Rebekah's animated hand impression

Every year I look forward to the fall opening of the Visual Arts Center at Davidson College. It’s the occasion of the faculty show, and a lot of fun, seeing old friends and new art.  It’s a last vivid summer art memory before the chill of fall sets in.  Tonight was appropriately sultry and rich.  http://www3.davidson.edu/cms/x25463.xml

RebekahTolley is new to the faculty and was exhibiting tonight.  She is a printmaker who is concerned with exploration.  I was privileged to hear her very brief but evocative talk.  In just a few minutes she managed to spark my imagination in a dozen ways.  She touched on the idea that printmakers today seldom make editions, being less inclined to quality control and consistency than to experimentation.  Also touching on the role of the found object in her work, she showed a piece of worm-infested wood she had rolled up with ink and layered over an image of her hands.  The key word she played with in the talk was “impression”.  One piece recorded a crab’s shell– “the impression the crab has left of itself”,  just as prints are referred to as “impressions”.  Rebekah also talked about her use of morphing software to create  progression, taking her images in the direction of animation.  I was particularly taken by an elegant piece with moving hands.

Cristina Toro, who lives in upstate New York, was showing her new paintings in the smaller gallery.  Cristina is a friend, and I knew her work would be wonderful, but I wasn’t prepared for how wonderful it would be. Turning into the gallery felt like walking into a jewel box or a sultan’s tent.   Like everyone in my family, she is fascinated by pattern, and her work is a combination of the balancing of bright, but modulated colored boxes, on which appear fanciful figures.  There is dancing rhythm, humor, intimacy, narrative, all rendered in fields of flat color covered  with pattern …  Persian miniatures writ large.  There were passages that might have been whole paintings, but instead they rested in the midst of a crazy quilt picnic blanket laid for a feast.  It was the Coat of Many Colors.  It dazzled.  Best of all, it exposed something of the life and times of Cristina.  It felt like a heart-to-heart talk, like reading her journal.

detail from a painting by Cristina

Stewart's last Saturday clerking at the store

One week from today my last son will leave home for college.  For the first time in 29 years there will be no children in this house.  Naturally inside me there is confusion about whether I’m bereft or ecstatic.  I’m ecstatic, literally, in the sense that I consider and anticipate what spiritual truths will come to fill me.  When the presence of all the boys I’ve loved with all my heart is removed what will take their places?   Instead of them I will invite “the universe” as people call it these days, to fill that empty space with something powerful.

It’s 4 a.m and I can’t sleep because lying in my bed I’m beginning to make this piece of work– a chronicle of the last week of the last child in the house.  I’m going to photograph the ordinary bits of life, the movements through these days.  And I’m going to write about them.  And that will be, I believe, the most  deeply felt piece of art I have made in a long time.  What is art other than a mirror, a magnifying glass, a kaleidoscope?  Beyond this week  I will begin another piece– the pulling together and imagining of the rest of my life.

Stewart's been working in the fields and behind the counter of the Bradford Store since he was 14.

Bonnard interior, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Where to begin writing about five days of looking at art and being with people  I love in New York!  It was such an overwhelming experience I can only think in terms of lists.  With Gordon I visited the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum and MOMA.  With my stepbrother, John, I visited Chelsea galleries.  By myself I went to the Met and some SOHO galleries.  We balanced all the art with lovely walks in wonderful outdoor spaces.  Gordon and I started one morning with a long walk through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, lingering in the Japanese garden,  and by the lotuses and waterlilies.  John gave me a fascinating tour of  Central Park on foot.  And, after dark one night, he shared with me the new elevated park built on a former train track only a block or so from his home.  The sky was huge, the moon was full, and the wild grasses and simple wildflowers beside our feet were softly illuminated.  The only word for it was magical.

So, out of all that art, what leaps to mind when I think back over my trip?  This afternoon, once off the plane, I took a nap and dreamed about a tapestry in peaches and blues, heavily patterned, serene, reassuring.  It represented, I think, some kind of amalgam of all those visual experiences and their emotional and psychological weight.  I think it represents not only the art hung in the towering rooms of these great museums, but also the complex weaving of thousands of faces in the subway and park and on the streets– of every nationality, color and mode of dress.  It made me smile over and over to observe people strike up a conversation between subway stops– the Muslim explaining his religion to the Puerto Rican couple, who showed him the tee shirts they’d just bought, the Hispanic girls who worked so hard to understand my questions and help me find my way, the young medical students talking about their particular cadavers, the smooth, perfectly groomed elderly man, in red shoes and hat, proud of the baby clothes he’d just bought to give as a gift.  The dream tapestry’s pattern was probably inspired, at least a bit, by the Bonnards and Vuillards I saw hanging together in the Met.  The peachy tones were probably from the terra cotta sculptures I saw, and studied for inspiration.

Roxy Paine, roof garden sculpture, Metropolitan Museum of Art

John told me to be sure to go up to the Met’s roof garden to enjoy the sculpture by Roxy Paine, installed across an area probably 40′x25′.  It was a series of limbs made of stainless steel, glistening in the sun, pointing the way for us to look, in the same way I use tree limbs in my work, and casting bold shadows on the floor and on the viewers.

Some large retrospective gestures that were supposed to excite the viewer, instead bored me.  I’ve seen this work in many museums, and on magazine covers, but it does not speak to me as it speaks to the curators.  I was mesmerized, however, by the installation at MOMA of the saved objects that made up the worldly possessions of one Chinese woman.  The piece was conceived of and created by Song Dong and his mother, as an act of healing in the aftermath of her husband’s death.  The poignancy of her story, and the tattered, exhausted nature of the things she had saved all her life added up to something real and compelling. I still see the tapestry of empty plastic soda bottles, capped in various colors, displayed together in the shadow of the remains of the framing of her original home, beside every shoe she had ever owned, and every toothbrush.  It had elements of everyone’s secret closet.

Interestingly, I saw the newly discovered “first” painting by Michelangelo.  It was on loan to the Met from the Kimbrell in Ft Worth, and was a small painting on panel, based on a popular etching of the time.