david, mark and i stood by the dyed harbor in the wind. mark commented that he did not have a painting of st patrick’s day green, rusty brown, cement beige. we told him that he did now. because we had made it so – as we stood there – “totally looks like a mark rothko,” we opined as we viewed the photograph i had just taken. mark laughed – in that other-dimension way we imagined. i reminded him of green and maroon – and my dedication to this painting at the milwaukee art museum. he was amused and agreed that emerald, rust and cement was – maybe – a worthy addition.
david just finished a piece he painted for me. it is stunning, both visually and emotionally. a really large canvas, it will find a home in my studio, where i can be reminded of the freedom – of space, of life, of voice, of love – it represents.
i have always wanted a horse and so he gave me one. this painting. and you can see – by the repose of my face – how undeniably happy it makes me, the peace it bestows, breathing the very air of all the universe.
it is said that mark rothko sought to make paintings that would bring people to tears. “i’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on.” as an artist, i cannot imagine any other reason to create other than to tap in, to elicit, evoke, to acknowledge human emotions.
when i stepped onto the floor of the basement – off the last wooden step – i stared at the painting in progress. it was potent for me. it was a painting of an arrival, of sorts. though David’s title is in dreams she rides wild horses, the reality for me is the wild horse of voice. it is the gallop of speech, the beginning of the release of silence, the horse i never yet had. i wept as i told him.
mark appeared suddenly, standing on the basement floor with me. he stepped under one of the studio spotlights and called over to d, “good work, robinson. way to make her cry.”
d looked surprised and glanced at me calling back, “thanks, rothko!” before i wrapped my grateful arms around him, “yeah, good work, robinson.”
we walked out of the parking garage and up the grassy hill to the path along the lakefront. a perfect day outside, we strolled as long as hunger allowed us and then we turned around, completely sated by art and fresh air, heading for the public market and bowls of gumbo at the fish market counter.
the idris khan exhibit “repeat after me” intrigued us. layers of digital repetition, scores of music sedimentarized into a single panel, stamped words superimposed on stamped words, scribbles on top of scribbles, it was surprising and fascinating. beautiful – seemingly blurry – images in larger-than-life scale, it felt an interesting statement of the concurrence of everything as it happens in this plane. in the collections of classic scores, words stood out to me: presto…poco rall (poco rallentando)…tempo markings…because he allowed them to be visible, i wondered if they were adjectives of his life then or just simply part of the music he was layering. i admonished myself then, aware of the overly analyzing curator mode to which i was succumbing. i remembered seeing christopher wool speak…the curator was going on and on about the psychological underpinnings of his work and he sloughed it all off – he was merely creating what he liked, what he felt he wished to express. art doesn’t always need to be analyzed – it is sometimes just your heart speaking out loud, on canvas, in image, in wet clay, in melody, in haunting harmony.
walking through this exhibit – from room too room- i was so aware of all the music books, sheets, scores in my own file cabinets. i kept thinking of ways i could incorporate all my collections into art pieces – for surely, there is little use for some of it otherwise and it will certainly go the way of recycling that millions of pages of music-on-paper have already. perhaps even an accent wall expanse papered with pages – the genius of composers gone before physically surrounding a studio space. the energy – sans the analysis.
idris khan called us. but, as always, *richard and mark and ellsworth* were there for us as well – steadfast and notoriously inspiring. we stopped by to say hello and they nodded the quintessential guy head-nod, barely discernible but a clear thank-you-for-always-stopping-by. we wouldn’t miss it.
we drove to have gumbo, hearts full and talking over each other about what we had seen. and then, the ride home was quieter, reflective and flush, revitalized.
*****
*favorites richard diebenkorn, mark rothko, ellsworth kelly
if you are averse to talking about cleavage, you should stop here.
because this lens…standing near the east windows of the milwaukee art museum…granted the lake cleavage…something i am – thanks to inheriting more genes from my dad than from my mom – unfamiliar with.
in a cleavage world it is tough to be a non-cleavage girl. not being endowed cuts in so many ways.
i clung onto the cleavage i had – for like five minutes – when i had my babies and was nursing, though i doubt it even counts as a nursing mom. still…i thought, “cleavage! wowza!” but it didn’t stick around. as soon as they were weaned, my cleavage was snatched from me. voila! back to none.
i’m not sure if the universe has a sense of humor about these things. i mean, who doles out the cleavage? and, here’s another important and relevant point: i must say, our society has a thing about it – cleavage, that is…not so much the universe – and bra companies like victoria’s secret grant the world’s best bras – with names and adjectives like “wicked” and “bombshell”, “miracle” and “fantasy” and “sexy illusions” – to people who “have it”. causing things like the day i cried in v’s secret. (read that glorious tale here.) it’s not a fair world out there.
so, it was a given i would walk up to the round lens on the east side of the museum, gaze out at lake michigan and see cleavage. for heaven’s sake!
i looked at david and told him, “look, even the lake has cleavage!!!”
he gazed back, weighing his response carefully. very carefully.
“ahhh, but it’s not a cutie-patootie like you!” he suavely replied.
uh-huh.
a cutie-patootie.
in this american society bent on what-we-are-shaped-like, i don’t think that’ll get me far.
sisu is alive and well at the milwaukee art museum. i was thrilled to see the scandinavian design installation. i was pretty sure it would all feel familiar. all my life, i have been surrounded by pieces from scandinavia, finland in particular.
in what is likely a sin-of-casualness, quite some time ago i placed the vintage marimekko dish towel into the kitchen drawer, wanting to use it, to see it more often than the rare times i open up the cedar chest. i took out other finnish linens as well, placing them in regular rotation. they are simpler, organic linens, raw in color. but the marimekko…it’s happiness in a towel.
so when we walked into the room with the brilliant marimekko maija isola’s unikko (poppy) design hanging as a giant banner of fabric, i was inordinately happy. gorgeous and bold, you could stand there for a long time and just soak it in, like sunshine on a bluebird day.
i have many finnish relatives. all delightful and spread about in finland and various other european countries, i haven’t had the pleasure of being in their company since i was eight and my grandmother took me to finland for ten weeks to experience the land of the midnight sun, the sauna and the lake of the northern cabin, the town named after her family – klamila. but, at eight, i wasn’t fascinated by bolts of fabric or designer glass. instead, i pretended there was a horse on the back porch and spent long hours on the porchrail, reins in hand, exploring the wilds of finland. it would do my heart good to meet this branch of family once again.
i knew my sweet momma and my grandmother were cheering as we slowly made our way through the installation. reading all the placards and admiring the simplicity of pieces of silver, of china, of exquisitely designed coffeepots, we had to, of course, veer off the scandinavian path and visit the diebenkorn and the rothko before we left.
the marimekko towel was the next one up in the drawer. i took it out and pondered the feasibility of using such a treasured item. and then i could hear my momma echo my grandmother’s words: of course you should. it’s your roots.
on the side of the willis tower – downtown chicago – is affixed the atmospheric wave wall. created by the same artist whose rainbow bridgewe loved at the milwaukee art museum, olafur eliasson’s piece is striking and imbues the colors of the lakefront – sky, clouds, water in all its moods.
in speaking about his piece, olafur – also a climate and community activist – says, “what we see depends on our point of view: understanding this is an important step toward realizing that we can change reality. it is my hope that this subtle intervention can make a positive contribution to the building and to the local community by reflecting the complex activity all around us, the invisible interactions and minute fluctuations that make up our shared public space.”
the steel catches the light of the sun. the piece seemingly shifts with the movements of everything around it, with time as time passes.
we have not yet seen it at night – lit from behind – but i imagine it is stunning – with light escaping from the intersection of the colored tiles. the places of light: in-between.
just as weird as it was to sit on the train it was equally with wonder to move freely about in the city – after all this time and so much that has happened in our country – sans innocence. it is with a bit of heightened awareness we move in the world now, though i don’t suppose heightened awareness helped any of the victims of the latest violent rages at the hands of angry out-of-control people. it is impossible to figure out why the wrong front door or the wrong driveway or the wrong ask-of-a-neighbor could elicit such unconscionably brutal responses.
we were driving to the grocery store. we took the route we usually take, a side street. two-thirds of the way down this road – before the traffic light – our attention was driven to a guy on the sidewalk, staring at us. brandishing something – we don’t know what – he flailed his arm around, pointing to the sidewalk, swinging, pointing, staring at us.
pre-whatever-phase-one-would-call-the-phase-that-this-country-is-in we probably wouldn’t have thought twice. we might have wondered what he was doing, might have wondered why he stared at us, might have pondered what he was brandishing. but we wouldn’t have been entirely creeped out and we wouldn’t have planned a different route home and, perhaps, a different route to our store for the continuing future. it felt like the place between was unsafe. and i find that devastatingly sad.
we live in a normal midwest town. only – i guess – not so much. our town is now known – in these last years of the more-unsafe-phase – for a plethora of events that have no light in-between. our small city is as broken as every other small city, as every other big city.
were there to be a wall of art to represent this phase of our world what colors would it be?
in his rush to get one of the coveted front spots at costco, the guy in the infinity cut me off in the parking lot. i parked in a different row, but watched as he got out of his car. he bent down and pulled out some kind of revolver, tucking it into the back waistband of his pants. then he walked into the store.
i must say – i haven’t ever felt a need to protect myself in costco. maybe from overspending, but never from violence. it was disturbing – almost to the point of turning around and going home – to know this guy was walking around – maybe getting a rotisserie chicken or ribs or a bottle of wine or eddie-bauer-sweats or glucosamine-in-bulk – with some big handgun in his pants. i told d about my reticence to go into the store.
we have a code word for anytime we are in a situation that suddenly feels unsafe. post-parade-massacres, post-grocery-store-shootings, post-concert-devastation, post-festival-tragedies, post-school-maulings – post-all-of-it and in the middle of all of it – we know to drop everything and get out or get away if either of us senses danger. no questions asked. no lingering. just go.
it is without light in-between that this country has come to this point. the intersections of peoples and genders and ethnicities and belief systems and economic statuses and, apparently, any differences whatsoever, seem to have no light. they are not backlit nor are they reflective of the sun streaming over this land.
“our shared public space.” shared. from sea to shining sea.
how do we create the invisible interactions and minute fluctuations of a safe shared public space? how – in a country that seems to have insidious anger and no shortage of violence – do we find the light in-between us? because “we can change reality”.
green sounds different than red which sounds different than blue. green looks different than red which looks different than blue. green feels different than red which feels different than blue. so a color field of all three would seem to emit, depict, emote a wide spectrum.
i’m pretty sure that mark rothko and i would have been friends. his goal: “to capture the essence of basic human emotions on the canvas and then evoke those emotions from his viewers.” (masterclass.com) my goal: to capture the essence of basic human emotions on the piano and then evoke those emotions from my listeners. instruments – the canvas, the piano – that tap in. yes. friends.
in my mind’s eye, i can see a tour. all over the country to different art museums that house a mark rothko or two. a big yamaha concert grand on the wooden floor, placed in front of the giant color field painting, paused in silence, waiting. abstract expressionism on the canvas. and then, the translation – abstract expressionism on the piano. action. color field. repeat.
i’m pondering this painting green, red, blue. in thinking and feeling green, i ponder what i’ve already composed that sounds, feels, looks green. in thinking red, i ponder what i’ve already composed that sounds, feels, looks red. in thinking blue – specifically blue-around-the-edges in this case – i ponder what i’ve already composed that sounds, feels, looks blue.
in a push of creative courage, i can see this tour. in a room void of people or full of people, i imagine me and the painting and a piano. high ceilings, the swoosh of the sustain pedal brushes against the walls and swirls around. no other sound. yet. and then.
i’ll play for you i’ll play for you i’ll play for you
and you will hear green and red and blue as you will see green and red and blue. and maybe, if you are open to it, you will feel green and red and blue. and mark and i will have done our job.
it’s the work of all artists – really, everywhere: play for you.
this installation was beautiful. stunning. olafur eliasson’srainbow bridge was in a room full of light and the spectrum of color was immediately striking. and then, we walked into the room further and all the color disappeared, instead spheres of glass reflected the windows and the water outside the museum. “the appearance of the spheres is unstable, slipping between clarity, colour, and blackness in response to the slightest movement of the viewer.” (olafur) if you stand right in front of one of the twelve spheres, you can see your reflection upside down, teasing you to make faces and play. we could have visited with this piece all day – moving around the room, standing still, watching the light waltz and dip as the hours wore on.
“its [the extraordinary] concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.” (mary oliver- upstream)
and so, when we finally moved on, past the sunlit rainbow, i’m quite sure we were both in that dreamy place – the place where you linger in all the vast possibilities that are out there – combinations of color and sound, notes joining together, brushes brushing, harmonics floating above you and bass notes stabilizing your foothold. it is a place of creation, where you feel the tendrils of ideas, of paintings, of songs, of melodies of piano, of sweeping strings and mournful french horns, of spattered acrylic, of photographs with intense depth of field. it is the place we visit on the trail, on the mountains, on the seashore, in our studios. it is beyond the edges of billpaying folders and mortgages, student loans and job searches. it flies past all the details of everyday mundane. it is nebulous and it is visceral.
we moved out of the room – newly equipped with dream – refreshed because someone else had “put it out there”. someone else – also – had vision and the impulse to express it. someone else – also – had stood for long hours, sat for long hours, pondered for long hours in front of canvas or a piano or on a wooden dance floor or waiting for the perfect snapshot. someone else had composed – the extraordinary – from out beyond the edge. and its whisperings fell on our ears, encouraging our response to it and reminding us to jump.
there was this knot-hole in this tree on this trail. i used to stop there each time we hiked – to gaze through it…stand and take in what i could see through the tiny porthole in the woods. always, it was a reminder of the fluidity of time, of ever-present change, of nothing standing still.
the porthole i found in the milwaukee art museum – through one of barbara hepworth’s sculptural pieces – had the same impact on me. bending down, i focused only on what i could see through that porthole. on a different day, at a different time of day, in a different month or season, never static. even minutes from my peeking-through, the wind picked up and the lake’s surface roiled a bit and all from before was erased.
late-late on sunday nights – into the wee hours – we stay awake to listen and watch our son livestream mixes from a club in chicago. he was away for a couple weeks and we missed these late dj nights. they are our porthole – our tree-knot-hole – into what he is creating, producing, learning, feeling. every midnight-hour-sunday we see the changes in the new seasons of his work, his growth, his zeal, his poise at tech controls that evoke curves of mood, layers of sound, textures of music we may not have accessed otherwise. we see his joy.
it’s the same reason i took my first snowboard lesson. at that time, it was a porthole view into our daughter’s life – a peeking window that allowed us to feel the smallest smidge of her professional work. watching her fly down mountains, picking up speed and agility and ever-more skill through our tree-knot-hole on the sidelines and touching her joy-magic with our own feet on a snowboard on a hill.
we can assume things about others. humans do it all the time. broad sweeping generalizations about people and peoples – different because of race or color or gender identity or ethnicity or country of origin or age or disability or socioeconomic status or politics or religion or whatever the prejudice-de-jour might be. we glance over at “them” and form opinions; we claim to be “open and affirming” yet we slam closed the porthole that might give us a true look into their life. we scrub away the transparency of truth and apply the balm of our agenda – totally missing perspective, the possibility of commonality, the gift of community, the connectedness of us all as a species attempting to just keep on keeping on.
were we – perhaps – to notice, to step forward and take a closer look, to shield ourselves from inevitable human failings of assumption and instead to breathe deeply and gaze – we might have a view into the sameness of us all, the things that unite us, the things we need honor and hold in high regard….that we are all one under the sun. that while we cannot walk in another’s shoes, we might learn by looking through any and every tree-knot-hole we can find. that new eyes, new focus may also mean new learnings and new appreciation and new grace. that we should stop and peer through portholes whenever we can. there’s no time to waste.
i take many photographs of us in shadow. it lowers the how-do-i-look bar to practically zero. though it does leave me a tad bit curious about why my head always looks bigger than his. i think it’s my hair poofing out; his is pulled back neatly, while mine is helter-skelter flying in the wind. nevertheless, whether we are smiling or not, whether our eyes are open or closed, whether we have a funny look on our faces – none of this matters.
some of my favorite shots of us are in shadow. we are on the dock at northport harbor. we are on trail in breckenridge. we are at the john denver sanctuary in aspen. we are on a frozen lake up-north. we are walking barefoot in florida, carrying our flipflops. we are in the sun on our back patio.
i know i might be accused of over-documenting. so many photos. “1.81 trillion photosare taken worldwide every year, which equals 57,246 per second, or 5.0 billion per day,” according to photutorial.com. at least they are not all mine.
yet i know that it takes many, many shots to get the right one. my dear friend scott is a world-class photographer with a compositional eye to die for. he shoots thousands of shots at a-list events. which makes me feel justified in my overshooting. i have loved being behind a camera since my parents gifted me my first 35mm when i graduated high school. crunch and i would go out and about for hours on end, on escapades, taking pictures and dreaming of what they would look like developed. the advent of cellphone cameras – as they are today – makes it infinitely easier to snap, snap and over-snap. and, though i can confess to that, i will not stop.
because every now and then, when i go through all the photographs i’ve taken on a hike or at home or traveling or with one of my children, i find a jewel. like the lyrics that are tucked into notebooks-upon-notebooks, scraps of paper of melodies, pa pads with ideas for smackdab cartoons and blogposts, sometimes something special turns up. “practice makes perfect,” my sweet poppo would always quip.
so, the other day, while we were hanging out with richard diebenkorn, i thought i would document our time together. not a gem of a shot, but – truly – they aren’t always gems. sometimes they are just reminders of time spent, thready mementos of moments, scraps of lyrics or color samples or heart rocks. they are a diary of time, back and forward, threaded clockwise and reverse.
despite the vast ponderings of art critics and pedantic curators, it would seem that richard might just be trying to create mood, evoke emotion. this ocean park painting – like the whole series – depicting shimmering light and air, his extended time in santa monica sun. he painted and re-painted 145 canvases in this series. a diary of time.
selfies and shadows, smiles and light. all stuff that counts on the way to 1.81 trillion.
it’s 925 miles from the corner of sixth avenue and west 55th street, but it displaced me in an instant. there i was – back sometime in the 70’s, in new york city, seeing robert indiana’s love sculpture for the first time. i loved love then. i love love now. (could that be any more redundant?!)
a part of sculpture milwaukee in 2018, this sculpture has returned and was permanently installed at the milwaukee art museum in 2019. we saw it for the first time last week. life and covid interrupted our visits to mam. we were really happy to be back. seeing love out the window facing lake michigan’s lakefront was the icing on the cake.
there are nearly fifty of these sculptures around the world. people travel far and wide to have their photographs taken next to the iconic stacked word. it became a u.s. postal stamp in 1973. it has big history. its artist has big history.
the success of this giant – yet simple – sculpture begs questions for me: what musical gesture might be equivalent to this sculpture? what rhythmic or melodic motif has this kind of powerful impact? googling these questions produces a plethora of suggested lists – everything from classical to motown to the beatles and beyond. i suppose it’s a truly personal thing.
any listener of albinoni’s adagio in g minor or j.s. bach’s air on the g string or arvo pärt’s spiegel im spiegel or ennio morricone’s gabriel’s oboe or john denver’s annie song or leonard cohen’s hallelujah or carole king’s you’ve got a friend or aretha’s r-e-s-p-e-c-t or the beatles’ here comes the sun or, for that matter, eldar kedem’s you and i or any piece composed and played or sung by giant artists or tiny independent artists …. any listener of anything arrives at the place of listening – the dropped-down-out-of-the-universe of their own world – individually. we tote along with us our lives-at-the-moment, our busy schedules, our worries, our longings, color and breath and heart, a distinctively different set of ears. we hear and we listen and we are transported by music to worlds away, places and times stored up, a chorus of commentators in us telling silent stories in viewmaster snippets, our hearts grasping the filmy tails of memories. impact. giant impact.
the love sculpture means something different to everyone who poses in front of it; every person’s story has different details, a different emotional spectrum. how we connect to this emotive piece depends largely on where we are when we visit with it, what we bring to it, how open we are to its energy.
the love sculpture stands outside the museum and i know that each time we now visit, it will demand our time as well. we will stand and gaze and visit with it. and we’ll keep loving it. it’s simple. it’s that kind of piece.
reverse threading 