LINEA: Artist Snapshot: Jill Nathanson
November 16, 2019 - Stephanie Cassidy for the Art Students League, New York
Artist Snapshot: Jill Nathanson
Exploring the mind and habits of an artist in twenty-five questions
At what age did you decide to become an artist?
When I was a tiny girl I loved horses, pretending I was a horse and also drawing horses. When I first started kindergarten, my horse drawing skill was rewarded: I was honored with the position of glue monitor. I had heard of horses being killed and sent to the glue factory, so I was nervous about a possible connection. I thought of myself as an artist in some way from that early time.
How did your parents react when you told them you anted to become an artist?
My mother was enthusiastic. She was a classical pianist with the highest level of training but a truncated career. She liked the idea of me being an artist even if she didn’t have a clear sense of what that might really mean, and I guess my father didn’t think much about his little girl’s future in terms of career in any case. From my earliest days I heard my mother practicing the classical repertoire without explanations, so I assumed she was making up the music as she went along — creating the great piano works of Chopin, Beethoven, Schumann. Why did she make the song go in that way. Why did the nice calm part become the loud stormy part? When I was a teen, my mother wanted me to go to Bennington College because that was where Helen Frankenthaler, a famous woman artist, had gone. So I went to Bennington early, after my junior year at the High School of Music and Art (now known as LaGuardia High School), thinking of myself as a professional from the start, knowing next to nothing. Bennington College, a key site of American modernism in the 1970s, was very good for me.