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[ water splashing ]
WOMAN: Being an artist can be a gift or a curse.
There's kind of a sensitivity you need to have
to things around you in order to process them
and then to create work that is a response to that.
You have to be willing to make decisions
that will support the work.
I'm Shelley Jordon, and I am a painter,
moving-image artist, and a professor of art
at Oregon State University.
[ waves crashing ]
I grew up in Brooklyn,
and even though it was very urban,
it was actually on Jamaica Bay.
My sister and I spent weekends swimming,
and my grandfather was a New York City motorcycle cop
back in the 1930s.
My mother has all these wonderful stories
about growing up the child of the motorcycle cop
whose beat was Coney Island.
My family was a working-class family,
and we had no art at all.
I didn't know anybody who was an artist.
But when I was a kid, Thursday was art day,
and that was the day that I shone.
The teacher would put me in front of the easel,
and I was happy.
And then I heard that there was an art high school
in Manhattan, which was a world away
from where I lived in Brooklyn,
and that if you got accepted to this school,
you could actually make art every day.
I got accepted, much to my mother's dismay --
she wanted me to stay at the local high school
and be a cheerleader.
I rode the subway and bus
an hour and a half each way every day.
I was in school for eight hours a day,
and I could not have been happier.
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I was a sort of traditional oil painter for many years.
I painted large-scale oil still lifes from life,
and I did those for 20 years.
I was showing in museums and galleries all over the country,
I got tenure, and then my husband had a brain tumor.
And even though he's fine, it kind of blew me apart,
and I couldn't focus on those long, large paintings.
One, two, cha-cha-cha.
Three, four, cha-cha-cha. Four...
Two, cha-cha-cha.
Side, two, cha-cha-cha.
I started exploring more interior subjects,
really bringing to fore more emotional quality in my work.
I started making these paintings,
and they were so different, and I didn't know
when I should stop, when I should keep going.
And so I decided to photograph
the process of making these paintings.
I used this technique
of just literally putting a sheet of paper on the wall,
setting up my camera with a tripod,
and paint, shoot, paint, shoot.
And suddenly I realized
I had a whole new direction in my work.
[ gulls cawing and boat horn blowing over speaker ]
There was animated installation, projection,
and I started collaborating with musicians and composers,
and it allowed me to expand the narrative of my work.
[ electronic shutter clicks and computer beeps ]
For me, it's really important that I'm hand-painting it.
And actually the energy of the painting process,
I think, is captured almost better in animation
because when a painting is finished,
all you see is the finished painting,
but in this process, you actually get to see
how the painting gets altered.
So I think I'll move this arm down a little bit.
So I try not to make too many changes in one frame.
[ electronic shutter clicks ]
And I can sort of check it...
and that looks pretty good.
This is my grandma, Clara.
My grandparents at the beach in Far Rockaway.
And very fond memories of those times on the beach.
They were Russian and had these wonderful accents.
But they were Russian Jews,
and there were pogroms in Russia,
and so my grandmother left Russia around 1910, 1915.
My grandfather was very fair-skinned
and could pass as a gentile,
and one of his friends was hiding him out.
He was 16.
But then his friend got scared
and turned him in.
So he told me this amazing story
of how he was -- literally had to jump into a body of water
and swim away as the Cossacks were shooting after him.
He ultimately came to New York and became a furrier.
You have to remember, he was Russian.
[ chuckles ]
My grandmother was an amazing cook
and also a fierce gin rummy player.
They were wonderful warm, loving people.
But their first daughter, their first child, my aunt,
contracted polio at the age of 2
and spent two years in an iron lung.
First that and...
She went on to become
an incredibly successful psychiatric social worker,
a very compassionate person.
[ gulls cawing and water flowing in video ]
She taught me how to sail and to fish.
[ laughs ]
And she was also an out lesbian,
which in that time was pretty radical.
Bought me my first oil painting set.
I would say she was the one person in my family
that really supported me being an artist,
that wasn't terrified by it.
And set an example for me as a woman
that you can do anything you want.
Don't let anybody ever tell you you can't do what you want.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
So now I'll show you the same thing
done transparently with water color.
I came into teaching
as a way to support my artistic practice
and also to kind of give back.
And I see myself more as a guide with my students,
where I introduce them to different technical skills.
And I'm often blown away by the creativity
and how they really rise to assignments
that are often quite challenging and quite complex.
You know, here are these young people
that are grappling with a world
that is not in great shape right now,
and a lot of those issues really get translated into their work.
And so I feel like I have this view
into what young people are thinking and caring about,
and I feel like it's a real privilege
to help them find their own creative voice.
Great, great.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
So this is kind of the first layer.
The leaf series that I began in 2016
after the presidential election
was an expression of the despair that I felt.
And I needed to express something in my artwork,
so I had gathered these decaying leaves in Forest Park
and brought them into my studio,
and I just couldn't imagine just painting them.
I needed to do something more physical.
And so I just started pouring different kinds of paints
that I knew wouldn't actually blend in a beautiful way.
I really liked the unexpected quality
where things separated and formed different colors,
and then as the paintings dried, a crust started to form
on the top that would crack,
and the crumbling and the layering
expressed some of the feelings that I had during that time.
So add a little bit of rot to those leaves.
Prior to this, I was always more a traditional easel painter,
and this is very different than a controlled painting
where I'm applying it with a brush
and every stroke is what it is and stays what it is.
And it was by doing these large-scale pour paintings
that I started realizing that part of the beauty of this
was how the paint was moving as it was drying
and as the colors were combining.
So that's when I decided to actually make an animation
about the process.
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So I'm trying to maintain
the sort of integrity and the character of the leaf
but also allow the paint to do its own thing.
Well, what I'm really loving right here
is this kind of resist -- it almost looks like
sort of bacteria.
And, you know, that's really kind of what's happening
on the leaves as they decompose,
this passage here where we get that green and red
really resisting each other.
I'm interested in the feel of the application of the paint,
the smell of wet paint, the sound of a brush mark
or a piece of chalk against a piece of paper.
All those things are part of the experiential aspect
that I love.