Interview with Gesso Cocteau

When in your life did you realize the art life was for you and how did that materialize in your being?

I grew up surrounded by creative people. My Mother loved books and so we had a library of every great classic and some very old first edition rare books. My Father loved to draw and play harmonica. We had poetry readings after school in our great room and since our house was the big house by the ocean we always had relatives staying with us. One of my Aunts was a painter and a sculptor. She use to make dolls out of doilies and pipe cleaners and create environments for the dolls to live. She painted the ocean over and over again and would tell me if you found one great subject that moved you and possessed you that was all the inspiration you needed. So I found the human body in an old Loomis book when I was in my early teens and decided that would be my passion and my inspiration. I have changed mediums throughout my career, starting with graphite, to acrylics and oils, to fabricated steel to cast bronze, but the human body has always been my most significant subject.

Who were your earliest influences and what attracted you to them?

Andre Loomis was my first influence, the  book ‘Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth’, which I think is out of print now was my Bible from thirteen through my twenties. Also George B Bridgman whose books were invaluable to me during my twenties and thirties. William Rimmer and Burne Hogarth were also early influences on my style of figure drawing when I was young. During this time I also fell in love with drawing super hero’s and would fill sketch pads with The Joker, Nick Fury and The Silver Surfer. So I was very influenced by Jack Kirby and Bob Kane-I also look back and think that I was influenced by growing up in a liberal Southern California beach city. The lightness of being, the buoyancy of movement and the liberal expression of passion.

What were your earliest pieces of work?

In my early twenties I worked in graphite doing portraits of immigrant workers. I lived in a Volkswagon van for four years during the summer and followed the fruit workers starting in California with cherries and ending up in the fall picking apples in Washington. We would sit by campfire at night and with a miners flashlight on my head and pencils I would draw the portraits of my migrant worker friends. At this time I was also doing sculpture with found wood. When I was in my mid twenties I applied to a studio on the Big Island of Hawaii to study with Bill Hilbert, who had been a special effects technician for a major Movie Studio and was now running an art studio designing high-end signs and sculptural designs. After being accepted to apprentice under Bill I began a seven day a week regiment of design, painting and sculpting. During this time I was still working on my graphite technique and creating my own Super Heroes. I returned to Los Angeles in my late twenties and began doing large scale head portraits of super heroes, monsters and erotica. I had just finished a collection of monsters and medieval dragons which consisted of sixteen life size drawings and were all purchased by a collector who was building a castle in Northridge California. I was also showing my life size graphite heads in various galleries throughout California.

How did you come to the sculpture form and why did you realize this was the course for you?

In my early thirties I moved to the desert of California. At the time I was working in gauche, graphite and pen mostly on canvas. I took a job as an assistant to a sculptor and at the same time took up welding so I could begin a series of fabricated steel. After spending five years welding I decided I wanted to concentrate on cast bronze. The man who had bought my graphite series of monsters and dragons commissioned a monumental size Dragon so this became a gateway to my passion. I had developed a relationship with a foundry in Northern California, I still work with the same team now that I did twenty years ago which started with my Dragon. After the install of that sculpture I produced an ongoing body of work consisting of tabletop to life size sculptures representing relationships which became my main theme of work up until I was commissioned to do the fifty one foot Endless Celebration.

After the installation of Endless Celebration I took some time off to contemplate my direction. I had always been inspired by poets, especially the romantics, but during this time I began to think about my life, not just the sensations of it but the meaning and I found that the revelations of my deepest desires and hope were surfacing. I realized that my body of work not only represented relationships, but I now saw that all of my desires and fears, potentialities and conflicts, almost all of the fabric of my own human will was psychologically imprinted in my bronzes. The one thing this time of thought did for me was to concretize my passion for the vehicle of clay and the medium of cast bronze.

In your current body of work, what are the key elements that you express and what is overall conveyed through your artistic vision?

Oppositions, contradictions and balance.

Love, Music, Introspection and themes reflecting the human spirit.

My work can raise as many question as it can answer.

I think it is dangerous for an artist to overstate her artistic vision, it leaves little room for the viewer to have an authentic reaction.

What concepts enthrall you that work there way out in your art? Overall themes and sub-themes…

The themes of myths. Relationships,. Between people, between people and music..The realm of Warrior Angels, Introspection, myth fashion and love. I am especially interested in the Mother Archetype. This idea consumed me for three years as I worked on my sculpture ‘The Original Mother’. I love the idea of the different aspects of this archetype, as Jung wrote: “These are three essential aspects of the mother: her cherishing and nourishing goodness, her orgiastic emotionality and her stygian depths.”

The idea that we are only who we tell ourselves we are has always fascinated me and I think in some ways I am sculpting my own story, my own personal mythology. I have a very complicated relationship with my own Mother and after fifty -seven years I still do not understand it, nor does she. I think our identification with the Mother archetype goes deep into our cellular memory of the first women and it is hard to reconcile with a personal theory of who our Mothers are until we understand who we are.

How did the messengers of hope come to you and describe their birth and what they’ve come to mean?

You are referring to the large warrior angels Messenger of Hope and Guardian Angel?

The idea came to me after reading Rilke’s ‘Duino Elegies’.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic

Orders? And even if one were to suddenly

take me to its heart, I would vanish into its

stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but

the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,

and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains

to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.

There was something so raw and beautiful about an angel who does not fit the prescribed appearance. The word ‘angel’ comes from the Greek word angelos, which is a translation of the Hebrew word mal’akh, meaning ‘messenger’, a being that carries messages between the human world and some other realm or realms of existence. I thought to myself of course they will look somewhat terrifying they are able to transport from creation to destruction and back to creation and they carry the hope of reconciliation. They are messengers that allow us a greater understanding and connection to our Spirit

I think I intended these beings as messengers of hope, protection and compassion. They are not perfect, but flawed in texture and proportion revealing the torment and suffering that they take away and exchange for protection, love, hope and social justice. I wanted them to be bold, powerful and humble at the same time.

I still do not think I have grasped the full meaning of why I did these sculptures. I often find it takes years of living with a piece before you find the motivation that stirred you into creating.

How is our personal studio space conducive to you creativity and what elements do you find essential to your process of creation?

I have experienced different spaces for over thirty five years, from large industrial to home studios and I find what works best for me is my home. Of course the entire house except the bedroom becomes my studio, but my cats and husband do not seem to mind. What is necessary to me to create is an environment of freedom. If I want to work until the morning hours my bed is always only a few feet away, also I have my best friend to bounce ideas off, my cats to take breaks with and the freedom to engage in my books at any time. It just works for me. I have always been accused of being the cleanest sculptor in the world. Yes, I like a clean uncluttered space and I realize that is not popular in the mythology of artist. But it is my way. I have to have order and cleanliness in my studio, this does not translate into my bedroom, but there is something about working without clutter that helps me concentrate and do my best work. I guess I have a bit of an Obsessive Compulsive Behavior.

How does your garden and nature influence your work and life as an artist?

I always think about my garden in the realm of what is beneath the soil and what grows downward and then what is on top of the soil and growing upward.

I see a hawk on top of the highest branch of my pepper tree and a mouse gnawing at the roots. It is the same with my work, what is beneath the bronze, what starts with the clay, the roots of the piece and what branches upward: this is the poetry of the piece once it is cast into bronze. Also it lightens my heaviness when I can be more involved with the earth. It influences my bones and my soul knowing that someday I will return to the soil. I think there is something very beautiful about the human flesh returning to the flesh of the earth.

What does being an artist in today’s world mean to you? Do you feel a sense of personal responsibility with what you put out into the world?

I don’t think of being an artist much different than being anything else. This is the life that was afforded to me, I don’t know any other life. It means that I am the story I told myself when I was a young girl and saw Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ for the first time. A witness like so many before me of the night sky filled with swirling clouds, the crescent moon on fire, the village below the rolling mountains, the colors alive with energy

I have tried to persuade myself from time to time that I have a sense of responsibility being an artist, but it really isn’t about that for me, it is about the poetry of the moment when something touches my bones and I feel the need to translate this feeling into something tactile.

What do you think artists contribute to today’s world and collective consciousness and unconsciousness?

I think as artist we continue to tell the great themes of myth through our vision.

Anything else to add about being a woman artist?

Not an obstacle and not an advantage….