Clayton and I drew architectural plans for a house that we built ourselves on six acres in Joy Woods, north of San Francisco. During the day I taught the children of hippies and discussed Gurdjieff in makeshift tents at the Wheeler Ranch, a nearby commune. At night, I sat by our wood-burning stove reading the biographies of artists such as Van Gogh and Gauguin.
I had married someone who provided me with an alternative to the middle-class values of my upbringing. But I wasn’t satisfied. Even with this remarkable young man, marriage was not for me. I wanted to be free. I learned from these biographies that being an artist meant living without the constraints of a regular job; and sometimes without the constraints of a regular relationship. The question was what kind of artist I would be.
I had written some poetry. I tried ceramics and sculpture. Nothing was right. Then I saw a poster reproducing something called “expanded painting.” The piece was very sensual and not too subtle: its painted Styrofoam rose up like a giant mushroom out of a base of wood shavings. The artist was William Morehouse. I decided to serve as an apprentice to him.
Bill announced in the first painting class that our model would be a woman on a motorcycle. That blew my mind. I stretched a canvas as large as life, and I put myself as close to her as possible. I was so excited to be standing right next to a woman on a motorcycle that I painted her with six arms and six legs. I had never heard of Duchamp.
Bill took me aside. We sat on the floor with our backs to the radiator as the other students worked at their easels. He told me how difficult it was to be a painter, that one had to make a thousand paintings before even arriving at a personal style. He told me that to be an artist was like living in a dark hole all alone. I shuddered at the thought of the isolation, but felt inspired by his confidence in me. The following week I commandeered an empty classroom one flight below the painting studio. I tacked a long roll of three-foot-wide butcher paper to one end of the room, and proceeded to unfurl it and tack it on all the walls around the room. Here was my dark hole. Here I would stay until I’d found my way, my stroke, my handwriting. Bill was a secondgeneration abstract expressionist, and I was filled with his talk of the artist’s unique individual gesture.
I saw myself at the heart of a drama. This allowed me to make my own story. I took acrylic paintbrushes loaded with color and swept around the room making marks. The forms were triangles, circles, and squares. I hadn’t heard of Cézanne but I was sure I had found my visual language, was proud of my independent move away from the class, and surprised at the imagery. Bill told me that both my movement around the room and the numerous arms and legs I had painted on the motorcycle woman showed more concern with motion than with paint on canvas. He brought an old 16 mm projector and some clear 16 mm film leader into class and suggested that I paint on it. I not only painted on the film, but I also projected this film onto the canvas. I painted with florescent colors and wired a black light to go on and off to make the colors move.
Then I got my first movie camera. It was a Super 8 mm motor-driven Bolex with a zoom lens. I was on my own motorcycle driving to Sonoma State to take a real class in filmmaking when I saw an old deserted shack with broken windows covered in red ivy. The site enchanted me. I parked my bike and went inside the creaky door. Looking through the cobwebs and dusty windows at the colorful ivy leaves outside thrilled me, and when I placed a bifocal lens an optomotrist had given me in front of the camera lens, adding movement, I knew what I wanted to do.
With the split lens I saw the image double. It perfectly fit my feelings of being a woman living in a man’s world. I ran outside on the sidewalk in the tiny town of Bodega filming my shadow until I saw a chair in the viewfinder. I slipped the bifocal in front of the camera lens and split the chair in two. I was filming the sidewalk again until I saw a man’s shoes in the frame. I climbed on a raised platform behind the man and shot him from above his head as he sat in the chair. I asked him to put a mirror between his feet, zoomed into the mirror filming his face, then I cut to my own. I was literally a woman living in a man’s world.
The projected work was larger than any painting I had made. I liked the fact that the audience could not walk as quickly by my film as they could a painting. Schizy (1968), my first film, won honorable mention in the Sonoma State Super 8 Film Festival. I was on my way! I left the confines of my marriage and moved to Berkeley.
In a few months I was running out of money and got a job teaching English at Santa Rosa Junior College. The sociology professor was teaching a class on women’s liberation and, when it didn’t interfere with my duties, I sat in. When the semester ended, a group of us from the class began the Santa Rosa Women’s Liberation Front. We met at my apartment across the street from the school. There, at the first meeting, Diane announced that she was gay. I immediately got interested. Not in Diane, but in her mysterious lover who would not come to meetings.
I had no anxieties about following my desire. Though I hadn’t consciously harbored lesbian feelings in the past, they emerged at this moment, and I was eager to act on them.
I met Marie, who became my first girlfriend. We traveled around Africa on motorcycles and taught in a German high school. After two years, we flew back to the States and drove from DC to California on our BMW bikes. I had a 750cc white 1972 with an Expedition-sized gas tank and she a 1971 650cc black one.
My mother never liked my girlfriend and she ignored her. My parents had divorced a few months after I had married. Mom told me they had agreed to stay together until I had matured, thinking that was best for me. I said it wasn’t, that I knew they were terribly unhappy and they should have separated long ago. My father had a drinking problem, and although I appreciated his humor and outgoing personality, I was deeply affected by his abuse of alcohol.
After their divorce, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. Despite our differences, I felt very close to her, and her illness had an enormous impact on me. I thought she would be distressed by my coming out, and I was sure she would disapprove. In an effort to protect her, I lied about being a lesbian. Of course, she knew anyway. To this day, I regret that I didn’t come out to her and deal with our feelings openly.
In January 1973, my mother died by her own hand or cancer (a question that will never be answered), ending for me terrible worry and concern for a woman I both loved and feared. I had spent three and a half days living in her Los Angeles apartment with my grandmother and sister during the coma from which she would never awaken.
Her body was cremated and I scattered her ashes over the Pacific Ocean. The consolation of her friends and the closing of her affairs busied my mind as I continued to live in her nearly vacated apartment. Finally, things were settling and I found an evening free to attend a woman’s gallery opening and to begin a new life for myself.
John, Barbara, Marian, and Marcia Hammer, Christmas, circa 1944.
We were the typical nuclear family. My mother wanted me to be a film star. She gave me all the lessons: tap, ballet, drama, elocution. We didn’t have money for professional acting school so I took neighborhood classes. During the Depression my father found a job managing a gas station and then he became a public accountant. He met my mom on a blind date at the University of Illinois, where they were both enrolled. My sister Marcia Lou was born three years after me so I was probably five when this photo was taken.
BH practicing ping pong, 1953.
What a look! I imagine it’s my father casting the photographer’s shadow. He liked to tease me. I won sixth place in the Los Angeles City ping pong play-offs that year.