ARTIST INTERVIEW – GAIL S. KOTEL

Capturing a Face.    So many times at the end of a session the sitter sees their parent or family member in the piece (I do tend to age people as I am fascinated by lines of the face and drawn to faces that show a life that has been lived).  Once at the end of a sitting, the man started crying when he saw the portrait, saying he hadn’t seen his father for twenty years, since his death. The energy of the person sitting for a portrait feeds my creative process and becomes the piece.

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Yes, I started with drawing with anything available and by the time I was seven, I had my own battery-powered pottery wheel.  It’s a drive, and a desire, like eating, I can’t live without it, I get antsy if I am not creating.  As a kid in New York City, I got into Music and Art HS which was such a privilege to do art for 4 hours every day. I, of course, looked for more and created a bridge between Performing Arts HS becoming the lead scenic painter and prop builder.  It was great, I taught myself Trompe l’oel and in the end, won a special award that hadn’t existed before and they kept the program going!!!  Continuing to art school was also a wonderful gift, spending all day thinking, learning, and creating was fabulous.  Becoming a Physical Therapist helps people and keeps me intimately knowledgeable about bodies and their frailties. Often, I end up painting my patients, continuing that relationship deepening the human connection and my fascination with faces.

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I have no specific medium that draws me- rather I let mediums become my art.  I am often inspired by the medium itself, and currently, that is bubble wrap.  With all this packaging in our lives, (and as a lifelong environmentalist) it was the next logical choice.  I try to force people to look at refuse, to make the discarded visible. I seem to make the materials challenge my ability to form a portrait. The face has to conform to the materials, not the other way around.  I set rules to follow in my art, restrictions bring creativity, like a haiku.  Being a city dweller, I have always been great at trash picking.  My current rule is that I have to find materials that become my medium; it started with windows, then frames, bottles, wood, and now bubble wrap.

As a kid growing up I went to Leon Golub and Nancy Spero’s art studio.  I was about 8 yrs old and when we walked into this huge loft space, Leon was on the floor scraping one of his large canvases with a meat cleaver.  The image was of an interrogation, with a hooded naked man tied to a chair.  The men in the piece were bigger than me and Leon was a bald scary-looking man with a cleaver. His wife Nancy saw how terrified I looked and took me over to her side of the loft and showed me her light-filled stencils, keeping the more scary images of torture away that first day.  When Nancy heard I wanted to be an artist, she took a strong interest in me and my art, inviting me to come to her studio regularly and show her my work.  This relationship continued for years -even after I moved away- until her death.  We would have passionate debates about the world and politics and she would push me to have my own voice and to have that in my art.   When I was in fifth grade she let me interview her for a school report and gave me two of her pieces for my report.  They stay framed in my home and continue to inspire me.

I love having people see my work – usually, it elicits a very strong response, people are drawn to my subjects and to the materials.  Often it’s a combination of the wow factor – like “how did you get the paint behind the glass or bubbles?” and feeling a connection to the person they are looking at.  My hope is that they will feel a sense of community with the person and a bit of them or someone they love.  Sometimes it’s just a response to the strong slightly fauvist use of colors.  I love living with these people all over my house.  I find endless pleasure looking at the light, shapes, and lines of their faces, I hope people will want to spend their lives finding new meaning in these faces, as they and their viewpoints of life change.