unrelatable - when really, you want to say, I can spend hours on the crisis hotline, couldn’t you?

how did the ten years of shelter work inform your art?

It was challenging work. There was very high turn around at the time, and I often worked 12 hour days. Late at night I would wake up with anxiety unable to return to sleep, and I would turn to writing and drawing. During the day, when I wasn’t working at the shelter, I kept a sketchbook and drew wherever I went. Many of my friends at the time who were painters, had little choice but to abandon their paints for better paying jobs, and so I would use their materials and paint when I got off at a decent time from work and on the weekends. During those years I found myself turning more and more to drawing and painting. Prior to that I was working mostly in video, and would continue to do so while at the shelter, but over time the drawing and painting took precedence.

You were noted as “on the radar” in ArtBusiness magazine several years ago. Do you feel pressure now to produce artistically?

Yes, but I simultaneously feel an urgency to care for my daughter, tend to my aging mother, write and work on projects that link back to the years I was involved in the shelter, so I guess I’m moving at a very slow pace. I do work daily, in my studio, but I am critical of my own work, and constantly paint over my paintings. In fact it is one of the reasons why I moved from oil painting to gouache and paper, to set limits. Years ago, when I was in school in Boston, a few friends would come by my studio and encourage me to document my process using video since there were so many paintings under each painting. I’m actually doing this, unintentionally in an animated video I’m currently working on and it is liberating.

Today you are drawing and painting for yourself but video has always been a part of your practice. You have been creating videos for other artists such as Maya Lin. What are you working on now?

I exhibited a video at the MFA back in 2018 when I had the Traveling Scholar show. It was part of an installation that also included ceramics I made in Japan, and paintings that came out of that experience. The video, on the other hand, was a project I had begun years earlier, and initially developed out of those late night anxiety drawings. It was a hovering boulder, vibrating to a low murmur and every few seconds limbs would descend, like a sand clock. I returned to it, and completed it for that exhibition. Currently, I’m working on another animation along similar lines of gravity, death and renewal, land and water - with my husband Jerry Lim, who is an artist and musician.

You described mourning the loss of your father in color, or “death in happy colors” which is reflected in your art at that time. Does that mean when you are happy, or at peace you work in black and white?

I made this gouache painting while I was in graduate school about a year after my father’s death. My father’s cousin came to visit me from NY and took me whale watching for the first time. I came back to my apartment and painted a boat on the water, the entire painting in a very specific color I had in mind. I do think color is powerfully linked to memory and trauma in this way. I was reading notes my mother wrote some time ago about the children’s camp she founded in the 70s and ran for 25 years in the Catskills, and in it she recalls escaping her childhood home in Japan on the back of her mother as her hometown was on fire during World War II. She remembers the fear in her mother, but also the happiness she felt as a child being so close to her mother and looking out on a field of rapeseeds, never forgetting that infinite yellow.

How has having a child affected your work (obviously children consume time, but what has changed in your work beyond that)?

I feel enormous change in myself, especially in my memory, as well as in my body. There has been a kind of coming apart and gradually (hopefully!) I think a reassembling that I find both frightening in terms of how disorienting that can be at times, and also welcoming because it is met with so much joy. Also, the figure has also made its way back into my work. In my latest animation, there is a woman eternally swimming in rapid currents - motherhood?

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be a clown, and my mother enrolled me in an after school clown program. I remember thinking how tedious the lessons on juggling were, as well as on how to apply clown make up. I wanted so much more! So it evolved into wanting to be a clown and a psychiatrist. Did not get far.

What are you excited about now?

Dinner! Working on another animation, and spring in two months.

What books are on your bedside table?

Richard Powers’ Bewilderment, which I just finished, and Jay Caspian Kang’s The Lonliest Americans, which I’m planning to reread, and Claudio Magris’ Danube, because last year around this time I delved deeply into research on the environmental histories of Europe for Maya Lin, and continue to really enjoy the reading.

What do you do to relax?

Generally, I like to spend time in areas where there is little human habitation, perhaps because since childhood I spent long months up at my family’s camp in the Catskills. I like swimming, I find the scent of frankincense or Japanese cypress very relaxing, and I also like to drink green tea.

What category/subject would you add to the Guide?

I am a 47 year old mother to a now 4 year old. Recently, at an intimate event, a mother started coughing up birthday cake when I told her this! I know I’m not alone, so maybe motherhood to a young child in our later years. How mothers run around with a toddler or small child, and possibly also pull a muscle while simultaneously thinking about aging and death. Incidentally, my father had me at 50. I don’t think he every worried about this. Maybe he did and didn’t tell me, but generally it felt like he was always walking around with the sense of how did I get to have a second life?

Link to Maia’s website:

A Recipe You Won’t Hate: Socca (Farinata)from Mark Bittman and NYTcooking

INGREDIENTS

1 cup chickpea flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
4 to 6 tablespoons olive oil
½ large onion, thinly sliced
2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary

PREPARATION

Heat the oven to 450. Put a well-seasoned or nonstick 12-inch pizza pan or cast-iron skillet in oven. (If you have a socca pan, obviously that will work well also.)
Put the chickpea flour in a bowl; add the salt and pepper. Slowly add 1 cup lukewarm water, whisking to eliminate lumps. Stir in 2 tablespoons olive oil. Cover and let sit while the oven heats, or for as long as 12 hours. The batter should be about the consistency of heavy cream.
Remove the pan, pour 2 tablespoons of the oil into it and swirl. Add the onions return the pan to the oven and cook, stirring once or twice, until they’re well browned, 6 to 8 minutes. Stir in the rosemary. Stir the onions and rosemary into the batter, then immediately pour the batter into the pan. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes, or until the pancake is firm and the edges set.
Heat the broiler and brush the top of the pancake with 1 or 2 tablespoons of oil if it looks dry. Set the pancake a few inches away from the broiler, and cook just long enough to brown it in spots. Cut it into wedges, and serve hot or warm.
That’s all for this week. Please leave a comment, if only so I can see that it works…I’m beginning to wonder…Below, a new experiment! I wonder if these exercises can help a droopy face? (Just fact and preventative. I am NOT being hard on myself….not really). I’m giving it a try. xo K

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?