Janet Geib Pretti, Sculptor

The Crying Tree, Naseem Rakha

The 2011 South Coast Writers Conference is over and done.  Naseem Rakha, author of The Crying Tree, was the keynote.  Before the conference, when I  recommended The Crying Tree, I found myself calling it a dense read, because you have to read every word, none are superfluous.  I also said it was about finding forgiveness - something everyone needed to learn more about. 

I know that I responded to The Crying Tree because it struck a chord with the day my family's world turned upside down and our journey back.  But as my 87 year old mother said when she looked up after reading the final words, carefully, tenderly closing the book, "this is a good book, the best book I have read since Cutting for Stone.  It is an important book, one that will change lives. . . but now I need a light read, something to make me laugh."   She made me stop at a bookstore for a copy for my sister before flying home.

My mom was right, as she usually is about books.  Read The Crying Tree and if Naseem Rakha comes to a town near yours - go see her.  She will not disappoint. Her web site is: http://naseemrakha.com/.

I have had two shows this year.  Each time pieces were finished just before packing the car.  Two will require some re-do.  The pre-show grind seemed especially brutal.  A recent day job promotion had added hours of commuting time and work time, leaving little time to get into the focused state needed to make the final  critical decisions to finish a sculpture.   But our college was closed for the Christmas holidays and I had enough vacation time saved to set budgets, long range planning, staff and student issues aside and slip back into the world of sculpture for a precious ten days before each show.

 

Sigmund Freud in his essay Civilization and Its Discontents wrote "beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it.  Yet civilization could not do without it."  I can't seem to do without it.  When a piece is finished and I finally see it for the first time after the long treasure hunt of discovery that slowly uncovers what it is to become, I always wonder if it is worth the months of neglecting  friends and family, leaving books unopened and movies unwatched to steal enough time to work in the basement.  After each show is delivered, comes a time of emptiness.  I am incapable of making simple decisions and I have to wrap my hands around my coffee cup each morning to uncurl them for the day ahead.  Yet glimpses of future pieces gradually began to surface and slowly my mind kicks back into gear.  

 

My mom gave me Joyce Carol Oates The Faith of a Writer for Christmas.  Oates believes that "we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called "culture" --- and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.    She  feels that " we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us.  In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born.    The individual voice is the communal voice." 

 

Making art, especially in these economic times  seems such a frivolous thing.   Building college programs for our isolated county seems so much more needed.  But I love to stand back watch people explore my pieces at shows.  I make sculpture because I need the dialog, the insights it  gives me that might never come without it.  But when I watch others interact with the finished pieces and begin their own journey of discovery, the making of them seems less frivolous, less self-indulgent.