Janet Geib Pretti, Sculptor

Michelangelo's Rondanini Pieta

I grew up in the mountains of Colorado. I don't remember ever going to an art museum before setting off at 21 to study art history in Vienna for the summer.  For two months, I attended lectures in the morning and spent my afternoons in museums, then we all went our separate ways for one month of travel.  I teamed up with a fellow student, crisscrossing Europe according to where the night trains went, exploring whatever city we arrived at in the morning and only finding a hostel if we found a reason to stay.  Our only pre-planned destinations were Spain and Paris for Bobbi, and I was adamant about going to Milan to see Michelangelo's Rondanini Pieta.  The books said the Pieta was at the Castello Sforzesco, but we walked round and round the grounds without finding any mention of it.  Bobbi and I ended up in a heated argument; she was adamant that it wasn't there and I was refusing to give up on my dream of seeing it.  She finally stomped off in disgust to get something to eat, while I tried to figure out a plan B for finding it.

I finally found a gardener and repeated "Rondanini Pieta" over and over, pointing to my map.  Somehow he conveyed that the building housing it was being renovated - "So sorry."  Heartbroken, I crumpled to a nearby bench in defeat.  I had been sitting there for awhile when he returned and motioned for me to follow.  He unlocked an unobtrusive door and guided me down the stairs to a tall cylindrical room where the Rondanini Pieta stood, lit with natural light from the windows circling high above it.  He told me to stay as long I wished and to go out the same way I had come in, and he went back to his gardening.  When I came out Bobbi was waiting but the gardener was gone.

I can't say why I am so drawn to this sculpture.  It is so different than Michelangelo's Pieta at Saint Peter's in Rome, finished in 1499, when he was twenty-four.  Michelangelo had started the Rondanini Pieta in 1556; but had abandoned it for seven or eight years before resuming work on it.  He had carved on the piece an enitre day just six days before he died in 1564, at the age of 89. It must have been important to him because he bequeathed it to his servant, Antonio.  It is clear that the piece was changing; the remnant of an arm going nowhere remains.  Maybe it is the mystery of being left to wonder how the piece would have evolved had Michelangelo had more time. 

I have thought of the Pieta and the gardener many times over the years.  I seem to pull out its picture when there are hard times and grief surrounding me.  The Pieta is as captivating and mysterious as ever.  I will forever be grateful to a gardener who understood my need to see it and for his incredible gift of leaving me alone, to sketch, to photograph, and to simply sit and contemplate Michelangelo's Rondanini Pieta.

Life on the Edge

As I sat down to write this week's post, art was the furthest thing from my mind.  Two major winter storms past through last week, each strong enough to flip chip trucks south of town, shutting down Hwy 101 for the duration of the clean ups.  Our son flew home from college, necessitating the long drive to Portland, but giving us an excuse for a weekend of big city shopping and family time with both sons.

We arrived home to the news that a Port Orford fishing boat had gone down on Saturday with all hands on-board.  Four families and our small community are grieving, trying to absorb the news.  My husband fished commercially for thirteen years.  I know the life.  It is a life lived in sync with the tides and the weather, not clocks and calendars.  It is an honest life, where everyday decisions can be richly rewarded or have dire consequences.  The working conditions can be harsh and endless or breathtakingly beautiful and exhilerating.  Fishermen and their families learn to treasure and appreciate the good times and gain strength and endurance from the bad.

When I drove to work this morning the crab fishermen were well into their work day and as I drove home their lights twinkled in the distance, a reminder that they were still hard at work.  The long delayed dungeness crab season is finally underway.  Like always, I found comfort it seeing fishing boats out on the water, but today I also felt a guilty relief that my husband had followed his dream, lived it fully for thirteen years, and was able to walk away when it became clear it was a younger man's game. 

Fishing families live their lives on the edge, with daily reminders and a full awareness that the tide will turn and the weather will change, but with the odd comfort of knowing that after the storms clear, the boats will once again go out to sea.  As we enter the holiday season, be grateful, treasure your loved ones, savor every joy and gain strength from every sorrow life gives you.

Russell Childers, When is art ART?

When is art Art is an age old question. It is hard to imagine now that at one time a Van Gogh was not considered art. I came of age after the heyday of figurative sculpture. Dada artists such as Marcel Duchamps had already made the first "ready mades" by mounting a unicycle upside down on a stool and lining a coffee cup with fur. Pop artists such as Claus Oldenburg had already made their giant clothes pins, and Campbell Soup cans.

In the seventies, while still in grad school, I was just beginning to define what my art was to be. I struggled with the fact that figurative art seemed to be the only work that my hands made, but they came out in such a way that fellow figurative artists rejected and refused to claim them because they never were just about form.

One day a fellow student brought several pieces by Russell Childers to our graduate seminar and asked, "Is this art?" Childers had been confined to the state mental hospital as a child and released to a group home/ work center as a middle-aged man. He was making sculpture with scrap wood chronicling his childhood before and after being placed in the institution. After much debate, our class decided it was folk art, not fine art.

Shortly afterwards I learned that the university art museum was mounting a show of his work. I took money saved for tools and drove to Lebanon, where his work was displayed in a jumble on a dusty table in the lobby of the work center. I bought his Dog. I knew that when the show opened, people would see his work and respond, and they did; all his pieces sold within the first hour of the exhibition. His work spoke to people. I used to go to museum and watch people going through his show. I knew that is what I wanted for my sculpture. But I also remembered that the art world judged it to be folk not fine art.

A decade later, I saw history repeat itself with the work of Elizabeth Layton. In an earlier post I wrote about my discovery in the 80's of her work.  Layton's early drawings were dismissed by the art world and only given a second look when it became clear that her work had the power to move, and the public saw its value and importance.

It has only been in recent years that I have been able to reconcile the way I make sculpture with my concept of what I had been taught sculpture should be. I stopped questioning whether I make art or ART.  I acknowledge that it is Russell Childers and Elizabeth Layton that I feel to be my closest art kin, but I also value my fine arts training and the long line of artists that have left behind their work to enrich and inspire me. I am finally content to spend my time searching for a balance, for a way to merge both legacies by making "educated folk art."

Jimmy Valvano, Don't Give Up, Don't Ever Give Up

I love December. In part because as the youngest, it was my job to arrange the nativity set. Little did my mother know that the hours, and I mean hours, I spent arranging and rearranging that set taught me my first lessons in sculpture. My passion for nativity sets and the hope and significance of the Christmas season continues.

But I have also learned to love December, because I can count on ESPN to play over and over Jimmy Valvano’s ESPY speech. It stops me in my tracks every time. Like Martin Luther King’s I have a Dream speech, and Kennedy’s "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country". Because I know, without a doubt, that if I do what Valvano suggests I will have the grounding that I will need for life and for making good, meaningful art. He said:

"I'm a very emotional, passionate man. I can't help it. That's being the son of Rocco and Angelina Valvano. It comes with the territory. We hug, we kiss, we love. And when people say to me how do you get through life or each day, it's the same thing. To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special.

. . . Don’t give up, don’t ever give up."

- Jimmy Valvano

Recipient of the Arthur Ashe Courage and Humanitarian ESPY Award, March 4, 1993