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.

A couple of weeks ago, I took an evening off and went to Greensboro to a workshop at the Weatherspoon.  There was a short component for teachers, followed by a kind of community-wide invitation to make a sculpture– or three, to be exact.  My one word description of the evening was “fun”.

The current exhibition of the installations and sculptures of Leonardo Drew were the jumping off place for the workshop.  The work is very dense and rich.  The palette is restrained– the white of paper, the red of rust, the brown of wood.   Much of the work is compartmentalized– assemblages of found objects.  Even more wonderful are the cast paper objects that appear in the work.  Like toys and tools constructed from eggshell they fascinate with their fragility and exactness.  Some of the work evokes  Pollock, with skeins of cast paper or other materials, put together in relief.  Real space instead of implied space.  The scale is monumental, in many cases.  Particularly arresting were, however, the small framed paper reliefs, influenced by the artist’s travels in Japan.

The workshop exercise involved retired doctors, engineers, moms, artists, students, professors and who knows what else rubbing elbows.  We were given three mason jars to serve as compartments, and told to bring found objects to work with in creating three pieces.  I was so irritated by the mason jars with their little embossed apples and pears on the surface that I worked hard to lose the jar, dignify the jar, deny the jar.

Teaching a sculpture class has sensitized me to the use of color in sculpture, so I worked with a stack of white paper lunch bags and transparent beads to make an  piece that was a kind of polite explosion.

A second piece became an illuminated cloud when I put a light source inside the jar and enclosed the jar in a blown up  bag.  Over the cloud flew a found goose.

The third piece I covered with masking tape, stacking component parts of the jar and lid to make as tall a totem as I could.  She bore a half of a face I’d found on the ground in my school’s parking lot.  She had breasts that were a milagro, slightly rusted.  I had golden paper wings in my stash– just in case I might ever need them.  The were attached to the totem’s back.  Twigs made arms and legs,  she looked perfectly ethereal.