Chicken Coop Series #3

Last night I had three dreams about houses.  This is not uncommon.  I often dream about structures and cubic spaces and the things that go on in them.  One of my dreams was oppressive.  In another my mother appeared and I asked her for advice.  The last one delighted me so much that I was still flashing back to it over breakfast.  In it  I was standing in a room, looking through a big square window at the glint off the water and the trees outside, when the view began to move, and I realized it was a floating house,  floating away.  It left me with a great sense of freedom and adventure.

Lots of my time is occupied with buildings and rooms.  For much of my adult life I’ve been rehabbing my farmhouse. Lately I’ve been deconstructing my chicken coop and smokehouse, both of which had begun to droop and sag like giant organic forms.  Rather than have them knocked down by a bulldozer I, my sons, and our helper have been taking them apart board by board.   En route to the dump I began to recognize beauty in bits and pieces of the scrap.  I found little archeological fragments in the dirt of the foundations—bits of my grandmother’s everyday china, early pottery shards, toys my children dropped, hardware from jobs their father had tackled. This so intrigued me that I set up a screen for sifting the soil in order to capture what might be hiding there.

Concurrently I was teaching my Intro to Sculpture students about the trash collages of Kurt Schwitters in the years between the wars.  I recalled for them my first live exposure to one of his pieces.  I described for them how, at the Tate Modern,  I was surrounded by Rothkos and huge Pollocks.  A Water Lily hung there, and many other great iconic works, but what riveted me were the tiny playing card sized collages of Schwitters.  They were indescribably elegant.  Their composition locked together with complete certainty.   I still recall the surface texture and subtle coloration of those pieces. It finally occurred to me that I should allow myself to be inspired by Schwitter’s example and create some assemblages using my bits and pieces, charged as they were with their layers of meaning and history.  Thus was born the Chicken Coop Series.

For me, the sculpting experience is a bit like standing in a room that one suddenly realizes is moving—shifting from the 2-D work I’m so accustomed to, and into this formal exploration of three dimensionality.  It’s loaded with adventure.  I labored for days over the arrangement of the first piece, then more quickly put together the second and third and fourth.  When I set them up to study them, the weakest was that first tentative effort.  As I go forward they become more aggressive with space, and I hope, lock together in relationships that seem meant to be.

Best of all I like that some fragment of the past utility and dailiness of those two old structures is brought forward into the utility and dailiness of the life of the farm today.  The farm is no longer a place where hams are smoked and chickens are laying.  Instead, it is a place where art hovers always a bit above our heads, or lurks buried in the soil, or shows up in time for talk around the dinner table, or stands with us as a comfort  in times of confusion and loss.  When Stewart was about five he made a drawing for me.  It was of a boat, rocking on the ocean.  High up on its mast it flew a flag that said “Art Home”.

Christmas Morning

Several faithful readers have asked why I’ve grown silent lately.  Very unexpectedly my mother died, on January 3.  We found her at the end of a busy Monday when she didn’t answer her phone.  She had apparently died early in the morning, or in the night before.  The week before she had canceled her plans to drive her convertible six hours to her beach place because she was too busy throwing two cocktail parties back-to-back.  A couple of weeks later she planned to cruise to Belize.  But instead she was suddenly swept away from us all.

My brother and I sat with her body for a long time.  I was glad for the chance to hold her beautiful hands one more time.  This experience has silenced me.  I have lost my balance.  No need to write from such a place.  There is both too much to say and nothing to say.  But, to move forward, I will try to say a little.

First, in tribute to that brilliant spirit, none of us can separate her in memory from her hearty laugh.    Second, it fell into place as she would have wished it– a swift exit without a long stay in some holding cell of aging.   Third, of all the things she passed down to us, nothing is more precious than the closeness and caring she fostered between my brother and me, and her lesson of eternal optimism.  No matter how bitterly we whined about our fates, we’d always be reminded of our  good fortune in the great scheme of things, and the crushing misfortunes of  many others.

A few weeks before Mom died, my niece Sally gave birth to her third son, Zimmer.  Mama, never one to bother with babies, took special note and went to visit him, declaring him “beautiful”.  She even spent a long hour Christmas morning rocking him to sleep.

When I cleaned out the convertible I found a  book: Being Dead is No Excuse.  I had to laugh, standing there beside the car.  I rushed to read it.  It was a written in a  distinctly recognizable southern voice, about death rituals in the deep south.  My mother could have written it.  It was so full of things she had passed on to me:  southern taste, manners, priorities and peculiarities.  The irony and fun of it cracked me up.  I credit Mama with the sense of humor to leave that behind.

In some junk shop a decade ago she’d found a brass plaque intended for a coffin, engraved in gothic letters with the phrase “she hath done what she could”.  She hung it over the front door.   That was her mantra.  I think she hath done a whole lot more.  The rest is currently inexpressible.

For the first time since I was a teenager I went, on the second Sunday in Advent, to Vespers at Davidson College.  I had forgotten how splendid an event  it is.  The Davidson College Chorale, Brass Ensemble and String Ensemble as well as the organist, offered a beautifully constructed musical service that ranged across centuries.  It was as spectacular an art experience as I have had in a long time.

The harmonies in the musical invocation “Oh Come All Ye Faithful, both orchestral and choral, were  ecstatic.  The service started on that kind of edge , where we glimpse the enormity of our human experience. Just remembering the power of those voices in that huge space draws me into a sacred space.  It makes me think that if we can bless ourselves in this way, then the small things, and even some of the big ones, that torment us are unimportant, dwarfed as they are by our huge seeking spirits.

The final anthem was composed by Jennifer Stasack, of Davidson’s music faculty.  It began as one might expect.  The chorale’s voices joined, but quickly deconstructed into individuated parts.  The many voices pulling apart from the whole reconnected to create a woven three-dimensional experience.  I was keenly aware of each piece of its warp and woof, and surprised by my sense of its materiality.  Later in the week I heard an artist discussing the concept of a sound sculpture.  That struck me as an apt description of what I had heard in Jennifer’s evocative, haunting, woven piece.

Strange to think that on the main street of a small southern town on a December evening an experience of such enormity was given to me, and anyone else who took the time to take a seat and listen.

There’s something about the Whitney that makes it my favorite museum in New York City.  Maybe I should credit the curators.  Every time I go there I see something I can’t forget.  I have some wonderful Whitney memories.  Maybe it’s that the size is just right and the organization is so clear.  I always take the stairs at the Whitney because I’m in love with the stairwell.  It’s heavily textured concrete that looks like it’s a product of rough week during the Ice Age.  That texture is combined with areas of smooth worn slate .  There is bronze colored metalwork , and a warm mahogany handrail.  The lighting is low and emphasizes the textures.  On at least one landing there’s a bench where you can rest  that looks vaguely oriental.

Once past the stairwell on this visit,  I found three floors of shows that fascinated me.  First flight up: Edward Hopper.  I am old enough to remember when parts of America still looked like that. Like my own paintings, Hopper’s are sparsely populated, if at all.  I like the loneliness of them, and the long shadows that wrap around forms.  I like that his paintings tell the story of a long love affair with his wife.  The work seems of a piece with the life he lived.

The second flight up was a show by Charles LeDray  called workworkworkworkwork. I can relate to that title.  Our family is riddled with people who love to work.  Especially the kind of hands-on crafted work this show evidenced.  It was a series of installations which included miniaturized clothing in miniaturized displays, as in a store, or miniature clothes used to make statements about identity.  A favorite was a blue collar workman’s jacket, with the name stitched on a label–” Charles”– the artist’s name, and inside dozens of tiny garments  hanging  from it by a thread.

There were vitrines of hundreds of tiny turned vessels.  I found myself absorbed by the infinite variety of them.  One vitrine had all white vessels, another all black and a third had vases in every color.

The most fascinating miniature work was made from bone.  The carving was stunning, even when some parts were the size of a human hair.  There was a tiny door with hinges, lying on its face, not much bigger than a playing card.  The bone had a beautiful warmth and grain, and the carving was masterful.

Next floor up, the mystical work of Paul Thek.  The Whitney has organized the first retrospective of Thek’s work in the United States.  Thek was not easily pigeonholed into the movements of his time .  Interestingly, he was a master draftsman, and I enjoyed his sketchbooks immensely.  He is important for his influence on the artists who came after him– most obviously Damien Hirst.  Thek created visceral pieces of meat from wax and paint, and placed them in plexiglass boxes.  He also created casts of his own body, and body parts, in wax and other materials which became musings on our physicality.  I was drawn especially to a hand, eerie in its verisimilitude, but decoratively bearing an abstract painting over much of its surface.  Hand as canvas.

The show was titled “Diver, A Retrospective”, referencing an image Thek painted of a nude male figure diving into water.  It was one of many paintings done with ephemeral materials like newspaper and tempera.  The diver seems to represent all of us as we screw up our courage to dive into the unknown stuff of life, and art.  This painting’s image was further explored in a cast figure created from Thek’s own body, around which fabric fish seemed to swim– their trajectory matching the diving figure’s.

In the Whitney, winding through the rooms, I would occasionally run across one of my sons, lost in their own thoughts.  We would blurt out to one another what we’d discovered, or go back to look at something the other recommended.  Maybe that’s why I love the Whitney.  It’s loaded not only with extraordinary art, but with great memories of shared experience.

On Saturday I met my dear friend, Cait, for a couple of hours, to catch up and share an art experience on my short trek to New York.  Fortunately, I asked her to choose the venue, so in the cold wind I walked unknowingly toward amazement.   Chilled by our early morning walk, we found a cozy Cuban restaurant to stop in for cocoa and coffee.  Tucked in among the several murals of tropical Cuba, and with a view from the bar of the yucca, plantains and yellow rice being prepared,  the  conversation flowed.  Once in a while, when hanging out with someone, I will realize how happy I am, and how much fun I’m having.  Hanging out with Cait is like that.  I could have sat in that steamy place enjoying her for hours.  But we pressed on to Gagosian.

I had just seen a large Kiefer canvas the day before at the Met, and many times before in various art publications, but until I saw the Gagosian exhibition I didn’t understand the full  range of his work.  The scale was overwhelming.  The canvases were about 12 feet tall, and 20 feet, or so, wide.  They were stark landscapes, but served , also, as environments.  They were colder than the November wind outside, covered as they were in snow .  The work evoked the Halocaust in a hundred compelling ways, not the least of which was its sensitive command of  mood.

The palette of the entire room was restrained– white, dulled metals, browns.  One painting was so fiercely textured that it represented the Alps with uncanny accuracy. It was, in fact, more a sculpture made of paint and canvas than a painting.   Huge vitrines filled the gallery center, made of patinated steel and glass,  as tall as the paintings.  They enclosed assemblages and constructions on several threads of the theme.   In a few, clothing functioned as metaphor for humankind.  One held a stiffened evening gown, white, with a hundred large shards of glass piercing the skirt.  We laughed ruefully to think that most women wear that ballgown  at least once  in their lives.

Some of the vitrines evoked warfare, like one with forms reminiscent of submarines, suspended by long wires at various depths.  Many referenced nature in a charred, dried or deadened state.  The installation  cast a spell by virtue of its arrangement and the density and variety of the images.  I was in a space, far back in time, when it was cold and devastation was all around me.  Only the vestiges of humanity remained.  It was silent, frozen, brittle, and echoing.  It was attenuated and delicate, towering and haunted, like a dreamscape that had been once long ago been reality.

10-10-10 It’s 8:15 a.m. and I’m facing east, sitting on the beach.  The beach is completely serene and satiny in this light.   The sound of waves as they dissipate has a long sheen to it as well.  The beach has few people, no clutter of human furnishings– just pelicans on their long horizontal flight path. That’s what I love about this beach– the depth and wideness of it, and the emptiness.  So, in words I save this moment, sewing it into a bag I will carry with me into winter, early darkness, repelling chill, small spaces.  I will take out the bag and open it to breathe back in the missing pieces of the 360 degrees of my life.

Rodin

I’m just home from a true Cinderella week in Paris.  I love that metaphor because I’m literally cleaning the ashes out of the woodstove one day and sitting under 15 chandeliers in Paris having tea, the next.  My son Gordon had an exhibition which opened in Paris last week and I made the rash decision to take a week away from my students and be there.  Turns out it was a completely sound and life-expanding decision.  Everything conspired to make it magical and nourishing.

There was time to joke around with my son, and share the discoveries that are around every corner in such an amazing city.  There were many kind and considerate people to meet and be touched by.  And there was Paris.  It was hazy, and moody with clouds a lot of the time.  When the sun shone it had the long shadowed slant of fall.  There were lacquered doors and polished brasses.  There were pinks and golds against shining blacks, and the lovely flavors of herbs and cheeses.  It was artful and alive.

Using the Metro is fantastic for looking at people, and studying a population–the handbag of the working woman, the  young mother’s scarf, the cut of the career man’s jacket, the immigrant family’s jewelry, the shopping bags carried by the old gentleman, the curious, laughing face of the little one in the stroller.  One Metro station which I had the good fortune to land in twice had a seven piece gypsy band performing with edgy passion.  If I concentrate I can still hear it, and its powerful echoes.

We discovered a little restaurant in the neighborhood of our b&b that was remarkable.  We appeared there one night without a reservation and the proprietor found us a corner.  It was apparently a much touted place because another American couple told us they had traveled from the opposite side of Paris to dine there.  The proprietor took a pity on us when my fairly competent restaurant French failed us– the menu was that exotic. He came to our aid by extravagantly pantomiming the contents of all the dishes for us– which ranged from veal brain to skate.  We quickly fell under Giles’ spell and when we left we were all kissed goodbye.  Gordon went back again to invite him to the exhibition, and then spent his last night in Paris dining with Giles again.  We may have to go back to Paris just to see Giles whose dark eyes, booming voice and theatrical love of his business made him totally irresistible.

So, yes, we ate.  But we also went to museums.  I think I counted seven that I went to, as well as Versailles.  It was at a strange juncture in my career as an artist, and I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that it was planned this way by the spirit guardians of my work.  I had just emptied myself of my work and set forth to discover my future when I found myself in Paris with a museum pass.   Today, I came across  a wonderful summation in Traveler magazine, in an article by Andre Aciman: “Once again, through an unforeseen ascent of a hill, I’ve stumbled upon something perhaps far better than what I came looking for.  I find myself suspecting that the humbling, intruisive hand of Providence is arranging events which couldn’t seem more random.  I like the idea of a design behind my desulatory wanderings around Bordighera.  I like thinking that perhaps this is how we should always travel, without foresight or answers, adventitiously, with faith as our compass.”

What did I find?  Exquisite and mythical relationships between human figures in the Musee Rodin;  sculptures from New Guinea that towered over me and overwhelmed me with their mysticism and power;  a modest piece by Eva Hesse that made me think seriously about tapping into my desire to make sculptures.  And some huge panels painted by Vuillard, of domestic scenes, that held me in their grip by virtue of their scale and their charming oddness–more eccentric than I’v e come to expect from him.  Brancusi’s recreated studio made me hungry to get back to my tools.  Gauguin’s bas reliefs stopped me in my tracks.  Oddly, much of what was most compelling to me was three dimensional.  I will watch with interest to see what spins itself from my hands and mind after that intense week of schooling.  I hope it bears an echo of  moody, rich, and ordered Paris.

In the liminal space between summer and fall, in the margin between darkness and dawn, I like to get up and go to the open window.  The night crickets and frog sounds are combined with the early bird sounds.  The air has a bit of cool damp attached to it.  The traffic is still.  I imagine all the drivers asleep.

Sometimes in that space I will go out to the hammock on the porch.  I think there must be something like womb memory that overtakes me in the hammock because once in it, I immediately fall into a thick and healing sleep.

Some mornings, waking up early, closer to fall,  I open the windows and the air that enters the house has a bit of chill to it– mountain stream chill.  This time it’s  just past the full moon.  Last night the moon rose late, and was the color of a persimmon.  Getting up, there were forty shades of darkness in the landscape, but my attention was grabbed by the white distorted disks  of flowers on the Rose of Sharon, floating like apparitions in the darkness.

I took the time to name the colors around the shrub.  The distant trees were black, the land black-yellow-green, the near trees black-turquoise.  To make sure I seized that moment, without turning on any lights, I climbed into a hot bath in the dark and watched the light change toward dawn, sitting there.

Looking through some old drawings in my journal the other day I came across a little sketch I did after sleeping on the sugar beach of a five acre atoll in the Caribbean.  Full moon.  Huge palms casting deep shadows.  Bright sand.  I wrapped myself in a white sheet which the wind played with like a sail, like the distorted disks of the Rose of Sharon, dancing in the darkness.

Call me corny and predictable, but I’m a huge devotee of Monet.  I know, there are a thousand bathrooms in a five mile radius where a Monet poster hangs.  I know.  But I fell in love at 13, and I never recovered.

My parents took me to NYC that summer.  We went to the Met.  The way I remember it, and the way I describe it to my 14, 15 and 16  year old students is:  coming around a corner in the museum, my eyes glazed over from Masterpieces,  I saw my first live Monet.  All my synapses fired.  I went into shock.  The way I remember it, it was a small painting, with color like a bucket of jewels.  I’d never seen color act as a participant in a painting like that before.  That was what it was ABOUT.

I know– color is the easiest way into  a work of art.  Everyone, except for possibly the color blind, can be touched by color, regardless of their insensitivity to the other aspects of a work.  But, in my soul, I am a colorist, and that little painting was screaming in my language.

On my last trip to France, five years ago, I had some pilgrimage duties planned.  I went way out of my way to visit Giverny.  And I planned to end the trip at L’Orangerie.  I was devastated to discover that the restoration of L’Orangerie was still ongoing and it was closed.  So, on this trip to France, I set aside one afternoon to make up for that missed opportunity.  I had seen isolated pieces of Les Nymphaes at various museums all over the world, and I’d seen studies for them.  But I had never seen them as Monet intended them to be seen,  all together.

I felt a real rush of empathy when I saw the sign at the mouth of the gallery  ”Silence”.  Indeed.  I wanted to allow my soul to drop down into wordlessness and to float into this work.  Nobody else seemed to have that impulse, however.  I kept wishing I had a special pass to come after hours and stand in that space alone, and allow it to subsume my field of vision and sweep me up.  It had to do that in spite of elbows and voices and cameras and other folks with a more relaxed interest.

Over the years I’ve read a lot about this particular work– the work of Monet that I’m most interested in.  I’ve read that it moves toward abstraction possibly because he was quite elderly and his vision was failing.  But seeing  the ensemble live I was shocked at  the explosiveness of the abstraction.   In my journal I wrote that they were “more wildly and vigorously abstract than I’d expected– as violently flung down as a Pollock or a de Kooning .”  They had a topography that surprised me as well.  Encrusted and multi-layered.  Thought and rethought.  I took photographs of abstract details.  But at a distance the work locked together like the dials on a safe.  They were definitely not the work of an artist whose vision had failed.  They were infintely sure-footed and wise.

I sat down and found myself settling deeply into the trunk of  a reflected willow tree.  It held me for an inexplicably long time– not billiantly colored, simply a dark textured vertical.  It was sinewy, rope-like, male and archetypal.  There was more in this shrine to nature and art than I had expected .

How nice to still find surprises in one of my oldest relationships.