Margot Bergman’s studio. {Photograph} courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago.
Do cups have souls? When you have a look at Margot Bergman’s portfolio in our Summer season difficulty, you is perhaps tempted to say sure: the cups she has painted, from numerous vantage factors and in brilliant colours, appear crammed with life. Bergman, who was born in 1934, has been portray for almost her entire life. She is finest identified for her sequence Different Reveries, which options collaborative portraits painted over artworks she has saved from flea markets and thrift shops. Every portray is layered with decisive, daring paint strokes, revealing a face latent with layers of feelings. They’re directly lovely, scary, humorous, and welcoming. Who knew that cups might comprise equally human emotion? We talked concerning the joys of portray, the feminine type, and naturally, what drew her to cups within the first place.
—Na Kim
INTERVIEWER
A lot of your work revolves round faces, and particularly feminine figures. When did begin portray these?
MARGOT BERGMAN
Within the fifties. The artist R. B. Kitaj was portray very flat work. I used to be drawn to his fashion. I started to color like that. I nonetheless have a few of these work within the basement of my dwelling, left over from the fifties—a sequence of flat work of bare ladies. They have been very flat, very unsexual, although the ladies have been butt bare, with their backs turned to the viewer. At one level, the town of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, needed a few of my work for the hallway of a authorities constructing. They have been these Kitaj-like work of girls, all bare, their backs turned, with what appear like bits of collage randomly positioned within the work. There was an issue, and the work made it in to the newspaper in Milwaukee, as a result of some ladies’s group had demanded for them to be taken down.
INTERVIEWER
What occurred?
BERGMAN
They have been taken down. It was the fifties. I assumed it was so humorous. And type of outrageous, however largely I assumed it was humorous. Unusual, humorous, and uninformed.
INTERVIEWER
These ladies with their backs turned, have been all of them the identical lady, or completely different ladies? Who have been they?
BERGMAN
I don’t know. However they didn’t signify me. They have been very planiform. There was no voluptuousness to them. There was no shading. They actually revealed type. They’d shapes, however no actual substance. And so they have been searching right into a courtyard, and the coloring was a bit Impressionist. They have been actually not expressionistic in any means. I might say that I used to be influenced by Pierre Bonnard presently—that was most likely my first real love of an artist’s work.
Margot Bergman’s studio. {Photograph} courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago.
INTERVIEWER
What about Bonnard was notably inspiring to you?
BERGMAN
I assumed his work was lovely. I assumed it was intimate. Later in life, what I’ve come to know is that there was an intimacy to his work that I used to be not seeing within the work of different artists. And that’s most likely what drew me to him.
INTERVIEWER
What led you to start out portray the cups which are featured in our Summer season difficulty?
BERGMAN
I had began one other physique of labor that wasn’t working. I used to be disillusioned in it. It needed to do with bricks, each inflexible urethane ones and kids’s constructing blocks. They have been three-dimensional, and I used to be attempting to do work of the bricks in order that the works on paper have been geometric kinds. I simply couldn’t make them work. So I tore certainly one of them up. I tore up a chunk of paper in my frustration, after which I simply made a portray of a cup on one of many scraps. God is aware of. God is aware of why.
Maybe now I can have a look at it and say that the unique work had a lot geometry, so many laborious strains, that I wanted a circle. However that basically didn’t undergo my thoughts. My course of may be very intuitive. I simply discovered myself making a round type, and the shape that got here out was a cup. Then the cups got here in a rush—I’ve now performed seventy of them. It was one after one other, after one other, after one other, simply pouring out of me.
INTERVIEWER
I needed to speak about one other essential physique of your work—your discovered collaborative work, that are portraits overpainted on work you usually discover in flea markets and thrift shops. There’s one thing so haunting about them. The faces actually stare again at you. Do you ever consider actual folks while you’re portray them, or are they individuals who come out of your thoughts?
BERGMAN
No, I don’t consider them as actual folks. However once they come out, they regularly have names. There’s something in my unconscious that finds a reputation. I don’t analyze it. Virtually at all times, after a portrait is completed, I do know the determine’s identify. It’s just like the portray itself: it simply is.
Margot Bergman’s studio. {Photograph} courtesy of Margot Bergman.
INTERVIEWER
What led you to start portray over the works of others?
BERGMAN
Earlier than I began making these work, I used to be embedded on this planet of artwork. I used to be within the galleries. I had lived in New York. I walked the stroll and did the speaking, and I spotted that I used to be uninspired by the issues I used to be making and didn’t like what I used to be seeing on the partitions both. These works had no coronary heart for me. And once I would go to a flea market, it was all coronary heart. There have been these inexperienced artists who have been giving the whole lot to make one thing that they really cared about. I used to be drawn to that, so I might deliver their work again to the studio. At first, I felt it was a no-no to color on them, so I didn’t, however I saved amassing them. After which, sooner or later, I simply noticed a face in certainly one of them, and I painted it on prime. That was very satisfying. For about ten years, I labored on that physique of labor. I needed to exit and search out these sorts of work, which isn’t a straightforward factor to do. And no person needed the work I did with them. I attempted in Chicago to have them be seen. Till John Corbett got here alongside, a few years later, no person would present them. I had pulled myself away from no matter I assumed was the artwork world, and I used to be making strictly for myself. I really like them. I really like doing it.
INTERVIEWER
You talked just a little bit concerning the difficulties of being an artist. What would you say have been some main roadblocks for you?
BERGMAN
It’s trite to say it, as a result of everyone is aware of it. However let’s begin with being a girl. I had youngsters. I used to be married. I lived within the suburbs of Chicago within the fifties and I had a husband who might assist me. I used to be engaging. I had no community as a result of I didn’t end my diploma on the Artwork Institute—I received married once I was twenty-one, and my husband was in service and I adopted him. What number of issues labored in opposition to me there? I used to be not a part of something, and I used to be completely different, then. However it didn’t cease me from portray, ever, ever, ever, ever. I labored like hell. I used to be at all times working. I feel we’re working even after we’re not working. I feel after we stroll in our area and we sweep the ground, we’re working. It’s one thing that’s inexplicable.
INTERVIEWER
What a part of the portray course of would you say is your favourite, when you’ve got one?
BERGMAN
I like pencils. I like paint. I really like paint. I really like paint. I really like mark-making. I really like the tip, when one can see one thing that one might say is full.
INTERVIEWER
How are you aware when a portray is completed?
BERGMAN
Generally I’ve been proper and typically I’ve been mistaken. I’ve usually thought, Can I make it higher if I maintain going? It’s a widely known indisputable fact that artists can depart their studio or workspace, suppose they’ve accomplished a portray and are glad with it, and are available again the following day and say, “Oh my gosh, that’s not almost what I assumed it was.” So, how do we all know? We don’t at all times.
INTERVIEWER
Is portray intuitive to you? Do you discover it tough?
BERGMAN
I don’t take myself too significantly till I must be severe. I like taking part in. I don’t imply that I’m not working significantly. I’m wanting laborious, however I’m additionally having an excellent time. Portray is a really joyful course of for me. And regardless that it may well have darkish undertones, for me, portray is the unearthing of no matter is there for me to seek out. That’s simply intuitive.
INTERVIEWER
The place do you suppose this curiosity and urge to create comes from?
BERGMAN
When somebody involves me and says, “I simply traveled to India, and I did this, and I did that,” I feel to myself, I simply traveled alone journey. I really like journey, and I equate what’s occurring to me on the canvas with a journey. My journey has no map.
Na Kim is the artwork director of the Overview.
