MADE IT

Dearest Readers,

Green Mountains Near Rutland VT in the Distance

Etta James and I are in Rutland Vermont for a three month summer art encapsulation. We drove up from Decatur at a leisurely pace, stopping to stay with friends Ann and Mike in Raleigh, 

Semra and Roman off to the Clinton Hill Co-op Pre-School

and a week in Brooklyn with my daughter, Semra, her partner Erik, and my three year old grandson Roman.

17 E. Center Street  Rutland Vermont

I’m cacooned in Rutland Vermont in an unfurnished upstairs apartment carved out of the back of a big, brown shingled Victorian home, circa 1890. I’m nestled amid dormers and gables, up a steep, skinny staircase under a massive gambrel roof. I have my own entrance, doorbell and mailbox. It’s old up here, somewhat Spartan, but clean.

 

 

Morning bedroom

Morning bedroom-North light

Kitchen-West light

Bathroom-East light

Funky old bathroom sink

 Artist friend Michael Beale (beneath my life/death wings), 

 and Chris and Ellada, the home owners downstairs 

have given me some furniture, a futon, pots/pans, two plates, and two sets of cutlery. I’ve turned the living room (originally a bedroom) into a studio and tarped the floor. 

Cecelia's Vermont apartment-studio

I’m rarin’ to start painting more wings in my series on transformation-enablers, and more self-portraits of those 89 days of recorded feelings on my face from 2010. Here's the latest portrait of feeling cold earlier this week in 40 degree morning weather. (It actually felt good).

#10-Feeling Cold

There’s also the conundrum to solve this summer of arranging and creating a quilt of the 89 companion hankie portraits. I've arranged and re-arranged them in a variety of ways...not satisfied yet.

Option #1-test sample

Option #2-test sample

Option #3-test sample

Somewhere in the quilt I hope to incorporate a life-sized replica of my Catholic School jumper. That blue gabardine uniform had a tiny breast pocket that was the grammar school’s allowable display-device for these colorful embroidered family handkerchiefs. 

Academy of St. Aloysius Grammar School Uniform from Memory

Rutland Vermont is lush after a mild spring and a week of cool rain. The statue of the Revolutionary Green Mountain Boy in Main Street Park hasn’t moved an inch since my childhood here–still overseeing the concerts in the bandstand on the green. 

In nearly a week here I've visited cousins Elaine and Moira Flanagan, friends Linda Morgan and Glenn Horgan, and touched base with my web designer Andrew Christie at Café Tera downtown.

Cousins Elaine and Moira Flanagan

Linda Morgan and Glenn Horgan

Andrew Christie-Web Designer

I ran into Maryann Belfore, a high school classmate in Price Chopper, and nearly bumped carts with my cousin Mary Margaret Fagan in Hannafords. I signed up for a Rutland Library card and received it in my mailbox two days later. I’m official!

I should mention before closing that I caught a few art shows while in NYC and a five-person spooky/funny contemporary circus from Sweden called Cirkus Cirkor at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music). My daughter had tickets. We left early when Roman got too scared, but it was darkly wonderful. 

Balancing a chainsaw-Cirkus Cirkor

The Cindy Sherman retrospective at MOMA is outstanding. It closes June 11.  I also spent an artistically inspiring afternoon on the odd-numbered side of West 24^th Street in Chelsea between 10^th and 11^th streets cruising the big-name galleries. Metro Pictures featured new work by Cindy Sherman to piggyback with her MOMA show.  

Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures-Untitled

Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures-Untitled

Anish Kapoor’s heaps of concrete dollops blew me away at Gladstone,

Anish Kapoor at Gladstone

 and Francesco Clemente’s paintings at Mary Boone were quietly spiritual. 

Francesco Clemente at Mary Boone

Francesco Clemente at Mary Boone-The Artificial Princess

Francesco Clemente at Mary Boone

These were a few of my favorites.

FROM POINT A TO POINT B-C-D

Dearest Readers,

Last time we talked it was Easter Sunday and I was riffing on the ups and downs of verticality and descent. The open road beckons me now, with its fears and freedom on a ribbon of horizontality. The Scion’s tuned up, with new shoes and juice. Dog Etta James senses the excitement.

Tomorrow we begin our slow road trip to my heartland of Rutland Vermont, unwinding the string from here in Georgia to way up there, with stops at the home of artists Ann Cowperthwaite and Mike Parker  in Raleigh, and a week in Brooklyn with my daughter Semra Ercin, her partner Erik Proft, and dear grandson Roman. Then three months of simple living, painting, writing, drawing, quilting and keeping cool in an unfurnished apartment in the Green Mountains near old friends and relatives.

I’m anxious about the journey this year. Will I be lonely? Will I get too tired along the way? 

Last summer I discovered my driving limits as I traveled around the country returning Hand to Hand artworks. I know what scares me, and I’m afraid I may get afraid, even though I’ve made this south-north trip many times. I went into a tizzy last week when my Vermont housing plans fell through, but then friends helped me find a new place. Nevertheless I came down with a cold and mental exhaustion. I'm amazed how much I like control and certainty. I say this out loud for my own sake. Etta and I will get behind the wheel and clamber up on the back of the road anyway, despite the jitters inside. Last summer I dubbed this panic “The Road Demon”, and kept right on moving. Rest and self-compassion seem to be the key.

 

This impending travel reminds me of an earlier car trip from Georgia to Rutland that Mom and I took back in June 1989. Tiananmen Square was erupting on the motel TV news, as I was carefully returning Mom, 81, the vortex of my life, back to her hometown comfort zone in rural Vermont, after eight years of trying to fit into Southern living. That little car became an intimate northbound space frame, bundling and hurtling the two of us together, then apart.

RISING AND FALLING

Noel Coypel,The Resurrection of Christ, 1700

J.H.Draper, Mourning for Icarus

Dearest Readers,

It’s Easter Sunday, and I’m thinking about the vertical, both up and down. This day is a celebration of rising straight up, outside the flat line of time, entropy and gravity. The premise of this day offers the craving body the possibility of avoiding dissolution and surface transportation, with all the annoyances of driving around an obstacle, instead of simply rising above it.

There is a vertical landscape above our normal horizontal plane of length and width that for me aligns the spirit with earth and sky. It’s the third dimension that rises from the ribbon of two-D, and offers a bird’s eye view of our journeys from here to there. This up and down line of being makes life interesting. When bent, this dimension gives us mass and shape, volume and heft. Thoughts too seem to hatch out of the fullness. In recent blogs I’ve talked about my desire to fly, which represents a curiosity about the spiritual self. I’ve drawn wings as tools for transformation, and ladders emerging from holes.

This isn’t an Icarus thing of hubris and descent. I’m creating contraptions on canvas for accepting eventual death.

Author Rebecca Solnit talks about taking a leap in her 2005 book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost–meditations on journeying outside our comfort zones. Yves Klein, the French conceptual artist took such a leap from a wall on a quiet Parisian street in October 1960. All that we have of the performance entitled Leap into the Void is a photograph* taken as his body arced upward, arms outstretched defying the pull of earth. I love the possibility that Klein and his dematerialized self made it up into the sky. The bicyclist pedaling by in the picture does not even notice Klein’s escape.


Solnit also explores falling, the literal downside of ascension. The 1958 movie Vertigo is about the fear of falling. Alfred Hitchcock creates a dark psychological landscape with a tower, twisting stairs and windows high above the city streets that beckon the characters over the edge.


Physicists have tackled the subject of gravity too. It’s a force field that is everywhere around us, keeping our bodies planted on the ground, drawing matter to the center. It can bend time and space. Black holes have so much of it that all light that gets too close is pulled inside. The Big Bang theory postulates that for a few seconds at the beginning of our universe, gravity reversed itself and exploded outward pushing particles rapidly through space. Then gravity reverted back to its old attractive self, leaving the universe still in expansionist mode.

Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, 2005

Whatever the scientific theories, I know I am an earth-bound groundling on this planet for a short moment in time. As I walk on the surface, I mostly look down, scanning the ground over the top of my progressive bifocals to guide my footsteps around objects in my way. I’m often lost in tunnel vision, and thoughts of social relationships or obligations. I notice the ground a lot. Lately I've been practicing dropping the personal story lines through the tool of meditation. Sometimes I experience a crack of understanding. Sometimes not. I’ve learned that it’s not easy to fly, or to let go of the handlebars and stretch out into space.

I leave you, dear readers with two of my drawings that play with verticality. One is a fanciful Flying Asparagus from 1992, the other an Attenuated Nude from 2009.

DIGGING DEEPER WITH HEARTS AND WINGS

Dearest Readers,
Heaven and earth fascinate me. So do life and death. I’m intrigued by quantum mechanics and cosmological theories of the origin of this universe. I’m enamored of digging through soil, tunneling below the surface, and the idea of sailing into deep, eternal space.
I own one standard shovel, and a small trowel about the size of a pointy hand. I haven’t dug myself to China yet, or fashioned a pair of wings from feathers and wax, but recently I’ve painted fanciful flying gear, and floating hearts on paper and canvas. I’ve had fun imagining holes underground, under water and in the sky. I’ve acted out Flying Lessons that I’ve given to myself to embody desire for flight. I haven’t given up hope!
Somewhere on my 65-year journey I’ve picked up the image of the heart to represent the self living on earth, and wings to symbolize soaring beyond the places we know. I keep digging down within these two metaphors to see what I might discover. I haven’t found God yet, but I have located a shining something within me. Today’s blog is the story of two new paintings from a nest of five that I thought I had finished in 2008 during a month long artist retreat at the Hambidge Center in the Northeast Georgia mountains.

Meet Thing One and Thing Two, my affectionate nicknames for Heart of Gold, and her sister Hearts in Space.
Thing One’s been on a longer journey, or perhaps I photographed more of her makeovers.





In the fall of 2008 at the Hambidge Center, three odd-shaped hearts in an isolated city emerged untitled as an 11” x 17” drawing in charcoal, ink, conté and oilstick on paper.


During the same residency this drawing became the study for an acrylic on canvas painting entitled Hearts in the City, 30” x 40”. I look at the slide now, and see that I had created a bright, 2-D world, still missing inhabitants, but decidedly more ominous. The hearts are scarier and their location in space is uncertain. I’m not sure what was happening in that cityscape, but I put her aside until 2009, when she traveled back to Hambidge with me for another month-long painting residency.


I had a glass of wine for dinner one night, returned to my studio cottage and courageously painted huge swirling circles of white paint across the canvas. It was a relief. I was thrilled with the intervention and my bravery, but I did not know how to proceed with the imagery that was still visible.

This February, two years after the act of creative destruction, I pulled Thing One out of the basement and put her back on the easel. I reinstated some of the hidden imagery, reduced the scope of the white circles of paint, and added new red striations underneath.


A week later I cloaked the checkered hearts in shrouds of whitewash. I wanted to honor their presence without them dominating my new conversation.


I added one realistic heart astride a set of ribs, and the outline of the horizontal clavicle bones. I think I was bringing the human body into the scene.


I refined the color,


added wings, and renamed her Heart of Gold.


Thing Two has a shorter story. The journey was as long as Heart of Gold, but I was not as diligent in photographing her phases.

In the fall of 2008, during the same Hambidge Center residency, I made the initial sketch for the then untitled Hearts in Space, with flying eyes I called harpies. Like the previous sketch for Hearts in the City, the drawing is of three isolated, odd-shaped hearts at 11” x 17”, executed in charcoal, ink and oilstick.


The imagery in the later acrylic painting of Hearts in Space, 30” x 40”, appears cartoonish and buoyant, but two-dimensional again, with one story to tell. I love the gray roiling storm clouds, but something was missing.


In 2009 I brought this painting to my second Hambidge residency a year later. I unleashed three wide white, pink and light blue painted circles across the canvas, leaning my whole arm and body into the action, with the wine glass in the other hand. Then I didn’t know what else to do, except be relieved, and happy. She rested in my basement for two years until this January, when I brought her upstairs and began painting. I shrouded the old balloon hearts in translucent white, reduced the number and importance of the eyes, and created a night sky. Over the month I added bubbles on either side rising from (or going down into) dark holes in space. I added and removed tiny constellations along the bottom of the piece, added an outline of feathered wings across the white hearts, and then covered most of the feathers in a wide span of butterfly wings. I painted three translucent, realistic hearts connected by dots, redrawing and refining them several times. I reduced the width of the 2010 invasive circles, now comfortably letting them swirl in the cosmic background. This is the mature painting of Hearts in Space.

I am indebted to my four artist friends in two creative critique groups who have helped me dig deeper and fly higher. Thanks to Ruth Schowalter, Lynne Moody, Susie Winton, and Mary O'Horo.