Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 95

A New Venture

Banner for my new online shop, StudioCassandra

As I wrote a while back, I've been musing about what to do with some of my artwork. Back in the U.S., I was associated for just about thirty years with AVA Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, NH, a non-profit exhibition and educational institution, first as an exhibiting artist and then, for many years, as a board member, board chairman, and member of the education committee. It was an important part of my life, and something I really believed in. Over the decades I saw AVA (that stands for Alliance for the Visual Arts) grow from a small local gallery to an arts institution known and respected throughout northern New England, with a vibrant year-round educational program for children and adults, ongoing exhibitions of very high quality, showing the work of the best contemporary regional artists and often taking risks; most recently, AVA bought and renovated their own building, full of exhibition and teaching spaces and artist studios, in the most environmentally sound way.

Early on, I was still doing a lot of art, but during the years when I was working hardest at our design and communication business, I didn't do much art myself but I always cared about it - and AVA was one way I could, and did, stay involved. After moving up here, though, I haven't been thrilled about the gallery scene; for all its strengths in music and film, I don't find Montreal very strong in the visual arts or crafts, though we do have a very good contemporary museum. There are the predictable galleries catering to tourists in the Old City, but a lot of the work shown elsewhere is very conceptual and intellectual -- the kind of thing where the artist's statement seems more important than the work on the walls. And there is also the problem of money: Montreal doesn't have the sort of individual wealth you still find in America, and while Canada and Quebec have always strongly supported the arts, the Harper government is busy cutting arts funding right and left.

As in publishing, artists have the freedom now to market their own work, and some do quite well on the internet. So I've decided to open a virtual "shop" -- I'll give it six months or a year -- hoping that this will also be an incentive for me to keep producing new work, especially prints which are affordable, and also that it might add to our income. I have no desire to go backward artistically; I want to keep growing and pushing myself forward, but I do have a number of paintings and drawings in my flat file drawers and on my shelves that I'd rather know that people are enjoying in their homes, so I'll be listing some of those as well, and may in the future produce some high-quality, archival giclée prints of certain pieces, such as oil paintings and large works like the Iceland drawings.

I think all of us artists and writers are uncomfortable promoting our own work, but unfortunately this is the present-day reality unless we are well-established, with agents and sellers who are representing us - and who, of course, share in the profits, as they deserve to do. Making a living as an artist (and here I mean all the literary, fine, and performing arts) is becoming harder and harder, precisely at a time when  -- I feel -- society needs art, and artists the most.

I don't want The Cassandra Pages to be commercial, so I've taken the "shop" offsite. I'll mention and show new artwork here, and continue to talk about the process, because you've been so interested, supportive and helpful with your comments and suggestions, but, as with Phoenicia Publishing, the transaction space will be over there for now. Of course I'm glad to hear any comments, suggestions, or stories of personal experience you've got relating to this venture, too!

Night Willow

A while ago, I promised my friend V. that I'd post a painting that was related to an essay I wrote about the loss of a huge, mature willow near our Vermont house. The other day I came across it in my flat file, and here it is.

This is kind of a "dream painting;" it came out of my imagination and memory during a period of time when I was doing very large watercolors and trying to loosen up both my technique and my head. I was aiming for the motion of the willow branches tossing in the wind, and the stars appearing through the branches, but more than that to convey a particular emotional temperature. I don't know if it's a "successful" painting or not, I that depends on what criteria you're using to judge it, but seeing it again brought back exactly the feeling of standing there at night, looking at the tree, even though it's been gone for many years. I like it because it does what expressive painting can do, and photography, most of the time, cannot.

Here's the essay:

Requiem for a Tree (1998)

While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
Wordsworth, "Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey"

The big willow is being cut. I'm upset about it, know it has to be done, but it's such a great and beautiful tree, worthy of being mourned. I've looked up into its branches for twenty years now, especially on summer evenings, when the only light was from the moon, to see stars shining through the leaves so far above my head, and fireflies dancing among them. It always felt like its own world, up there, in the bowls formed by those great dark branches, populated by things of the air and heights. A pair of orioles nested in the tree each spring, serenading me as I turned over the first soil in the garden; later their purse-like nest swayed above me. And it was home to many smaller birds: chickadees, nuthatches, warblers, feeding no doubt on a vast colony of insects. Kneeling next to the garden beds I'd feel drips of water raining down on me all summer, even during dry weather, and wonder whether willows really wept, if that was how they got their name.

Branches fell continually, especially in spring storms, and I used the long supple tender ones to make woven fences and supports for herbs and other plants. It was a high-maintenance tree for us, and we didn't even own it, but I never minded. I drew it many times, painted a watercolor, wrote a poem --trying unsuccessfully to capture that mysterious, secret world suspended in the sky.

When this hill was a pasture, a stream flowed between our property and the neighbors', and along its banks a line of willows grew up. Ours was the first house cut out of the farm proper, near the turn of the century. Over the last twenty years, the hillside, divided and subdivided, became house lots. The willows -- streambank trees, never intended for shade -- were left in one back yard or another, sending their shallow roots into basement walls and dropping branches each spring. Homeowners, sympathetic at first, grew tired of taking care of the trees and worried when major damage occurred in thunderstorms. It's understandable. But as is always the case, it doesn't matter that the trees were here first, that we are, in fact, the ones who have encroached on them.

Last night, after dinner, the chain saws in the neighbors' yard were finally silent. I went out on the back porch and looked over at the willow. The tree stood there still, its great wide crown shorn, one main trunk remaining with all its branches and leaves, the others amputated into huge logs that lay around the base. It was a horrible sight but heroic in a way; the tree, still alive, retaining something of its nobility and the strength emanating from that huge solid trunk, easily five feet in diameter at chest height. Yet it was doomed; this would be its final night, the last time those branches reached toward sunlight, leaves stretching a few new millimeters in length. I came back upstairs, drew a basin of water for the dishes, and started to cry, filled with sorrow for mankind, for being alive at a time and in a culture which values the safe, the cheap, the fast solution: whatever fits easily into our lives and causes the least inconvenience. I cried rueful tears for myself, made so sad by a tree -- how out of step I am, and how painful it is to stubbornly refuse the cries of a culture that would gladly give up Bach for the sitcom-of-the-moment; where artists, musicians and poets eek out a living and developers get rich.

I'll remember the willow best on those nights, years ago, when I was trying to figure out if God existed. After I'd meditated for an hour, the incense burned down to ash, candle extinguished, I'd come out into the night, and to my polished mind, open, newly innocent, every sensation appeared fresh, important, astonishing. The Milky Way had never seemed so vast, the air so exhilarating, the snow under my feet so white. And there the willow loomed: hugely alive, pulsating with being-ness and a quality of home that strangely did not feel closed to me. I stopped trying to paint it or write about it, but just stood there, night after night, as if it were part of the meditation ritual; looking up, not thinking, I let it tell me whatever it had to say.

Tipping Point

 

Tiny blueberries,

handpicked, lie in small boxes

like orbs of lapis

"Summer," for me, always arrives around July 1, announced by the blooming of the ubiquitous roadside orange daylilies and spires of (fuschia-colored) purple loosestrife. The more delicate June flowers that thrive in showers and coolness quickly fade and give way to these robust, and (to me, anyway) coarser plants, able to withstand long days of sustained heat and battering thunderstorms.

Something in me gives way, too, when I first see them blooming. Just when summer finally arrives here in the north, with our two warmest months still ahead of us, I know that actually the sun has paid his visit and is already packing up and starting the journey south. We wait so long for heat, and I, especially, time the passage of the seasons by this natural calendar of anticipation and succession: the fleeting bloom of trillium and hepatica followed by lily-of-the-valley, poppy, peony, rose, delphinium; the arrival of robins and butterflies, all that meeting and mating and nesting followed inevitably by the gradual toughening of tender leaves and stems, by the fracturing of egg and chrysalis, by eventual departure.

Am I like that too? I asked myself, walking home the other day. Has my life followed a trajectory of tender, idealistic anticipation that gradually ceded to maturity, realism, and an accompanying toughening against the vicissitudes and difficulties, against the knowledge of what's to come?

There's truth to that, I decided, but only so far as I allow myself to be trapped by my own biology; tenderness can persist forever if I carry it inside me, and ripening continues right up to the fall of the fruit.

 

What's happening with comments?

First of all, this is not a complaint, but simply my musings about commenting here and my own beahavior as a commenter. I love and appreciate everyone who reads and who comments here. Thank you for visiting and reading my words, whether you ever add a comment or not!

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Most of us who've blogged for a while have observed a gradual decline in the number of comments. Many of us have also noted that we, too, don't comment on the blogs we read as often.

Social networking is often blamed for siphoning off a lot of the interactive energy that used to happen on blogs, and that's probably true to a large extent. We chat and interact elsewhere, and long-form exchanges, whether on blogs or by e-mail, are a lot less common than they used to be.

I think there's a definite "taken-for-granted" factor: certain blogs, like mine probably, have been around for a long time and readers assume they'll continue to be, with or without the encouragement and conversation that comments add. That may or may not be true: it depends on the blogger. Perhaps it's even assumed that the writing is more important to the author than the conversation. In my case, yes, I'll probably continue the blog, but no, what I write is not at all more important to me than your own thoughts. I write and post images in order to share things I'm interested in, but primarily because I hope others will have a reaction or be moved somehow or think more deeply about that subject. It's a happy bonus when I hear back: when a reader has a thought or story or experience of their own to share with me and with the other readers. So for me the posting will always be about sharing. While there's a certain amount of esoteric stuff here, I try to write about subjects that concern all of us, not just me. It's great when that leads to a conversation.

My husband was saying the other day that as we've become more and more used to the internet being a big part of our lives, we've gotten used to the idea that content is free, and that it's simply going to be there for us to find, and to consume. Society pays for objects, but expects and consumes a great deal of free content, especialy artistic content. I'm reminded of public radio on-air marathons, which usually convinced me to contribute a little bit so that the shows I loved would keep happening. Blogs are free, so readers don't even have to contribute except by indicating once in a while that they're present! I'm amazed and deeply appreciative of the generosity of near-daily blogs like Language Hat, Via Negativa, or Marja-Leena Rathje -- longtime friends who just keep going, giving away intelligent writing and beautiful images, without the expectation of any particular return.

As a commenter myself, I know that I don't leave comments as often as I used to. When I ask myself why, the above justifications come up -- along with the fact that my online life is spread out over many more sites and many different types of interactions now. But there's also another factor that prevents me from commenting as often. It drives me nuts to have to jump through a routine of captcha-entries or elaborate sign-ins designed to prevent or reduce spam and potential hacking. So many times I've written a comment only to have it disappear after some sort of failure in the authentication routine. I tried to sign into a blog I love today, in order to leave a comment, and finally I just gave up! Have we perhaps gotten a bit too paranoid about this? At Cassandra I require only an email address and don't moderate comments; I have advanced virus software on my computer. Spam is extremely annoying, but I don't get excessive amount at all; I delete it and add spammers and their subjects to my "block" list. My site has never been hacked; perhaps I've just been lucky, perhaps that's a function of TypePad -- I'd like to know.  I've always felt that I wanted to keep my site as friendly as possible, and have probably erred on the side of less caution, and convenience for the readers rather than for myself.

Is that naive? What's your experience been, and how do you feel about this whole subject?

In the Country - 3

 

Wheatfield.

We went up on a nearby ridge on a gorgeous day last weekend, and drove through the central New York farmland. This area, in general, is quite depressed economically, and every time I've gone recently I've been able to see the deterioration, which seems most apparent to me in the towns, where more and more shops are empty or boarded up, and increasing numbers of individual properties seem to be in disrepair. Unemployment is high, and several factories have closed or moved. Yet, in the grocery stores, where a lot of people looked pretty down-and-out, prices were higher than in Montreal.

Beans in the foreground; cabbages (blue-ish) in the middle distance beyond the trees and grass.

Corn. Everywhere.

Family farms have been hard hit here, as they have been all across the country. But recently things have seemed a bit better. One development in recent years has been an influx of Amish and Mennonite families from further south. They, and some other enterprising local farmers, are leading a revival of community supported agriculture, through CSA food-basket shares, and the sale of cash crops, eggs, crafts, and baked goods at the farmers' markets which are becoming a feature of small town life. Milk prices have been more stable, too, since the remarkable growth of a yogurt company, started in 2005 in a closed Kraft plant, which now makes a new brand of Greek yogurt, Ciobani; the factory buys most of the milk produced in this part of central New York, and it's all hormone-free.

The region seems divided, however, about a much more contentious issue: energy. I already mentioned the windfarms which have gone up in Madison County, but I haven't spoken here about the natural gas wells. During our drive we were astounded at the number of wells in the area. The gas companies enter into long-term leases with the farmers and landowners, many of whom have been so impoverished that they don't want to refuse; we heard of some who later wanted to get out of their contracts, only to find out that this was impossible. The area sits on the Marcellus shale, which is rich in natural gas and desireable for fracking. (As I understand it, the type of well shown above is a straight gas well, not the result of fracking, but perhaps a reader of this post who knows more can explain better.) New York State has put a moratorium on fracking while the longterm effects on groundwater are studied. I can hardly blame local people, who already feel forgotten and hopeless, for signing up for a chance for guaranteed income, but I'm very sad about what may happen in the future.

Meanwhile, the land continues to bowl me over me with its beauty.

Your E-reader is Reading You (and the Implications for Literature)

Books may have been thought to be dangerous in the past, but it was a matter of having your mom find the steamy novel under your bed, or having to read subversive titles in secret. The reader was still in charge, and the book was an object, even if that object was a symbol of something else .Now, we learn, our e-readers are anything but passive objects. Like the eye behind a hidden two-way mirror, they're looking back at us, and passing along what they learn to a higher authority. (Imagine if Lady Chatterly's Lover or Das Kapital had been able to do that?) But, in true 21st -century form, political and moral snooping are taking a back seat to the real payoff: how to maximize profits.

An article in the Guardian, "Big E-reader is Watching You," tells the details of the types of information being collected:

"With digital content we have the ability all of a sudden to glean new insights into our customers," says Todd Humphrey, Kobo's executive vice president of business development. "How often do they pick up and engage with a book? What's the average time when they start to read? How many pages do they read an hour? How long does it take to read a book? And through bookmarking, people tell us where they stop. If we were to dive into that reader space, we could see they picked up a book, read the first five pages in five hours, then never picked up and engaged with the book again. What does that say, if 90% of readers stop after chapter five? It certainly provides insight for the publisher and the author."

Yes, no doubt it does. And that's what I find the scariest of all, because of its implications not just for book publishing in general, but for literature. We live in a society where budgets are increasingly determined through quantitative, not qualitative, measures. Teachers are judged by their students' scores on standardized tests; even university courses sink or swim on the bottom line: how much income they generate for the institution. The resources available for artistic endeavors of all types are dwindling, along with the energy of those who are willing to champion excellent work which may appeal to a small market.

But if that's not bad enough, now, for the first time, we have the spectre of quantitative information being used by publishers to influence not only what is written, but how it's written. In genre fiction, perhaps, this isn't so outlandish as it sounds. Here's British fantasy/sci-fi writer China Mieville:

"I hope it wouldn't change how I wrote, but conversely I do wonder if getting specifically worked up about this is simply a kind of neophobia, because if it did change how you wrote, wouldn't it just be a new variant of what authors have done for centuries, which is writing to a market?" he says. "In other words, that writing to algorithm, while I'm certainly no fan, is just writing to what one believes readers want – no more or less infra dig than writing in response to demands from the marketing department, or in response to one's analysis on perusing the bestseller list, or trying to second-guess what makes a best seller. A bit more micro-level in its analysis, but not qualitatively 'worse' or 'better'."
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Reader privacy is another major issue. And while e-book manufacturers like Kobo say they will only use and pass along (read: sell) information to publishers that has been aggregated -- not individual statistics - do you really want your e-book reading habits used in this way? Or has social media altered our view of privacy so much that we can accept that even reading a book is no longer a private act?

"If they don't bookmark, and they're not online when they're reading, and they're not taking notes, we're not going to glean much information except for the purchase itself," Humphrey says.

But, he readily admits, they want more. The knowledge of where people stop reading, or how particular books are read, "could eventually affect what's published."

"You can understand what books are selling, where in the world, how fast people are reading them, how long it takes them to finish, where they accelerate or decelerate through a book – all of that at the end provides the publisher with pretty interesting insights to work with the author, on the style of the book and the story, and from a publishing perspective how to market based on where it is selling. At the end of the day, it does allow publishers more information than they would have if they just put the book on a shelf," he says. "It is going to be interesting to watch how it evolves over time. It is more power to the people who are essentially telling publishers and authors what it is they want to read."

Books as reader-driven commodity? We're already almost there. So what's the implication for literature? I predict that here, as in all the arts, a small sub-group of writers and publishers will emerge, largely separate from what's going on in the big-business side of publishing, and continue to create and make available works of enduring quality, for a smaller group of readers. But to preserve that level of care for the written word in human culture will take a level of selflessness, ingenuity, and determination we've only seen before when culture is threatened by totalitarianism, war, or extreme poverty.

In the long run, I fervently hope that Darwinian capitalism will run its course and that a more benevolent and humane world society will emerge. That long run may be very long indeed, and if human society does indeed survive, the process is going to be ugly, threatening, and at times truly dangerous to our bodies and particularly to our spirits.

Books have always been a symbol of human freedom. What we do with them is always significant. Are we prepared for the next phase in our relationship, and for what it's going to take to preserve not only the very best writing, but those who write it?

(This article is cross-posted to the Phoenicia Publishing blog.)

In the Country - 2

Windmill blade, en route. There are two windfarms fairly close by, but not on a huge scale - each one has a dozen or so windmills. The local population is divided about whether this is a good thing or not, as they are about fracking. We saw plenty of signs in Madison County saying "No Industrial Turbines."

Homemade ice cream at Gilligan's Island. The lamps are made from minnow buckets.

Sheep, safely grazing.

Daisies, of course.

And back to the lake for some ripple-watching and fish-splash-listening...

and lying on our backs, watching the slow dance of the clouds.

In the Country

I'm back now, in my studio, in Quebec, and both feel like quite a contrast to the rural, agricultural landscape and small towns of New York State's Chenango and Madison counties, right in the center of the state. I love it there, where I grew up, for many reasons, not least of which is the peacefulness of being surrounded by nature and quiet. There are other aspects of life in the U.S., particularly rural areas like this one, which are not happy or peaceful at all, and which are painfully obvious to me whenever I go back. But my family was doing well; my father at 87 is still vigorous and enjoying life and golf and good health; the lake itself was clear and seemed in better ecological balance than it has been for some time. It was a good visit, with beautiful high summer weather all the time we were there. I'll post some more photos tomorrow; these are all from the small lake where I spent my childhood and where my dad still lives.

Part of our shoreline, looking northeast. Froggy habitat in those reeds beyond the ferns!

Crown vetch.

Honeysuckle berries.

And who was eating them. (A pair of cedar waxwings: they were very unafraid, and I watched them mating on the branch just before I took this photo.)

And a portrait of an important member of the family, exactly the same age as I am. Restorative and cosmetic surgery is an ongoing project!

Trip

It was a long hot drive getting here, with big holiday waits at the border. But I'm now in central New York, visiting my dad.

More photos tomorrow, all lush and nature-filled.

A Visit to the Modern Scriptorium

The major task at my studio this week has been to make packages of bound, pre-publication review copies of Thaliad, forthcoming in November from Phoenicia, for the big review lists: Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal. These outfits are very selective and only review a small percentage of the books they receive. Then there's the effort and expense of pulling all the required elements together into a presentation package -- ISBN and technical info, author's bio, previous credits, blurbs and comments on previous books, illustrations and cover art -- and essentially "making" the book itself three to four months prior to publication.

After a couple of years running a tiny publishing house, I understand very well why bigger publishers have staffs, and interns, and larger budgets, and also why so many of them go out of business.

And I see why it continues to appeal to me. There's such pleasure in collaboration, made tangible when I see my own work coming together with Marly Youmans' words, and Clive Hick-Jenkins' collages. But there's more to it. As I was remembering yesterday while I printed and cut and bound these copies, I've been "making books" ever since I was a little girl. I found an early one when we were moving from Vermont: it was about 2 1/2 x 2/12 inches square, with a text written in pencil and illustrations in colored pencil; I must have made it when I was about seven or eight. There's something about the whole process, from conception to holding the finished object, that is deeply satisfying to me; it's part of what led me to write and do art, and certainly what led to my interest and, later, professional career in calligraphy, typography and graphic design, and the book arts.

It all felt like a particularly appropriate process for this book, too, because so much of Thaliad is about re-learning the old ways, the handcrafts and basic skills and wisdom, after an apocalypse. Clive picked up on this in his choice of a folk-art motif, drawn form early-American quilts, for the illustration style.

Some things about us, deep inside, simply don't change very much over the years, but technology certainly has. I would have given my best swirly glass marbles, half a century ago, for the ability to do what I was able to do this week in terms of computer files and ease of printing multiple copies right in my own studio. But the most satisfying part was still the handwork: feeling the pages under my fingers, hearing the swish of the papercutter blade, watching the cut sheets pile up to become a book-block, and finally, binding them into a book that could be paged-through and easily read. It's an elemental process, one that connects me with medieval scribes and woodblock printers and even further back, and still feels somehow miraculous and very human, emerging as it does out of our desire to create, to communicate, to share.