Künstlerportrait: Jane lafarge Hamill aus New York

Als ich mit meinem Fahrrad auf dem Heimweg war bemerkte ich, dass die Straßenbahnen neben mir eine riesige Schlange bildeten und alle Insassen laufen mussten. Kurze Zeit später sah ich eine Frau mit einem riesigen Paket, welches sie trug und dieses ihr den weiten Weg zu laufen ersichtlich erschwerte. Demzufolge hielt ich und bot ihr an, dieses Paket auf meinem Gepäckträger zu stellen und wir liefen gemeinsam. Ein Gespräch ist demzufolge unverzichtbar und dem hinzu kommt, dass sie kein Deutsch spricht. Jane lafarge Hamill ist Künstlerin „Painter“ aus New York und vier Monate in Leipzig zu Gast für ein Kunstprojekt in der Spinnereistraße zu Plagwitz. Somit ergab es sich, dass ich gerne ihre Kunst sehen und sie ins Portrait nehmen wollte. Wir verabredeten uns in ihrem Atelier. Dort sah ich ihr zu, wie sie arbeitete. Sie sei gerade in den Vorbereitungen für eine Show in New York, die im März nächsten Jahres stattfindet, erzählte sie mir strahlend. Später gingen wir in den Hinterhof eines Cafés inmitten dieser großartigen Kulisse der Spinnereistraße. Jane lafarge Hamill ist eine begabte, intelligente junge Frau „with heart and soul“ und auf das Portrait der anderen Art spezialisiert und jenes erklärt sie im Interview.

Which music do you hear with pleasure?

I enjoy music that’s grounded to a good beat with slight dissonance in the melody. If there’s no surprise or discomfort, it goes in one ear and out the other.

Which music connects you with your life?

This month I’m listening to Tune-Yards. The singer is from California, and does unexpected things in her music with a beautifully varied voice. Her lyrics are a good mirror of American culture for my generation- for all our bullshit, humor, truths, and questions. In general, artists that keep coming back to me are Aaron Copland, Battles, LCD Soundsystem, Neutral Milk Hotel (I spent a lot of time painting to their albums On Avery Island and In The Aeroplane Over the Sea) and a great deal of Nina Simone. She is a huge influence. It’s almost as if you can hear her heart being pumped into that voice, and her lyrics spare no one. If there is someone who gets right to the matter of life- it’s her.

When have you felt that you are an artist?

After graduate school, I felt like a painter- but I only just recently called myself an artist. To refer yourself as an artist means that you have the responsibility of making Art- and I wasn’t ready to judge my work to say that what I was painting was actually Art.

How would you describe to yourselves and your art?

My paintings are an attempt to balance the representation of human emotion with the synthetic material of our culture. Physically, it’s oil paint on canvas.

What does art mean for you personally? It’s a basic form of communication that can’t be expressed in any other fashion. Try you to provide with your art values? If anything, I think I try to question the values. Do you use your art also as a sort of mask?

I think we use art to get rid of the masks. Most people wear masks everyday, and there’s no room for that when you’re attempting to make something true.

What is your intention? My intention is to express our time- or something relevant to our time. What moves you and touches you inside? Shar pie puppies. I can’t help it. What inspires you? People who aren’t afraid to be themselves. People who know who they are, and act as they are. Which artists do you estimate particularly? Cy Twombly, Nick Cave, Veronese, Alexander Tinei, Euan Uglow among so many others. What is beauty?

Something that moves you- the fulcrum point of an act, a sight, a sense, or event that changes you- that makes you new person. those pin points are beautiful things.

What is style? A unique voice or technique. Which opinion you own about the stealing of art among other things(and others) from in the form of ideas, draughts(plans) and the final result. How important is the robbery for an artist?

This is a very good question. There’s a fine line between appropriation and stealing someone’s ideas. Perhaps a culture produces common thoughts from a history of events, that leads to an idea surfacing at the same time by different people. Like a shared conscious. This may be true, but I see a lot of artists feeding off each other’s ideas because they can’t come up with something original. This has always been the case, and will always be the case. And I can’t judge whether or not you can discount great art if it came at the expense of help from another person’s ideas that were not as well formed. There was Picasso and Braque, there is Richard Prince now- who blurs that line between appropriation and stealing in a meaningful way. But I do know that it’s pretty irritating to see someone start making paintings like yours- a friend of mine calls people that copy his brushwork or content in his paintings „the biters“.

Do you own a basic principle or a quotation?

I try not to- I find quotations that you hold on to like fortune cookies- are a little empty. You get to know them so well, they become ubiquitous. And principles become rules. Which one should never have. And if you have them, you should break them, because you probably have them because someone else imposed them on you, or you are just forming habits. And that’s no fun at all.

Where do you see yourselves in the future? How much gold and heart blood do you lay in your aims?

As an art student I thought that I wanted to be famous- or at least well known. And I could care less about that now. I wanted success with full f*cking force- and put a lot of energy into being the best I could be. Which was exhausting, and false since it was a means to an end. Now I just try to do something sincere. That’s all I want now. And that’s a personal want.