Our Saturday morning drawing class has been invited to participate in the The Arsenal Center for the Arts summer theme exhibition— What’s Your Story? As I mentioned last time we are starting with art pieces based on the word shoe and on Saturday we shared stories.

Mine is—When I was nine I had the awful realization that apart from the queen of England everyone important in the world at large was a man—Jesus, the Prime Minister of Canada, Elvis Presley. I had faint hopes that Prince Charles might cast his eye my way but it took a great deal to imagine that as he was in England and I was in Canada and I was already schooled in the rules of monarchy. Then Elvis came out with his song, Blue Suede Shoes, and I convinced my mother to buy me a pair. I really hoped, that with the right shoes, I would be important too.

The other stories were fabulous—a young girl realizing her feet were as big as her mother’s; a grandmother, whose granddaughter is far away, thinking of shoes she bought the little girl and missing her; a young Jewish girl begging her disapproving mother for yellow shoes then being asked by a stranger in front of her mother if they were her Easter shoes. Little snippets of life that say so much.

Now we imagine how we might create visual images to accompany these stories.  The way we create the art piece will say a lot about where we are now in relation to the story. I expect that each artist will create a piece based on things that they like to do.  Some like to paint, others use fabric, others like to make three-dimensional things.  The choice of medium will speak to the story, for sure.

As wondrous as each piece will doubtless be they will be especially evocative when hung together. It’s so liberating to step forward and speak your truth and fun to step forward with our fellow travelers.  No blue suede shoes necessary!

On Saturday we started up again with the drawing class. I think of it as a club because most of the members have been together now for nearly two years. Of course, it was great to see everyone but also a challenge for me, the teacher, to create new experiences that give us all the opportunity to grow and shine. Art is not just about skills, I say, it’s about connection to spirit! We’re trying to get out of our own way.

We’ve been invited to participate in the Arsenal Center for the Arts summer exhibition—”What Is Your Story?” I’m thrilled about this because we are a group of women over the age of forty and we have stories! And every time we tell them we get a little closer to connecting with our spirits, to peeling off a layer of dross and stepping forward just as we are.

Many of our members are coming to art after raising children and in the midst of busy and successful careers. There is such a yearning to create and explore that gets squashed in ‘real’ life, so we gather every Saturday morning and draw. One new member expressed a vague concern that I don’t teach things like perspective or shading. The thing is I don’t know much about them even after making my living at art for twenty-five years. I tell them it’s why I was able to succeed—it was my own hand that was evident, the one I was given, and I didn’t have any sense that I ought to be anything other than I was. I never went to art school so was spared expectations. (There are advantages to going to art school but challenges too.) Even when our own hands are shaky or naive, they have such amazing beauty in them. No one really wants to study perspective—that’s what we have cameras for!

Our first story project will be around the subject of shoes. I felt we had to have somewhere to start. Why not the feet? The ground. Those humble slips of leather that carry us here and there. Those things we hunt for and pay big bucks for, that we sometimes feel pride in sticking one foot forward. Those things that pinch and give us blisters and make our feet ache when we’ve chosen the wrong pair. Everyone has a story about shoes. So next Saturday they’re all to bring in a few sentences about a pair of shoes in their lives in preparation to conceiving an art piece to bring the story into this world like a mother births a baby. Stay tuned.

So, for our first class I decided that what we really needed was to just make a mess, just take some big white paper and make a mess—throw our anger and frustration down on the page or our confusion, scribble, rip, spill, cut. I said now’s our chance to not be polite, to not be good. Let’s be BAD!!! I thought we’d do this for an hour then move on to actually draw something for the next two hours. But everyone became so deeply engrossed in this that we never moved on. Bit by bit the messes became more subdued, more peaceful, as everyone lost themselves in what they were doing. Very, very interesting, Watson.

Yesterday we held Le Salon des Refusés at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown, a stone’s throw from Boston and Cambridge. And, hooray, it was a great success! When we first set up it felt a bit lonely and we wondered if anyone would come. It was so informal—we had no idea even how many artists would show. But show they did! And so did the crowd—much to our amazement.

About thirteen artists hung their work in the space of an hour before we opened the doors to the public. The next two hours—a steady stream of people, friends, people popping in from the theater next door at intermission, fellow artists. I think we had well over one hundred people. It gave us the idea to do an informal show like this every once in a while. It took minimal effort—we cleared the space out the day before, bought some wine and cheese and hung the art. Of course, the space is great!

Someone else said to me—This is theater! It was a fabulous collision of people and energies, chance meetings, inspiration, a look at art and art talk. Just seeing what other people are doing gives us ideas. One friend was showing work for the first time—a real thrill. It’s always great to see friends who’ve taken time out of their Sunday to show up. And thanks to those who were there in spirit! No one sold work but that was not the point. We stirred the energy and that’s a good thing.

As for the art? Splendid, splendid! We’re so beyond judgment—an art in itself! So there! Edouard Manet would be proud, I’m quite sure. And we made sure of this by putting up a poster of Le Dejeuner sur L’herbes. Le Salon is, after all, a tribute to him as well as to ourselves. Let’s just say he’s our inspiration and though our efforts were not so radical as his or so serious—we are marching forward with heads high!

Allan got a chance to hand out flyers for his book,Stories We Need To Know, and to announce his book launch party which will take place in the same space. It also gave us a chance to show the center to friends who came over from Cambridge and other towns around.

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We sent out the announcement for Le Salon des Refusés II last week to both the artists and the public. It will be held at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown, MA this Sunday, the 20th, to show the work of artists rejected from the Members Show last November. We artists are always vulnerable to criticism and it seemed like all who entered a show like this ought to be honored in some way—hence this alternate show. The good news is that the Center made a decision that a members show ought to include one piece from every artist who enters. I’m truly happy with that decision. Now we can celebrate the journey of making art. It’s all good.

The first Salon des Refusés was in 1863 in Paris. When the great French painter Edouard Manet was rejected from the annual Paris Salon exhibition of ‘official’ painting he took his entry, ‘Le Déjeuner sur L’herbes,’ and created another venue. His painting sparked both an artistic and a cultural revolution. It was radical then to show a picnic in the woods with the women unclothed. It was also radical to make a painting that appeared unfinished, one of the nudes just sketched as if the painter were imagining a possibility rather than painting a reality—which is just as it was. French society at that time was rigid with conformity and propriety, denying all sensual and erotic expression. It would still be odd to happen upon such a picnic.

It’s curious that even now Manet is radical. His painting ‘Olympia’ is actually of a naked woman, a prostitute, in fact, in the setting of an affluent Parisian home of the time complete with servant. It was painted like an official portrait of a wealthy woman but without the clothes. Cheeky. But it’s more cheeky still that Olympia is entirely self-satisfied and looks out at us with an air of utter confidence in who she is. I don’t think Manet was painting the reality of the prostitute’s life or even trying to suggest that. But I think he was trying to honor who she truly was as a person, her sensuality and seductiveness even her cheek, and accept her without judgment. That remains a truly radical perspective.

I made a pilgrimage to the Musée D’Orsay in Paris some years ago with my son who was fourteen to see that painting. We wandered around and around and couldn’t find it. I was going to give up but Nick insisted we find it. So glad he did. It’s radiates good energy.

Which brings me back to our Salon. There will be no Olympias, I’m sure, but who knows what lurks! I’m approaching our Salon and my own work in it with the same radical acceptance Manet brought to Olympia. We’ll toast Manet—and each other.

Should be a fun party even though at this point we have no idea how many people will come!

On Saturday the Saturday morning drawing class begins again….

My friend Maureen and I went to an exhibit at the Pierre Ménard Gallery in Cambridge the other day based on the book The Writer’s Brush. The gallery, in an ancient house on Arrow Street not far from Harvard Yard, had just two smallish rooms and a basement space and the paintings, all by writers, lined the walls ceiling to floor. It was great to see such a mishmash of work and by so many authors—e e cummings, Sylvia Plath (who did the painting you see here), Borges, Gunter Grass, Victor Hugo, Maurice Sendak, Patti Smith. A very eclectic group and the paintings ranged from inept to brilliantly executed. Gunther Grass had a strong, clear hand, for one. I loved e e cummings best—his paintings of both men and women were full of eroticism and humor. They had more than a faint hint of the amateur but it lent the paintings a charm that cannot be designed. All the work felt like artifacts of fine adventurous lives. There is something fantastic about seeing the actual hand of a writer whose work you’ve loved.

What amazed me was just how many writers paint. I’ve always felt powerfully drawn to both writing and art and have practiced both all my life. Writing is where my true energy is now but there is still the need to make art. They are different muses—I can hardly say how though one is linear and narrative obviously, the other tactile. They are different ways of playing, like we experience in different friendships. But one is as necessary as the other.  This show really made me aware of how wondrous the whole range of personal expression is—not just writing and art, but mastery and ineptitude too.  There’s no need to judge or place things in a hierarchy of good and bad it seems to me.  Everything that spills from the human hand holds some kind of magic in it.  Sometimes it’s the small inept work that touches us more than we know.  A tiny line drawing of a tiger from Victor Hugo, for instance.
This whole crowded mishmash of an exhibit, with the prices typed on peel-off labels stuck onto the wall, half askew, and a few missing, made me think this is how we ought to see art—in a casual way, like it’s part of everyday life and not a precious, ghastly serious thing. By the way—some of the prices for this everyday art were in the stratosphere—$25,000 and more. May we who feel compelled to draw and paint live long!

I’m so happy to announce that Allan’s book, Stories We Need To Know / Reading Your Life Path In Literature has just been published by Findhorn Press. It’s a brilliant book, a directed walk through some of the great stories of over 3,000 years of literature , from ancient myths to Jane Austen to Harry Potter. What Allan does is show us how the characters in these stories progress through six stages of development (or, at least, some of those six stages) and how we, in our own journeys, do the same.

Not everyone realizes they are on a journey, of course, and that is one of the reasons that we read stories—to gain this awareness. We know there is more and want more and are moving in varying degrees from innocence to self-awareness and mastery to being effective agents of wisdom in the world. What Allan does is break down these stages into six archetypes. These are fluid states—we may be very effective in the area of work and not so effective in personal relationships but on the whole, once we break through to awareness, we are moving forward towards self-realization. Knowing what these archetypes are and what the particular challenges each faces gives us real tools for our onward journey to happiness and peace and effectiveness.

And seeing ourselves in the great stories of literature lets us know we are not alone and that there is a way forward. Whenever unhappiness strikes it is a sign we are ready to move into higher levels of being.

I’m very excited about this book. It’s a new perspective that I know can be of help to many people. It’s also a new experience to market the book and bring it into the world. I will share the adventure here as we go on. We are planning a book launch party in Boston, there is a reading in New York City in February, workshops in Boston in June and so on.

But for now—just a big shout out—Allan Hunter!—Stories We Need To Know!

Hooray!