Artist Becomes The Water

“It’s wonderful to see all your smiling faces,” said artist Anne Doris-Eisner. The Zoom audience of about 30 participants assembled before her on Thursday morning had come to hear her talk about her art and life, in the latest installment of Coffee Break and Culture, an ongoing series from the Jewish Community Center of Greater New Haven. In that discussion, the hard-earned wisdom Doris-Eisner had gathered over the years connected in deep ways to the current hardships of life during pandemic.

About 30 participants joined the meeting, some from as far away as Arizona, California and London, others from much closer by (“I’m your neighbor from five seconds away,” one participant said). After a brief flurry of greetings, Doris-Eisner got down to telling her story.

“I feel I was born to make marks,” she said. She recalled being a child in West Orange, N.J., ​“looking at the patterns of light” from the sun filtering through the leaves over her as she swung on a swing. ​“I’ve always been entranced by nature. I’m born to see, but somehow my vocabulary was all about marks.”

She spent hours copying drawings from her mother’s art books, particularly sketches from Van Gogh. ​‘I felt like I was developing — or releasing — this vocabulary inside of me,” she said. Then, on a trip to a museum with her mother, ​“she said something that shook my world open,” Doris-Eisner said. They were standing in front of a Van Gogh drawing, and her mother said, ​“you know, he invented his marks.”

The comment connected with something inside her that had recoiled at art teachers who instructed that there was a proper way to draw, a proper way to paint. She had ​“rebelled against that rigidity, that formula.” Her mother’s comment was the beginning of her journey to find her own way.

“After all the years of copying art,” Doris-Eisner continued, she did a painting of a tree in junior high school that her teacher selected to in an art show in the hallway. ​“Do you know what it’s like to get praise from someone outside of your family?” she said. ​“It’s what the outside world says to you that can make a huge difference.”

For her, ​“it was that year that I decided to be an art teacher,” she said. “ I had found my passion.” Her family moved around the Northeast a lot, ​“but I felt very grounded” because she knew what she wanted to do.

After college, Doris-Eisner taught art at Amity Senior High School from 1972 to 2008, winning numerous teaching awards and attending honors seminars. She served as president of the Connecticut chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art and has served as secretary and board member of the New Haven Paint and Clay Club since 2013.

She described being an art teacher as a ​“blessing” because ​“you’re exposed to so many styles and techniques.” But, she said, a question remained: ​“how do you find your own voice?” For her, ​“it took going out to the wilderness.”

The reason for her wilderness trip were deeply personal. In 2001, her son died at the age of 18. ​“He was a pure, good soul,” Doris-Eisner said. All her art, she said, turned black. She needed a way to explore what had happened. She turned to her art. There’s a piece hanging in her Erector Square studio, she said, that she calls ​“the altar piece.” She created it on the floor of a friend’s studio in the weeks after her son’s death. ​“I felt angels were coming and the water was flowing. Out of chaos … we have to be able to transform ourselves and move forward.” She found a new direction not long after, in British Columbia at the Atlin Art Centre, founded by Austrian artist Gernot Dick.

Dick, Doris-Eisner said, built the art center ​“singlehandedly,” including log cabins and studios. His center attracted international travelers, whom he hosted and helped with their art. ​“He believed that for a breakthrough you have to be willing to walk on an edge,” Doris-Eisner said. Dick meant that literally, guiding his visitors into nature to walk on volcanoes and glaciers. Then, she said, ​“he had us writing concepts to connect our own personal beliefs with greater universal issues. How do you say succinctly what you believe without sounding trite?”

By the time she visited Atlin in 2001, she’d been teaching for 30 years. ​“It unlocked something in me. That’s where I discovered my power.” Around her, in the monumental landscape of British Columbia, ​“I had all this evidence of how life went on… of new life.” Being out in nature, ​“facing my fears on the edge of a volcano, it continued to help me figure out who I was and what kind of artist I wanted to be.”

“There’s evidence of the destruction that comes our way, that we don’t ask for,” she continued. ​“How do we go on?” She found her inspiration in natural forms, and particularly trees — trees that had suffered some sort of trauma and grew out of it and around it, putting out new branches. She returned to Altin in 2002 and then spent the next two summers at an artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vt. ​“to continue to explore working with the black, understanding the things I discovered about myself in Atlin,” she said.

Part of that, she discovered, was about relinquishing control. ​“I love working large,” she said of her pieces. ​“I start out maybe knowing what I want to accomplish, but the richest experience is in letting go…. I feel like I’m channeling something bigger than myself.”

“I have my son to thank for giving me a power in my work that I find really satisfying,” she continued. ​“I don’t know where it’ll go, but I’ve hit on something that felt personal.”

As an example, she dove into one of her works, ​“Ancient Tree,” that ​“feels like a self-portrait,” she said.

Early in working on the piece — some take her over a year to complete — ​“I felt like a whirling dervish working on that,” she said. ​“It was like being a little kid again with a sponge painting.” She used sponges; she used her hands. ​“The whole page was all these marks — cacophony,” she said. ​“Then, when I stopped to look at it slowly … I started tinkering, as I thought it was a tree…. It’s always about stop, look, listen — what is it saying to me? What more does it need?”

As she continued to work, the form of the tree emerged, in ways that mirrored her own experience. ​“It got wider,” she said with a little laugh. ​“It had some broken branches. But it was still spreading out, embracing life.”

She has continued with working mostly in black on white paper ever since. ​“I don’t add white — it’s only black acrylic,” she said. ​“I feel like I’m carving” the images out of the paper, she said, more like a sculpture. She turned to a piece based on a precipice in California. ​“But of course I invented on this — I extrapolated. To me it’s very sensuous.” She sees figures in the lines of the cliff’s face. ​“It was inspired by something real, but it went on to something else.”

In images she has done of water, she said, ​“I’m the water — I’m finding my way slowly out to the bigger ocean. It may be turbulent, but there’s always light at the end.”

She occasionally experiments, or considers experimenting, with other media and other forms. ​“When I do get thirsty for color, I go to the Creative Arts Workshop and play with color,” she said. ​“I think about it a lot. I think about working 3D or adding collage. But I feel like I need to stay authentic to myself.”

“I admire the artists who are so playful,” she continued, but ​“I’ve learned who I am for now.“ Though she didn’t rule out the possibility of changing her mind. ​“Who knows? Maybe I will. I’m not dead yet,” she said.

And she continues to return to the forms of trees. ​“I will try to capture the essence” of what drew her to a particular plant, but ​“the marks take on their own power.” As she works further, she uses her fingers, or sticks. ​“I find a million ways of touching the brush to the page.” And ​“I always see figures,” she said. ​“They’re almost like ghosts coming to tell me stories.”

In a way, she said, her art is also a continuation of her calling as a teacher. ​“It’s really an important part of my work,” she said, ​“I want to continue my teaching in a way, about how to go on in life despite difficulties. Everybody has their own story. It’s amazing how many people open up to me after I share my story. It’s not easy. I usually feel it a lot later. But there’s something thrilling in knowing I’ve connected with people and helped them.”

To see more of Anne Doris-Eisner’s work, visit her website. Visit the JCC“s website to check out its latest cultural offerings. The JCC is also planning to make some on-site services available to members soon; check its website for details.