Artwala Road

We have a new president and it seems now as if anything is possible.  I mostly thought it was though it’s been mighty hard to keep faith these last eight years.  It’s not always a popular belief but our Barack Obama knows the power of believing and staying on course, of having big vision.  I’m so thrilled that he’s going to be our next president.  It does make me wonder though what the rest of us can do or should be doing at this time when our planet is in such peril.  And it especially makes me wonder what we as artists should be doing because we spend so much of our time pondering, feeling, creating.  What should we create?

I think about these things sometimes but mostly I just show up at my new studio and put some music on and begin.  I know that whatever I do is not about making it into MOMA or some other place that sanctions art.  I really do art to know my true self and put out good vibes—for me that’s the purpose of this journey. I really believe that the best we can do for our planet is live good lives, be happy and do our best. Not always easy.

I’ve started a new series of paintings just six inches square.  It’s entitled You’re Not Alone, about all the connections in our lives, seen and unseen.  I have about sixteen now and you can see the first few at the top of the page here.  This shot was taken last week and there are more now but I haven’t had a chance to take another snapshot yet. We’ll have open studios on December 4th and I hope to have 30 or 40 paintings done by then.  Some will go to the Joy Street Open Studios next weekend, November 22nd, where I’ll show with my friend, the photographer, Mark Peterson.

Having the studio is absolutely fantastic—I’m getting twice as much done as I did before, maybe more.  But I’m also getting hooked into designing things for the art center like this poster for the upcoming members’ show which I did this afternoon.  No complaints.  The painting is by artist Alvina Lavdani and is wonderfully quirky.  I love that artists work away on their art and, if they’re lucky, they find something compelling to keep them going.  This painting is so full of charm and mystery.  It makes me wonder—a good thing.  I like paintings that leave something unsaid, something we have to fill in ourselves.

There were several choices for the poster.  I wish we could do two.  Susu Wing has done the most fantastic sculptures out of regular old packing tape.  Just brilliant.  One now graces the hallway and I’d love to put it into a poster but we didn’t get a chance to photograph it before the room behind it became filled with handcrafted items for the annual shop.  It took me by total surprise when I first saw it—just plain fun.  Art on the planet.

I’ll post more photos next week of my wall of paintings, better quality, I hope.  Meanwhile The Saturday Morning Drawing Club continues to meet.  We’ve been drawing upside down, a very good exercise for looking with care and developing a sharp eye—so necessary in art.  Try it—you’ll be surprised what emerges.  In my case the results are more fun and stronger than when I draw right side up.  I look more carefully, that’s why.  I’m beginning to see that art is really all around us.  We just need to see it.

November 12th, 2008 | Category: Dear Reader, Drawing Club, Spotted / Art on the Planet | Comments (3)

I know, I know, I’m on summer sabbatical and I was only going to post at the beginning of the month. But things keep happening and I wanted to make note of this. One afternoon last week we went to see JK Rowling give a speech at the Harvard Alumni Association meeting that always follows the graduation ceremonies. It was an unseasonably cold and rainy day and we discovered to our dismay that we’d be sitting outside in a light drizzle. We arrived early without umbrellas or rain coats but it didn’t matter. Somehow, perhaps by magic!, we were ushered up into the front section of Harvard Yard not far from the podium when it seemed the audience was scant. Minutes later we turned around to discover the whole yard filled with thousands of people. Some were even standing on the steps of Widener Library.

JK did not talk about Harry Potter, except obliquely. What she did speak about was failure and imagination. When she wrote Harry Potter she was in the midst of what felt like a massive failure. Her brief marriage had failed, she had no job, no home of her own, only an infant daughter whom she adored. She had nothing but a big idea and decided to go for it. Failure, she said, was the firm foundation underneath her feet. Though she had nothing, she was still alive, still carrying on. And, I think it’s true, if you’ve not gone out into the wilderness on your own, you don’t get to find that amazing strength that we all have within. What I found inspirational though was the way she didn’t second guess herself, she didn’t come up with Plan B—she hunkered down and wrote the first volume of what became the largest selling series in history.

And it’s not the sales numbers that matter but the fact that she got kids reading and thinking about the presence of evil in the world and how to deal with it. In her speech she said imagination was something only humans have and it’s the ability to see ourselves in the situation of others. She urged the newly minted Harvard graduates to take this to heart as they stepped into the world.

“That is your privilege, and your burden,” she said. “If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better.”

“We do not need magic to change the world,” she continued. “We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: We have the power to imagine better.”

We came home chilled to the bones, made cups of tea and put on our wool socks. It wasn’t until I’d thawed out that I thought how fantastic it is that when real magic happens on this planet it’s because we hold fast to our dreams and act on them! Dream on! And now back to work!

The sun is shining, the temperature is now in the stratosphere, five huge pots of tomatoes, beans, peppers, lettuce, arugula and herbs are planted and sitting quite happily on the patio. Peonies and roses are blooming. Summer is here.

June 9th, 2008 | Category: Spotted / Art on the Planet | Comments (2)

I’m on blog sabbatical but promised to check in the beginning of each month this summer. As chance would have it, I discovered today that Yoko Ono is starting a blog called 100 Acorns, ideas for bringing awareness to creating peace on the planet. Forty-four years ago she published a book of conceptual instructions called Grapefruit. I was sixteen when I bought my copy and loved it. I might even say that it planted a seed in me about how we might think about life as a creative journey—things happen but we also get to invent our response. It opened my mind.

Forty years ago, Yoko and John Lennon created a series of events to bring awareness to peace. John Lennon wrote the gorgeous anthem, Imagine, and invited us to imagine what a world in peace might be like. As necessary to do now as then.

I lived in Montreal at the time that John and Yoko spent a week in bed in a hotel there for peace. It was incredibly exciting—imagine that! It was exciting that two artists would spend a week in bed in the name of peace and the media hovered around like lightening had struck. Funny and great. It felt that peace was within our grasp back then but the people in power are still living in fear. Last fall Yoko created the Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavik, Iceland, in conjunction with the Museum of Art—a beautiful beam of light that arises out of a wishing well and shoots towards the heavens. We’re all invited to send in a wish for peace that will be planted in the ground around the well. This is art.

For the last six or seven years a whole segment of humanity who dreams of and desires peace has remained more silent than we might have imagined possible. The Buddha says that everything is perfect and even in this most discouraging moment something new is being born—a new consciousness, courage, art. We’ve been reflecting and gathering steam. There’s so much that’s changing on the planet right now, so much that needs our care and our courage. Sometimes one radical emblem—a song, a book, a peace tower—shifts attention to the truth of our infinite capability and generates both energy and change.

The lights are on in the Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavik to announce that so many on this planet love and respect each other. Maybe we can each beam a little light up.

Check it out—Imagine Peace.

June 3rd, 2008 | Category: Dear Reader, Spotted / Art on the Planet | Comments (4)

I’ve just discovered that Cy Twombley will be at Tate Modern in London from mid-June to mid-September. I love his work. Monumental scribbles and splashes of pure color. Words that can barely be read and some that can be read quite clearly. Dribbles of paint. Thoughts and explorations. Repetition. The human hand writ large. All that freedom and carelessness. All that open space and yet within it a rather loopy daring. We saw a few of his pieces at MOMA in New York this spring and they filled me with a great sense of expansiveness and what the heck. There was nothing careful about them and I know I can get caught in that game of excessive care as an artist and a writer. I can get caught in thinking something has to conform to form—to be a careful version of what already exists. I’m really trying to break free of that in everything I do and get to that experimental place where I’m just following what comes to me.

I had that freedom once, as a kid, we all did. I had it as a very young artist, for a very short time. For all sorts of reasons I side-stepped away from the open declaration of whatever it was I cared about then. I became an observer, a studier of life, and that’s okay too. I like to think it’s all perfect and I’m thinking about it a fair amount because I will soon be sixty and that seems like so many years. Yes, it is a little odd to say it. It will take practice and I am starting here. I want to be open about who I am even if women were not appreciated for so long as they aged. I feel more creative and alive and centered now than ever. I do not think I’m too old to do the things I am doing. I still want to do things! It feels vital to me to contribute somehow to this world, especially now. And I still think, as I did in my twenties, that when I get up in the morning I get to make art and write about things that matter! I still think how I might send these things into the world as little tokens of lightness and I still send them. I think it’s all just right even though it is not quite as I thought it might be back then. Like every other artist I envisioned a rather grander kind of success than the one I achieved which has been fine and well-rounded and a little cagey. And I know, now that I’m almost sixty, just how lucky I was not to get the kind of success I envisioned back then! And when I really think about it I know I envisioned the big bucks rolling in rather later in life. Ahem. Well, never mind—now I feel rich anyway. I have so much that’s good in my life!

But I’m aware too that what I do now can never have the innocent freedom of my younger days. I feel a little nostalgia but can’t stop there. It doesn’t take us very far to dwell on or in the past. I’m just giving it a small nod as it sails by—like, it was nice knowing you, you wild, sweet, crazy girl!

Which brings me back to Cy Twombley. He’s even older than I am, for one thing, twenty years older, and he’s doing this amazing art still. Imagine. Art is fabulous like that—the gift that keeps on giving. If you give to it it gives back, over and over. We are very, very lucky those of us who have these things we love to do.

There were times when people thought Cy’s work was just scribbles, that it made no sense. He just kept doing it and, in fact, he used bigger and bigger canvases. Let’s take note of that. He was bold and brave. What an inspiration! If we’re going to try something new do it big! Make big mistakes if that’s what they’re going to be or maybe there’s no such thing as a mistake. Maybe there are just experiments. Maybe every honest gesture of our hand is worth something. I think Cy may be saying that too.

Because of this I’d really like to see this show. My mother-in-law lives in London so I go most years to visit. But now the exchange rate has become so unfavorable it seems almost prohibitive even when we have a place to stay. I will ponder a little more. There is work to be done here. Even if I don’t actually make it over I’m very excited because there will be a catalogue. I gave a Cy Twombley book I once owned to a dear artist friend some years ago and now it sells for $300. on Amazon. There’s nothing else affordable in print but soon there will be!

May 20th, 2008 | Category: Dear Reader, Spotted / Art on the Planet | Comments (5)