Nose Job.

Steve the Miracle Cat, my feral “pet”, who disappeared in a terrible blizzard that hit Long Island last week, wants to thank all the wonderful Commenters who stopped by this blog and left good wishes for his safe return, and then welcomed him back when he finally moseyed back home. And immediately after thanking all of you kind readers, he wants breakfast.

And he wants it now.

Steve gets a bowl of dry food and a bowl of wet food in the morning, served on a mat because that bluestone gets really cold on a cat’s little feet:

Steve is a Manx, so he only has a little bunny butt instead of a tail which is one of the reason that I cannot resist him.

After getting his fill of breakfast, all Steve has to do for the rest of the day is to take up position and wait for dinner:

It’s been punishingly cold for most of the past week here on the north shore of Long Island. I mean painfully, brutal, bitter cold. I am still fretful about Steve being outside in all this so I check on him hourly, and it always does my heart good to see him tucked into his heated nest behind his plexiglass wind break:

Our neighbor’s cat, Dennis, got caught in our house when the blizzard hit last week and he was with us for three days. His people would have liked to have him home, but Dennis was quite content to be our uninvited guest and didn’t seem all that eager to budge from the comfy pile of Adirondack seat cushions that he found in the basement:

On Saturday night I was finally able to catch him, and I picked him up and carried him next door and delivered him to his people. Between Steve and Dennis, I wonder what I would do with my free time if I didn’t have to herd cats.

Whenever I leave the house these days  I am still wearing a small band-aid on my healing nose. My husband and friends have assured me that it’s barely noticeable. I suspect they are lying.

So I was in Lowe’s the other day, buying bird seed, and ahead of me at the checkout was a little boy who was horsing around with the shopping cart while his mother was paying for some traffic cones. (Yes, traffic cones. Makes you wonder.)

The little boy, who was tiny — maybe three years old? — spun around at one point and something about me caught his attention. He pointed his tiny little finger at his tiny little nose and looked at me and said, “Booboo?”

So, Ha!! I knew that “barely noticeable” thing was a  big fat lie. When you go out in the world with a band-aid on your nose, no matter how “small” (the band-aid), everyone notices, even three-year-olds.

Back to the little boy’s question: Of course I wasn’t going to tell a tiny child about skin cancer. So I made up a story about playing with my cats and one scratched me on the nose, instantly regretting that I was giving cats a bad rap.

So if you haven’t seen me around lately, it’s because I greatly dislike going out in the world with a band-aid on my nose.

So I’m staying in my house even more than usual, reading the paper. Here’s a headline that caught my attention while I was reading the New York Times on Sunday (Jan. 7). It went:

From Artisan to Artist

To quote: Betty Woodman, a sculptor who took an audacious turn when she began to transform traditional pottery, her usual medium, into innovative multimedia art, moving her work from kitchen cupboard shelves to museum walls, died on January 2, 2018 in Manhattan. She was 87.

Overlooking the fact of that very ungraceful lead sentence, I read on. Mrs. Woodman, I learned, spent many years happily making clay pots, cups, saucers, and bowls in her house, selling them at yearly yard sales in Boulder, Colorado. However, in 1981, her 22-year old daughter killed herself and Mrs. Woodman, in the words of her son, “emotionally fell apart.”

In the months after her daughter’s death, Mrs. Woodman began to make non-functional pottery (such as pillow-shaped pitchers). And then, according to the obituary, “Mrs. Woodman’s evolution from artisan to fine artist culminated in a retrospective in 2006 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its first for a living female artist.”

This is one of her fine art pottery pieces, called Aeolian Pyramid:

Aeolian Pyramid is an installation of 44 pedestal-mounted vase shapes that gradually tiers upward in a dramatic, pyramidal design. An art critic praised this piece in The New Yorker, writing:

Her aim is to charge negative space—the air around her pieces—with active presence. … the dynamic is miraculous in “Aeolian Pyramid,” a stepped array of thirty-five [sic?] big, slab-presenting vases of abstracted Greek design in black, yellow, and pale terra cotta. The composite keeps squeezing out real space, which keeps muscling back in. The result is a visual “Hallelujah” Chorus.

So this article about Mrs. Woodman, which happened to be an obituary, skipped over the part about how, exactly, this artisan pot-thrower become an artist. The unwritten assumption is that Mrs. Woodman’s career trajectory, taking her from a maker of pots to someone who installs bits of pottery in museums, was one that advanced her esthetics and creativity from the mundane to the ethereal.

So, OK, even though I don’t get the pots (see: Aeolian Pyramid, above) or the hallelujah chorus, OK, for now I’ll roll with this theory that making pots is of a lesser order of artistry than making bits of pots and arranging them in a triangle.

The least you can say is, her installation is original. The idea is hers alone. Nobody else (that I know of, but I don’t track these things) has thought of that before. So, that’s something.

Here’s a piece that Mrs. Woodman called The Ming Sisters:

The Ming Sisters is a triptych of cylindrical vases that features paintings of Asian women in gowns on one side and paintings of vases on the other.

The New York Times noted that “Mrs. Woodman’s vividly colored ceramics drew on innumerable influences, including Greek and Etruscan sculpture, Italian Baroque architecture, Tang dynasty glaze techniques, Egyptian art and Islamic tiles. They also evoked paintings by Picasso, Bonnard and Matisse.”

So here’s the thing about art vs. artisan: If what you make is art, your stuff can “draw on” and “evoke” other more famous people’s work. But if you’re just an artisan, your stuff that resembles other people’s stuff is “derivative” Also, if you want to elevate your stuff to art, it helps if your stuff is decorated very badly.

I haven’t seen Mrs. Woodman’s art in person, but I’m not impressed. Just saying.

But what do I know? I’m a hack. Remember last week when I showed you this painting of mine (work in progress) of the Japanese bridge in Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny?

It is still unfinished, by the way. But this week I happened to be looking through an old book that my sister bought way back in 1984, when she went to see Monet’s garden for the first time, and I found this photo:

I promise you, Dear Readers, that I will try to be more original next week, when we meet back here next Friday.

Have a great weekend, everyone. Stay warm, or, if you’re in Australia, stay cool. Put out water bowls for thirsty critters, whether it’s 9 or 116 degrees outside.

XXOO