Janet Geib Pretti, Sculptor

For Christmas I treated myself to two new books on the sculpture of Andy Goldsworthy.  Then I saw Manufactured Landscapes a  documentary on the photographs of Edward Burtynsky.  Much of Goldsworthy's sculpture is fleeting, made with natural materials which melt, decay or are washed away with the incoming tides.  But one of my new books, The Andy Goldsworthy Project, is on his permanent work.  Through out his career Goldsworthy has been a meticulous photographer, carefully documenting the purposeful interactions of one man (and his team of workers) with and on nature.  He records the evolution over time - the impact his pieces have on the land or the impact nature has on his pieces. Images of his work are in the Other Artist album.

Edward Burtynsky's  photographs record the collective impact of humankind on the environment as we extract and use natures resources to manufacture the consumer goods of a modern society.  Burtynsky's photographs reminds me that even degradation  and pollution seen through an artist's eye can be incredibly beautiful.  But his work also stuns me by revealing  the shear magnitude of the scale and change we are having on the world.  One of Burtnysky's pictorial studies is on the multi-decade, Three Gorges Dam project in China.  For some of the workers   it was simply a job, but others glowed with pride for being part of something so monumental, bringing  progress in the form of power generation, transportation and floodcontrol.  A good website to see Burtnysky's work is  http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/. But I have added a few pictures to whet your appetite.

As a community college dean,  I am privileged to be part of making a long dreamed for small  branch campus a reality.  I was there when local tribal members gathered Sitka Spruce roots for baskets, before the trees were felled and the land cleared.  I  watched as trucks haul away a ridge of rock slowly but surely, day after day.  The structural beams of the building are finally peeking over the hill.  Half of the ten acre site will be untouched but the other half will be forever altered, in spite of the solar panels on the roof and the carefully engineered system of bioswales and filtering ponds designed to manage runoff before returning it to the neighboring wetlands. 

Like the Chinese workers I swell with pride and excitement every time I am on site, because  I knows how needed the new facility is for our isolated, rural county.  Like Goldsworthy, I have enjoyed the design process and seeing the project evolve.   But Burtynsky reminds me that like most people, I have a hand in the steady transformation of our planet. 

Construction workers tease me about my "magic tree", the one remaining Sitka Spruce circled by barricade netting, to remind everyone to keep it safe.  When I look at it, I remember the beautiful spring day when we gathered roots for basket making, how the land looked and smelled before we began carving it up to build a college.  Sometimes I find myself making the Spruce a promise - that once we are done building we will re-plant with natives so it won't be solitary forever. I promise it that we will use the surrounding wetlands wisely to teach watershed management.  And I share my dream that by setting the college at the edge of town, in the midst of a forest with a distant view of the ocean, our students will reconnect to the land, learn, and be inspired.

The Color of Sadness

I was recently asked what color sad was.  I floundered about, mentally picturing color after color trying to find a fit, finally deciding sad did not have a color.  Sad is emptiness, it is what is left after mad, after grief, after all the other emotions have flamed out.  It is a stuck place where there is no forward or backward movement.   It is texture-less, colorless.  It is a void. 

 

Then I realized, that I while I could not settle on a color for sad, but I did envision an image  - The Invisible Object, Hands Holding the Void, by Alberto Giacometti.  

 

His later pieces, the ones he is most known for, do resonate with isolation and sadness, but I was surprised when the word sad triggered Hands Holding the Void.  I have always loved this piece, because she appears to be just on the verge of being able to tell me something important, something life changing. She does have a certain helplessness, a quiet desperateness, but she also seems so earnest, engaged, even hopeful - in spite of the curious rectangular slab pressing against the front of her lower legs.

 

It is hard to find good pictures of this sculpture.  Most are full frontal images, where it is hard to grasp that she is actually represented sitting on a chair and in some versions there is even a bird sitting beside her.  Everything is skewed, but logical except for the slab pinning her legs together, preventing the independent movement necessary to stand and move on, trapping her in place. 

 

Giacometti wrote 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." It was one of his last surrealist pieces. He would later struggle to finish work.  His brother Diego sometimes arbitrarily emptied his studio to force him to begin new pieces. Was Hands Holding the Void his last heroic effort to get a grasp on the sadness and isolation that was about to descend, an attempt to capture and hold it so he could set it aside and move on?  Was in the end he left with emptiness, resigned to letting it settle into his life without further fight? 

 

Maybe Hands Holding the Void is my image of sadness because it was the last piece by Giacometti that engaged the viewer, that grappled with emptiness, that tried to communicate emptiness.  Every figure afterward stares back at the viewer dispassionately, in the world but not part of the world, seen but not heard.   

Commuting Whales

Thursday as I was driving to work, I was so distracted thinking of the meeting filled day ahead that I almost didn’t notice that the ocean was calm and the light breeze was barely stirring up a wind chop. A perfect day to spot a whale spout. This is the time of year that a straggler or two hang out in the bull kelp south of town. I generally commute 50 miles round trip, but a gray whale’s commute is endless, back and forth from Baja to the arctic, traveling south in the fall and north in the spring. Sometimes I envy our local slackers, wishing I had the freedom to take a summer off too.

At one point in time I was so used to spotting them that I could spot a spout from a moving vehicle. But that skill seemed to trickle away after I returned to the year-round workforce years ago. I rarely even stop at the overlooks anymore, but I always keep an eye on the tourists pulled over to snap vacation pictures. I hope someone has clued them in that a special treat may be in store for them or that they are naturally observant so they have the good fortune to observe a whale in the wild.

Then it happened, just as I whizzed by a young girl staring out to sea with her family leaped joyfully into the air pointing emphatically and shouting for her family to look. It was probably just its spout, but if she was really lucky she saw it roll and the graceful arch of its tail slipping back under the water.

I never saw the whale. She never noticed the passing car. But for one split second we were joined together by the majesty, the miracle of one of the Pacific’s most wonderful creatures. Experiencing her joy vicariously propelled me through my workday and I hope the magic of seeing a whale fuels a lifetime of wonder and discovery for her.

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?

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/.

Life on the Edge

As I sat down to write this week's post, art was the furthest thing from my mind.  Two major winter storms past through last week, each strong enough to flip chip trucks south of town, shutting down Hwy 101 for the duration of the clean ups.  Our son flew home from college, necessitating the long drive to Portland, but giving us an excuse for a weekend of big city shopping and family time with both sons.

We arrived home to the news that a Port Orford fishing boat had gone down on Saturday with all hands on-board.  Four families and our small community are grieving, trying to absorb the news.  My husband fished commercially for thirteen years.  I know the life.  It is a life lived in sync with the tides and the weather, not clocks and calendars.  It is an honest life, where everyday decisions can be richly rewarded or have dire consequences.  The working conditions can be harsh and endless or breathtakingly beautiful and exhilerating.  Fishermen and their families learn to treasure and appreciate the good times and gain strength and endurance from the bad.

When I drove to work this morning the crab fishermen were well into their work day and as I drove home their lights twinkled in the distance, a reminder that they were still hard at work.  The long delayed dungeness crab season is finally underway.  Like always, I found comfort it seeing fishing boats out on the water, but today I also felt a guilty relief that my husband had followed his dream, lived it fully for thirteen years, and was able to walk away when it became clear it was a younger man's game. 

Fishing families live their lives on the edge, with daily reminders and a full awareness that the tide will turn and the weather will change, but with the odd comfort of knowing that after the storms clear, the boats will once again go out to sea.  As we enter the holiday season, be grateful, treasure your loved ones, savor every joy and gain strength from every sorrow life gives you.

Jimmy Valvano, Don't Give Up, Don't Ever Give Up

I love December. In part because as the youngest, it was my job to arrange the nativity set. Little did my mother know that the hours, and I mean hours, I spent arranging and rearranging that set taught me my first lessons in sculpture. My passion for nativity sets and the hope and significance of the Christmas season continues.

But I have also learned to love December, because I can count on ESPN to play over and over Jimmy Valvano’s ESPY speech. It stops me in my tracks every time. Like Martin Luther King’s I have a Dream speech, and Kennedy’s "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country". Because I know, without a doubt, that if I do what Valvano suggests I will have the grounding that I will need for life and for making good, meaningful art. He said:

"I'm a very emotional, passionate man. I can't help it. That's being the son of Rocco and Angelina Valvano. It comes with the territory. We hug, we kiss, we love. And when people say to me how do you get through life or each day, it's the same thing. To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special.

. . . Don’t give up, don’t ever give up."

- Jimmy Valvano

Recipient of the Arthur Ashe Courage and Humanitarian ESPY Award, March 4, 1993