Back to School with Ali Liebegott

Binder paper & poem painting with our GUT visiting artist

SPECIAL ALERT: This Fall we’ll have some materials-based lessons in the GUT. I will let you know a week in advance what we’ll be exploring so you can stock up. NEXT WEEK: OIL PASTELS. If you don’t already have a few sticks lying around, you may want to go grab some.

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Welcome back my fabulous GUT friends!

You all are too great. Thank you for all the kind words of support and suggestions around my recent elevation into bionic status. (Read: hip replacement.) I am grateful, healing, and looking forward to getting back in the saddle (which is to say the studio) asap. Phew. AND. I loved all your TV studies from last week’s assignment - you all made such amazing drawings inspired by mysteries and medical dramas, the US open and the WNBA, and of course the new season of Bake Off. I bow.

Also, huge shout out to our Austin GUT members for organizing an IRL meetup and sharing some pics. We included them in the GUT gallert at the end of this missive. I love you/us.

Which brings us to now.

We’re at that transitional, disorienting moment in year when the weather still feels summerish, but the youngs are back to school - so it doesn’t quite feel like “summer” anymore. Plus, I hear the Bay Area is about to get our regular fall heat wave, which is essentially our summer. We do things different around here. ;)

Related, I know our GUT visiting artist this week from around the bay. And like SF weather, Ali has always done things her own way, too. And thank goodness for that.

Back to school with Ali Liebegott.

As a kid, my favorite thing about Fall was back-to-school supplies. (Reminder: stock up on some oil pastels for next week, GUT!) My first painting canvas was unwashed blue denim stretched around a Mead three-ring binder. It was there that I first experimented with typography (bubble letters!), learned the aesthetic value of a good lyric and/or quote, and perfected cross-eyed cartoon characters. I also loved binder paper. The magenta and cyan lines. All the potential an empty page offers. I could — we could — do anything on that paper.

Thinking about this reminded me of a body of work I adore, by my friend, the writer and artist Ali Liebegott.

It’s Ali!

Ali is an artist, a writer, and a poet. She is the author of four books: The Beautifully Worthless, The IHOP Papers, Cha-Ching!, and her novel-in-prose The Summer of Dead Birds. I first encountered her writing and poetry when she lived in SF. She was active in the queer literary scene, and working at Rainbow Grocery (which is its own scene - IYKYK). She was invited to write for the groundbreaking television show Transparent, moved to LA, and has continued to have a pretty amazing career in TV, going on to write for The Sex Lives of College Girls, The Conners, Little America, Love Life, Big Mouth, I Love That For You, and Beast in Me. And while she writes, she paints.

And a lot of those paintings involve writing.

I think of my paintings as poems sometimes. - Ali Liebegott

Ali told me once (and I hope I’m remembering this correctly) “I’m not really interested in learning to paint the right way.” I love that. While she mentions in our Q&A that she would love to go to art school someday, I love that ultimately she is interested in learning more so she can make her own decisions about what and what not to use - so she can keep painting her way. Not some realistic “right” way. Ali is our perfect rep for the number one hard and fast rule of DrawTogether & the GUT: No rules in art.

Ali Liebegott: Paintings as poems.

Wendy: How did you get started painting?

Ali: I really started painting in 2001 after 9/11. I had moved to Providence, Rhode Island from NY and became obsessed with feeding ducks at the local pond. I started keeping an illustrated watercolor chronicle of my duck feeding, and that morphed into an illustrated novel that I never completed called, The Crumb People. I moved from there into oil painting, and have [painted with oils] ever since. Today, I work in both oil and watercolor/gouache.

Wendy: How do you balance your writerly self and your painting self? How do these two mediums feed you?

Ali: Unlike when I worked at the grocery store, when I started working in TV it was too much for me to work all day, and then go home and write more of my own stuff. I needed to do something at night that was coming from a different part of my brain than writing, like painting. I would say since 2014 I have been much more regularly oil painting. So I usually paint when I’m employed as a TV writer, and write when I’m not employed. Painting is very separate from my writing, more meditative, calm, fun, playful. Writing, because I’ve done it as a profession, is more fraught, less fun. But both are necessary.

Wendy: When you include text in your paintings, do you consider that your writing as well?

Ali: No. But I think of my paintings as poems sometimes. I’m trying to capture a moment, a specificity. There is a narrative quality to them, easter egg details sometimes. I am constantly trying to think about how text can operate in visual form.

Wendy: You once told me that you liked a person’s art because it was clear they didn’t go to art school, and you liked that unschooled approach. What is that to you? What do you like about it?

Ali: Well, I think I often respond to a rawness and a feeling of boldness, breaking the rules. I know that that can also occur in people’s work who have gone to art school. I would love to go to art school. I actually want to learn all “the rules” and then I guess decide to go from there on whether I should break them.

Wendy: And for those of us who struggle with wanting to get things right, what makes you feel so free?

Ali: HA! I’m tormented by wanting to get things right too. I grew up with the idea that an artist was the one kid in class who could perfectly render something, work in realism. Because I can’t render anything, have some sort of problem with seeing things as they are, spatial reasoning, perspective problems, I’m often frustrated and humiliated when I look at my own work. It’s been a whole process for me to let go of the things I can’t do and just leaning into the things I can. I love color, and humor. But it’s been an ongoing process for me to accept my technical limitations and try and work around them.

Wendy: Do you have anything else you want to share with readers of the GUT?

Ali: I guess just to say that nothing brings me peace and joy as much as painting. The way time moves, it’s like someone has washed my brain out by the end. I’m so glad that I have a regular practice which I honestly think of as a kind of meditation. I want to be one of those people that’s painting until I’m 100.

Wendy: Thank you so much for chatting with us, and sharing your work, Ali. I think I speak for all of us when I say that we hope you’re painting until you’re 100, too.

Ali in front of a self-portrait.

Alright everyone, we have an Ali-inspired-text-as-visual-back-to-school assignment for you….

The Assignment: Binder Paper Poem Paintings

There is a series of paintings Ali made a while back that I love. She paints classic binder paper and uses that as a foundation or background for a text painting. They feel accessible and universal. And they are deceptively simple. A concise headline and a few hatch marks can convey a lot of dark humor and ton of depth and feeling. Here’s Ali on the series:

I think the first [binder paper painting] came about as a painting inside a painting. You can see it as the list of things to do: feed ducks, take meds, etc. This was from that illustrated novel I never finished called The Crumb People.

I just began to make these other "list paintings." In some ways it was like a warm up exercise. First draw the lines in pencil, then the holes. Then cover the watercolor clock in an ochre, then make the red and blue lines. It would usually take two nights to finish one painting because the notebook paper would have to dry before I decided what I was going to write on it.