released May 18, 2015
interview recorded
August 2013
in Harlem, New York

music:
nathaniel geographica
nathanielgeographica.bandcamp.com
www.facebook.com/NathanielGeographica

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Transcription:

I’m Ersilia. I like to go by Ersilia. I’ve had three last names so it’s hard to say: Zaccaro, Eastman and Crawford. So right now I’m Ersilia Crawford.

It’s really strange, I think I didn’t think about making art for any particular reason, ever. But I started painting with a teacher when I was what thirteen, fourteen, in Italy and so I did like the work that I saw the Neapolitans do, which was very colorful, and was mostly the scenery around. I always felt that I really couldn’t write, even in Italian – to express myself in the written word was always so mysterious to me – I couldn’t crack it. And here speaking English, or learning, I read, I did manage to read, and I did well in school, considering, but it still was something that did not belong to me. It was at Oberlin that I had an experience finally that made me feel that art may be what belonged to me – the expression that was mine.

I guess expressing myself was important, always, as you Andrew know, and have experienced now – and I’ll say something more about that. So I was on probation at Oberlin – I was not doing well – I did not know where I was going, why I was there. So I was on probation but I wanted to get out of it at least – so I took a drawing class and that drawing class was wonderful because it opened up to the possibility of seeing anything that you recognized and turning it around in whatever way you wanted and it still had a sense of being but it wasn’t the object anymore – it was you at that point. So it was a revelation.

After that – because of personal relations, whatever went wrong, right, whatever, I came to New York and I went to NYU where I studied painting with William Baziotes, who was a wonderful individual who was so warm. I never depended on a teacher to tell me that I was right or wrong – even now. But to have someone that accepts you, that respects you, and that adds to you – he was one of those. And he was also a very fun person. He said to me, “why are you here, this is a very expensive school. Why are you here? Why don’t you go to Hunter. I’m going to teach at Hunter. Motherwell is teaching at Hunter. Tony smith is teaching at Hunter.” They were all teaching at Hunter, so I went to Hunter, and Hunter kind of made me…But it wasn’t like a revelation that you wake up at Hunter and one teacher and you say oh wow this is it. It’s a constant re-evaluation, a constant changing. And right now I use the same elements that I’ve used for the past fifteen, twenty years, but to me they are so different. To me they have acquired the meaning that I want my work to have: to touch something about who am I and what my life is, for me.

In that period of time, in the 60s and 70s, is a time where that’s how I understood abstraction and that’s how even Motherwell spoke about it – which is abstraction is not unrealistic, abstraction is what the object, the scene, the nature, the thing, what does it become when you deal with it? That was part of it – so I entered the water, and in fact it still fascinates me, the water that has color and movement and constant change and brilliance and light and depth and space and that’s a painting that you have, right? The paintings that I’m doing now – you don’t see that much at all, and yet, they still have a landscape feel to them. And they’re much more abstract and they’re a little more crazy, too.

A: Would you say that the art that you work and the process of creating allows you to maintain optimism?

EC: Yes, you know why? Yes! Because of the spiritual thought that I have embraced or that has come to me from all my reading of various, various different areas and religions, they all talk about that there is no distance between me and you, me and the other, or us and the others. That there is no separation – that we are one, not just because we are children of God, but because we are one! Well now I feel that my optimism comes from the fact that we are the same as the sand and the rocks and the trees and the air, what we can see, what we cannot see, and so there is no difference between life and death, there is oneness, there is just oneness.

When I saw this bird, it rose up from where I was. I can tell you that this corner of the garden where I was was totally abandoned, nobody used it, and it would be my secret place, and so it was my holy place so to speak. I saw this – it filled my vision – because a pheasant – the wings of the pheasant might be four feet once they’re open and the tail is very long, and the plumage is iridescent, the colors, many are iridescent. I think right now – so much time has passed, I think I was thirteen, fourteen, either less or more than thirteen. It was like my heart went * boop * like I had been transported, like I was the bird or the bird was me. Well I’m grateful to you for asking because that’s the thing that makes me so happy is to see things that I thought would not come together have come together in my life.