Janet Geib Pretti, Sculptor

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.   

Fitting In (my latest piece)

For three months in third grade, I was the most popular girl in my class.  My dad had returned from a big city business trip with Barbie dolls, the first in our small town.  All the girls wanted to play with my doll.  It was thrilling to be in the in group, but after Christmas everyone had dolls of their own and I was relieved to disengage from the Barbie Fan Club.  I tried to see what they liked so much about her, but her caricature figure confined to a lifetime in high heels seemed silly to me.

 

The drive to fit in begins at birth.  In America it fuels our economy.  Parents strive to provide their children the latest clothes and toys, the right schools and neighborhoods.  Children quickly learn what is in and what is not.  They hang upside down on monkey bars trying to stretch, diet or spend hours perfecting their cosmetic masks.  Everyone is confused and hurt when parents scrimp and save for the latest fad only to be met with wails of anguish when it is the wrong brand; or a birthday party invitation is suddenly revoked or refused by parental directive because the invitation was from or to a child not in the acceptable social class.

But I was lucky, I was given a Barbie doll.  After the initial infatuation dissipated I began to feel the exhaustion, the boredom of trying to fit in where there was no fit. Slowly I learned for myself who I was, my passions and dislikes. I learned to live within my own skin. I learned that life was never dull, never stagnate, if I was willing to share my life with people and ideas that I didn’t always agree with.

Recent Work

Fences

Laying down my pencil in disgust, I was jolted with the realization that I hadn’t spoken more than the few words needed to buy groceries or greet a neighbor in weeks. My husband was fishing in Alaska. Our cat had died months earlier, but I refused the offer of a neighbor’s kitten out of fear of one day having to grieve its loss.

For years I wondered what was wrong with me. I sifted through my memories for ones to explain the sudden and complete fear that would grip me, unannounced, uninvited. I never was prepared for those moments when my body, my words were hijacked, for my embarrassment, my anger that I had no control, no say in when or what words were allowed to come out of my mouth. After our move to the coast away from friends and the routines of work, it was easy to slip into the life of a recluse. I loved the dramas and rhythms of small town life, but I watched from the sidelines. Within the safety of my fenced off world, my body was rarely triggered to betray me and I was lulled into contentment.

But staring at my stale, lifeless drawing, I suddenly realized that freedom from fear has a price. My life and my art had shriveled within the confines of my self-imposed isolation.

It would be decades before I pieced together the whys of my fear. But the next morning, I crossed the street and welcomed my neighbor’s cat - Stanley into my life, into my heart.

Child of Promise

"No child can escape his community . . . the life of the community flows about him foul or pure, he swims in it, goes to sleep in it and wakes to the new day to find it still about him. He belongs to it: it nourishes him, starves him or poisons him, it gives him the substance of his life." - Joseph K. Hart

Resiliency is the ability to recover from or adjust to misfortune or change, to bounce back in the face of adversity, to see beyond today’s pain to a better tomorrow. I was fortunate to hear Mervlyn Kitashima speak on resiliency. In 2003, she was named National Mother of the year. Mervlyn was born on the island of Kauai in 1955, one of 687 babies tracked from in utero through their early 30's for a comprehensive longitudinal study on resiliency. The study identified factors that put children at risk, but more importantly it discovered resiliency traits and skills that could be fostered to buffer them from the adversity permeating their lives.

Growing up, Mervlyn did not know of the study. She lived one day at a time, trying to survive, trying to thrive. She was a child at risk, or as she prefers - a child of promise. When asked how she overcame the odds, she says she knew how to work. She had a grandmother who loved her, to whom she could run across the cane fields and feel safe for a time. She had a sense of purpose, a belief that life could be better and she was given challenges and opportunities by people with high expectations who considered her worthy, full of promise.

Resiliency is built one smile of encouragement, one safe haven, one skill mastered, one dream at a time. On an airplane we are instructed to put on our own oxygen mask first. In life we must first nurture resiliency in ourselves, then we must nurture it in others.

Anniversary

A thirtieth anniversary seemed as far and improbable as walking on the moon. But days accumulated into years, we matured, memories piled up and problems that need solving continued to crop up. We built a partnership. We became each other’s ballast.

At 68, Elizabeth Layton took a contour drawing class that inspired her to draw prolifically for the last 14 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. Now it is the portrayals of Glenn and their life together that brings a knowing smile to my face. Layton wrote in the caption for Husband on Scales, "Glenn is game to pose for me however I need. He may balk at first, ‘I can’t stand it. You want me to be a bunny rabbit? NO bunny rabbit.’ But he always comes through".

Lonnie does not pose. He has always been interested and supportive, and over the years less threatened by the all consuming thinking, experiments, revisions, and starting over that begets each piece. He is more confident that I will make it back from these forays. He might say, "You want to pull those wires through that oxygen tubing? No way!" Three tries later, we devise a plan, and he always comes through.

Baggage

There will always be differences over what is right and wrong, what is mine, yours and/or ours, freedom versus rules, change versus keeping things the same. Sometimes we work through the thorniest of disagreements, hurt feelings and anger. Other times everyone is instantly angry, rigid and unyielding.

Anger simmers within all of us. For some it is proudly worn like a second skin, an impervious shield keeping the world at bay. For others, anger is a permission slip to shun and exclude, to sort the world neatly into black and white, good and bad, us and them. I stuff my anger deep inside. It stays hidden, buried under all the petty slights and meanness of daily life until the weight of one more rude or sarcastic comment causes all the hurts to combust in a brilliant flash of cleansing anger.

I thought communication was the key to resolving conflict. Now I believe it is a matter of how we manage our personal baggage - our biases and beliefs, the unhealed wounds of our past, stress, our battered egos, our anger style. If we are lucky, everyone can check their baggage at the door to conflict. But when the first person retreats to the familiar comfort of old baggage, others are tempted to reach for theirs. Anger’s adrenalin overtakes reason and the dysfunction, pettiness, and failures of the past recycle into the present. We hunker down with our baggage, lobbing negativity into the discussion. We thwart any chance of lasting compromise with stubborn resistance or acts of sabotage.

Reflection

After our youngest son left for college, I brought my sculptures home from galleries and out of storage. I was filling a void. I was preparing to "art" again. I needed to remember where I had been and where I was headed before setting art aside to sculpt boys and communities.

I always knew sculpture is my thinking place. I saw individual pieces as snapshots of isolated moments, or sometimes as bookends to a continuum of a thought. Yet in the stillness of the mornings, my eyes tracing their contours as I drank coffee, I began to realize that together the sculptures told a story, my story, our story.

I scoured my workroom for the words scribbled on scratch paper that accumulate when I sculpt. I reread my graduate thesis. I sifted through slides for a record of the false starts and forgotten versions. Finally, I began to put the words and the pictures together. I rearranged them. I wrote more words, finding words for long-avoided pieces, uncovering words from which pieces had yet to grow.

Slowly words stitched the images together. As the gaps and loose ends became glaringly apparent, I knew where to begin. Unfinished pieces were resolved, new pieces evolved, and the parables of my life coalesced into sculpture and words.

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.

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."

Kate Wilhelm, Getting Started

The keynote speaker at the February, 2004 South Coast Writers Conference (which I have coordinated since its inception) was Kate Wilhelm.  I lost my voice to laryngitis on Thursday.  By the beginning of the Saturday afternoon sessions everything was under control and I slipped into the back of library just in time to hear Wilhelm ask everyone to close their eyes. She began describing the entrance to the school just outside the library and then said "The door opened......" and stopped. After a few minutes we opened our eyes and she asked "who walked through the door?" She went on to say there were two types of writers:  those for whom someone had walked through the door; and those who were still deciding if a person was coming through the door, after all it could have been blown open by the wind. I perked up my ears, as much as they could be perked up in my sick haze, because no one had walked through my door.

Wilhelm said the conundrum of the first group, the visual writers, would be that they would be able to get to work quickly but would end up with too few words and would always be in search of more to flesh out their stories. For the second group (the intuitive writers) - they would have trouble getting started but would end up with too many words and have to learn to cull. There was a noticeable sigh of relief from a small number of people in the room. I am sure it was from the intuitive writers. Because it is the intuitive writers, and sculptors, who have such angst over where to start, who wonder if a person is ever going to come through that door.

I was awake before dawn the next day with an urgent need to begin preparing for my first sculpture show in 12 years. It was scheduled for October, 2004, and I had been struggling with where and how to begin again for months. I was too sick for the physical work of sculpting, so I sat down at my computer to busy myself with retyping some of my old piece statements. But the words kept coming, and coming, and coming - a lifetime of words flowing through my fingers. I began scouring my workroom for the words scribbled on scratch paper that accumulate when I sculpt. I reread my graduate thesis. I sifted through slides for a record of the false starts and forgotten versions. Finally, I began to put the words and the pictures together, rearranging them, writing more words, finding words for pieces I had long avoided, uncovering words from which pieces had yet to grow. Slowly, the words began to stitch the images together and as the gaps and loose ends became glaringly apparent, I knew where to begin again. Unfinished pieces were resolved, new pieces evolved, and the parables of my life coalesced - in sculpture and words.

Mulling over a concept visually and verbally had always helped move me past the blind spots, detours and dead ends. But I used to view the words as a by-product and rarely tried to hone the words, complete them with the same care and clarity as my sculpture.  Now, I finally understand that I sculpt and write, write and sculpt. The words are an integral part of what I do, not a by-product. I am not just creating a snap shot of a moment in time, I am trying to capture the lessons learned. I need the words to dissect my life and thoughts down to the core, where my sculptures wait to see the light of day. My work is about form and negative space, but it is also about color and about words, and about life. For the first time in my life I have a string of titles, of problems, of lessons, stretching to the horizon. I know what I do, I know how I do it, and I look forward to the dialog, the lessons, each piece will bring. And, as Wilhelm predicted, I am finally having to learn to cull.

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.

I became a sculptor in the first place to say things I could not say with words, but more and more I find myself grappling to find the image and the words. Mulling over a concept visually and verbally helps move me past the blind spots, detours, and dead ends.

Holding the Void by Alberto Giacometti, and Raven and the First Men by Bill Reid are favorites of mine. I am awed by their makers' audacity and drive to tackle such grand ideas, stripping them down into concise, complete pieces. I live a simple, small town life; I coax and pry subject matter and inspiration from everyday life and events. Yet my intent is the same - to give shape to an idea, not an object.