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Welcome to artbyakacooper aka Katherine Fishburn
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Biographical Information Before
I was an artist, I was a poet. Before I was a poet, I was a scholar. Before I
was a scholar, I was a teacher. Before I was a teacher, I was a writer. Before I
was a writer, I was an artist. Before I was an artist, I was a child. Before I
was a child—well, who knows? But I
have made it my life’s work to leave the world, as best I can, a better place
for my having been here. In
tracing the trajectory of my life, I mean to inscribe a toroid. I have left
nothing behind, yet I have not stopped reinventing myself. Most of what I know I
have taught myself.
It
is ironic, therefore, that I—who learned everything I consider worth knowing
outside the classroom—chose to stand in front of one for thirty odd years. I
began by teaching junior high school students in Frederick County, Maryland.
Without the generous intervention of Howard Goodrich, the county’s English
supervisor, I might well have been fired for sheer incompetence. But it wasn’t
until I had become a university professor that I discovered the real secret of
teaching. The turning point in my career came when it occurred to me that the
subject matter I was responsible for was less important than the students
themselves. Although it took literally years of practice and experimentation, I
finally managed to teach my classes in such a way that I could say at the start
of every semester, with some hope of succeeding: “My goal in this class is to
change your lives and in changing them improve them.” I added, “ Although we will read a series of novels, this will
be a class about understanding—one that focuses on the act of understanding
itself, what enables understanding to occur and what impedes it. It will thus
focus heavily on the art of asking questions. It is, therefore, a course not
just about reading and interpretation but one that concerns both ethics and
philosophy. But part of my teaching must be to wean you from needing me since,
after all, once the semester is over, I won’t be going with you. The best I
can hope is that the habit of mind and the ideas I introduce you to will serve
you well as you make your own way in the world.” Student evaluations strongly
suggested that I had accomplished my goal.
I
quit teaching at the height of my game. I didn’t retire early because I was
tired of teaching. I retired because I wanted to reinvent myself outside of the
academy. Until this point in my life, everything that I loved doing had
contributed to the advancement of my career: the teaching, the research, the
writing—all were intellectually stimulating and, therefore, anything but
boring. But during an emotional crisis a few years previously, I had reclaimed
my artistic talent and I wanted more than anything else to develop what I had
had to put aside as a professor of English. I had already successfully
reinvented myself as a poet, but painting simply did not count when it came to
my annual evaluations. So I said, to heck with it (actually, I said to hell with
it).
I
wasn’t introduced to much art as a child, although I visited the Metropolitan
Museum of Art a few times and my aunt, who liked to paint, gave me a ten-cent
box of water colors to play with. The only other art in our house was confined
to a book that contained inferior photographs of famous paintings, which had
been edited by a bitter man who considered Leonardo da Vinci to be a mere
amateur because he didn’t know any better than to experiment with oils in
painting his fresco “The Last Supper.” In retrospect, I assume that I poured
over the pictures (especially Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”) and
ignored the editor’s dismissal of another man’s obvious genius. Our high
school had an itinerant art teacher who found fault with everything I did. She
scolded me severely once for making the fatal error of combining abstract and
representational. Yet I persevered. In college I took three drawing classes.
Occasionally I would whip up pastel drawings for my friends. Then I went to
graduate school in English and that was pretty much the end of my art career,
although for one of my papers on William Blake’s poetry, I reproduced a print
from Songs of Innocence in order to
discuss its relationship to the poem that it illustrated. I apparently did such
a good job of counterfeiting that my professor, a Blake specialist, initially
thought I had acquired the real thing.
So,
how is it that I became an artist—again? When my father died, I wrote a book
of poetry (The Dead Are So Disappointing)
to express my grief and my anger at his inability to express the love he felt
for me. For various reasons, I have been depressed, to one degree or another, my
entire life. For the past ten years I have taken a combination of psychotropic
drugs in order to function. But sometimes . . . sometimes even they are not
enough to keep me safe. Several years ago I fell into the slough of despond and
could not medicate or talk or write my way out. During this time I had been
corresponding with a prisoner who sent me letters in envelopes that he had
decorated with fabulous and oftentimes scary pencil drawings. What the heck, I
thought, maybe I should try colored pencils, so I bought myself a beginner’s
set. I told one of my friends that I didn’t know if I had wasted my money or
not. It seemed I had not. At the suggestion of a friend, I began to show my
drawings to Robert Busby, an extraordinary man who owned the Creole Gallery in
I
have always been deeply interdisciplinary, as my books and paintings reveal. I
didn’t write a lot of books, but I never repeated myself. The subject matter
of these books includes but is not limited to the following areas: African
literature, African American literature, women’s literature, cultural studies,
anthropology, philosophy, science fiction, and physics. I think equally well out
of both sides of my brain. When I paint, I draw on my knowledge of literature,
social and intellectual history, art, mythology, politics, ecology, and
chemistry. I seem to have remarkable intuition about the workings of the
physical world. I am either a minor polymath or a self-indulgent dilettante.
Maybe both. But I do continue to ask provocative questions. I use brushes and
palette knives to paint in oils and acrylics. Some of my collages include hair,
bones, broken glass, wax, pictures, and whatever else I can get to adhere to a
canvas. Some are faux collages that include drawings of notes, prison forms, and
famous paintings that I have forged. My own paintings run the gamut of emotions,
sometimes within a single work. Many are downright grim and frightening, others
are beautiful and inviting—but all ask questions of the viewer. Some of the
paintings are small, some are large. I don’t yet have the studio space to
create huge ones. Some come with frames that contribute to the paintings’
meaning. Right now I am working on two projects. One is a series of relatively
large paintings—whimsical portrait landscapes (2’X4’) of places that do
not exist anywhere. Still they seem familiar. Another is a series of smaller
paintings about my childhood anguish that are inspired by Goya at his darkest.
In
2007, one week before I was to move into my new studio above the Creole Gallery,
my dear friend Robert Busby was murdered by his handyman. I continue to paint
because I am a painter. But I also paint because Robert believed in me.
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