Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 52

Happy Saint-Valentin, tout le monde!

My first-ever bougainvillea plant seems to be successfully overwintering in the studio, and for the past few weeks it's been putting out the most gorgeous blooms, oblivious of the fact that just beyond its window is the frozen north. It reminds me of Mexico, where, insh'allah, we'll be heading in a little more than a month. And of my father-in-law.

Happy Valentine's Day to everyone, and especially to my love.

Sharply Cut

Mid-February, and the winter doldrums have finally hit. It's been so damn cold up here, for so long, that the throngs of people moving through the transport system feel sullen, withdrawn, silent. At least it doesn't seem like as many people are sick as last year; when you get on a bus everyone isn't hacking away. Swathed in our layers of sweaters and fleece and down and fur, we slog through piles of snow, under which is slippery ice, hard as concrete. All the floors of public passages and entryways are muddy and wet, so you have to be careful not to slip both inside and outside. Today was bright and sunny and I checked the thermometer before leaving home, thinking maybe it was a bit warmer -- but no, it's -23C! (-9.4 F) You've got to be kidding.

Something I love, though, and find hard to describe to people who've never lived in the north: the clarity of the air. On a morning like this, absolutely clear blue and extremely cold, it's as if a sharpening filter has been applied to everything in front of your eyes. The distance has no atmospheric perspective, no haze. And the air doesn't feel like anything except coldness: there's no moisture to give it thickness, just your breath which condenses the minute it leaves your body. It's almost...as if the air isn't there. And yet, what else is it that hits you the minute you walk out the door? So it's quite strange, this double sensation of an invisible wall of coldness, and its utter clarity, so that you feel you can walk through it and see through it and hear through it with perfect transparency.

On the unusual mornings when we leave the island and drive over the Jacques Cartier bridge and the frozen St. Lawrence, and the air has this quality, I love to look at the city: the glass and steel and stone gleaming in the sunlight, every church spire and skyscraper tower a cut-out punctuation against the sky. The far becomes near, and of more equal importance with the close and familiar. Of course, there is steam rising straight up from heating towers, but wood fires have been restricted in recent years, so there is much less smoke.

From the height of the bridge, you can see the monadnocks of the Montérégie above the flat floodplains of the great river, where the productive Quebec farms lie sleeping under their white duvets, and the mountains of Vermont in the far distance. Somehow it is like looking back across my own life with bright dispassionate vision, and a surgical clarity that's so sharp it doesn't hurt at all.

Last Week's Drawings

I resolved to draw more creatures and humans in 2015, so the practice begins with my close-at-hand models. Manon is better at sitting still than J., but neither of them are particularly cooperative so I have to work fast or wait for them to fall asleep!

It's a matter of "practice, practice, practice, and don't worry about the failures and mistakes."

The lessons carry over even when the subject is an inanimate object. I like the spontaneity of drawing here; this is a little pot that my mother made.

And most of all, I want to have fun and enjoy it. I love the feeling of the brush on the paper and seeing the color flow out and create forms. Trying to work fast and spontaneously, and to capture some of the energy -- both of the living subjects and that of my own hand --in the drawings and sketchbook watercolors. I think of my old friend Aya Itagaki, a remarkable person and Sumi artist/Japanese calligrapher, whose work simply exploded onto the paper after some moments of silent, intense concentration and self-emptying. We need to let go of our thinking at a certain point, but one can only do that after lots and lots of practice and total awareness. I'm not there yet with this sort of drawing, but I trust the way forward.

On Being an Artist: Vijay Iyer

Palette. Dried acrylic on plastic.

The jazz pianist Vijay Iyer said a few things recently that resonated with me. He was talking in particular about jazz improvisation and about the notion of a "career" - a label he rejects. I think his comments can apply equally to all the arts.

 

"My primary orientation is as an artist and what that means is that I make things. I don’t make things in order to make money—I make things in order to communicate, reflect, meditate, and connect with people. It’s a personal practice. It’s a spiritual practice. It’s a social practice. And that’s really the foundation of everything I do."

--

"The most I can say is that it never feels finished to me—I never think I’ve mastered anything yet. I just think of myself as a student. I also work really hard on details and I don’t mean in an obsessive way—I mean in a patient way. You know when something is ready by not overthinking it and tapping into something that’s emotional and spiritual. You have to really wait until it hits you there and then you know you have something..."

--

"What is success? When it comes to making art, I don’t know what that is. I know what’s genuine and I know what I want to hear...The main thing is the value of being a performer is that I get to listen to the audience the whole time. I listen very carefully to them. It’s not about listening to them clapping—it’s about listening to them breathing. What are their bodies doing right now in relation to what I’m doing and are we connecting? If I always listen to that, then it’s not about success in terms of album sales or awards. It’s actually about meaning something to people and reaching people and making a difference."

--

These remarks are excerpts from an article in Fast Company, which came to my attention via the newsletter of the website Piano Street. Iyer is a classically-trained musician who studied both violin and piano, but he studied mathematics and physics as an undergrad at Yale, then started a doctorate in physics at Berkeley -- but music eventually won out. He's the recipient of a MacArthur grant and has recently been appointed to the music faculty at Harvard; meanwhile he is busy playing concerts and recording. Our friend Teju Cole recently performed with him in New York; Iyer has created a large performance work based on Open City.

Candlemas: Looking Forward

Whether you note Candlemas or Groundhog Day or any other festival around the beginning of February, all of them represent a mid-winter tipping point, when we've definitely made it through more than half, and can start looking forward to spring. Up here in the north, we know that's a pretty far look into the distance, but it's still real: the days may be super-cold still, but it's brighter and the light lasts longer.

Liturgically, Candlemas is a day when the next year's candles are blessed -- this past Sunday the whole congregation processed around the dark cathedral carrying lighted tapers -- and it occurs forty days after Jesus' birth, marking the required time when a Jewish first-born son would have been presented in the temple. It's the official end of the Christmas season, when we start looking instead toward Ash Wednesday, Lent, and Easter.

I marked the day at home by burning all the leftover holly and evergreens in the fireplace, and putting away the Christmas cards, after making the drawing above. The lovely print of a Madonna and Child is by Natalie d'Arbeloff; the cards are in a Mexican palm-leaf basket, and that's a volcanic rock in the left foreground, not a hunk of cheese or bread!

---

In other news, last weekend a feature article about my husband Jonathan and his new book appeared in the local paper, the Valley News, back where we used to live. The article includes an excellent portrait of him and a number of photographs from his book, many of which were taken in that area of Vermont and New Hampshire in the late 60s and early 70s. Although that was a few years before we actually met, the article has quite a lot in it about our later life there, so I thought some of you might be interested in the link.

Les tomates et la neige

Well, this is how it is right now! We can dream about summer, but there's hardly a decent tomato to be found, and lettuce is selling for $3 - $4 a head.

We only got the tail end of the snowstorm that hit Boston, and I'm glad for some fresh whiteness to cover the soggy grey. This is the long slog now, through February. So far, I'm coping all right. The key for me is to get enough light (our studio is really bright all day and it helps so much), keep busy, see friends, be amused at the absurdity of living in this climate, and indulge in a few treats now and then -- fresh raspberries today for our breakfast.

I did look at a garden catalog...

Recent drawings, and learning to be oneself

Shell.

Coins in a teacup, with Palestinian purse

Desk with whittled ball and chain, made by my friend G. in the early 70s.

These were the final drawings in the sketchbook I started January 26, 2014; the one at the bottom was done on January 25, 2015. Not intentional -- it just worked out that way.

Over on Facebook, I've been posting three works a day this week, M-F, in response to being nominated for the Art Challenge that's going around. It's funny to notice how uncomfortable I feel doing that, because I do post work here regularly and put the links up at Facebook. Part of it is that I don't like FB's denial of basic copyright laws, but the larger discomfort is just a kind of shyness I feel about blowing my own horn so loudly for a whole week in an environment where (a) everybody is doing that all the time and (b) people over there seem to harbor the same insecurities and self-criticisms and tendency to compare themselves to others that made high school miserable, and have carried over into a lot of adult lives. My blog feels like my own home, where I can just be myself, and people can show up or not, as they want. On the other hand, a lot of people I care about only communicate through FB now. I've appreciated seeing other artists' work in more depth and breadth during this current challenge, so I'm going to assume other people feel the same way.

My own discomfort was palpable enough that I needed to explore it. Being good at things -- unless they're sports -- wasn't a way to be happy and popular when I was young, especially growing up in an under-achieving and pretty anti-intellectual environment. My parents encouraged me to be myself, but by second grade I had learned to be quiet in public about my enthusiasms, interests, and eagerness; "keeping my light under a bushel" seemed like the best way to go. In college I was surprised to meet kids from urban areas who were extremely competitive, pushy, and brash about their own achievements, and who were quite ready to walk all over other people on their climb to the top: this was a personality type I simply hadn't encountered. I also met other kids from smaller school who were a lot like me, and had had some of the same challenges. It took all four years for me to learn to take advantage of the opportunities that were offered, holding to values of kindness and decency while developing my own skills and ability to navigate in a large, competitive world.

When we were moving from Vermont, I found a box of old papers from college, and in it, a letter of recommendation from my advisor praising my strengths, while noting "a lack of confidence." That might seem odd to people who know me now, but not to me: I not only remember how I felt, but I know how other people feel, too. I never wanted to be one of those who was willing to do anything to get into medical school, or get noticed by the visiting genius professor. I just wanted to be myself, to work hard, and not to be disliked for it. My parents told me things would work out, and they did, but not without some cost. I've lost some things that were once important to me, and I've lost certain people too, while gaining authenticity, satisfaction, confidence, and the ability to be comfortable and at peace with myself. The early pains in our lives may be forgiven, but clearly they aren't totally forgotten, even forty years later. Maybe it's not an accident that these drawings contain a shell all by itself, some money in an antique teacup, and a ball and chain made out of wood -- and attached to nothing at all.

Scary Business: Buying Art

There's been some good news on the art front for me too: I sold a print earlier this month, and while away, got news that this painting had been purchased:

It's always encouraging to sell work, and I'm very appreciative of the people who buy it. When people come to our home, they often go around looking at the artwork, by ourselves and others; at this point in our lives our problem is not a lack of art (or textiles, or ceramic plates), but rather not enough walls. On the other hand, in 2013 I gave some small original prints to friends inside Christmas cards. It made me very happy to hear that some of them had framed the prints and put them up, but I was surprised to hear many of them say that it was the first piece of original art they'd ever owned.

Surprised, yes -- but I do understand. Buying a first piece of original art is a real leap; it's often a significant amount of money for something that feels impractical -- as compared to furniture, for instance -- and rather scary. Nobody teaches us how to buy art, and it's not a kind of shopping that's shared among peers like buying music or books. Many people are unsure of their own taste, and hesitant to make a mistake. We don't have these hang-ups when it comes to clothes -- where we all do make some mistakes and accept that fact -- and frankly, a lot of clothes cost way more than a piece of original art. I think it's important not to worry about what anyone else thinks but to listen to your own heart, and buy what you really love. If you see a piece of art that sticks in your mind, that you think about again and again, or that has meaningful connotations, that's a good indication it may be for you. You can start with a print, or a small drawing, rather than a more expensive painting: for $50-$100 you can often buy something original and of good quality, and you can get an affordable frame at IKEA or Pier 1. That's basically one dinner out at a good restaurant, a few bottles of wine, or a pair of not-very-expensive shoes -- and instead you'll have made an investment that will give you enjoyment your whole life.

How about you? Have you ever bought original art? If not, why not? Do you have posters or other reproductions of artwork? What would you like to have on your walls, if price were no object?

 

A sunrise on New England, and on some creative lives

We've just come back from a short, happy visit to the area on the Vermont-New Hampshire border where we used to live. How different it is from Quebec, and from this big international city! And how utterly familiar. We stayed with family, attended a twenty-year dinner given by our longtime client for their ongoing project, saw friends, negotiated with a local bookstore, and spent some time at AVA Gallery and Arts Center where I used to be quite involved on the board, the education committee, and as an artist. It has grown so much, with an expanded facility and program; classes and open studios for adults and children; its own green-certified building (a renovated factory) now filled with artists' studios as well as galleries, a media lab, a library, and wonderful teaching spaces. I was so delighted to see the most recent changes, visit my old friends there, and felt a small glow of pride at having been a part of it during the early years when survival was tenuous. And - especially good news - my husband will be having an exhibition there from April 17 - May 20, this spring!

A great photo from the AVA Gallery website

What I saw at the art center these past few days were art classes of senior citizens, developmentally-disabled people, and children -- not just motivated artistic adults -- all having fun, supporting each other, and being encouraged to make art, to be creative, to express themselves. I met some of the students, and heard first-hand how their lives had changed -- they were eager to talk about it. I was really moved, and powerfully reminded how important the arts have always been to me, and how much of a difference organizations like this can make. I talked with our longtime friends Murray Ngoima, who has taught there for ages, and Bente Torjusen, who has directed the organization for more then 25 years.

"I see the desire to be creative all the time among readers of my blog," I said. "People often write to me and tell me they have been encouraged by my writings about my own artistic process to get out their own paints again, or try writing poetry. That encourages me to keep writing about this and sharing my own work, but it also proves to me what I've always believed: that everyone is creative. It makes me sad that so many people feel reticent or even afraid to return to something they once loved or were attracted to, because they were discouraged in the past, or gave it up for one reason or another, or think if they can't achieve on some higher level it isn't worth it."

"Exactly!" Bente said. "'Compare yourself to yourself!' That way, people can just get on with it, and claim a part of themselves that they've forgotten or neglected -- and find community and happiness along the way. It actually transforms lives -- we see it here all the time."

In Alabama

by Teju Cole

When I went down to Alabama last month, I listened repeatedly to John Coltrane’s Alabama. The introduction of the song has a discursive quality to it, like a black preacher’s exhortations. And that, it turned out, was what it was: the keening saxophone line, built over rolling piano chords (like a congregation’s murmuring), was a paraphrase of the eulogy Martin Luther King, Jr., gave after a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, killing four girls.

Alabama’s earth is red like West Africa’s, dusty, unpromising. On this earth one expects nothing to grow, and on it everything grows. Kudzu and Virginia creeper run riot. This is fertile earth. William Christenberry likens it to brown sugar. James Baldwin wrote: “I could not suppress the thought that this earth had acquired its color from the blood that had dripped down from these trees.”

I was sad all the way to Selma. We drove from Gadsden, where cattle prods had been used on protesters in 1964. Down through the counties, across land that had known human love and life long before the white man’s arrival. Selma’s not much, a main drag, Broad Street, that chucks you out of town via the Edmund Pettus Bridge almost as soon as you arrive. The town is much smaller than those others in whose company it evokes the civil rights movement: Montgomery, Birmingham. In the hot sunshine of a Sunday, it was stunned and quiet, with the fable-like air of a crumbling movie set. Selma is named for an Ossianic poem; to me it melds “soul” and its Spanish cognate, “alma,” into a single moody word. Selma’s shops are closed that day. People are few and drift about in the sun like people in Google’s Street View. But if you take a left some crossings before the bridge, and a right, you come around to a housing project and, across the street from it, the clean and well-kept Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, the starting point for those marches fifty years ago.

Long after history’s active moment, do places retain some charge of what they witnessed, what they endured?

On Sunday March 7, 1965, six hundred people, led by John Lewis, marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Just after crossing the bridge, they were met by Alabama State Troopers and local police. The men in uniform wore masks, and some of them were on horseback. They gave a brief warning, and then shot teargas and charged into the crowd with billy clubs. They rolled through undefended people with a sickening carelessness for human safety that the corresponding scene in Selma—Ava DuVernay’s necessary and otherwise fine film—failed to match. That’s the point, perhaps: that what we watch from the safety of a movie theater cannot, and should not, relay to us the true horror of things. For how would we bear it?

But watch the original footage. These Americans brutally beat unarmed women and men, thorough in their mercilessness, cheered on by other Americans, sending more than fifty Americans to hospital. The footage made the difference, and shocked the nation’s conscience. It accelerated the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

 

How not to link it all together? Selma and Ferguson, New York City and Cleveland, torture by the CIA and mass murder in Gaza, the police state and slave patrols: no generation is free of the demands of conscience, and no citizenry can shirk the responsibility of calling the state’s abuse of power to account.

Selma was a small town then, and is a small town now. On Sunday December 7 when I visited, the headline of the Selma Times-Journal was “Surprise At Parade: Fire department mascot Sparky makes return at Christmas parade.” The lede: “Sparky the Fire Dog has returned and he made a grand entrance the morning of the Selma-Fallas County Christmas Parade. The dog costume was stolen from a vehicle parked at the Station 3 firehouse on Oct. 20 and found weather-damaged, dirty, torn and missing pieces behind the old Pancake House...”

I walked down the Pettus Bridge alone. I thought not of Sparky but of John Lewis, whose face and whose spirit I like so much, his light brown trenchcoat, his back pack, the concentrated dignity in his small frame. I felt these things in my body, tried to honor with my solitary stride the bravery of those women and men, and in the silence of my walk, the steep drop of the Alabama River to my left, the clear air ahead where there had been smoke and atrocity, I began to hear again Coltrane’s Alabama, not a melody but rather a recitation delivered with the saxophone.

Then the drive down to Montgomery, winter’s dry bright landscape flicking by. This bitter earth, these crumbling signs, the things that may have happened in these woods: in this place, I touched on a fissure in America’s unfinishable history. Selma to Montgomery on U.S. Route 80 is an hour’s drive, some fifty-four miles. It was a walk of four days in 1965, and on that third and successful march, many thousands walked together, 25,000 of them by the time they surged into Montgomery and rallied at the Alabama State Capitol. Around those days, some died. Klan work.

“These children,” sings Coltrane’s line in 1963, “unoffending, innocent, and beautiful.” McCoy Tyner weeping on piano. “Were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes every perpetrated against humanity.” Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. After Montgomery, after the memorial to the many murdered during those years, the placid-looking Court Square where tens of thousands had been auctioned into slavery, Dr King’s church, the Rosa Parks museum and the woman who was so much more—so much smarter, so much wiser, so much more tactical—than her best known act of refusal: after all this, we went to Birmingham. And Birmingham was heartbreak, too. At the 16th Street Baptist Church, my soul took fright. How could humans?

 

History won’t let go of us. We’re pinned to it. Days later, after my return to New York and with Alabama still in my ear, I’m in the crowd of tens of thousands for a march that takes us some miles through lower Manhattan. The language is close in its keening. Rosa Parks, John Coltrane, Martin Luther King, Jr., not a melody but a recitation, an exhortation. The raised voices echo down the caverns of the city’s streets. I can’t breathe. Black lives matter. I can’t breathe. Black lives matter. I can’t breathe. Black lives matter.