Midori Snyder's Blog, page 8

Katherine Ace: The Open Ended Metaphor

I am bringing an old post back because I wanted to review again the fabulous discussion on women's art, especially the work of Katherine Ace and the events that surround and shape the directions of women's lives. And re-reading it again, I still find it as fascinating and with much to offer as when we first tackled the subject. Please feel free to join in with this ongoing discussion in the comments below. 

 

The structure of fairy tales and traditional folklore rests on the use of repetition to pattern the images into metaphors providing an emotional experience of transformation for the audience in the oral traditions as well as for the reader following them in print. Story tellers use repetition to shape the story and for emphasis on important details in each section of the tale. It begins with an interdiction at the home of birth, a repeated request to do or not to do something which usually by the third time is ignored. The middle section is a stripping away of identity and connection to the human world, the protagonist becoming lost in the woods, the veld, the sky, the sea. Swallowed up and sometimes ingested by the elements of nature and the fantastic.

Repetition helps to parallel the experience of the two separate moments: the repeated interdiction of "don't " becomes a new list in the middle of what must be done to survive. Feed the cat, oil the gate, clean the eyes of an old woman. But a price is paid, sometimes even a temporary death, as the old identity is stripped, and a new one is reformed in the fantastic world.  And the last section, becomes the return home, often perilous, success dependent on how well nature has communicated the rules of survival and how well they are followed. If in accordance with nature, the protagonist returns, restored to a new identity, a new status, and new purpose.

Each section of the narrative -- separation, initiation, return-- is patterned in a parallel fashion to the other. As in metaphor, there is a delightful tension between where it begins, where it meets with the impossible, and where it sublates the changes to become something new and unique. The dialectical journey in rites of passage, the death of the old identity, the reforming and re-emergence of a new identity, are combined into a single metaphor of transformation, revealed through images from the human world, the fantastic world, and the cache of inherited cultural archetypes in the narrative performance. 

All this is to explain, why I am so taken by the fairy tale art of Katherine Ace, who expresses her work with fairy tales in a very similar fashion -- painting the narrative with a series of visual metaphors folding in on themselves to express the unstable identities of the tales. She says this in her artist's statement: 

"The intersection of contraries fascinates me: ecstasy and agony; humor and tragedy; natural and constructed realities; experience and news. I find that I'm curious about the struggles of diversity vs. unity in human, animal and plant societies. I am captivated by complex issues that we all face, and yet experience personally, intimately. I am interested in the role of dark feelings, thoughts and states of mind in the process of transformation, l am drawn to fire beneath reserve."

And again here when she considers the evocative imagery in fairy tales that fuels her ideas as an artist:

"I am interested in complex story telling using cultural myths and histories that reach back into our collective and personal pasts. Figures and still life figures evolve as open ended metaphors for concepts and environments that are themselves also metaphors, and therefore fold - like fabric, time, or paint - back in on themselves. Like a poem, a painting is a surface. The depth is in the surface (oddly). It sort of dawns on you - like the way one remembers a dream sometimes, in fragments that float up all through the day, assembling themselves oddly, disturbingly..."

I find this description compelling -- for it is in the story tellers performance, or the writer of fairy tales to create the same tension between the surface of the tale, and the dream-like, metaphorical journeys as real and fantastic collide in the stories, and that it is the experience itself -- dreamlike and disturbing that holds our fascination with the tales. 

 The paintings from top to bottom: "The Juniper Tree," "The Frog King," "The Handless Maiden,"  "Six Swans," and "Many Furs."  (All my favorite tales!) For more information on Katherine Ace please visit her website.

Emile as a Young Soldier

I am a bit late in posting this, but I want to acknowledge my father's participation in WWII, which was considerable.

My Jewish father was 16 when he fled Nazi-Occupied France and arrived in the US. At 17, he enlisted in the Navy and served in almost every major Naval battlefield, including Normandy, where he fought to liberate France. His last engagement was in Okinawa, where a Kamikaze jet fighter bombed the destroyer and cast him, along with others, into the sea. He floated, holding onto debris for close to 24 hours before being rescued. He was, like many men of WWII, modest and quiet about his service. He lost good friends, and he brought home to their families the last papers and items from their lives at sea.

And now, many years later, I am also giving thanks to my son, who served as a Navy Seal for over fifteen years, and in many battles, crashing helicopters, friendly fire, shrapnel, and once more, having to bring home in flag-draped coffins those men he lost to the war. 

 

To Hell with a Handbag.

Probably because my status has shifted from mother to um...crone (even though I don't have the long white braid wrapped around my head like a secret ninja whip -- wouldn't that be cool? )...I have been rediscovering with a new found pleasure all those story variants of the old woman who went to hell and then was sent back again after beating the imps sore, or returned on her own persistence after deciding she would remain for eternity wherever the hell she pleased. Often the women of these stories are harsh, old battle axes, though in the example of the indomitable Dowager of Downton Abbey, they do have all the best lines. 

And this is why I love this little film, "Not Without My Handbag" -- creepy and wonderful -- where the crone is a fashionable Auntie determined to remain so, despite being summoned to hell for a late payment on her "Dante Wash and Spin" washing machine. This is an early film from the very talented studio of Aardman Animations and it's elegantly charming -- the Devil even speaks with a French accent. 

 

I also like that the handbag has become one of those iconic accessories for the modern crone/grandmother. There's always a dollar or two, a hankie, a piece of candy, something to appease a beloved child regardless of age, and in some tales, the handbag is a bottomless source of magic (ala Mary Poppins.) My daughter watched this film as a child and discovered the cure for terror was the handbag -- of which she had many and as a child-crone in training, wielded it like a weapon if she felt threatened. And of course, there is Margaret Thatcher's infamous handbag which seemed to rule with a power of its own, causing her ministers to declare they had been "handbagged" when they felt sideswiped, and once before a meeting when Thatcher had set her bag down on the podium, but had left the room for a moment, a minister quipped "Why don���t we start? The handbag is here." 

All this has got me thinking, I need to work on getting just the right handbag to keep me out of hell. 

Memory and Storytelling: What We Lose, What We Imagine, What We Steal

While researching, I came across a terrific article Speak, Memory by neurologist Oliver Sacks and the lovely animated film above of Billy Collin's poem "Forgetfulness" that have me thinking about the role of memory in storytelling --not merely as an exercise in memoir -- but more importantly fulfilling a deeply embedded need to tell stories. We learn quickly to construct narrative in answer to almost any question about our day, our life, or our work. But according to neurologist Oliver Sacks, we really become creative with narrating long term memories -- giving them shape and form, creating dialogue, selecting images to emphasize how we feel emotionally about those memories. But we also appropriate memories that are not our own -- and braid them into our memories because the additional information makes better stories. "Memory," Sacks says, "is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds." And like the paradox of fiction, our memories into story are both lies and truth. And then there is the opposite, as the Collin's poem suggests, grief at the loss of memory because it leaves us with fewer words and impairs our ability to tell stories.

 

The Amazing Varieties of Mushrooms: Family Hike

We had a great time in the mountains in Pittsburgh, hiking and taking pictures of a wide variety of mushrooms -- most of them unknown to us. Whenever I am in the woods, especially one as green and dreamy as this place, I just want to camp out and breathe deeply of the moist, fresh air and the beauty all around us. And I especially love this Froudian gentleman, sitting calmly and watching me, watch him.

 

 

Nature Knits with all manner of fibers.

How They Drank in the 40s

Here's another one of those mysterious family photographs -- this one of my maternal grandmother (the one in the back-left squinting from the smoke of her cigarette) sitting at a small table in an even smaller kitchen with a group of really elegant women friends and a whole lot of bottles of Cutty Sark and Rexnor. It is impossible to tell what time of day it is -- but I always imagined for some perverse reason that it is in the afternoon -- and the shade is down to keep out the bright California sun. And then there are the vegetables incongruously sitting on the edge of the table -- as though someone any moment might actually get up and make dinner?

There is a long story behind the photograph -- my grandmother Jeanette Westegaard worked in Hollywood as a script writer. The other women all worked in costuming and especially elegant hats. They were good friends -- even at a time when segregation might have made it difficult for them to gather.  

And of course, I wonder about the woman who took the picture -- and the fact that none of her friends are looking at her, or posing for it. One of the group just stood up (and where has she been sitting? on a counter? there's no extra chair) and snapped it.

And what happened immediately after the photo was taken? Did they all look up from their intense conversations, put down their cigarettes and glasses, and laugh at being caught unawares by the camera?

Mountain Beauties

It is such a luxury to live along the Colorado Front Range, surrounded by beautiful high mountains, forests, rivers, and a wide diversity of flora and fauna. We had a great time at a recent family hike up Mt. Brainard, which tops out at a little above 10,000 feet. The forests were full of wild strawberries, and the small streams were full of flowing water. But the real discovery was the abundance of wild mushrooms and lichens we had never seen before. Here are some of them: 

                            If I half-close my eyes, I see a woodland face, a creature from one of Brian Froud's lovely art. 

                          That beautiful pale pink mushroom creating lovely steps up along its face.

                          All those tiny rolled-up bits of lichen capturing the moisture of the forest floor. 

                         This was a tremendous find -- a wild porcini mushroom the size of my hand. 

Hannah's Garden Available in Kindle Edition

Feeling very excited to see the first of my revised novels about to go live in a Kindle Edition. It has been a long journey for me (with more than enough road blocks and frustrations along the way) but joyful too as my dream starts to come true. You can find the kindle edition of the young adult novel here. 

 

 

Book Blurb: Seventeen-year-old Cassie Brittman was thrilled to be playing the violin solo in the Rose Bay Youth symphony. But that changed with a phone call informing her mother Anne that Cassie's grandfather, Daniel Brittman, a painter living in Northern Wisconsin, was gravely ill. Cassie, Anne, and Gunnar, Anne's new boyfriend, quickly set out for the Brittman farm. On their arrival, they discover the farmhouse and great-aunt Anna's gardens have been ravaged by looters. Darkness hangs over the farm, and ghostly forms waver at the edge of the forest. Soon, Cassie can't shake the feeling that they are being stalked by wild creatures or something much more dangerous.

Book Reviews for Hannah���s Garden

���A mystical spiral garden that is also a gateway to another world blooms at the center of Snyder's tightly woven fantasy, a potent blend of faery and family conflicts���Thanks to Snyder's gift for description, readers may feel as if they can hear the music or smell the fragrance of the garden's rare woodland species; the audience will be hooked.��� Publisher���s Weekly

���Like the tales Cassie remembers her mother telling, this is ���filled with wonderment and botany,��� as well as music, deep relationships between generations, and complex, evocative magic-working.��� Kirkus Reviews

���Inventive, beautifully written���Snyder���s use of language is especially poetic in describing nature, including the farm���s flora and fauna and the magical creatures of the Green Clan���a satisfying mix of real life problems and lovingly described magic.��� School Library Journal

���Compelling���This has a power and depth that makes it good for contemporary fantasy of all ages. Locus���

Finished Cover for Hannah's Garden

Love the shadow of the hare footsteps beneath Cassie's feet.