Artwala Road

Saturday was the first class of the spring session of the ladies drawing club. I was thinking what the heck to do that would keep us all alert and paddling upstream when I picked up my new book on Dada which I’d plucked from a bargain table. And there was the most wondrous revelation—Sophie Taeuber. First, Dada, as you probably know was an art movement that lasted only from 1916-1920 before it morphed into Surrealism which sort of morphed into Pop art and Fluxus—if art can be called linear at all. Dada, in the midst of the horrors of the first world war, insidted that the thinking that produced that war must be rejected. For the Dadaists that meant rejecting all prior culture and the restrictions of art movements while attempting spontaneity and free expression. Curiously, it too became an art movement. It was pretty interesting though and I think it got half-way there in beginning to reject thinking as the real basis for art. But—I digress!

There in this book is Sophie Taeuber of Zurich, the companion of Hans Arp whose name we actually know. Sophie had begun already in 1915 to think of art outside the established bounds of painting and did embroideries and sculptures and puppets. She wanted to make the art in the ordinary apparent. Her work is fantastic, beautifully executed, evocative and arresting. And, in the official history of art, so few women make an appearance. It’s great to discover a female artist who was not painting endless pictures, however beautiful, of mothers and babies. (Sorry, Mary Cassatt.)
For our intrepid group who meet every Saturday, some who’ve worked at art for a long while, others who are just embarking on their artistic journey, it was great to be able to look at this woman’s art. I’m flying the flag here! Yay, Sophie! Here was an independent woman who dared to follow her own path and she’d begun her explorations before the assertions of the Dadaists were made. It takes courage to abandon a conventional path and strike out on your own. We need to know this woman. The image here is part of a tryptich—I couldn’t get it all into the scanner but it’s rich and balanced and full of surprises too—absolutely stunning.

The night before class I’d overly salted our dinner by mistake and lay awake the whole night. I suppose too much salt can do you in and, well, there I was—not a wink of sleep the whole night and still a class to teach. Luckily a couple of the group also missed a few winks so we forged on in good cheer, especially after looking at Sophie’s art for a bit.

I decided we’d work on portraits this week and chose an image from the Dada book—Marcel Duchamp in drag photographed by Man Ray. I attribute the choice to lack of sleep! The picture’s pretty weird and funny but very arresting. It was also an image I thought would free us up, like the Dadaists. The tendency in doing this sort of thing is to try to get it right but I wanted our goal to take this crazy image and go wild with it—play around with the elements of art to make a picture that said something.

Everyone did amazing stuff and one of our members is now recording the efforts so, with luck, we’ll get some of them up here before long. We went from this to use mirrors to observe ourselves and do self-portraits. Next week we’ll work with gouache again using photographs of ourselves to paint self-portraits. With luck we’ll have time to do more than one and experiment, as the Dadaists did, with expression without feeling tied to getting it ‘right.’

Here’s my drawing. What we all discovered was that it took several tries to break free of the idea that we must draw something in a realistic way. I did three quite ordinary drawings before I suddenly woke up to this one in which I left all the details out and went for the drama using the deepest black and yards of wide open white space. I kind of like it though it feels, curiously, very early twentieth century the way the person hides behind hat, feathers, jewelry and hair. But I slept like a baby last night.

March 30th, 2008 | Category: Drawing Club | Comments (6)

Yesterday I got hired to design a poster for a symposium here in Boston hosted by Harvard in mid-April called—Art in the Life of the City—London Stories, about ephemeral art projects. What a fun assignment! I’ve already started to play around.

Last summer we watched the film, The Sultan’s Elephant which documented one of the most amazing public art projects ever. One day in London an object appeared on a major street. It looked like a space ship had crashed to earth—it was half submerged in the street and the road was all broken up. Londoners were stunned and puzzled when they encountered it. No one seemed to know what was going on—there were no explanations. The next day an enormous mechanical elephant, gloriously and extravagantly decorated, emerged from a side street and began a slow march through London. Soon the whole city was watching, the police cleared traffic, people pored out from office buildings, kids skipped school. Nobody knew what was happening. Where did it come from? There was a smile and wonder on every face. In a day or two a huge human figure, a little girl, stepped out of the elephant and began walking. The way she moved was so life-like, the whole thing was magic.

The event lasted three days and the procession ended back at the spaceship that was now, miraculously, whole again. I will say no more. Rent the film if you can.

But it reminded me that art can really take us to the place of infinite imagination and possibility if we think BIG. Imagine what might be possible if we started to think that way all the time! I’m so happy to be doing this poster. Now to think BIG!! Stay tuned. Will post when done.

March 27th, 2008 | Category: Dear Reader | Comments (3)

My friend Debra has a cool post today about how the words we put to things change our experience. “I can choose to see the promise of rain or see rain threatening.” So true. And Gandhi, as Debra points out, says we need to be the change we want to see in the world. So, if we want peace in the world, then it’s we who must find it within ourselves first. We need to know it’s always there for us. I love that.

I’ve been watching the Ekhart Tolle class with Oprah online when I get a chance. You can call it up at any time—oprah.com. He teaches that our true spiritual essence is peace and joy. It’s great to encounter his energy—it really is deeply peaceful and kind of fun. Catchy too when you encounter it, as I discovered.

The other night I got impatient about some trivial birthday plans—it’s one of those ‘big’ birthdays.  I got my knickers in a twist, saw the whole thing as stressful, labeled it in a negative way, then sat down by “chance” to watch some of Eckhart. Almost immediately saw the error of my ways! Would have cottoned on sooner if I’d avoided the twisted knickers, but there you go.

Once my energy changed I saw that I didn’t want to do this big birthday bash at all—I’d rather take a cool trip somewhere. I want to go somewhere I haven’t been before. I’ve decided this birthday will launch a great chapter of this life. They’ve all been rather fabulous, truth be told, even those when rain threatened or even pored. But now the promise of both rain and sunshine seems to open real possibilities. The good thing about getting older for me is I see the world more as I did when I was a child—as a wondrous place to be explored and shared. I think artists need to travel—it sharpens the vision!  So now I’m thinking where and how.

Let me reframe this—I’m not ‘getting up there’—I’m on the cusp of a grand new adventure! Yes.

March 25th, 2008 | Category: Dear Reader | Comments (11)

Dear A and I were reading The Boston Globe at breakfast this morning as we do every morning. Usually A spouts indignation at the way a major world news story has been shunted to some small corner of an inner page while a sports hero decorates the front. It wasn’t much different today but on the inner page was the story of China’s crackdown on the Tibetan monks agitating for Tibet’s independence. It was a tiny article, about seven inches long, two columns wide—you get the picture. But what it said seemed huge to me. The Dalai Lama is threatening to resign if China cracks down further.

Here is a man who has been our teacher for many years. He has brought the deep practices of Buddhist meditation and observation, of compassion and respect for life to our consciousness. He has taught all around the world techniques to achieve peace and happiness and as a result he has become a beloved teacher, a person who is deeply respected. And faced with this sad and desperate situation, his own country occupied by an unwelcome force, he is saying he will step down rather than fuel violence of any sort. Think about it.

He does not allow fear in. Here, the worst has happened—his country has been overtaken and still he does not rally the troops or other world powers to lash out with force. He does not declare war. He says, if it will help to diffuse the situation, he will resign. He says that beyond everything human life must be honored and cherished. Human life rather than country.

Like I said, it was buried on page seven. To the editors of The Boston Globe and other mainstream publications the news is only that the Dalai Lama might resign. So far no thoughts on how his radical stance for peace might be the one true path that can lead to the real liberation where we can live without fear of war. But that liberation, as the Dalai Lama has tried to teach, is truly how we change our minds. He tells us if we can find the peace within, we will get beyond our own fears. We can only create peace on the planet when we find it in ourselves.

Curiously, after reading that, I sat down at my computer with my morning cup of tea and found the counterpart to that news on The Guardian Online, my home page, an independent liberal British paper. It was a four minute video of children in Sadr City, Iraq—one eight year old boy who sells drinks to commuters in cars from five in the morning until four in the afternoon to support his mother. And another boy in an orphanage, also aged eight, who, in trying to say how his father was killed by a car bomb when he was six, broke down and wept, a witness to the truth of the savage toll of war. It was almost unbearable to watch. This small boy knows too well what Dalai Lama is working to prevent. May his grief and the Dalai Lama’s patience teach us that radical change is not just possible but necessary.

March 19th, 2008 | Category: Dear Reader | Comments (9)