Janet Geib Pretti, Sculptor

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.

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."

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/.

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.