Doodle Paintings from 1980 Revisited in 2018

In 1980, during my senior year at Douglas college, I was studying with the painter Joan Semmel. Feminism in art was in vogue in the late seventies and the early 1980's. Douglas, the woman’s campus at Rutgers University, was at the forefront of a galvanized interest in historical contributions of women in art as well as inquiry in to the female expressions of contemporary artists. Lucy Lippard and Judy Chicago were the heroines of the day.

On the local college level there were, I recall, exhibitions of collages made of female panties (painties?) and a plethora of art on such themes as menstruation. These were topics that I generally wished not to think about. But I was intrigued by the question of whether or not there was a female approach to abstract painting that differed from their male counterparts. Some claimed that one could deduce the gender of the artist just by looking at an abstract painting. I was not so certain about that but just for fun, decided, with a touch of irreverence, to execute a series of nine abstract paintings on wood panels that would look feminine. I called them "Doodles" because they were based upon the doodles I would freely make in the margins of my notebooks. I figured that anything that was intrinsic in nature would be most likely to emerge from free association. Professor Semmel admitted that she was uncertain as to how to evaluate these stream of consciousness paintings because they were so "quirky."

The paintings were displayed in the college gallery, then taken down and put in to a square box. They remained in that box for 38 years. This past summer, I retrieved them from storage. I almost discarded the entire box. Who wants to be reminded of their callow youth? Yet I decided to take them home with me anyway.

Last week, in an act of plagiarism of my own younger self, I restored, repainted, and re-posted these paintings. Some were just cleaned up a bit. Others were almost completely redone. I then posted the "new" works on social media. Someone wrote in and called them "quirky."

I’ve posted the before and after paintings here, quirky or not, as an interesting comparison between the young woman painter of 1980 and the old woman painter of 2018 who may or may not have learned a few new tricks over time. Having some technical difficulty on posting the revisions, but will try.

In 1980  they looked like this: