Out on the very edge of North Carolina, where it touches the sea, I greeted the new year.

Some wind must have blown there from the islands, it was so gentle and warm.

The colors out at the edge of North Carolina in deep winter tend toward white. There is a huge expanse of sky constantly color shifting, and brilliant oblique sunlight. The ocean, so stirred, sends out foamy fringes, white and lacy, like the shells on the oysters at supper.

For a while I have been silent, watching myself try a new kind of life, observing what emerged, not sure what to say. Finally in the last couple of weeks things have settled enough for me to write about this part of my passage.

For the first time in many years, when the school year began I was not there. I was, instead, on the beach, drenched in bright light, wrapped in blue water, eating local shrimp. A few weeks later I realized I have not retired; I have resigned from my teaching job and gone to work full time as an artist.

For a long time I didn’t paint. I did chores. I worked on farm buildings. I tried to refind myself. A week long study session at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, initially, just further confused me. In that intense week, paid for by the National Endowment for the Arts, I lived in a beautiful small apartment in the buzzing, humming hub of Chicago, walking daily to my studio behind the museum.

Once there, I would internally rebel. I don’t work well in an urban studio, cut off from nature. This stuff doesn’t come out of my head. It comes out of a dance with the natural world. And since the death of my mother I had not painted. So, with the sole assignment of feeding my soul for a week, and exploring art, I would jump up from my easel and go look at something in the museum for a while, then go back and kick it around.

Finally, one morning I walked down the street to a strange storefront where dusty fabrics were sold. Amid the bronze satins and leopard prints I found a transluscent fabric, dotted with tiny spots– like stippled painted marks. I took it back to the studio. In my overnight kit there was one of those traveling sewing kits with needles and thread. I started creating a fabric sculpture.

For some reason, I wanted this to describe my re-emergence– a piece about my mother, found dead, too soon, and unexpectedly. I recreated her hand, as I found it in death, and remembered it in life. Very soft. Beautiful. Turned in upon itself. Passing from materiality to immateriality. In the hour in which I sat with her body I studied and held her hand. That hand I know so well. I can’t remember so many things about my father, dead now for 37 years, but I can see his hands with perfect clarity. Once I complained to Mom that my hands were so ugly, but, she said, they can do anything. Always hers were beautiful.

So I made this piece. I avoided painting. Finally, as the week drew to a close I realized I had kept myself from taking any benefit from a brilliant painting exploration by obsessing instead over this sculpture. So I asked my instructor to look at some images of my work from the last couple of years and talk to me. He was a brilliantly fluid young man. He could spin out a rapid fire line of discourse about the work that was as evanescent as champagne bubbles. I tried to capture, in my notes, the essence of what he said. Like he was channeling some spirit from the other side, he was almost unconscious of the content of what he was saying. I asked him to repeat something and he looked shocked, saying he had no idea what he’d said… it was already gone. But I dutifully did the best I could to write it down against a time when I might be able to use it.

When I returned home to my own studio I struggled with the words of advice he’d given me. First, I recognized that both my instructors made work I didn’t understand or particularly appreciate. They had MFA seals of approval from vaunted institutions. One made all gray minimalist paintings, for which he had airtight arguments. The other revered the work of Jacques-Louis David, and did reiterations of David in hot pink. These two facts were sufficient to cause me to take their advice with a grain of salt. How relevant could it be to me, a naturalist who loves to render. But, beyond what they themselves made, there was some serious wisdom.

It took me three months to find the central message I most needed to hear in all the notes I took. The message was– do what makes you different and do it a lot. So that is what I have been testing. In the last couple of weeks I have discovered that time-freedom allows me to get lost in a piece and give it the kind of obsessive attention that feels right to me. There is no deadline. There is no schedule. There is just me, paint and discovery. Suddenly I am in love with working again.

The new pieces are small and experimental. Until I find my sea legs there is no need to shout my message on a large scale. I had piles of small stretchers made so I can explore. The background music is often the French Suites by Bach, played so many times it’s starting to take on the familiarity of pop music. And lots of Latin Jazz. These intricate musical pieces parallel what’s happening on the surface of my canvas. There is point and counterpoint. There is intricate afro-latin rhythm. It’s all pixilated, stippled, dappled light and shadow. It is time to say what I can say, in the clearest voice I can muster, and to do what makes me different and do it a lot.

People  outside Raleigh might not know that a new museum has opened there.  I had heard vague rumors in the Charlotte area, and was in town overnight, so I went for my first visit to CAM Raleigh. 

 Catching a glimpse of the building I was immediately glad I’d set aside the time to explore this new museum.   Raleigh is unlike any place else in North Carolina.  Because of the powerful presence of its architecture and design schools, it is loaded with brilliant visual experiences.  It might be as simple as the typeface on the menu you’re studying, or the choice of a particular piece of hardware on a door.  Everywhere you look there is visual sensitivity, engaging detail,  funky juxtaposition and imagination in evidence.

 So I’m standing there, engaged with the canopy over the glass vestibule of the museum.  I’m noting the funky juxtaposition of this glass box and lacy metal cloud canopy with the softened-by-age red brick building it’s attached  to.  And I haven’t even seen the art yet.  It’s a façade that sets me up for the excitement inside.  It’s a let-your-mind-float welcome. 

 Once inside the visitor is greeted by museum employees who are clearly engaged by the art.  They are likewise welcoming, and well-informed.  I surprised myself with the number of questions I came up with which then spawned a couple of great conversations.  They were keen observers of the artists’ processes, and were able to deepen my appreciation for what I was seeing.

 The inaugural exhibition features two artists—Naoko Ito, based in New York, and Dan Steinhilber, based in DC.   Ito’s work is a distilled reaction to the natural world, titled “Urban Nature”.  It has a spare, poetic feeling, and focuses on the truncation and controls we as humans exert on the natural world. 

 Steinhilber’s work is also poetic and wildly playful.  He has created “paintings” using plastic wrapping materials, and constructions using coat hangers and cardboard boxes.  But the show-stopper is an environment he dreamed up.  Operative word: dreamed.  Once inside, you are in a dreamscape.  You might possibly be walking somewhere out in the Milky Way.  You could be snorkeling in a huge reef with the sun filtering through the water.  You could perhaps be in an opulent tropical garden. 

Get this:

The Process—take a football field’s worth of white plastic greenhouse covering.  Next, you will need a lawnmower and a bunch of post consumer colored plastic shopping bags.  Run over the bags with the mower to “mulch” them up.  Spread them on the plastic in painterly abstract configurations.  Then attach electric pancake griddles to the bottoms of your shoes with a long extension cord and walk over the plastic so it sticks to the greenhouse material.  Then seam it up, colored side in,  again using the griddles, so it creates a crazy three dimensional form with all kinds of caves and caverns and trajectories. Inflate it, and take an old refrigerator door and its seal to create the entrance.  Now invite everyone you know to enter your dream universe.  

Pretty fantastic stuff.  If I knew any children living in Raleigh, or any erstwhile children, I would drive them over there right now and put them inside the dream.  I don’t think any child who experienced that could go away unmarked by the magic of this experience.

It’s mid-week in mid-May and I have the good fortune to find myself on a little adventure.  After school I drove up to the mountains to the lovely, rambling house of friends.  They loaned me their mountain house so I could transact some business in the vicinity.  Lucky for me, it’s very cold so I’m sitting by a blazing, snapping fire with a glass of wine, and taking time to write in unfamiliar and friendly surroundings, far away from the rest of the world.

This house is built to accommodate four children, their spouses and fifteen grandchildren so it’s jolly even when it’s empty– echoes of optimism all around me.  The house sits on a hundred acres designated as Stewardship Forest and on the walls are hundreds of photographs of easy, happy family times, collections of arrowheads, wild turkey feathers and stone age tools.  It is a place that’s all about love of family and love of the land.

I’m tucked in amongst the books and the stonework, socked in by fog and toasted, on the front side at least, by my cozy fire.  What a luxury to be alone with one’s thoughts; to be removed from routine and exploring new places; to be alone on a mountaintop.  This big echoing house must be startled by its lone guest, accustomed as it is to a huge family that enjoys its time together.  Big and empty as it is, it’s doing its best to embrace me.

In the morning the house is still cold.  I have clearly not decoded the furnace.  So first thing I start a fire in the wood stove from last night’s coals.  In my robe, with a cup of coffee, I prop my feet in front of the fire.  Outside, the house is blanketed in a smoky white fog and the fire and fog trigger a favorite memory.

I am 20.  I have been camping at Linville Gorge near the falls with  my boyfriend.  We have spent a cold night sleeping on a 30 degree incline, deep in our down bags.  This is the boyfriend I let slip away, though he earnestly held a ruby engagement ring out to me in the front seat of a Toyota in city traffic.  Upon waking in Linville Gorge with the sound of the falls all around us on that long ago morning, we broke camp and drove away in search of some creature comforts.  We found a rustic restaurant with a hearth and a blazing fire, and early on that foggy mountain morning we gratefully ordered huge breakfasts and produced our own bottle of campsite-chilled champagne to go with it.

In memory there is laughter, firelight, bubbles and complete relaxed pleasure in the company of another.  How, I have asked myself many times, did I allow myself to discard that for the company of less joyful, more tortured souls?  Thousands of firelit mornings lie between this one and that.  But none so crystal clear, with a sense of wholeness and happiness.  I was accepted as I was.  I was encouraged to be more wholly myself that I ever had been.  I was truly loved by another joyous and playful soul.  In my innocence and ignorance I did not know the purity with which a boy first loves.  Instead, I presumed a good deal less.

But I have, as a kind of marker, that memory.  When I feel that whole and happy again I will recognize it and cherish it.  And should that not happen I will simply hold as dear as a blood red ruby in a small box the memory of that morning.  I believe the value of memories is as great as the pleasures of the moment, or the anticipation of the future.

The fog is lifting and I have my first sighting of what might lay beyond this porch.  It promises to be a ravishing day.

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.