Reconstructing Robin Glassman’s Worlds
by Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani
In Accord, New York, on the edge of the land where Robin Glassman lived part-time for the last twenty years, a small creek leads to a waterfall. Three large streams of water flow through a barrier of rocks creating a transient sight of harmonious movement. Glassman’s life resembled this waterfall pushing through seemingly insurmountable obstacles. As a young girl before going to school, she created imaginary worlds on her window sill using various found materials--a practice that stayed with her throughout her life.
After being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma at the age of twelve and struggling with numerous additional health challenges from the high doses of radiation that she received as a young teenager, Glassman found meaning and joy by expressing herself through art and cultivating a community of friends who nourished and supported her creativity. Glassman studied art education at NYU with the vision of sharing her passion for painting, drawing, and found object sculpture with others. Although she earned a living primarily as a bookkeeper, including nearly two decades working for a non-profit arts organization, Glassman helped teach and co-lead art-making workshops and continued to broaden and strengthen her skills by taking classes that introduced her to new mediums such as encaustics, shadow boxes, and laser arts. Throughout her life, she exuded a playful and childlike wonder and curiosity that comes through in her works.
My first acquaintance with Glassman came through a vast collection of her sketchbooks. Tightly bound Arteza drawing books all contain thick paper that gives drawings a quality of engravings. She used a regular black ballpoint pen, but with this simple medium created a vast array of inner and outer landscapes.
Influenced by the pastoral nature surrounding her in upstate New York, Glassman drew trees, roots, and streams of water as well as human figures connected to these natural elements. She used the waiting time before numerous medical appointments to fix her thoughts and impressions in these sketchbooks which are filled with words of compassion, release, readjustment, harmony, and peace. One could rarely see hints of fear or resentment in her words or sketches.
What strikes the viewer most powerfully in Glassman’s sketchbooks is her introspection, vulnerability, and desire for a deeper connection with the world around her. Her sister, Jeanne, mentioned that Robin expressed herself fully in these sketches and all her art and never developed a protective filter for her visual language. What I saw in these drawings and notes was a strong human being who found communion with the world around her and used a simple pen to flesh out this connection, doing it with wonderful skill, persistence, and certainty. Engraving elements of her inner being on the small pages of the sketchbooks Glassman, not unlike Agnes Martin – an artist of interest for Robin – was trying to erase the superfluous to make visible only the most important. Defining and striking lines leave minimal room for error. Her Inner conviction and strength are powerfully evident in this mark-making.
Glassman’s collection of found materials attests to her ability to view any kind of object as precious and almost sacred. Stones, branches, and small accessories create tiny portals conveyed by her energy to find beauty and harmony. Glassman found a close affinity with diverse artists such as Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), William Blake (1757-1827), Emily Carr (1871-1945), Pat Steir (1958-), Agnes Martin (1912-2004). Glassman was not guided by the exactitudes of scientific inquiries of George Ehret (1709-1770) or John James Audubon (1785-1851) and neither was her interest purely abstract. Considering various shapes and forms as structural materials – the method of Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) or Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) was also not Glassman’s way. To her, it seems that nature was a deeply soothing, benevolent field of imagination, a source of her strength and a tranquil mirror to her life. “The essence of her art was preserving nature or wanting to preserve it at least through the objects”- mentioned Ivy Brown, a close friend of Glassman’s and a gallerist.
Organic forms permeate not only her ink drawings and small mixed-media objects, but also her watercolors. Cavernous shapes overflowing and interacting with one another resemble spiritual vessels – another important aspect of Glassman’s life. As a deep thinker as well as a student of Jewish spirituality, she found wisdom, strength, and meaning by developing ritual practices that were incorporated in her art. Glassman also built relationships with various artistic organizations in Brooklyn and was a devoted member of her Blue-Sky writers group for long-term cancer survivors and an ongoing Qi Gong practice with the Taoist Art Center. It was through an organic connection to community that Glassman found an important source of her resilience.
Sustainability was an important priority for Glassman and, thus, her dedication to recycled materials is not surprising. A number of people I spoke with cited her playfulness towards materials and ability to see only possibilities rather than limitations. This open, unguarded attitude towards techniques and materials shows through her works be it small wooden boxes, watercolors with embedded tubes, or faces etched into tiny frames. Glassman maintains a visual vocabulary of an outsider artist who has not bound herself to one specific movement, aesthetic, or a stand of art theory, and stayed open and true to herself. Being deeply connected to her practice emotionally, she never strayed too far from expressing her innermost vulnerabilities and a strong sense of individuality.
As Stephanie Damoff, one of Glassman’s collaborators eloquently writes about her:
“I would say her approach was both intuitive and very methodical. She knew what she wanted. It appeared that she might have intuitively approached pieces, exploring, letting them work themselves out; and then guiding them to their end. I remember on more than one occasion seeing a piece that I particularly liked and thought was done, but then coming back to her home another time and finding it radically altered because it wasn’t doing what she wanted. She emphasized playing instead of working… She loved to dance and I think that free joy of expression came out in her work.
I admired how she knew when to let go of a piece, when the last necessary mark was made and the piece was complete; or when to transform it into a different piece, whether by repainting it or incorporating it as an element into a different piece.”
Through this deep and yet playful, process Glassman carved out a life that helped to ground her even in the face of many health challenges. All her works have this quality of tranquil and well-defined artistic integrity.