Janet Geib Pretti, Sculptor

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/.

Magdalena Abakanowicz

Lately I have been thinking a lot of my travels in Europe at 21.  How different it was in 1973, before cell phones and internet.  How truly on our own we were, especially during the final month of our travels.  Phone calls were prohibitively expensive and nearly impossible to execute.   My only communication home for 3 months was a sporatic postcard crumb trail.  I tried to send a card at the train station every time we changed cities.  But, with our night train crisscross journey through Europe, had something gone amiss, it would have be weeks before anyone would have known to start looking and hopefully the right city to look in.  My son's girlfriend is spending inter-term in London.  I have no doubt they are exchanging email and pictures regularly, if not phone calls.

My travels were during the summer of the Watergate hearings and all across Europe people would shake their heads at us with wry smiles, commenting on how naive Americans were to be surprised and outraged that a politician would lie and our simplistic optimism about life in general.  I am sure I traveled with a permanent wide-eyed look, amazed at how history and art were infused in the daily lives of average people, not just the wealthy.

In Lausanne, Switzerland we stumbled upon an International Fiber Arts Biennial.  Colorado State University had a strong fibers department, so I already new the discipline was expanding in exciting ways, but I was not prepared for the work of Magdalena Abakanowicz, and others.  It is her name that I remembered and her career that I followed from afar.  My slides from the show are long gone, but I suspect that what I saw exhibited were pieces from her Abakans series.  Their allusion to a human presence seem to foretell her later explorations of the figure and search for the individual within the masses.  The Abakans would have appealed to my desire to define humanness, and my search for the common denominators of the masses expressed within the individual.  As I watch my son's generation, with its new technology and connections, I wonder how our new connectivity will influence our sense of individuality vs. being an anonymous piece of humanity.

This fall Abakanowicz installed Agora in Grant Park in Chicago.  More pictures and information can be found at http://www.abakanowicz.art.pl.  It is a beautiful, comprehensive new site featuring her work and well worth the time spent exploring it.

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.

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."

Christo's Valley Curtain, Celebrating Failure

Last summer, when Christo and Jeanne-Claude installed The Gates in Central Park, all New York was a twitter with the orange rustling fabric.  I just smiled. I knew that they would never know how it felt to stand in what I consider Christo's first gate, hearing, seeing a massive orange wave of fabric dance overhead against a deep blue sky. 

In 1972, I was home from college for the summer. I was oblivious, like most of the locals, to the fact that a major art event, the installation of Christo's Valley Curtain, was being staged less than 25 miles away in Rifle Gap. The man who years later would become my husband first got wind of it from his extended family living down valley from the Curtain. So the day after it was scheduled to be completed we packed a picnic lunch and headed for Rifle Gap, two ranch hands, a want-a-be artist and her childhood friend. We looped through the back country, approaching the Valley Curtain in reverse of most visitors. But instead of a taunt curtain stretched across the road between outcrops of rock, a portion of the fabric rippled overhead, roaring, floating like a giant wave through the blue sky. The volunteers and professional crew were milling around in stunned defeat. My friends tolerated my determination to capture the orange rolling waves with my father's borrowed camera. 

Out of concerns for safety, the Curtain was removed within days, weeks before schedule. The locals chattered irreverently about it throughout the summer, about the meaningless of modern art, the wasted money and the foolishness of putting it in a place known for it constant, prevailing winds. When the Curtain is included in books and information on Christo's long career, only pictures from its first day of being are included. 

I have always wondered why Christo did not seem to value the magic of both Valley Curtains, the one he envisioned and the one that nature imposed a collaborative role with. Both were beautiful. But the later was my favorite, it was so dynamic and fleeting, impossible to ever recreate again. Sometimes it is what we can't plan and never foresee, that humbles us and teaches us our most valuable lessons.

Pictures and project information on the Valley Curtain can be found at http://christojeanneclaude.net/vc.html.  Pictures and information on The Gates are at http://christojeanneclaude.net/tg.html.

Elizabeth Layton, the Power of Self Reflection

Sometime in the 80's, I clipped out a small article about Elizabeth Layton from the Sunday Parade. Several years later the traveling exhibition of her Through the Looking Glass show made it to Oregon. I was teaching a drawing class in a small coastal town. We decided we needed an art day, so off we went, for a 7 hour drive, lunch and an art show. I wanted to show my students that sometimes the power and conviction of the message was more important than a sophisticated, polished execution. Some students were mesmerized, others questioned the art taste of their young, idealistic teacher.  Twenty years have passed, but her images and messages are just as fresh and meanful today, as the day they were drawn.  They still have the power to move my heart and challenge my thinking.

At 68, Elizabeth Layton took a contour drawing class that inspired her to draw prolifically for the last 15 years of her life. Layton laid bare her fears and fantasies with colored, wavering lines in frank and unflattering self portraits. Her husband Glenn appeared in many of the drawings, bemused and bewildered. When I first saw her work in the late 80's, I was fascinated by her image and story. But now, after nearly 30 years of marriage, it is the portrayals of Glenn and their life together that brings a knowing smile to my face.

Layton, a native of Wellsville, Kansas came from a family of writers and journalists and was herself managing editor of her hometown newspaper, The Wellsville Globe. But she had suffered bouts of depression throughout much of her life and had undergone 12 shock therapy treatments before enrolling in a contour drawing class in 1977. Layton credits her daily regime of drawing her image reflected in a mirror, without looking at the paper, with saving her life. Consequently early drawings were dismissed as art therapy, but later the power and volume of her images earned her exhibits at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art, and in more than 200 art museums and centers throughout the U.S. She drew nearly 1200 self-portraits during her drawing career, giving nearly all of them away to friends, museums, and charity auctions. In doing so she raised more than a half million dollars for the arts, women’s organizations, civil liberties, mental health, medical ethics issues, the visually impaired and the Wellsville Library. I have added a small collection of her work to this website, hoping to tempt you to want to see more. Check out http://www.elizabethlayton.com for more images and information.

Deborah Butterfield, Becoming 'Political'

I have followed Deborah Butterfield's work for many years, and even had an opportunity to hear her speak in the early eighties when her star was just beginning to rise.  A couple of years ago I bought Horses, The Art of Deborah Butterfield, and read her 1988 interview with Marcia Tucker.  Tucker asked,  "What do you feel is the most important issue for you as an artist right now?"  And Butterfield responded:

"I suppose I feel that what's most important is to try to make work that advances you as a human being, that somehow pushes you to keep asking yourself questions, makes other people ask questions, and hopefully encourages them to see the world through different eyes.  When I was a little kid I wanted to be able to be inside somebody else's body and see through their eyes for just a minute.  I felt that if I could do that I could understand myself and the world so much better.

And I guess that's what art is about. .......  And I suppose that's why I make sculpture, because I feel that people have to sense my work almost as much with their skin as with their eyes, and in doing so they learn a different way of perceiving the world.  If we could each learn to step into the other for a while, we would be a lot better off.

Art is very important in terms of politics; not just in a literal way, meaning that we should all do work that is overtly political, but in the sense that we make the step of transference into someone's otherness."   

I make art to understand me, my time, my place. It is the place that I learn to live within my own skin. It is through the sharing of it that it becomes 'political', as Butterfield defines political.  With each piece I try to pare my experiences down a common denominator, not to what makes them unique.  And it is always my hope that if I can get it close enough to right, you, the viewer, will experience a moment of transference and walk away with a sense that you have brushed past a fellow traveler. 

If you would like more information on Deborah Butterfield, the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle has created a web page for her at http://www.gregkucera.com/butterfield.htm.

Wes Magyar, Inspiration in Unexpected Places

I arrived at Denver International Airport last August hungry, cranky, and sleep-deprived after sitting on a plane with a malfunctioning computer for two hours in Oklahoma City.  My connecting flight was long gone and the reward for my ridiculously early wake-up call - being able to arrive home (a 5.5 hour drive from Portland) before dinner had evaporated.  Instead, I was facing a long layover with no way to notify my husband.  I dawdled my way through breakfast, explored the shops, and was resigned to finding my gate and settling in with a book.  But high above the concourse, Wes Magyar's SEMBLANCE peeked over the mezzanine rail. 

The Best of Colorado show had just been hung.  What an unexpected gift.  The vibrancy of his colors, the precision of his brush strokes, left me wanting to know about the couple, and their unfinished conversation that seemed to linger unspoken in the space between them.  More paintings by Wes Magyar can be found at his website, www.wesmagyar.com.

John Berland, Sculptor & Teacher

Fortunately for me, Colorado State University art majors had to take four "samplers", in different genres of art before declaring a major. I entered college intent on becoming a painter, but John Berland was the sculpture teacher. Our first project in the sculpture sampler was a modeling, molding, and casting project. Watching the nearly 3 ft high women, mid-thigh up, begin to take shape in a circle around the model, was a magical, magical time. Mold-making and casting was hell. We cast in body putty, and because it was body-putty, we painted them. I was hooked. But, because I painted my first sculpture, I don’t think I fully understood that choosing sculpture meant giving up color, for in the seventies painted sculpture was rare.  Though I probably wouldn’t have changed that decision, because at the time I did not understand how essential raw, pure color is to my soul.

There were no brutal group critiques in the sculpture department. At the end of the quarter, I had my one-on-one review with Berland, where together we would assess the current work and plan for the next quarter. There was no competition with anyone but myself. Everyone worked and struggled together. Berland was skilled in the techniques of sculpture, especially casting, and he taught them well.  I am always surprised when my mom sends me articles about the international renown sculpture scene in Loveland, Colorado, that no one seems to remember that Colorado State University was just down the road. It was John Berland that nurtured a love for sculpture in the area and his well trained students that kept the first foundry staffed and afloat with plenty of work to cast.

John Berland seemed to view his real job as one of nurturing the creativity inside each student. It was never just about form and how to make it, but also about why we made art, and what was the intent of the work we made.  He worked daily on his own work in the studio along side of us, modeling a work ethic, showing that art is a journey, ever evolving with something new just around the bend.

More photos of his work are posted in my John Berland photo album.  The pictures were scanned from a memory book made for his wife and children after his death.  I thank his wife, Yvonne, for generously loaning it to me.  At the time I was intent on capturing the images.....not the titles.  All references to them are based on memory, not fact.