Sad and Pissed Artist Rachel Hecker on love by Lauren Johnson

Still life at table: smoked salmon, crème fraíche, capers, a red pear, and these little crackers that my girlfriend says taste like dirt. These items plus a bottle of red wine decorate the table where artist Rachel Hecker and I now sit in her house in the Houston Heights. She smokes Camels, like she did when I first met her in 1988 or ’89–I don’t remember which year, but I remember the circumstances perfectly. At the time Rachel was the interim director of the Glassell School and I was writing an article, my very first article, on the art school for a long-defunct Montrose magazine.

I remember knowing she was gay–I don’t remember how I knew that–and I can remember thinking how remarkably intelligent she was. Two years after that interview, Rachel started dating one of my best friends. Their relationship lasted nine years, during which time Rachel and I became good friends. Over those years, we shared much wine and food (Rachel is a terrific cook), as we are doing now.

Many Houstonians may know Hecker’s work from her painting Censorship, a depiction of a shirt-and-tie everyman with a huge cartoon character’s fist obscuring his face. For years the painting hung in front of DiverseWorks for five years until it was stolen in 1994–its whereabouts are still unknown. This in-your-face piece as well as its slash-and-run theft are typical of Hecker’s Bad Girl reputation in the Houston and national art world. Not that she doesn’t have an art establishment pedigree–starting with a master’s from the Rhode Island School of Design and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she’s had numerous one-person exhibitions and countless group shows all over the country, in venues from the Menil Collection to galleries and museums in Dallas, Canada, and France. Warm, wry, and tremendously funny, her sly humor is evident in even her saddest paintings.

By the time I met her in the late 1980s, Rachel had been at the Glassell for seven years, first as an assistant director, then as an associate, and finally as acting director. After leaving the Glassell, Rachel became a visiting professor at the University of Houston in 1992, becoming an associate professor in 2000. I ask Rachel about these accomplishments, and about what it’s like to have tenure at the University of Houston.

"I’ve had some fulfilling things happen to me professionally–I feel like I’ve passed though the eyes of some very small needles–but on the other hand, those things don’t really change you, not in any kind of fundamental way."

I know what she means, which is that the things that do change you in a fundamental way are the things like love, and its beginning and its ending.

Today, about 10 years after Rachel met my friend and became one of the important people in my life, their relationship ended abruptly and painfully. Through a bit of divine irony, here I am once again writing an article with Rachel Hecker at its center. This time, though, it’s about her, and her upcoming show "Sad and Pissed," at Texas Gallery, in the month of February. The artist’s reception is–when else?–February 14.

"I wanted the reception to be on Valentine’s Day, for obvious reasons," Rachel grins. "The phrase ‘sad and pissed’ describes the extreme emotions I’ve experienced in the last nine months quite accurately, I think."

I first saw the paintings back in April, and have watched them progress. I ask Rachel to describe these paintings, to compare them to her earlier work. In the past, she says, she has used pop culture images to comment on society, but always from a safe intellectual distance. Never before this work did she use her painting to reflect her own personal feelings or situation.

"This time, I made a conscious decision to place myself emotionally in the work, making paintings about loss, alienation, and abandonment, but the context was theoretical or from the past, or at least I thought so. I thought I was quite happy and in love when I began them."

The paintings fall into two groups: the Comic Explosion paintings and the Emotional Narrative paintings. Although I laughed out loud the first time I saw the Comic Explosion paintings, it was a kind of wincing, painful laugh. I know from my own experience how good it feels to say words like "bitch" and "liar" when you can’t say what you really need to say, since what you really need to say is unsayable. If you could say it, it would sound something like the air being stomped out of a large, human balloon. Or look like one of Hecker’s paintings.

If the Explosion paintings are a kind of emotional venting, the Emotional Narrative paintings depict emotional states by telling stories, a new approach for Hecker. Rachel’s alter ego in the world of the paintings is portrayed by the Sanrio "Chocokitty" from the popular "Hello Kitty" children’s toys and novelties.

"I made the decision to be more revelatory in my work, but I was a safe distance from the emotional content," she says. "This was before my breakup, before I had this bomb dropped on a nine-year relationship. I was making paintings called They Couldn’t See the Dark Cloud That Hung Over Their Relationship, as well as comic book explosions that for me are a metaphorical depiction of what happens when ordinary life doesn’t. And then ordinary life stopped happening for me–with a bang, I might add."

When her relationship ended, the distance between life and art closed, and the narrative moved from fictional to autobiographical. Suddenly, the painter who had been creating what she thought were imaginary stories about heartbreak, loss, and endings, found herself painting stories from her real life. Ironic, isn’t it?

Rachel smiles. "I’m not particularly interested in irony, but I am interested in shared experience. For me as an artist, popular culture provides a location where I can discuss specific events in general terms."

Artists communicate by making the specific experience general–that is, by making it something the audience can relate to. This isn’t always a pleasant experience, for the artist or the viewer. Rachel Hecker’s journeys of the last nine months–both the personal and the artistic ones–have not been pleasant, but they have been productive.

"Suffering is humbling, because it connects you to every other living being. And humility breaks the spell of self-involvement and that in turn provides a way out of your own sense of loss."

So on the way out of her own feelings of loss, Rachel Hecker, artist, teacher, and friend of mine, shares, through her paintings, her own suffering, which has made her feel–you got it–sad and pissed. And how does she move out of sad and pissed, and on to what’s going to happen next in her life?

"I say yes a lot, even when I don’t want to. Yes makes me get out of my own skin. And teaching does the same thing, because to do it well you can’t be self-focused. I learn a lot about life from my students."

And what about love? Is it changed for her in one of those fundamental ways we talked about?

Rachel smiles again. It’s a sad smile, no doubt, but not pissed.

"I’m still a romantic at heart," she starts, and then replies to my surprised look, "I am, really. I still love love, and being in love. I just can’t see it happening for me. But then again, we never see the big things coming, do we?" Rachel Hecker grins at me again. "Hey, there’s your irony."

"Sad and Pissed," a one-woman art show of works by Rachel Hecker will be showing Feb. 1—28 at the Texas Gallery, 2109 Peden, 713/524-1593. A reception will be held Thursday, Feb. 14, 6—8 p.m.

Lauren Johnson and her partner Sharon Ferranti start shooting the lesbian horror script Make a Wish in March 2002, which they hope will be a less horrifying experience than the film’s contract negotiations. In addition to contributing to local and national magazines, Lauren is the director of communications for a large public pension plan in Houston.