A Storefront View of a Worker in Progress

A strange notion persists that a good way for people to get acquainted with art is to watch artists at work and hear them talk about what they’re doing.

Of course, observers always are welcome at craft demonstrations or portrait-drawing sessions at county fairs. But making a serious work of visual art is innately private. It begins with an image or an idea perhaps only vaguely perceived by the artist, and it develops over time in a complex dialogue between the artist’s imagination and abilities, and the inherent qualities of the medium to be used.

To have to verbalize what one does from moment to moment is to turn this intimate activity into a sort of bogus theater. (Obviously, performance art--in which the performance is the work--is an exception.) For this reason, projects like the Floating Storefront Studio Artist-in-Residence program at the Irvine Marketplace seem to miss the point.

But I was struck by the special quality of Barbara Berk’s storefront residency, “21 drawings, 21 days,” which ended earlier this month: She refused to speak to anyone, even if someone asked her a question.

As she explained in late June, “My project is simultaneously an installation, an exhibition and a performance. The essential aspect of the performance is that I am drawing. Each drawing session lasts three hours, and during that time I do not interact in any way with anyone who comes into the space. . . . My intention is to communicate nonverbally.”

She said that for her, drawing is a basic activity, “like taking a walk or cooking.” By paring the process down to its essentials, she hoped to focus attention on the act rather than the finished product--just the opposite of the way we look at a work of art hanging in a gallery.

In fact, despite Berk’s rationale, the project probably was more rewarding to her than to anybody else. Which is not to say that her experiment failed.

I dropped in twice during the run of the project. The floor was covered in a thin layer of flour, which kept two grumbling men in suits from stepping through the doorway. (Berk recalled a perceptive mother explaining to her child that the flour allowed visitors to leave their own “mark.”)

The walls were hung with drawings she had done on previous days, in sequential order. Two comfortable chairs were provided for visitors, though no one lingered. Actually, few people walked in.

Berk worked steadily at a table stocked with Prismacolor pencils, pastels, charcoal, rags and a ruler. She seemed almost in a trance, nodding her head and flexing her toes in a sort of counterpoint rhythm. Even when I stood up and leaned over her table, she never appeared to notice. Every now and then she stepped back to look at her drawing.

“At the beginning, I was so self-conscious,” Berk said later. “If anyone walked in, I’d do very repetitive things with my hand to keep myself busy.” Her nervousness about being on display seeped into the first few drawings, which look tentative and wispy.

During the next few days, Berk said, she felt “very self-conscious” about the drawings. It bothered her to have to display work she felt was under par.

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One day, she suddenly veered from her nonobjective approach and drew the corner of a room. “I felt really cornered when I did that corner,” she said.

Subsequent drawings look somewhat like unevenly growing clumps of hairs or grasses. “I was playing,” Berk said. “I stopped worrying about the drawings.”

It’s surely no coincidence that Berk frequently uses hair and grass imagery in her sculpture.

In one of her delicately linear three-dimensional pieces in a recent three-person exhibition at the Art Institute of Southern California in Laguna Beach, a soft extrusion of fine blond hairs created a curiously organic zone around a cubic stack of sheets of paper.

During her last 10 days at the Marketplace, Berk tried a different tactic. She turned her repetitive manner of drawing--the slow accretion of hundreds of small marks--into a quiet ritual: a demonstration of the way an artist sets herself a “problem” and then attempts to solve it.

“I get the impression many people . . . think a drawing must be of something,” she said. “But all you need is visual curiosity.” Planting her wrist on the paper, she drew an arc of radiating lines marking the furthest points she could reach without moving her arm. By repeating this constrained action as she moved her wrist down the paper in tiny intervals, she eventually made several bushy columns of pencil strokes that intersected with broad tracks left by her graphite-covered forearm.

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It was as if the drawing literally grew out of her own body--a particularly apt metaphor for the medium that permits the most intimate and direct link with an artist’s sensibility.

Whether the nuances of that sensibility came across to the casual viewer is almost a moot point.

Although Berk said a few viewers scrutinized her activities and returned to chart her progress, it’s quite possible that even they were bemused by drawings that looked more like exercises than the sort of technically or emotionally involving tour de force one might expect from an Artist At Work.

But what too often gets lost in the bureaucratic organization of community art events is that their primary beneficiaries should be the artists themselves, which is what happened here. If some viewers came away with a clearer notion of what it’s like to make something out of nothing, all the better.

* The Floating Storefront Studio Artist-in-Residence program continues at the Irvine Marketplace (Campus Drive across from the UC Irvine campus) through Aug. 12 with drawings by Gail Wilson. 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays; 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays. Free. (714) 552-1018.