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.

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”.

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.