Most of my day is spent being very, very logical, like a lot of us, so when I get into the glues and the messy piles of clippings and things-- it’s all Id. I don’t know what happens. But I do know from teaching in the design field for so long that that composition and color are things that I do decently by intuition. I know that even if I make a mess, I can work my way out of it. 

 

I started out as a painter but in the end I didn’t have enough skills and I didn’t think I could make a living from it. But, oddly enough, I later got a job as a design professor, first teaching students how to write and to research in the design field. Then, I taught new media, balance, composition and color for 17 years.

 

You were a painter? Where did you go to school?
At the University of Massachussetts in Boston. I wasn’t actually a painter. I took some painting classes without much success. I wanted to be an art major but I didn’t think I was good enough so I let it go. I studied English Literature instead because I thought I had more of a facility for writing and speaking than painting. My peers were encouraging, but my professors didn’t seem too excited by my work. A lot of people get crushed exactly that way. I was also really working class and I knew this wouldn’t get me a day job. I knew I had to get serious and English Lit was as serious as I could get. I always loved reading so it worked for me.

 

What kind of day jobs did you have and then how did you continue your interest in art through your career?
I've made my living writing and teaching various types of writing: ad copy, technical writing, editorial work, junk mail, research. I started teaching college when I was 21, and I taught people how to write. For a while I was a reporter for the National Enquirer.

 

Get out! (Laughs) That’s why you read all those magazines! I have to find out about that. Where are those offices?
It’s in Lantana, Florida. The Biggest Christmas Tree in America is at the National Enquirer. (Laughs) And right beside it in the same office building was The Globe. People sit in rows according to seniority. I wrote about movie and TV stars. My beat was Tom Cruise and Don Johnson. The secret of the Enquirer is that they actually hire a lot of academics to do freelance work. You read lots and lots of magazine articles and write précis for them. Then the editors torque what you wrote to make it more bizarre.

 

I always believe what I read in the National Enquirer because it usually makes some underlying sense.
I do too. And I know it to be true from behind the scenes. They are usually quite accurate and now pointedly accurate since they’ve been sued.

 

I read magazines too, and ever since I was a kid I’ve been into the stars because my mother was. She had a subscription to Photoplay, which was one of those old Hollywood movie mags, and I always read it. My grandmother used to read the old National Enquirer which was a super lurid tabloid which had horrific stories like “Father Chops Daughters Boyfriends Head Off with an Axe” and stuff like that. My grandma would bring me a bag of Enquirers and I’d read them when I was 11 or so.  So, what’s the deal with your magazine obsession? How’d you get into it?
I’ve always loved to read a lot and had to read serious stuff for work, so I go for the non-serious stuff for fun.  You can pretty much ask me anything about Britney and KFed, Beyonce, or Heidi Montaug.

 

I can’t keep up with the new ones…
It’s really hard there are a number of blondes on the new shows that all run together and I can’t keep them apart. Yeah, I love magazines; they’re also so visual, so I’m having it both ways.

 

It looks like you’ve used home and décor magazines on this collage. There are pieces of architectural detail, a chandelier, furniture…
Interior design and architecture are recurrent themes in my work. I think there’s a double edged meaning to my interior fetish—I create dreamy worlds, usually pieces of interiors. I'm always thinking about notions of beauty… how much I want to live in beauty. It's an old-fashioned concept; kind of discredited now. My friend, Lu Lu Liebel, told me it was OK to produce something pretty, even beautiful. Even Matisse thought it was OK.

And decoration has always been trivialized, too. I have a gendered analysis of that.

 

Women artists often make art involving interiors. I’m thinking of some young artists like Rosson Crowe. Many of the female surrealists did interiors—Tanning, Sage, Varo. Women’s lives have been associated with the home; their bodies with buildings; their inner lives with rooms.
I’ve also been thinking about Virginia Wolf’s concept of a room of one’s own for women. If you can get that time and place for yourself, you’ll develop a richer, fuller internal life, and you can develop your art.

 

How did collage become your medium of choice?
I made collages in my free time—when I went to the beach or traveled. I liked that I could carry it with me. I just needed a pair of scissors and some glue. I’d tear apart the materials around me in rooms and hotels; the magazines, ticket stubs, and all. At home I could work on a kitchen table.

 

When my kids were little, I made collages because it was something I could be interrupted while doing. I could stop when they needed me and start again later. You can’t do that with painting. The only part of collage when you can’t be interrupted is when you are pasting it down.
That’s right. When you’re pasting, if it gets bumpy or jiggled, or you put it down wrong, you’ve got a problem. I use my credit cards to press down really well. It’s a good tool. (Laughs)

 

The collage process is compartmentalized–cutting, sorting, arranging, pasting-- and that has a congruity with the way your life as a working woman is compartmentalized—job, family, making your art. And you compose a collage like you compose a life. Tell me more about your work with design.
For many years I taught graphic designers and product designers to write briefs, research, do marketing stuff like finding the target audience, demographics. Rationalizing your designs and expressing it to the client through great writing and presentations. Writing was considered a really big part of the program at San Francisco State where I worked. We felt that it was a real advantage for our students.

 

I think the public understanding of design is that it’s a veneer that you add on to what was empty in the first place, and that’s not what it is at all.

 

That’s what bad design is. Good design comes out of the ideas.
Exactly, but most people don’t know how organic the process is. So much preparation goes into coming up with good thoughts--ones that culminate in two or three design solutions the client can choose from.

 

Fine artists go through a similar process, but there’s no client except themselves.
I’ve always described the difference between fine art and design as, “Fine art is a soliloquy.” It’s funny to come back to the title of this piece here. When I taught Design 1 I'd tell my students, “Fine art is a soliloquy, design is a conversation.”

 

Who are your influences?
Cornell, Rauschenberg. I am very into graphic design, so people like Lucille Tenazas, the San Francisco designer. I love poetry, like ee cummings, the quietude and simplicity of his work. Very evocative and simple.

 

Do you use words in your work?
Yes, I have little word clues--cryptic messages--in my work. In this one there’s the word “Goethe”. Like in Jo Ann Biagini’s piece over here, she’s worked on book pages so you can almost read the words but not easily. Sometimes I’ll do that, too. Or I’ll put my initials in, but hidden letters so one might not notice.

 

Your mentioning Lucille Tenazas reminded me of the words because she designs with words so beautifully.
She’s a singular artist. Her work is so varied and complex. Her kid went to the same school as my kid for a while, and she used to do the parents' flyers. I would save every one and I thought, “Do the other parents even understand that this incredible artist is doing their parents' flyers?”

 

Ce Ce, like Jill McLennan, the other artist showing at Mercury 20 this month, you are from the East Coast.
Yes, I grew up in Somerville, Mass. which is a working class community near Boston. The title of my upcoming show is “Lilacs in Somerville.” The story is that my father was a bartender and a con man. He fenced a lot of stolen goods from the bar. My mother was dying for six years. I remember these beautiful lilacs that grew in my front yard; they were a source of beauty in our lives. Beauty was a little bubble that saved me. I needed to find that beauty and serenity in the midst of a lot of…ugliness. My sister [Claire] and I both have this “eye”--a desire to find beauty within a harsh reality. It’s a very powerful survival mechanism.

 

Tell me about the work in the show. Actually, tell me about how you have any time to make art at all! (Laughs)
(Laughs) Ah, that’s my biggest problem. I work about 10 hours a day. So I make art on weekends. If I’m lucky I can work at night. My son, Max, has just gone away to college, so I have a bit more time now. I just keep doing it. I have always done the collaged boxes, so I’ll be presenting a couple in this show. They show the Cornell influence.

 

How do you feel about exhibiting your work? This is the first venue where you have really exhibited, right?

My sister’s partner, Cathy Perillo, is an artist in Mercury 20 and she thought my work was really coming along and that joining this gallery would help me develop, and it certainly has. I’m learning so many things--very basic things--ways to compose and unify the images. I knew these things theoretically from teaching, but to really be doing it is great!

 

Seriously, I actually hated showing my work at first. But then people started buying it, and that changed everything (Laughs). It blows my mind. “Lilacs in Somerville” is my second show. I did my first show last year with Peter Honig. I was so in awe of Peter’s work—his beautiful images, his amazing technique, his wit. Peter walked me through my first show ever. At first I was freaking out saying, “I can’t do this, I’m not good enough to show with you, why did I ever think I could do this?” And he told me, “Ce Ce, everybody feels that way before a show.” And I didn’t know that! And he said, “You have no clue what people will think of your work until you put it out there.” And the first night I put my work up I sold four or five pieces.

 

Every time I gallery-sit I see that people are drawn to your work. I remember a guy who came in to pick up a piece he bought and he told me that your work really stood out for him. And that it was especially great because it was reasonably priced.

That’s deliberate. Being the working class girl, if people like my work, I want them to have it. I want people to have the opportunity to own some art.