Janet Geib Pretti, Sculptor

The Leaning Curve of Gratitude, Mary Chapin Carpenter

Sunday morning I woke to the sound of Mary Chapin Carpenter reading her NPR This I Believe essay titled The Learning Curve of Gratitude.

The day before a friend had sung her favorite Chapin Carpenter song in a clear but breathless voice ravaged by asthma and chronic pulmonary disease. My friend struggles with a host of chronic illnesses and in recent months caring for her husband post cardiac surgery. She is tired of being ill. Her children have grown weary of her always being ill and are serving up indifference, guilt, and conditions for their love. She is between a rock and a hard place and sees no glimmer of change in the foreseeable future. A granddaughter stopped by to confront her about the growing rift in the family, wanting to know what she was doing about it, and she replied "I pray". She tried to answer her granddaughter's next question, "So what does that do?" as honestly and sincerely as possible, but moved on to another topic when the granddaughter scoffed "well you can get that from yoga". I smiled at the image of my very Catholic, frail friend bowed by the ravages of rheumatoid arthritis, twisted into a yoga pretzel pose.

After her granddaughter left, we sat in her garden and she talked of her determination to live each day with grace and gratitude. Mary Chapin Carpenter summed up what that means quite well in her essay when she wrote:

"What I want more than ever is to appreciate that I have this day, and tomorrow and hopefully days beyond that. I am experiencing the learning curve of gratitude.

I don't want to say "have a nice day" like a robot. I don't want to get mad at the elderly driver in front of me. I don't want to go crazy when my Internet access is messed up. I don't want to be jealous of someone else's success. You could say that this litany of sins indicates that I don't want to be human. The learning curve of gratitude, however, is showing me exactly how human I am."

Chapin Carpenter's complete essay can be found at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11182405.  Striving to be content to live simply with gratitude is not an easy thing, especially now when we are trained from birth to want more and more and more, to expect to always "have it our way", and to feel cheated or defeated when life doesn't turn out as we planned.  Eventually most of us will have to struggle with the learning curve of gratitude.

I look forward Mary Chapin Carpenter's next album.  Her songs have always been rooted in life.  The songs she writes now will be born from her struggle to reach a state of gratitude and they will resonate with those of us who also search for peace and gratitude along roads we never dreamed life would take us.

"The Sell"

This week our community had an opportunity to meet four finalists for the college dean overseeing programs in our county. Each applicant was allotted precisely three minutes for his/her vision, followed by a question and answer period. The first question to the first applicant started with "I feel I just heard the Fuller Brush man". We all inhaled sharply and the candidate graciously responded. But the questioner had a point, all four candidates had three minutes to sell themselves and they had to make the most of it. I would like to think it is just Americans who seem to turn everything into selling a product or an idea or a person. It seems to be our number one competitive sport.

I am an alumnus of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts at the University of Oregon, though in my day my fellow grad students liked to call it the School of Arts and Allied Architecture. As a result I receive their quarterly newsletter. The recent newsletter featured an interdisciplinary initiative exporing how architecture and museums convey the memory of war and if it was possible to do that in a way that might prevent future conflict.  I was reminded of the funereal architecture class that Maya Lin talked about in her book Boundaries which started her inquiry into memorials and eventually led to her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The U of O initiative also concluded with a competition and the winning entries were included in the newsletter. The thumbnail photos were too small to read or understand the proposals, but big enough to show the quality of presentation needed to be competitive today. I found myself pulling out Maya Lin’s book to revisit her original proposal - simple drawings, simple statement. We live in a technological world where desktop publishing is readily accessible, over-the-top presentations are expected, and flash is often used to sell otherwise average or even mediocre products. I wonder if we would even be capable of recognizing the exquisite simplicity of Maya Lin’s vision in the midst of today’s slick hype.

Even I can turn into a used car salesman to prod a student to take the leap to get the education to make their dreams a reality. But I struggle when it is personal, when it is art. It is such a delicate balance. I am easily wooed by hype if I don’t remind myself to look deeper and I often fail to make "the sale" because if feels awkward if not sleazy. Yet in the end we all buy and sell something.

And then there is a matter of how much is enough. In the same newsletter was an article about a design duo that limit their architecture practice to four projects a year so they have time for other art projects. How do we not get caught up in the competition of "the sell", so that we still are centered, capable of being content with less rather than more, with genuine rather than hype?

Andy Goldsworthy

It is spring, the time of year I prowl my yard daily searching for signs of life - a swelling bud, a spike of green poking through the ground. I clear the dead stalks of last year and pull the weeds first in places I know certain plants will soon emerge, because if I don’t they will be choked out by the weeds and grass that already have a head start and are thriving.

Last night on my nightly prowl I came across my crude barren circles in the weed choked flower beds and thought of Andy Goldsworthy. His book Andy Goldsworthy, A Collaboration With Nature was published in 1990. I thumbed through it anytime I saw it in bookstores, but I didn’t buy it until last Christmas. It is remarkable that it stayed in print all these years. I sometimes day dream of coming upon one of Goldsworthy’s pieces in nature, by happenstance, or of sitting mute and still watching him create.

Unlike my want-to-be gardener attempts to bring color and seasonal variety to my yard, Goldsworthy is a master collaborator with nature, in tune with the landscape and weather; pushing the limitations of individual materials, yet maintaining balance within his individual pieces, within nature itself.

I garden to stay connected with nature, to get outside and be reminded that life is cyclical and fleeting. I make sculpture to ponder and capture life's lessons, hopefully with sufficient complexity that they will continue to intrigue and give insight long after they are finished.  I want my sculpture to be able to stand the test of time.  I want my garden to grow and renew itself year after year.

But much of Goldsworthy’s work is as fleeting as life itself.  He uses plant materials that decay, ice that melts, stones that the tides will tumble to create a moment of balance and beauty that from the moment it is finished continues to evolve and decay in a natural life-cycle. I have always been in awe of his ability to create such exquisite moments of perfection knowing that for the most part they would only be seen and experienced through the photos he took to record their life cycles.  Only in his later stone work, can we experience his work for ourselves. 

But most of the art I treasure I hold onto, return to through books and pictures. It really doesn't matter whether a piece still exists or has long since decayed or collapsed from the forces of gravity, wind or rain. Most of Goldsworthy’s pieces were never expected to survive past the turn of the tide or rising sun, but through pictures, they will continue to delight and inspire generations.

Goldsworthy has many books and DVD's chronicling his work.  In March, he completed a new stone installation for the Doerr/Hosier Center in Aspen, Colorado.  The wall combines the beautiful red Colorado sandstone of my childhood with red sandstone imported from England, China, India, and Jordan.  I can't wait to see it when I visit Colorado in the fall.  It is a permanent wall, requiring a team stone masons and architects, but I hope it still captures the essence of Goldsworthy's earlier, solitary work made when his only collaborator was nature itself.

Why Art?

I was up earlier than normal this morning. A deadline with the foundry is looming and my brain was wanting to organize my work tasks in order to move on to thinking about what might also be accomplished in the four extra hours I was planning to take off to 'art'. Yesterday a coworker asked how I managed to find the time, the focus for my art? I gave my usual answer, "because I am a better person for it."

My first clean-up task of the morning was to catch up on email. The only feed I have set to automatically come into my reader is This I Believe. The series airs on Mondays on public radio's All Things Considered. I have a link to it on this website. The essays by people from all walks of life always give me pause to think.

Judith Jamison, artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, wrote this week’s essay on To Thine Own Self Be True. Jamison started her essay with her belief statement - "I believe that there is sanctity in the fact that we are only on this earth for a short period of time. And I believe that with that time, we’d better be doing something good." She went on to explain that honesty comes with goodness, describing that connection from her experience as a dancer and choreographer.

"As dancers, we need to bring our life experiences to the stage. We don't just want to thrill an audience with how many turns we can do or how high we can jump or raise our legs. Plenty of people can do that with practice. We need to share our truth. When a performance stands out, it's not just the arms and legs that stay in your mind. What you remember is the feeling you get from the performance, and that feeling comes from the dancers' expression of self.

A good performance on stage should take the audience on a journey where they learn something about themselves. It's about all of us. It's about reaching for perfection, and, most of all, it's about honesty."

That is why I squeeze extra hours from my day to art. It is a need to search for honesty, to spend part of my day thinking and working hard for true understanding of one small chunk of life, knowing that if I am honest and good enough the resulting piece will have the power to nudge others along their own paths of self discovery to find their own truth, honesty and goodness.

Rosanne Cash, Black Cadillac

A year or so ago, I woke to a Saturday morning interview on NPR with Rosanne Cash. I lay there, snuggled under the covers, listening to her talk about the death of her parents and the process of writing the songs for her new album, Black Cadillac. Cash was incredibly open and frank in the interview, generously sharing her loss and her journey towards healing. Afterwards I found myself thinking of the sculpture I made following my own father's death and my own journey to find healing through sculpture - my thinking place.

I have a limited personal collection of music. I let the DJ’s spin music for me, usually on public radio or classic rock stations, almost always skipping country stations. But I bought Black Cadillac, curious to hear more than the snippets included in the interview. At first there were songs I didn't like as much as others. They hit a little to close to the anger and feelings of abandonment I felt when my dad died, but the beauty of the music drew me into acceptance and eventual fondness for all the songs. Death and loss are part of life and we have to accept all the ugly and hard moments to move on. These songs were birthed from pure, raw grief but they are a life affirming, strong, and incredibly honest record of the healing journey needed to center and move on.

The other day I recommended the CD to yet another friend, and later listened to it again on my commute home. It was a beautiful sunny day, and Cash's clear voice backed by hauntingly beautiful accompaniment seemed float and weave ahead of me along the curving coastal highway dividing land from sea. I suddenly realized that I only listen to this CD on my 25 mile commute along the edge of the continent. Maybe it is because I drove to an overlook over the dock often after my dad’s death, just to watch the rhythm of waves and the routine of the fishing boats coming in, going out. Or maybe it is simply because my commute along this ribbon of highway hugging the coastline and Cash's songs are both about transitions and divides, and the fine line that separates one way of being from the next.

More information on Black Cadillac and Rosanne Cash can be found at her website http://www.rosannecash.com/bchome/.

Maya Lin

My mind is a-whirl. Yesterday I drove a friend to Eugene for doctor appointments and walked to the nearby U of O bookstore instead of hanging out in the waiting room. I am working on new pieces for a November show. Books are strewn around my computer chair and piled on worktables. I am thinking and searching for long forgotten images and memories and longing for new connections. I was excited with the prospect of coming home with a new book. But I was stunned with how small the art book section was and disappointed that it appeared to be a rehash of "old" History, Picasso and other men..... until I saw two books on Maya Lin. I came home with the one she wrote - Boundaries. I had it read cover to cover by 9am this morning.

I remember vividly the day I learned that a 21 year-old Yale undergraduate had won the design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I was four years out of grad school, early into my spiral into reclusion, adrift, trying to find my voice, my vision in the male minefield of sculpture. I took the newspaper article to the beach, staring at the waves I found myself thinking God help her survive. I knew it had been a blind competition and I was sure that the selection committee was just as stunned to learn that they had selected a woman, let alone a college student of Asian heritage, as she was to learn she had been selected. And I followed the ensuing controversy as best I could from far, far away, wishing her strength and perseverance.

I did not see the Memorial until three years ago. I just happened to be in Washington shortly after neighbors had learned that recently repatriated remains had been identified as their MIA son. The memorial was everything I had hoped it would be sitting on that beach twenty years earlier. I was grateful that I could turn my back on the superfluous figures added to appease the vocal objectors, and just experience the space as Lin intended. I sought out my neighbor’s son’s name, keenly aware that the tiny cross beside his name would soon become a diamond, relieved that Lin had planned ahead for the possibility that MIAs might someday come home.

But I remember that I left saddened for the family of the very last name at the tip of the right wing as it dipped into the grass. I knew the names were recorded chronologically, but mistakenly believed they read from left to right, and the last name on the right was the last man to die. Last night I read that the names begin and end in the apex, linking the first and last into one continuum,  removing the significance of who was first or last, sharing the the weight of the loss amongst all the names.

I have always considered my cousin John a casualty of the war. He was practically the only veteran I know who came home with his love of life and humor in tact, but he died of skin cancer in 1980, before the design competition and long before the full impact of Agent Orange seeped out into public knowledge. John’s death was new and raw when the design controversy ensued. I was angry that his name and the names of others who came home, but just as surely lost their lives to that war as those who lost theirs on the battlefields, would never be incised into the marble. But, now I know that his name is there, strung with all those other names, written by our memories along the invisible arc that completes the continuum, connecting the end of the wall pointing towards the Washington memorial with the other pointing towards the Lincoln Memorial. I am in awe of how complete and wise Lin’s youthful vision was.

Several years ago Maya Lin was selected for the Confluence Project (http://www.confluenceproject.org) along the Snake and Columbia Rivers. When I read that news I found my self thinking good, she survived and finally there is going to be a piece within reach of my backyard that I will not have to wait 20 years to see. But somehow she had fallen off my radar screen in those intervening years, and until I poured through Boundaries, I had no idea just how well she had survived, thrived. Her pieces after the Vietnam War Memorial are just as remarkable; her words succinct; her process so familiar to the way I work. Our work, our lives are worlds apart, but our need to think, to write and clarify our thoughts before any form begins to take shape is the same. What a joy to rediscover her work, to know that she was not swallowed whole by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial controversy, that she maintained her center, steadily thinking and creating an incredible body of work.

More information on Maya Lin can be found at http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/lin/index.html, an interview at www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/lin0int-1.  The web is a miraculous source of information but most of all, I recommend reading and learning about her work through her own words in Boundaries.  As Lin wrote in the book, her "work is hard to capture in a single image.  Without the element of time, one cannot see these pieces, and since so much deals with tactile sensations and changes in height, depth, and sound, the experience of a piece is not easily reduced to a single image.  Except perhaps in writing, where [she] can best describe the what of a piece, often by describing the why of a piece."

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. 

Vincent van Gogh and Other European Memories

One last indulgent post on European travels long ago. From Switzerland we travel to Spain and then on to France. We toured the Prado and the Louvre, but then Bobbi flew home to teach junior high art, and I traveled on alone. I headed north seeking to put distance between me and the unsettling forwardness of Mediterranean men. First to Copenhagen, and then a ferry ride to Sweden so I could make the claim that I had stepped foot in my maternal ancestral lands.

I took a side trip to the tip of Denmark, staying in a nearly empty hostel because the days were already a crisp reminder that summer was over. I walked the empty beach to its most northern tip, wanting to find the place where the North Sea and the Baltic Sea came together. My college education up to that point had been about how to make art, but my senior year would be the beginning of learning what art I was meant to make.  There, where two seas came together, seemed a good place to begin sketching ideas and laying plans for my last year of college. At the time I thought it so odd that a girl from the Colorado Rockies felt so at peace there walking by the sea. Little did I know that as an adult I would find a similarly isolated place on the edge of a continent to root.

On the train back to civilization (Amsterdam) I teamed up with four other Americans, two studying for the priesthood at the Vatican and two telephone operators exploring the world. We all had ideas on what we wanted to see and do, and one by one we checked off the list. We strolled through Amsterdam’s red light district, boated its canals, toured the Heineken factory, walked on a dike, bought cheese from a farm and took our picture in front of the World Court in The Hague. Spending time in a country below sea level, with its 180 degree expanse of sky and long daylight hours was such a contrast from the mountains of my youth. I finally understood how place influences art.

Then we went to the newly opened Van Gogh Museum. The slides of my art history lectures and the pictures in books did not prepare me. I had grown accustomed over the summer to seeing rooms dedicated to the work of one artist, but never a whole museum. Van Gogh’s work was hung chronologically, with the earliest work on the lowest floor. It was incredible to see its progression from the sepias of his early drawings to the vibrant hues and madness of his later years. It is so rare to be able to see that much work by one person spanning an entire artistic career. Though in reality Van Gogh's career only lasted ten short years, from 1880 to 1890. I think he was able to make that incredible transition because he had previously worked for his uncle, an art dealer, and studied to be a minister. He had thought deeply about art and life before he began and then his sheer prolific production of work propelled it forward at warp speed. 

When I flew home a couple of days later, I had a small reproduction of the first picture in this post, The Fishing Boats on the Beach of Saintes-Maries tucked safely between my pocket guide to the Prado and a small book on Michelangelo.  I probably would have chosen one of Van Gogh's self portraits, but I also wanted to hold on to my memory of a beach where two seas came together as one.

There are many books out on Van Gogh. But my new favorite is My Brother Vincent van Gogh, by Ceciel de Bie. It is a children’s book, but it captures his life and work in such a refreshing way.  A very comprehensive website on his work can be found at http://www.vggallery.com/.