Jimi Hendrix and Alice Neel

In the past few days, I've watched two documentaries, both named after their subjects: Jimi Hendrix and Alice Neel. Sure, their backgrounds and lives and means of expression couldn't be more different, but encountering their work through these films got me thinking about the same kinds of things...

Watching film footage of Hendrix playing guitar put me in a sort of exalted state of jubilance. The reassurance that his kind of utterly defiant, beautiful expression is achievable got me through what was a quite difficult weekend. I realized that part of the power of his guitar playing - apart from the obvious transcendence of skill (and for what it's worth, I'm left rather cold by the theatrics and am always more impressed just watching his fingers on the neck of the guitar than by the teeth thing, etc.... Well, OK, the fire conjuring was pretty fucking great... ) - is the volume he used. This is probably totally obvious, but I just want to write it down here. In order to get the kind of feedback he liked to use as punctuation as well as a place for extra notes and texture, he would keep his amplifiers at a constant extreme volume, as far as I can tell. This requires the ability to maintain tremendous control over the positioning and pressure upon the strings, pickups, neck and body of the guitar. But what it does is it gives that sense of anticipation driven to exuberance that his music has, because the sound is quite literally always at the edge of going out of control. As a result, it's super sexy and joyful as hell.

Alice Neel was 70 years old when Jimi Hendrix died in 1970. The documentary was made by one of her grandchildren and includes wonderful footage of Neel painting interspersed with interviews with her friends and family as well as artists and writers who knew her. Neel led an extraordinarily difficult life as a single mother raising two boys after her first child - a daughter - died before she was even a year old and her second child - another daughter - was taken from her by the father's family. Neel and her sons lived in extreme poverty. She never had a studio other than the living room or the kitchen of her apartment in Spanish Harlem. Anyway, my brief biographical overview of her life is published in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution and there is a detailed biography, numerous monographs, and this documentary, for anyone interested in the whole story.

Neel's paintings are deeply moving for their unrelenting directness and their tremendous beauty. Neel painted portraits, almost exclusively. Now that we are in an era that accepts a broadly heterogeneous array of styles and subject-matter, it is hard to imagine what it must have been like to paint portraits in New York City in the 1950s when abstract expressionism was championed as the only art worth scholarly attention, and the tenacity it required is evident in the volume of paintings Neel amassed in her long career as well as in the obsessive attention to contextual and psychological detail she was able to express in them. She managed to paint her times through the people she encountered in the many cultural sectors she engaged. Every time I have the privilege of encountering one of her paintings, I feel like I've been given an incredible gift. In 1974, Alice Neel was the subject of a one-person exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art. The footage of her greeting friends and admirers at the reception had me in tears. At the age of 74, it was the first and only major museum exhibition of her work to be mounted in her lifetime.

Hendrix, of course, succumbed at a very young age, and Neel somehow kept going until she died from cancer in 1984 at age 84. They gave us sounds and images that help remind us of the great unquantifiables, of that which is intangible and soulful. It helps me, anyway, because sometimes it's easier for me to give in to the material world than to become amorphous to absorb and encompass everything that is the world, like all great artists must.