Janet Geib Pretti, Sculptor

Larry Brooks, Unblocked, Unleashed & Uninhibited

For the last 12 years I have been coordinating the South Coast Writers Conference in Gold Beach, Oregon, on the Friday and Saturday of President’s Day weekend. Every year it is a huge undertaking for our small college outreach center, and every year we manage to pull it off with a small but mighty group of volunteers. Every year the day before the conference, I wonder why we keep adding its pressure and stress to an already full workload and every morning after I wake up with a head full of notes to make things work just a little better next year. I have just spent two days swimming in the currents of 100 plus people learning, thinking, challenging their pre-concepts of creativity and writing. It is contagious. I don’t consider myself a writer, I am just a sculptor who writes as part of my process, but creativity is creativity, there is always a nugget I can take home to use in my work of making sculpture.

Every year I manage to attend just one workshop in the session after lunch when all the presenters have had at least one round of presentations so I can assume any glitches have been resolved and before the final session which we use to begin packing things away. Inevitably I am always late.... so I go to the library where I can slip in with the least disruption. Larry Brooks was presenting Unblocked, Unleashed & Uninhibited. He was already nearing the end of his list of ten suggestions for becoming unblocked, and then he began discussing what it takes to be unleashed - to break in to being published. Brooks began a discussion of the six components of writing. Four are essential - concept, theme, structure and character, and the two are necessary but not critical - voice and execution. He believes the odds improve considerably for a book to be published if at least two of the four essential components of it are stellar, fresh and memorable. You really will have to attend one of his workshops (usually in the Portland area, but he has tentatively agreed to come back to the SCWC next year) to get the full gist of this concept. I don’t think he ever made it to unfettered, but I was distracted trying to translate and apply his ideas to the visual arts and specifically to the making of my sculpture.

I have gotten so much better about avoiding dead-ends and detours early on in the making of a piece, but I still struggle with each and every piece. As I gear up for my first show off the coast in 23 years, I know I will be mulling over his ideas and trying them out, hoping to use them as a guide to stay on track; as a lens to reconsider previously finished pieces for modifications and as a measuring stick to assess the progress of the new pieces.

Information on Larry Brooks is at www.booksbybrooks.com and information on this years writers conference is at www.socc.edu/scwriters.  Planning for next year's conference is just beginning so it will be awhile before any news on it gets posted to the website.  You can be added to our mailing list by emailing scwc@socc.edu.

Alberto Giacometti

I have been thinking a lot about Alberto Giacometti lately. When I was in grad school, professors would tell me my work was reminiscent of Giaocometti’s and from the few pictures I could find, it appeared to be so. Then, just before my second year of school, I purchased a small book on his work released to coincide with his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965.

Giacometti is mostly remembered by his later work - rough, elongated figures rooted solidly to their bases with oversized feet. Most viewers, myself included, find the figures evocative of the loneliness and isolation that we all feel at times in our lives.  So I was startled to read in the book’s introduction, by Peter Selz, that Giacometti was striving to "discover the visual appearance and to render it with precision - not the reflections of light which occupied the Impressionissts, nor the distorted view of the camera which fails to register distance, but the object as it is contained in space, as seen by the human eye, the artist’s eye." Giacometti was trying to "render precisely what he sees at a given distance. This distance - which creates the space containing the object- has become absolute: it is about nine feet, the distance from which his glance, focusing on the model’s eye, can organize the whole."  He was never striving to evoke an emotional response, he simply wanted to render exactly what his retina saw. And, because I have been blind in one eye since birth, I quickly realized that I would never be able to see that period of his work as he did, because I will never see with the binocular depth of field that he was trying to capture.

My favorite piece from this time period is Dog, 1951. About it he wrote, "It’s me. One day I saw myself in the street just like that. I was the dog." I think I like it because if what he wrote is true, it is evidence that at times even Giacometti could not keep thoughts and feelings from imposing themselves on his mission to precisely capture the world as he saw it.

But mostly I am drawn to his earlier surrealistic work, when he still seemed to be trying to say something with his sculpture. Invisible Object (Hands Holding the Void), 1934-35, is particularly intriguing. Giacometti later wrote about the piece that he "could have destroyed it. But I made this statue for just the opposite reason - to renew myself. Perhaps this is what makes it worthwhile."

And I relate to his struggle to find his way in art, a struggle that has been well documented by historians. Irene Gordon captured the image of that struggle best when she wrote in a chronology of his life that in 1940 he abandoned working with a model and worked from his imagination, which lead to a series of minuscule figures. From 1942 - 1945, he lived in Switzerland where "the problem of the tiny figure continued, and when he left Switzerland to return to Paris his entire production of those years was said to fit into 6 matchboxes." At one point, when I was struggling to find my way, my art, I lined up six boxes of kitchen matches (surely she did not mean the smaller version), imaging three years of work in them. I did not feel so alone. 

In 2001, The Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a major show of Giacometti's work.  A flash on-line presentation was prepared to accompany the show and is still viewable at http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2001/giacometti/start/goflash.html. 

Bill Reid & The Raven and the First Men

Recently a site visitor asked me about Bill Reid’s The Raven and the First Men, mentioned in my opening statement. Living and working as I do far off the beaten path, books have become my umbilical cord back to the art world. In the early 80's I came across Indian Artists At Work, by Ulli Steltzer. Just my kind of book, beautiful black and white pictures of artists and their work, and few words. The book came home with me primarily because of two pictures, one of Bill Reid holding a tiny Raven Discovering Mankind in the Clam Shell and the other of Fred Davis working on a piece of a man changing into a killer whale. Both pieces seemed to push beyond the Haida traditions, true to them but something more.

Bill Reid often portrayed Raven. In Steltzer’s book, he said, "Raven is the deus ex machina, the most important figure in Haida mythology. There are many Raven myths. He is the one that caused everything to happen, though quite inadvertently. He was, for instance , the one to steal the sun, but it was the Eagle who put it up in the sky so there would be light in the world. The Haidas are divided into Raven and Eagle moieties. All the other crests, like the Bear, Beaver, Killer Whale, are minor crests."

Years later, stopping for gas, after two whirlwind days at the World’s Fair in Vancouver, BC, I bought a postcard of The Raven and the First Men. At first I thought it was the finished piece from the book....until I turned the card over and read the dimensions - 210 cm high x 180 cm wide. It was evening, we were already late heading home, there was no turning back to find it. So I have only seen this piece through the pictures in this post. They are both primarily from the same vantage point; but I have drawn enough clam shells and made enough sculpture to know that this piece is one of those rare sculptures that will read well no matter what your vantage point. 

The Raven and the First Men is perfect in form, in line, but more importantly for me, in how it captures, becomes the Haida creation story that it portrays. The piece displayed at the U. B. C. Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, is still on my Must See Someday List, but I would be just as thrilled to hold the tiny original version in my hand.