Janet Geib Pretti, Sculptor

Daniel Minter

While I was in Seattle last month I went to the Northwest African American Museum to see the Jacob Lawrence and James W. Washington, Jr. exhibit.  It was a treat to finally see Jacob Lawrence's work in person and be introduced to the sculpture of James W. Washington, Jr. , but the biggest surprise of the day was to see the work of Daniel Minter. 

 

Minter had been an artist in residence at Washington's House and Studio and the paintings he had completed were hanging in the museum's hallway and cafeteria.  They were breathtaking and haunting.  Minter also sculpts and illustrates children's books.  His website is www.danielminter.com.  I am posting a few pictures from the website to help lure you into checking it out for yourselves.

In Seach of Marisol

I decided to write a post on Marsisol Escobar months ago and have been totally frustrated trying to get information to get a clearer perspective on her career as a whole. I was surprised to discover there is not a comprehensive retrospective book and instead found myself following crumb trails across the internet.

First I came across a 1976 book by Robert Creeley, his words, her sculpture. Then I found the recently produced Marisol Works 1960 - 2007, from the Neuhoff Edelman Gallery. And finally Marisol, from the Neuberger Museum of Art arrived this week, after three months of emails and morning calls. It is by far the most comprehensive and I recommend it. Eleanor Heartney’s essay is insightful and the color photographs chronicle work from every decade of Marisol's long career.  The small black and whites give us a glimpse of her life at the center of the New York art scene. But if you decide to purchase it, take into account time zone differences and call only when the gift store is open.

The Creeley book has grainy black and white photographs of sculpture I found nowhere else: of A Portrait of Sidney Janis Selling a Portrait of Sidney Janis by Marisol by Marisol, of her lyrical 1970's fish series, and of the Father Damien maquette which I like better than the bronze. The catalog from the Neuhoff Edelman Gallery shows some early work and more of her later work.

And I still hope some day there will be a comprehensive retrospective book on Marisol.

Marisol, Rediscovered

Last December I came across a picture I had saved of Stephanie’s Family by Marisol Escobar. Marisol was the only woman in the new Pop Art movement that burst on the scene in New York in the early 60's. I had always assumed that her stature had continued to climb with that of her male Pop compatriots. Somehow I had missed that she had been stripped of membership in Pop Art by the art critic Lawrence Alloway who declared in his 1974 book on Pop Art that she was "a sophisticated, naive sculptor, whose figures possess a folkloric decoration and fantasy that is quite unlike Pop." That pronouncement didn’t seem to slow down Marisol. She is still making sculpture, her work is in the collections of major museums and a 2007 retrospective of her work was at the Neuhoff Edelman Gallery in New York.

In 1975, I had the unlikely opportunity to visit the private home of a major collector of American Pop Art. There was a grouping of multiple Warhol portraits of the collector's wife gracing the dining area. The gallery room featured Jasper John’s paintings and number prints, one through nine. An Oldenburg vinyl drum set, a Stella, a Lichtenstein and other pop art masterpieces were on display throughout the house. I was mesmerized by the Jasper Johns prints. It was the only time I have ever seen that much work of Johns close up. Their layers, complexity, and variation were beyond the capabilities of a camera to capture. It is true, Marisol’s work was no where to be found and probably would have been out of place in that sleek contemporary home and life style where the human element had been reduced to a design element. It was a wonderful afternoon, but I left looking for my heroes elsewhere.

Like the other Pop artists, Marisol looked to popular American culture for subject matter. But she focused on the people and the social conventions of the time, not the products they consumed. She created at times poignant and other times searingly satirical portraits of the unknown and the famous. Warhol treated a Campbell soup can and Marilyn Monroe the same, but Marisol’s subjects never lost their humanity. The famous often looked foolish (John Wayne on a hobby horse or The Generals) or over-whelmed (Desmond Tutu reduced to a small head atop a massive red rectangle and a staff). But the unknown always seemed to maintain their dignity and pride.

In a 2004 interview with Whitney Eskew, Marisol was asked if there was a dominant mood or theme in current artwork. She stated that there wasn’t and went on to say - "Art used to be a group effort. Artists worked in movements like Abstract Expressionism. Now everyone is on his or her own, working in a more individualistic style. Working together our efforts were more fruitful." When asked by Whitney where her work belonged, Marisol said, " My work is Pop, but not in the strictest sense because it doesn’t use found objects exclusively. My work has a surrealistic quality as well."

I find myself wondering. How would it feel to be part of a movement, to know where you belong even when the experts declared otherwise? What would I have thought of her work had I seen it that long ago afternoon I spent immersed in Pop Art, when I was still in search of a place to belong? Would I have followed her work more closely? Who else did I dismiss too early, who persisted, who now have a lifetime of art to discover and glean?

Recent Work

Fences

Laying down my pencil in disgust, I was jolted with the realization that I hadn’t spoken more than the few words needed to buy groceries or greet a neighbor in weeks. My husband was fishing in Alaska. Our cat had died months earlier, but I refused the offer of a neighbor’s kitten out of fear of one day having to grieve its loss.

For years I wondered what was wrong with me. I sifted through my memories for ones to explain the sudden and complete fear that would grip me, unannounced, uninvited. I never was prepared for those moments when my body, my words were hijacked, for my embarrassment, my anger that I had no control, no say in when or what words were allowed to come out of my mouth. After our move to the coast away from friends and the routines of work, it was easy to slip into the life of a recluse. I loved the dramas and rhythms of small town life, but I watched from the sidelines. Within the safety of my fenced off world, my body was rarely triggered to betray me and I was lulled into contentment.

But staring at my stale, lifeless drawing, I suddenly realized that freedom from fear has a price. My life and my art had shriveled within the confines of my self-imposed isolation.

It would be decades before I pieced together the whys of my fear. But the next morning, I crossed the street and welcomed my neighbor’s cat - Stanley into my life, into my heart.

Child of Promise

"No child can escape his community . . . the life of the community flows about him foul or pure, he swims in it, goes to sleep in it and wakes to the new day to find it still about him. He belongs to it: it nourishes him, starves him or poisons him, it gives him the substance of his life." - Joseph K. Hart

Resiliency is the ability to recover from or adjust to misfortune or change, to bounce back in the face of adversity, to see beyond today’s pain to a better tomorrow. I was fortunate to hear Mervlyn Kitashima speak on resiliency. In 2003, she was named National Mother of the year. Mervlyn was born on the island of Kauai in 1955, one of 687 babies tracked from in utero through their early 30's for a comprehensive longitudinal study on resiliency. The study identified factors that put children at risk, but more importantly it discovered resiliency traits and skills that could be fostered to buffer them from the adversity permeating their lives.

Growing up, Mervlyn did not know of the study. She lived one day at a time, trying to survive, trying to thrive. She was a child at risk, or as she prefers - a child of promise. When asked how she overcame the odds, she says she knew how to work. She had a grandmother who loved her, to whom she could run across the cane fields and feel safe for a time. She had a sense of purpose, a belief that life could be better and she was given challenges and opportunities by people with high expectations who considered her worthy, full of promise.

Resiliency is built one smile of encouragement, one safe haven, one skill mastered, one dream at a time. On an airplane we are instructed to put on our own oxygen mask first. In life we must first nurture resiliency in ourselves, then we must nurture it in others.

Anniversary

A thirtieth anniversary seemed as far and improbable as walking on the moon. But days accumulated into years, we matured, memories piled up and problems that need solving continued to crop up. We built a partnership. We became each other’s ballast.

At 68, Elizabeth Layton took a contour drawing class that inspired her to draw prolifically for the last 14 years of her life. Layton laid bare her fears and fantasies with colored, wavering lines in frank and unflattering self portraits. Her husband Glenn appeared in many of the drawings, bemused and bewildered. When I first saw her work in the late 80's, I was fascinated by her image and story. Now it is the portrayals of Glenn and their life together that brings a knowing smile to my face. Layton wrote in the caption for Husband on Scales, "Glenn is game to pose for me however I need. He may balk at first, ‘I can’t stand it. You want me to be a bunny rabbit? NO bunny rabbit.’ But he always comes through".

Lonnie does not pose. He has always been interested and supportive, and over the years less threatened by the all consuming thinking, experiments, revisions, and starting over that begets each piece. He is more confident that I will make it back from these forays. He might say, "You want to pull those wires through that oxygen tubing? No way!" Three tries later, we devise a plan, and he always comes through.

Baggage

There will always be differences over what is right and wrong, what is mine, yours and/or ours, freedom versus rules, change versus keeping things the same. Sometimes we work through the thorniest of disagreements, hurt feelings and anger. Other times everyone is instantly angry, rigid and unyielding.

Anger simmers within all of us. For some it is proudly worn like a second skin, an impervious shield keeping the world at bay. For others, anger is a permission slip to shun and exclude, to sort the world neatly into black and white, good and bad, us and them. I stuff my anger deep inside. It stays hidden, buried under all the petty slights and meanness of daily life until the weight of one more rude or sarcastic comment causes all the hurts to combust in a brilliant flash of cleansing anger.

I thought communication was the key to resolving conflict. Now I believe it is a matter of how we manage our personal baggage - our biases and beliefs, the unhealed wounds of our past, stress, our battered egos, our anger style. If we are lucky, everyone can check their baggage at the door to conflict. But when the first person retreats to the familiar comfort of old baggage, others are tempted to reach for theirs. Anger’s adrenalin overtakes reason and the dysfunction, pettiness, and failures of the past recycle into the present. We hunker down with our baggage, lobbing negativity into the discussion. We thwart any chance of lasting compromise with stubborn resistance or acts of sabotage.

Reflection

After our youngest son left for college, I brought my sculptures home from galleries and out of storage. I was filling a void. I was preparing to "art" again. I needed to remember where I had been and where I was headed before setting art aside to sculpt boys and communities.

I always knew sculpture is my thinking place. I saw individual pieces as snapshots of isolated moments, or sometimes as bookends to a continuum of a thought. Yet in the stillness of the mornings, my eyes tracing their contours as I drank coffee, I began to realize that together the sculptures told a story, my story, our story.

I scoured my workroom for the words scribbled on scratch paper that accumulate when I sculpt. I reread my graduate thesis. I sifted through slides for a record of the false starts and forgotten versions. Finally, I began to put the words and the pictures together. I rearranged them. I wrote more words, finding words for long-avoided pieces, uncovering words from which pieces had yet to grow.

Slowly words stitched the images together. As the gaps and loose ends became glaringly apparent, I knew where to begin. Unfinished pieces were resolved, new pieces evolved, and the parables of my life coalesced into sculpture and words.

Andy Goldsworthy, Stone River

I was in Colorado a couple of weeks ago for two family weddings, followed by a few days on the banks of the Frying Pan River to regroup before my final push for the Hult Center Show.  The aspen were just beginning to turn, the air was crisp.  I was purposely not thinking of art, or work, relishing in having the time to catch up with family and friends, play Swedish Rummy and read the stack of books I had brought.  But I couldn't resist the temptation to make a trip into Aspen to see Andy Goldsworthy's new Stone River. 

From an inauspicious beginning from underneath a parking lot, Goldsworthy's river of red sandstone flows "downstream" through a small meadow, under a walkway and through a reflecting pool.  Then the very tip of the sandstone wall curves into the building at the base of a wall of windows.  The thin line of red sandstone meanders in broad snaking curves through a large conference room back outside, across a cement deck where it disappears over the edge, curving in perfect alignment to join up with Roaring Fork River flowing far below.

Unlike the majority of Andy Goldsworthy's work, Stone River required a team of skilled stone masons to construct. It is a major installation piece, but like a river, it only rises to ground level; and like a river born from individual rivulets and streams from multiple and diverse watersheds joining and flowing as one, Stone River combines the beautiful red Colorado sandstone of my childhood with red sandstone imported from England, China, India, and Jordan. 

Stone River was designed and built in conjunction with the new Doerr/Hosier Center on the grounds of the Aspen Institute in Aspen, Colorado.  Founded in 1950, the Aspen Institute is an international non-profit dedicated "to fostering enlightened leadership, the appreciation of timeless ideas and values, and open-minded dialog on contemporary issues."  All the components of Stone River's design are purposeful, reflecting the nature of the work being done in the building, especially the bringing together of red sandstone from all parts of the world to mingle together and create a river of ideas that flows from the outside world in through the meeting room and back out into the world. 

At first, two elements of its design seem disconcerting - its abrupt beginning, appearing to emerge from a rectangular opening from underneath a parking lot and its constrictive, tight, snaking curves.  But then I remembered that a couple of years ago the culvert diverting a small stream under the highway and parking lot outside my office had to be dug up and up-sized to correct a chronic high water problem.  That is what happens to streams running inconveniently through cities and ideas outside the box, they remain hidden and contained until they overflow the system meant to control them and are given room to flow.  Flying  home to Oregon, looking down at rivers cutting through the landscape far below, made me realize that Goldsworthy's exaggerated curves do reflect the true nature of rivers.  But it is a perspective we loose when we sit on their banks and can only see as far as the next bend in the river.

Stone River is a hard piece to describe, a hard piece to photograph, but it is definitely well worth going out of your way to see. I did not know the title of the piece before I went, I was expecting a wall and instead discovered a river.  For those on the west coast, since returning home I have discovered that in 2002 Goldsworthy completed a 320 foot long Stone River on the Stanford Universty campus from sandstone salvaged from buildings toppled in the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes.  An article on that Stanford Stone River can be found at http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2002/january23/goldsworthy-123.html. An article on the Aspen Stone River can be found at http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20060923/ASPENWEEKLY03/109240048.

Commuting Whales

Thursday as I was driving to work, I was so distracted thinking of the meeting filled day ahead that I almost didn’t notice that the ocean was calm and the light breeze was barely stirring up a wind chop. A perfect day to spot a whale spout. This is the time of year that a straggler or two hang out in the bull kelp south of town. I generally commute 50 miles round trip, but a gray whale’s commute is endless, back and forth from Baja to the arctic, traveling south in the fall and north in the spring. Sometimes I envy our local slackers, wishing I had the freedom to take a summer off too.

At one point in time I was so used to spotting them that I could spot a spout from a moving vehicle. But that skill seemed to trickle away after I returned to the year-round workforce years ago. I rarely even stop at the overlooks anymore, but I always keep an eye on the tourists pulled over to snap vacation pictures. I hope someone has clued them in that a special treat may be in store for them or that they are naturally observant so they have the good fortune to observe a whale in the wild.

Then it happened, just as I whizzed by a young girl staring out to sea with her family leaped joyfully into the air pointing emphatically and shouting for her family to look. It was probably just its spout, but if she was really lucky she saw it roll and the graceful arch of its tail slipping back under the water.

I never saw the whale. She never noticed the passing car. But for one split second we were joined together by the majesty, the miracle of one of the Pacific’s most wonderful creatures. Experiencing her joy vicariously propelled me through my workday and I hope the magic of seeing a whale fuels a lifetime of wonder and discovery for her.

The Leaning Curve of Gratitude, Mary Chapin Carpenter

Sunday morning I woke to the sound of Mary Chapin Carpenter reading her NPR This I Believe essay titled The Learning Curve of Gratitude.

The day before a friend had sung her favorite Chapin Carpenter song in a clear but breathless voice ravaged by asthma and chronic pulmonary disease. My friend struggles with a host of chronic illnesses and in recent months caring for her husband post cardiac surgery. She is tired of being ill. Her children have grown weary of her always being ill and are serving up indifference, guilt, and conditions for their love. She is between a rock and a hard place and sees no glimmer of change in the foreseeable future. A granddaughter stopped by to confront her about the growing rift in the family, wanting to know what she was doing about it, and she replied "I pray". She tried to answer her granddaughter's next question, "So what does that do?" as honestly and sincerely as possible, but moved on to another topic when the granddaughter scoffed "well you can get that from yoga". I smiled at the image of my very Catholic, frail friend bowed by the ravages of rheumatoid arthritis, twisted into a yoga pretzel pose.

After her granddaughter left, we sat in her garden and she talked of her determination to live each day with grace and gratitude. Mary Chapin Carpenter summed up what that means quite well in her essay when she wrote:

"What I want more than ever is to appreciate that I have this day, and tomorrow and hopefully days beyond that. I am experiencing the learning curve of gratitude.

I don't want to say "have a nice day" like a robot. I don't want to get mad at the elderly driver in front of me. I don't want to go crazy when my Internet access is messed up. I don't want to be jealous of someone else's success. You could say that this litany of sins indicates that I don't want to be human. The learning curve of gratitude, however, is showing me exactly how human I am."

Chapin Carpenter's complete essay can be found at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11182405.  Striving to be content to live simply with gratitude is not an easy thing, especially now when we are trained from birth to want more and more and more, to expect to always "have it our way", and to feel cheated or defeated when life doesn't turn out as we planned.  Eventually most of us will have to struggle with the learning curve of gratitude.

I look forward Mary Chapin Carpenter's next album.  Her songs have always been rooted in life.  The songs she writes now will be born from her struggle to reach a state of gratitude and they will resonate with those of us who also search for peace and gratitude along roads we never dreamed life would take us.

"The Sell"

This week our community had an opportunity to meet four finalists for the college dean overseeing programs in our county. Each applicant was allotted precisely three minutes for his/her vision, followed by a question and answer period. The first question to the first applicant started with "I feel I just heard the Fuller Brush man". We all inhaled sharply and the candidate graciously responded. But the questioner had a point, all four candidates had three minutes to sell themselves and they had to make the most of it. I would like to think it is just Americans who seem to turn everything into selling a product or an idea or a person. It seems to be our number one competitive sport.

I am an alumnus of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts at the University of Oregon, though in my day my fellow grad students liked to call it the School of Arts and Allied Architecture. As a result I receive their quarterly newsletter. The recent newsletter featured an interdisciplinary initiative exporing how architecture and museums convey the memory of war and if it was possible to do that in a way that might prevent future conflict.  I was reminded of the funereal architecture class that Maya Lin talked about in her book Boundaries which started her inquiry into memorials and eventually led to her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The U of O initiative also concluded with a competition and the winning entries were included in the newsletter. The thumbnail photos were too small to read or understand the proposals, but big enough to show the quality of presentation needed to be competitive today. I found myself pulling out Maya Lin’s book to revisit her original proposal - simple drawings, simple statement. We live in a technological world where desktop publishing is readily accessible, over-the-top presentations are expected, and flash is often used to sell otherwise average or even mediocre products. I wonder if we would even be capable of recognizing the exquisite simplicity of Maya Lin’s vision in the midst of today’s slick hype.

Even I can turn into a used car salesman to prod a student to take the leap to get the education to make their dreams a reality. But I struggle when it is personal, when it is art. It is such a delicate balance. I am easily wooed by hype if I don’t remind myself to look deeper and I often fail to make "the sale" because if feels awkward if not sleazy. Yet in the end we all buy and sell something.

And then there is a matter of how much is enough. In the same newsletter was an article about a design duo that limit their architecture practice to four projects a year so they have time for other art projects. How do we not get caught up in the competition of "the sell", so that we still are centered, capable of being content with less rather than more, with genuine rather than hype?

Andy Goldsworthy

It is spring, the time of year I prowl my yard daily searching for signs of life - a swelling bud, a spike of green poking through the ground. I clear the dead stalks of last year and pull the weeds first in places I know certain plants will soon emerge, because if I don’t they will be choked out by the weeds and grass that already have a head start and are thriving.

Last night on my nightly prowl I came across my crude barren circles in the weed choked flower beds and thought of Andy Goldsworthy. His book Andy Goldsworthy, A Collaboration With Nature was published in 1990. I thumbed through it anytime I saw it in bookstores, but I didn’t buy it until last Christmas. It is remarkable that it stayed in print all these years. I sometimes day dream of coming upon one of Goldsworthy’s pieces in nature, by happenstance, or of sitting mute and still watching him create.

Unlike my want-to-be gardener attempts to bring color and seasonal variety to my yard, Goldsworthy is a master collaborator with nature, in tune with the landscape and weather; pushing the limitations of individual materials, yet maintaining balance within his individual pieces, within nature itself.

I garden to stay connected with nature, to get outside and be reminded that life is cyclical and fleeting. I make sculpture to ponder and capture life's lessons, hopefully with sufficient complexity that they will continue to intrigue and give insight long after they are finished.  I want my sculpture to be able to stand the test of time.  I want my garden to grow and renew itself year after year.

But much of Goldsworthy’s work is as fleeting as life itself.  He uses plant materials that decay, ice that melts, stones that the tides will tumble to create a moment of balance and beauty that from the moment it is finished continues to evolve and decay in a natural life-cycle. I have always been in awe of his ability to create such exquisite moments of perfection knowing that for the most part they would only be seen and experienced through the photos he took to record their life cycles.  Only in his later stone work, can we experience his work for ourselves. 

But most of the art I treasure I hold onto, return to through books and pictures. It really doesn't matter whether a piece still exists or has long since decayed or collapsed from the forces of gravity, wind or rain. Most of Goldsworthy’s pieces were never expected to survive past the turn of the tide or rising sun, but through pictures, they will continue to delight and inspire generations.

Goldsworthy has many books and DVD's chronicling his work.  In March, he completed a new stone installation for the Doerr/Hosier Center in Aspen, Colorado.  The wall combines the beautiful red Colorado sandstone of my childhood with red sandstone imported from England, China, India, and Jordan.  I can't wait to see it when I visit Colorado in the fall.  It is a permanent wall, requiring a team stone masons and architects, but I hope it still captures the essence of Goldsworthy's earlier, solitary work made when his only collaborator was nature itself.

Why Art?

I was up earlier than normal this morning. A deadline with the foundry is looming and my brain was wanting to organize my work tasks in order to move on to thinking about what might also be accomplished in the four extra hours I was planning to take off to 'art'. Yesterday a coworker asked how I managed to find the time, the focus for my art? I gave my usual answer, "because I am a better person for it."

My first clean-up task of the morning was to catch up on email. The only feed I have set to automatically come into my reader is This I Believe. The series airs on Mondays on public radio's All Things Considered. I have a link to it on this website. The essays by people from all walks of life always give me pause to think.

Judith Jamison, artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, wrote this week’s essay on To Thine Own Self Be True. Jamison started her essay with her belief statement - "I believe that there is sanctity in the fact that we are only on this earth for a short period of time. And I believe that with that time, we’d better be doing something good." She went on to explain that honesty comes with goodness, describing that connection from her experience as a dancer and choreographer.

"As dancers, we need to bring our life experiences to the stage. We don't just want to thrill an audience with how many turns we can do or how high we can jump or raise our legs. Plenty of people can do that with practice. We need to share our truth. When a performance stands out, it's not just the arms and legs that stay in your mind. What you remember is the feeling you get from the performance, and that feeling comes from the dancers' expression of self.

A good performance on stage should take the audience on a journey where they learn something about themselves. It's about all of us. It's about reaching for perfection, and, most of all, it's about honesty."

That is why I squeeze extra hours from my day to art. It is a need to search for honesty, to spend part of my day thinking and working hard for true understanding of one small chunk of life, knowing that if I am honest and good enough the resulting piece will have the power to nudge others along their own paths of self discovery to find their own truth, honesty and goodness.