Rachel's House

Saturday, October 8, 2022

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

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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Sunday, September 25, 2022

The bicycle theory...in practice

Good morning. And it is a fine, fall one. The air is cool, but not yesterday's chill, and though the sky is thin with clouds, it's fine for walking. I'm not walking yet, though.

This last week has been both brilliantly celebratory and dastardly painful, but this morning I woke after a long good sleep, and began to make bread...Challah, to be exact. It's the Jewish new year beginning tonight, and since I'd spent most of last week feasting on Aunt Sadie's 100th birthday (more later), and driving home in the pained aftermath of over-indulgence, I'd not ordered the traditional round sweet bread ahead. So I told Joseph, who was vetting the menu I concocted around various diets, that I would make my own.

I can't remember the last time I baked a Challah (the community center makes a really good one here). But like the bicycle (once you know how to ride, it comes back to you time and again), I opened the Family Cookbook and there, in my own words, was the recipe down to the last detail. Except for following the ingredient amounts, I hardly needed it. And now, an hour later, yeasted and mixed and scraped and kneaded for as long as my wrists could hold, it's resting smooth, shiny, and round in its traditional bowl (the largest of a set I got early in my housekeeping, from that original store of Cabela's, which had a thick catalog) under a linen cloth from my mother's 1943 wedding shower and the also-traditional sweater (mine...I wore it yesterday in the chill) on top to keep it warm, as my grandmother did.

I'll show you the end result after it's baked. It'll be half a day or more by then. You can't rush bread.

Meanwhile, the porch and my post to you begin to wile away the hour and a half or so as it rises for the first time. I feel good about this loaf and about the morning.

I've been reading A.S. Byatt's novella, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994), which I plucked on a whim from the library shelf as I passed the Bs the other day. It's a marvelous story about stories about stories while the woman at its center becomes the character in her own story. (It turns out that there's a current film which steals in a picky way from it, but don't bother...it's stripped of Byatt's real story)

With that literary spirit, and a bright square of sunlight like a note left under the bedroom door as I left the room, I thought how the aftermath of pain, even as it wanes, brings its wisdom of change.

Perhaps the new year's and the fall's seeping in makes everything I think of lately involve the impulse of spontaneity.

To wit: Here's that book on the shelf as I pass...I take it. It turns out to be a something which excites me, after so many others have failed to be anything but the usual over-indulged trivia. Byatt's is rather an indulgence of language and learning and most of all the depth and fascination of stories, and what makes a story the sort that continues lively over 1,001 nights (which is part of Byatt's story's story).

Here's a story in the making, too: I woke up one morning a few weeks ago, and decided that minute to order myself tickets to London, Scotland and Paris in early October. I can see my friends Will and Dorothy there, and Uncle George's sister Ada, and maybe her daughter Catriona, lovely woman, and then in Paris meet a new friend called Emily. I found a hotel off the grid in the 6th, just the right neighborhood for me. I started a list of what little I will pack.

And Aunt Sadie's birthday, the long ride to Hershey, long anticipated and worked toward: suddenly even there is change...and though Barbara's planned luncheon in the garden room at the Hotel Hershey is lovely, one night Eileen and I find ourselves in Aunt Sadie's apartment playing Scop, an old card game, with her...trying to remember how, the rules changing every ten minutes, and laughing ourselves silly. We'd brought other games and crafts to do with her, but this inspiration is inspired! We hardly want to leave for supper, so we have some soup while we are playing. Later, we are torn away by the others to visit, and when we return later that evening, Eileen and I tired as we pick up the hands we were dealt earlier, Aunt Sadie is ready for a new game. Wordle, crosswords, the game of life itself...she is adept at them.

She is a wonder, that centenarian, game for anything. If a walk in the larger Gardens is now too much for her, a walk around the gardens of her apartment is not. She walks among the other residents in her independent living building like a queen...not haughty, not proud, but beautiful...resilient and affectionate and admired. She doesn't hear well, but her sight is as clear as the finest lens on the Hubble (and much older).

She still teaches us all sorts of useful things and remembers what we need to know. It is an honor to be her niece and learn.

I'll call her today and see how the rest of her birthday week is going, and tell her about the bread rising in my bowl.

She'll ask me how I am, and I'll tell her...better, thanks! The little pain left is not worth mentioning, though it is worth remembering...the sign of turning a corner, flying off, making old things anew. Making a new story from the old and its old stories and theirs.

Aha. I see it is time to punch down that risen dough and let it begin to rise again. As we all can do. Later, I will coil it into the shape of a long spiral of life and let it rise a third time. In its own time.

Meanwhile, happy fall, dear readers.

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Later the same day

le shanah tovah...

to a sweet year!

Wednesday, September 7, 2022

A stitch in time

Last spring, my neighbors Holly and Steve announced that they were signing up for the John C Campbell Folk School's session at the end of August and invited me to come along. I'd been wanting to take a class there; had been collecting catalogs over the years since other friends had gone, impressed with their offerings.

I waited a few days before I logged on (we could call it slogging), and sure enough the classes I thought I'd like had no more space. The Campbell School, in Brasstown, NC (not much farther west or south than that and you are in Tennessee or Georgia) fills its workshops and sessions fast, so I apologized to my kind neighbors and laid the summer back.

But then, two weeks before their classes began, Holly and Steve mentioned it again at lunch, excited to be gathering their things together for the session. "You should come," they said again. Oh, why not? I thought. I could use a break about now. They offered me a ride (it's a 6-hour drive from here to the school) and a place to stay with them...there is nothing better than an adventure with good neighbors.

Before I called the school, I armed myself with classes I thought I could still try...the mixed media class that originally was closed but might have (unlikely as it seemed) a drop-out by now, photography, clay. Alas, they were all filled. "I could put you on a waiting list," the registering staff member told me on the phone. But there was another that still had one opening: Wool embellishment and embroidery. I'm sure she could hear my sigh...alas, my hands, for all the basic sewing they do, aren't really attuned to such close, particular needlework.

I come from a family of superb needleworkers, who sewed, knitted, embroidered, beeded, and embellished their own (and often my) clothing over four generations. I seem to be the one who didn't inherit the necessary genes for precise work, though when I was younger I managed a few sundresses, a plain but silk shift, and a tennis dress.

On the other hand, signing up for something so challenging would have two advantages: one, it would get me out into the school; and two, I'd learn something difficult, however handy I'd turn out at it. I'll take it, I told her.

As it turned out, spending five and a half days, all day, learning the intricacies of the stem stitch, the chain stitch, the blanket stitch (I already knew that one, though I kept forgetting how it begins), the daisy, the fern and feather stitches, the French knot and too many more, filled me with new life. I found the class and my classmates, not to mention Kit, the instructor's assistant who was my savior, delightful.

Penny, our instructor, with a lot of years' teaching there, handed to us daily, lump by lump, a huge set of embroidery skills. In a class where skills ranged from mine (almost nil) to expert, I learned to pace myself and do what I could.

Yes, it was hard. No, I didn't become proficient, and I take the prize for the slowest student there...I didn't even begin two of the scheduled projects, because I was working so hard on my individual design (see below), planning and re-doing and re-doing again, taking out at least a third of the stitches I'd put in. But I finished it.

Despite hours of practice, motor memory, which our instructor assured us would come, failed me time and again. Still, I was comforted that I had the running and backstitch in hand already (sewing tasks at home provide practice all the time) and though the stem stitch's first angle eluded me with every start, I loved doing the French knot, the daisy, the loop, and the fern. I couldn't imagine a future sitting quietly to do needlework cushions, but absolutely everything I learned could easily become part of my own art.

Even more wonderful was the Campbell School itself. It's been an important folk school in the region since 1925, when Olive Dame Campbell and Marguerite Butler, with education, deliberation, and careful planning, established it. At first with an agricultural focus, only a few years later it incorporated traditional craft skills, which were much needed and much practiced in the mountain areas, as the self-sufficiency was and is essential in remote areas.

I won't go into its whole history here**, but Campbell and Butler chose its location well, after much study and with the full, even hearty encouragement of the rural population. Landscape is an important backdrop to their philosophy that making by hand begins with ground rules...that is, begins from the ground up. (Steve's woodturning class, for example, began by making the tools they would use.)

Here the natural setting, water nearby, hills and gardens and rough trails inspire. Plain as they first appear on the outside, the school's rustic buildings open to large well-lit spaces and good equipment for working at each of the crafts it teaches: woodworking, iron and metal work, stone and pottery, cooking and baking (I'm tempted to sign up for the next class the sweet cooking instructor is going to hold: cooking in the wild...we forage for our food), chair caning, furniture building, photography, weaving, basketweaving, quilting, sewing, painting and printing, bookmaking, dance and music (we were serenaded at lunch every day outside), the making of musical instruments, and more unrecalled.

And its people: goodness, what nice people, talented people, helpful people, genial people, from everywhere. Besides a few North and South Carolina residents, my classmates came from Georgia, Tennessee, Ohio, Washington DC, Vermont, Massachusetts and the Finger Lakes of NY State. Ages ranged from early twenties to eighties. There were couples and singles and siblings and friends. Many were on fifth or fifteenth visits working there.

Because let me tell you, you really work. All day, breaking for lunch, and, if you are lucky enough to have stayed on or near campus, often returning after dinner to finish the day's assignment. And after that, there are talks and concerts and dances and demonstrations to attend. There is a sense of community that is deliberate...essential to the way one sees and learns and accomplishes and communicates.

Holly and Steve had arranged to stay in a house well outside of campus, up a mountain on smaller and smaller unlit roads until gravel brought us to our lair, so night visits weren't practical. Still, our shoulders ached from hunching over stitches, paint and collage (H) and wood (S). We had our balm, though.

The porch overlooking a steep garden and beyond a setting of trees and blue hills became my focal point there. I could step out of my bedroom with a cup of coffee and inhale the forever view. Or rock with Steve and Holly at the end of the day talking about what we'd made and mastered (or not...quite).

Steve's woodturning

Holly's mixed media woman

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On the fourth day, I received a message from my cousin Lorraine in Lancaster, who serendipitously forwarded me a "Slow Stitching" link she thought I would enjoy. She hadn't known where I was or what I was struggling over, but I was quick to tell her and excited to find the ways that version of the craft offered for my art. I showed the link to the others in the class, though Penny, the instructor, didn't seem impressed...she's a needleworker of some skill, of course.

What did I do on my summer vacation, one might ask? It seems to have been a time of needle and thread, of making...my own as well as others'. A broadening time, from June with the Florida quilters through August at the Campbell, one stitch at a time.

I can't wait for next year.