The hand...and click...of fate

Sometimes fate brushes you past someone whose art transports you, and whose graciousness in extending it illuminates life.  I've been lucky that way, to have turned a corner, or crossed a street, or sat down to lunch to meet someone who inspires what Allen Ginsberg called "extending yourself".

Elizabeth Matheson, balcony

I think of them the morning after Elizabeth Matheson's amazing show at Casselhaus, itself a modern architectural wonder designed for exhibiting art, especially photography.  (I won't stop now to describe that house where light and art live; you can look it up at Cassilhaus.com.)  Please note:   I use "amazing" and "wonder" in their original meanings...not the mall and greeting card versions they have become.  

Elizabeth Matheson, self-portrait, Ayrmont

Elizabeth's photographs bring one into a maze wherein another world exists, some even in sight of your own, if you would only look, some so far out into the country of empty rooms and their unseen ghosts that we ordinary seekers might never find them otherwise.  I "met" her briefly a long time ago at a reception for one of Chris Brookhouses's books, Quartet, of four North Carolina photographers (Chris' photographs are not one of them, but being the owner of two of his, I wish he'd done a book of his own).  Then, I was asked to review another book of her photographs, To See.  I was startingly drawn to the way she saw.  I fell into one photograph, particularly, curtains blowing in through open French doors, an elaborate staircase going up to what could only be...there!  A whole story unfolded at once, one welling up from deep inside both the photograph and me.  I began to "know" her then.

But it was many years later that she and I shared enough time for me to appreciate what she is, where from her seeing and the feelings her camera acquires emanate.  I'd seen the photograph, above, on Instagram (matheson8698).  Taken in the early hours of the morning, when shadows graced a Hillsborough porch, mostly hidden from view, in that small space the curls of its wrought iron chairs became, with those shadows, images of my grandmother's dresses.  No one else, of course, saw that image except me, but that's art, isn't it?  It opens a vein inside where something new, something old flows.  And she, like me, likes windows and doors.

Elizabeth Matheson, mill windows late afternoon

Elizabeth Matheson, door

So, that Casselhaus showing:  Elizabeth's long journey through photography belonged in that space, even though it was almost an accident (fate, again?) that it settled there.  That's another story, though.

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What I want to say now is that in the morning, with the perfection of her show still in mind, I began to think of those who, like Elizabeth, fate has sent my way, often just in time to open new veins, inspiring a new way of looking, feeling, doing.

Leysis Quesada vera

Leysis Quesada vera

                     Our views daily.  We get [so] used to seeing everything withered and destroyed, that we insist on looking for beauty in all this.

I think of Leysis Quesada vera (@leysisquesadavera), whose quote above accompanied one of her images online.  Leysis has cataloged life in her neighborhood, Los Sitios, La Habana, and across Cuba. I found her (or she me) because her brother Leonel became, after my sister-in-law connected us, a genial guide and continuing friend.  I'd gone to Cuba to study the art there (that's what I told the US State Department, anyway, and it was mostly the truth), but the people...those wonderful people...were what I found most inspiring.  Leysis' work was in a gallery run by the granddaughter of one of Cuba's famous photographers; like her grandfather, she was a photographer, but of quite a different sort. But Leysis' lens captured the heart of what Cuba, in its everydayness, was...its beauties sometimes stark, always colorful (a contradiction, does it sound like?  I know, but it's true), the resilient, encumbered, enchanted people's days...the pulse of their lives.

Leysis Quesada vera

What does her work mean, now that I have seen Cuba and continue to see Cuba through her eyes?  I see how, in one's art, there must always be love and admiration, a nativity, that leads to understanding.  Seeing from within, as she does, one knows  meaning and captures it; she can because she is part of the scene in her lens.

gourds

When I moved back to Chapel Hill nearly 30 years ago, there was Jane Filer, the painter, but also the teacher who brought me to the shades and depths drawing could bring to simple lines.  (I look at the one above and marvel that it came from my hands.)  

[Forgive the missing image of Jane's work here...I've got to wait for permission to use it.]  

What I admire about Jane's own work is its fantastical, mythical being.  Color and shape people painting after painting, fascinating me with its invention.  Invention...that's what I found by her, learning to sculpt a drawing...not simply lay flat lines on a page, but pushing in and up until its character is revealed.  Jane Filer's own wild universe on canvas, and her student Eva Rubin's, were myths and legends I could read in their paint.

Carolyn Sleeper, pots

Once, in a sort of art-rut, I showed up at the Botanical Center for a class in encaustics.  I was dreaming of feeling the pressure and softness of wax and wanting to mold things in it, the way I used to feel clay in Carolyn Sleeper's workshops in Washington NC.  

I loved the wax form in Martha Petty's class,  but sadly it wasn't something I could continue at home in my small, closed space of a workshop. Still, I had met Martha Petty.  Though she lives nearby, I hardly ever see her, but her art is embedded in my being.  We send each other infrequent notes, each one a reminder of how a life can be informed by art, how it builds a body into a house that becomes, as one works, a home.  I admire so  much of what she does, whatever the medium, but one work (see above), at the Triangle Book arts exhibit four years ago, stunned me into a humility that draws me back to my work table time and again.  It's book art, its pages tiny pieces of worded paper tucked all that way down the sharp edge of that beautifully sculpted wood.  Her work is nothing like mine; it is powerful, strong, full of passion.  Our connection might be found otherwise in this quote she keeps on her website:  

    I was thinking about how images repeat themselves in work and what it means.  People expect you to move so quickly from one idea to the next, but the way you really develop is by returning again and again and again to images that you're really fascinated with and trying to understand why.

That quote calms me.  My own work is full of repeated images...tree, house, landscape, spirit-skies.  Martha brings me back to the point of art each time I see her art or hear her words, or read them.  Image after image, trying to figure their morality or intention.

Helen Rasplicka last of letters

In the beginning, long before those inspirers, there was Helen Rasplicka, the calligrapher and mixed media dabbler who pulled me gently into the realm of art, which I would probably not have stepped into on my own.  She took me to a course in drawing at the San Antonio botanical gardens, where I had to trade my pencil and eraser for a fine pen, and never looked back.  There, the gardens, their impulses to drawing, made a permanent place in me. The shoe you see here was a gift from Helen...a shoe last she covered with letters I'd sent her over the years...my words and her art conjoined in that endeavor.

There's Alexandra Bloch, too.  I can't remember our first meeting, but somehow she had ended up in the little town of Washington, provincial as it was for such a cosmopolitan couple as her and Joe.  She was a painter and thought of herself thus.  She painted the grace, the idiosynchracies of the body, unsentimentalized but understanding of its fullest needs. My intersection with her art is not anything I could emulate...but I recognized its potency in the care, dedication, and skill she brings to her work.  I think of her sometimes when I am working, more randomly, loosely (read haphazardly), and remembering her precision of pencil and the deep glazes of her paints gives me a mental backbone.

Susan Bradley, Michael's quilt and Spring Garden

I've already written about the marvelous quilts of Marty Mayer.  But long before Marty began quilting, there was my now-lost friend Susan Bradley, each in her way, bringing me back to fabric and the enjoining feel of piecing...what comes about when we pull together the scraps of our lives into a brilliant whole (even if it's not the last whole we make).  I once told her that her quilts were a kind of journal; though she looked a  bit skeptical, they are indeed.  They are where, beyond their art (and hers are spectacular art), we needle in our memories, our hopes, our histories...no matter how old and frayed...where they live on.

Susan Bradley, Stories in Another Language

That brings me to Betsy Cook, my next-door neighbor, whose art is nameless.  You could call it mixed media, encaustics, paint, textile, etc., but all those terms miss the point.  

Whatever form she works in, she is a storyteller.  Her quiet, almost mysterious pieces use every sort of material imaginable...she expounds with lace and wax and paint, flowers and braids, and words like secret talismen.  She is not afraid of sorrow or pain, nor of its beauty when released into a piece.  She gathers more bits of things, seeing their part in creation each time she works.

                Betsy Cook, GLOBAL TRANSFORMATION.

The ancient trio of Hebrew letters from Kabbalah that signify this transformation are embedded in the central "Tree of Life image.  There are 72 such sequences in the ancient Kabbalistic mystical tradition, said to represent 72 names or aspects of God.                       

She, like the others here, brings me out of my limitations (some of which I've drawn myself, as people do).  My list could be so much longer.

For now, know that it is Elizabeth Matheson, her photographs at Cassilhaus, that in this season of remembrance, binds me to them with gratitude.

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