The Brooklyn Rail

Have you ever watched the TV series, Miami Vice? I was an extra on that show three times and it is the secret door into my inner world. I was a child in Miami in the seventies and a teenager in the eighties. Miami was a new, dangerous and exciting city much like it was portrayed in Miami Vice. Nothing there was old or historical, everything was new and had a thrown-together cheap quality. The lack of history molded me into the artist I became. Of course I was not aware of this at the time. My first notion of old buildings came in the form of EPCOT’s European Pavilions in Orlando at Disney World. These buildings appeared “old” from far away with their turrets and draw bridge, but when you would come close, their new flimsy construction was nakedly apparent.

While studying art in college, Nicolas Poussin’s paintings and their weird dusty orange colors looked a bit “Liberace” to me in the way that the Old European town looked in Disney World. The paint colors and textures were off. I had a gut reaction, “gross.” I had left Florida only recently so I was still too close to the feeling of “fake old.” But my husband kept bringing me back to take a closer look at the Poussins whenever we were at a museum. He started to get really into them like he had figured out a secret. I remember first looking more deeply at one of the Poussins at the Louvre and realized he was making these paintings as a contemporary artist would, just like we would, referencing the past (not his past but his idealized past) in a very postmodern way. Suddenly I saw that they were very revolutionary and strange on purpose. He was layering time in his painting, his own Baroque period with its contemporary colors, techniques, and problems swirled with his fantasy of the past. Poussin is saying, “I am alive now and am making this “fake” version of the past that I have made up.” In spite of how artificial Poussin’s paintings may seem to me, they always invoke time, death and memento mori. As his painting Et in Arcadia Ego portrays, even in the fantasy of Arcadia, death is ever present. And only art is able to outlive death.