Artist and craftswoman CONSTANCE von BRIESEN (1915–2000) lived for nearly 50 years in Southern California, making her home in Rustic Canyon. In her watercolors, drawings, and paintings, von Briesen offers an exquisite close-up view of the California terrain, capturing creeks, root systems, bare trees, and drought-stricken desert.
In this interview, exhibition curator and Weisman Museum director Andrea Gyorody speaks with von Briesen’s surviving children—Linda Fates, Constance (Connie) von Briesen, Jr. (’77), Derek von Briesen, and Jill Walsh—about their mother’s life and work on the occasion of her first solo museum exhibition.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
AG: Thank you all for joining me to talk about your late mother, Constance von Briesen, on the occasion of her solo exhibition at the Weisman. After everything you’ve shared with me already, I wish I had known her. What do you most fondly remember?
CONNIE: She taught me sewing from the time I was little. My first chore was pinning. She would lay out the pattern, and I would pin. By the time I was 12 or 14, I was confident on the sewing machine and could sew anything from coats to bathing suits and felt fully confident. Her craft was infinite, whether it was dressmaking, knitting, or needlepoint. Her mother, our grandmother, has a needlepoint hanging in the National Cathedral in Washington. She was that good. For Judy Chicago’s iconic Dinner Party installation, she co-led the fabric department, historically researching and helping Judy with choices about who to depict, but also historically what stitches were known and utilized in the period. It was an immense effort for these runners that dressed the table upon which Judy’s plates would be placed.
DEREK: Her original needlepoint sensibilities and contributions really changed the way that Judy Chicago went about constructing that show because initially, it was all her ceramics, her vaginal motif ceramics. With Mom’s early contributions, the runners became a hugely important part of the storytelling. She recognized that the ceramics only went so far and that the story of the various women could be told and expanded upon by making the runners a really important part of the installation.
AG: Flipping through the Dinner Party catalogue, it’s remarkable how many times von Briesen is mentioned. She played a truly integral role in that project.
DEREK: Oh, absolutely. It was funny because she was probably 30 years older than all of the young, very progressive, very rainbow-orientation women that were involved in this collective. If Mom had lived, she would’ve finally voted for Al Gore in the year 2000. She had never voted for a Democrat ever. She had a wonderful sensibility, but she was just branded a Republican in her family. I think she voted for FDR at some point, and that was the last time she voted for a Democrat. The point being that she was 30 years older and of a completely different political persuasion. Certainly, those people would’ve been children of the ‘60s and very much influenced by that emergence. She loved it. They came to look at her as this incredibly talented village tribal elder.
CONNIE: She sculpted in clay, she carved in wood, she painted. Most importantly what I think she gave me was that sense of “you can do it,” a can-do attitude. She was also incredibly well read. She lived to 86 and never lost a single brain cell. She was always vibrant, totally up on current affairs, and a very intelligent woman.
SHE SCULPTED IN CLAY , SHE CARVED IN WOOD , SHE PAINTED .
MOST IMPORTANTLY WHAT I THINK SHE GAVE ME WAS THAT SENSE OF “YOU CAN DO IT,” A CAN-DO ATTITUDE.
JILL: She also had a flair for understanding how things worked. She had an almost mechanical, analytical engineering mind from her father. Her own mother was a phenomenal woman with a needle as well.
LINDA: She liked a challenge, and perhaps when she’d mastered something that she hadn’t tried before, once she’d mastered it, she wanted to move on to the next thing. Now in my old age, I think I have a better appreciation for what must have been a really committed, driven mindset to her art that she couldn’t put it down. It was something she had to do. I can understand that it took precedence over a lot of other stuff. I don’t know whether that’s a fair comment or not, but it’s not said as a criticism. It is said much more as a better understanding and a kind of admiration and certainly respect.
DEREK: She would say to me at 5:30 in the afternoon, when I found her in her robe, not having eaten, still working, “I just came in to do a little dab.” Of course, this was six hours later, and she hasn’t eaten, and she’s still in her robe, and the day is starting to end, and it just always cracked me up. The funny thing is, I do the same thing all the time. I come downstairs, and I’ll go into my office studio, digital dark room, and I’ll just start working on something. Six hours later I will have not eaten, I’m still in the robe, and I need a shower. It’s right out of Mom’s workflow, her school of thought. It always just amazed me. It’s a very emblematic story about how she used to work. She just went into that other world.
AG: She was so wonderfully multitalented. I know she had some formal art training, and I’m curious to hear more about her time at the Art Students League and her life in New York.
JILL: I was born after she’d attended the Arts Students League. When I was 10 or 11, she decided she wanted to learn, I don’t know whether it was ceramics, but she went up to Woodstock, New York. There was an art community there. She worked with a group of artists, and that was very stimulating in the ’50s.
LINDA: She went to Sarah Lawrence College for two years. Back in the day when she was there, it was a two-year college with an invitation to certain students to return for a third and fourth year. She only went for two years, but she told me that she was invited, which was considered quite an honor, to stay for the full four years.
AG: After Sarah Lawrence, she was married and living on Long Island with three children—Jill, John, and Linda—before she moved to California with her eventual second husband, and had twins Connie Jr. and Derek. What motivated such a bold life change?
CONNIE: At a certain point, she felt she didn’t fit any longer in the life she lived on Long Island. She had more to explore—the calling of an artist. She wanted to be outside the box of expectations and move to California, where things were a little bit more free, maybe a little more liberal.
JILL: She fell in love with a local man who was a friend of the family’s, who I think had similar frustrations. Together, they saw their future in California or at least leaving Long Island. They moved to Southern California because Fritz had a job, I think, with a magazine.
They’d set up the housekeeping and bought a house in California, in Los Angeles, in Laurel Canyon first, and then Beverly Hills, and then Rustic Canyon. It was Connie’s dad who, I think, set his sights on moving to California. The interesting thing is that Mom’s grandmother lived at the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, believe it or not. That part of the family had discovered Southern California as an oasis in the middle of winter because the Matthiessen family from Illinois, at that point, needed a watering hole and the warmth. They came to Pasadena, and Mary Eda Matthiessen, her grandmother, had a cottage on the grounds of the Huntington Hotel. I know Mom would go and visit her there. Linda, you probably don’t remember much.
LINDA: No. You think about the era, though. It was the early ’50s. California was the land of promise, new beginnings, and opportunity. Opportunity maybe is the way to think about it. Connie, what you said really captured perfectly what my understanding had always been, that she just did not see herself in the prescribed environment of North Shore Long Island—cocktail parties, school mother, and carpool driving, traditional stuff. She was ahead of her time in some ways, bucking against all the norms.
AG: Where did she develop a passion and proficiency for landscape painting?
JILL: It came about here [in California]. She was a very good photographer as well and had a Leica camera. She had already established this amazing eye. That was the medium that was convenient. She didn’t paint plein air all that much. She would go and capture and then paint.
CONNIE: Mom would sometimes accompany me on trail rides with my horse. She would walk alongside with her trusty camera taking pictures. Many images from Serra Retreat, Malibu Creek, Bonsall Canyon. It’s true that she rarely painted en plein air, preferring to capture her subject material with photographs where she could return home and work at a more leisurely pace.
DEREK: She was a very ardent early adopter of Polaroids, the Polaroid Land Camera, the instant-developed Polaroid Land Camera.
She had a couple of different Minolta 35 mms. I don’t know that she was ever highly versant in photographic craft. Basically, she was just going out and shooting the things that she wanted to take back and paint. She had a wonderful eye, obviously, because that’s what became the model for her paintings. I was along on a lot of those excursions, what we used to call “photo safaris.” They were really fun. I remember one trip up to Sequoia Kings Canyon that was just incredible. It was pure adventure going to national parks, just me and Mom. Then coming back and seeing those photos become paintings was really something else. Later in life, when she stopped going out herself, she painted from a vast collection of landscape photography coffee-table books, and a lot of photography that she would scroll through and find stuff she wanted to work from. Also, she had a whole lot of stuff on the early 1900s California landscape school, which was so important.
AG: When von Briesen was photographing in nature, what was your sense of what she was seeking or prioritizing?
CONNIE: Primarily composition and color. She loved what she called “difficult colors.” Anybody can paint green and blue, but she loved complicated colors. I think to render soft colors well and still make it exciting to the viewer, you need to be very adept with your paint.
JILL: Would you say perhaps it’s as though she was seeing sculpture in nature?
CONNIE: Oh yes. Composition was always a part of her eye, whether it’s dressing a table or putting an ensemble together to wear. Things have to be compositionally in balance. She would sit us down after a day’s work and say, “Tell me about this painting. What do you see?” She taught us about composition and perspective and dividing the canvas and the use of negative space.
DEREK: I’m like her in my photographic pursuits. I don’t think she was looking for anything specific. She would just put herself into a really beautiful place, like Sequoia Kings Canyon. When she saw it, she knew it. She would shoot the pictures and come back.
ANYBODY CAN PAINT GREEN AND BLUE, BUT SHE LOVED COMPLICATED COLORS .
It was never a tripod thing, it was always handheld. Maybe she had something specific in mind, maybe I was too young to ask her, but she shot a variety of things.
She would shoot close-ups of trees and roots, and then she would sit back and shoot the Merced River with reflective pools or ripples and flows and rocks and trees surrounding. I never really saw anything that would have been canonical. The way that landscape photographers emulated Ansel Adams, who set the template and prototype—she never shot that kind of stuff. She loved things more off the beaten path.
I’m proud to say, quite a bit of what she painted in that series from the Santa Monica Mountains came from photographs that I took. She would hand me her Minolta because I was mountain biking and hiking and getting all around. I mountain-biked from Point Mugu all the way to the Hollywood Hills in the Santa Monica Mountains. There are trails that run the whole length of it and I was super into it. I was in and around places that were incredibly beautiful. She just put it on auto and I actually didn’t have a clue. I didn’t pursue the craft until I got my first digital camera. As I often say at talks to photo groups, I didn’t know the difference between a pixel and an aperture. I just had this compositional sense and this eye for light that was basically innate.
But so much of it came from Mom. I remember at one point I had a couple of Mom’s pieces on the walls, and I went in and realized, “Oh my God. Look at that. It’s like direct descendants.” The use of strong diagonals and curved, foreground-to-background compositional motifs and framing elements with ovals. So many of the things that Mom used to do were things that [I was doing], but I didn’t notice it until maybe five or six years into my development as a photographer. I had this head-smack moment, a light bulb. Because I was never doing it consciously. I just realized how much of my mom’s compositional style had become my compositional style.
SHE LOVED THINGS MORE OFF THE BEATEN PATH .
JILL: Can I add another thing that I think occurred to Mom? She started to see problems in—it wasn’t the term “climate effect,” but the oil industry wanted to establish rigs out in the ocean along the Pacific coast. She was very much against this. She saw pollution as an enemy. Several of her paintings championed this.
There was one of an oil drum in a creek, which Derek now owns, showing the pollution from the leaking oil drum. The trees, the flowers, she saw how valuable they were in the landscape.
CONNIE: What was odd is that it was also beautiful. The ugliness still had compositional beauty, a soft palette of colors. The scene is ugly, but there’s still beauty in the painting. While we’re on that subject, a lot of times people would say, “Well, Southern California is so drab.” Unless it’s spring and you have a super bloom, there’s nothing to see here. Oh, yes, it may look gray, but to an artist gray is pink, and gray is blue, and gray is—there are many colors to create that gray. She taught us to see that.
AG: Von Briesen exhibited locally in her lifetime, but she never broke into the mainstream, never had a museum exhibition until now. Why do you think that is?
LINDA: It always puzzled me. Her work, I thought, was so good and she was prolific, but it didn’t seem that she put any effort into trying to sell her work. Maybe it was a shyness, maybe it was a sense of not wanting people to turn it down. I think she was thrilled, delighted to be invited to participate in shows.
DEREK: It almost always was just for her, it was her heart’s content. It’s what she loved. One of the interesting things is that basically everything that Mom did was related to art. Whether it was creating her own original needlepoint work, which of course ultimately made her such an important part of The Dinner Party because she never did needlepoint from patterns or preconceived stuff. She drew it and then she did it herself and she invented all kinds of different stitches, and it was always original. We had a hillside behind our house that she painted with flowers.
It was like a van Gogh impressionist [painting] of flowers on the back hill. If she saw a huge root in Oregon, she put it on top of her car and brought it home, and then spent months and months and months making it into a piece of art. She did amazing collages, mixedmedia collages. She started in watercolor and eventually moved into her preferred medium, which was acrylic oil. She basically just saw everything in terms of art.
BASICALLY EVERYTHING THAT MOM DID WAS RELATED TO ART
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AG: What do you think people might—or ought to—take away from seeing von Briesen’s work today?
CONNIE: Be aware of your environment. See the beauty in any kind of a scape. Look a little deeper, maybe. There’s beauty there even though it may seem boring, but once you start to try to figure out how to render boring, it’s not so boring.
JILL: Also, honor your voice, honor your instincts and talents, and do it over and over and over again. I’m happy for this occasion because we knew she was talented. It’s touched my heart that this is happening.
