Characters in Dance and Writing

For the last month, I have been traveling the state to teach Chinese Calligraphy and Painting. My program, A Brush With History, teaches students the historical development of Chinese writing and painting with hands on training in brush painting. My February Residency at Spartanburg Day School happened to coincide with Mardi Gras, which only added to the festive spirit - replete with King Cake served in the school cafeteria. King Cake was a delicacy that I had been hitherto unacquainted with, but as someone with a penchant for sweet things, I was more than happy to make that acquaintance. It was a tubular creation filled with an eclair-like cream and festooned with sugar sprinkles in a gaudy array of colors ranging from purple to yellow. Tradition has it that a small baby doll is hidden inside and whoever gets the piece with the baby in it will have good luck and will throw the next party. (I’m not sure how bearing the expense for a party can be called "lucky" but I suppose you just have to roll with that).
My Brush with History residency went quite well. The classes were small, the students were attentive and my teaching hosts were very accommodating. The school was unusual in that a Chinese language program had been in place and the elementary students already had up to four years of exposure to Chinese. I was also amazed at the plethora of work by professional artists adorning the hallways and hung in large meeting places. The cafeteria was like a restaurant with a full time professional chef. My eyes were often wide in disbelief at the cornucopia of fresh fruit and greens available. Such is the lot of private school students: good food, good culture, small classes, one-on-one attention opportunities. Although the residency was only four days, I was able to cover the three classic elements of Chinese Painting: calligraphy, brush painting and seal carving. The residency was fortuitously covered in the Spartanburg Herald as my stay happened to coincide with a visit to the school of a Chinese contingency from Guilin.
My second residency was at A C Flora High School in Columbia, SC. What a contrast public to private school was! The grounds were still under construction and there was a lot of repair work still needed on the school infrastructure. Teachers packed their own lunches but that was fun anyway for the lunch comradery. At Spartanburg Day School I had about a total of thirty eight students. At A C Flora there were over one hundred. (I have had some public school experiences where there were over two hundred students for the week Some teachers regularly have about one thousand!) Although some of the combined classes were quite large, I fortunately had the help of the visual arts teacher, Mary Conner as well as the dance instructor, Gayle Etheridge. This was an experimental residency combining dance students and visual art students. It was the culmination of something I had been wanting to do for several years - have dance students choreograph a performance based upon Chinese calligraphy. It entailed having both the visual art and dance students study Chinese calligraphy forms; the basic strokes of kai characters, stroke order, and stylistic variations such as oracle bone, zhuan shu, xing shu, li shu and cao shu. The final day, the entire group of participating students were divided into fourteen groups of about five to eight students - visual artists mixed with dancers. Because I had about two decades of pent up ideas with regard to dance and Chinese calligraphy I had loads of suggestions for these groups. The art teacher and the dance instructor advised me, however, to hold back as much as possible during the student’s creative phase. And they were right because although many students incorporated some of my ideas, most of them came up with even better ones on their own.
Despite the two days of emphasis on Kai, or regular hand characters (something I could compare to printing versus script) most of the students performed dances based on zhuan characters. This made sense in that ancient Chinese zhuan characters (roughly 800 BC) are closer to pictographs and it is easy to envision people striking exotic poses when looking at them. In some instances, though, these were used as elaborate floor patterns for creating dance movements - something I wouldn’t have thought of. Since I provided translations of the zhuan characters many of the students focused on literary content in their dances. One used the concept of wisdom and philosophy, another used both the form and content of the sun and earth elements.
There was one truly brilliant dance performed to the writing of basic strokes of kai characters and I was glad to see at least one group take on that challenge. There was one particularly fascinating bit of choreography with the calligraphers drawing in the air with brushes over the heads of the dancers who simultaneously "translated" these gestures into body movements. The students did such a great job that I almost cried at their performances.
Performance day itself was full of surprises. We had a visit from the director of the Confucius Institute at USC, Professor Tan Ye. Professor Ye gave us information about what how the Confucius Institute is supporting scholarly exchanges between South Carolina students and China and encouraged the high school students to consider further language and cultural studies. Professor Ye did not come empty handed and presented students with a bag full of goodies in the way of Beijing Opera letter openers and silk good luck charms to hang from door knobs.
After the residency, I attended a meeting with the dance instructor, her student teacher, as well as the art instructor. We all came up with ideas to make the next residency even better but most of all we just took some time to bask in the warmth of each other’s company and the satisfaction of a job well done.
　

Abstract Expressions: Both Ancient and Modern

While routing through my materials I came across a painting I did as a demonstration work for a course I taught last year for the Columbia Museum of Art on automatism in Abstract Expressionism. In keeping with my vow to either throw out excess material or use it up in a new way, I decided to "complete" this little painting by making it into a collage with strips of leftover paintings from a different course I had taught previously on lightweight mosaics.
Despite my title for this log, Abstract Expressionism is not entirely modern in that its adherents were painting about sixty years ago - how time flies! But there has been a resurgence of interest in this period and the theories behind the creation of 1950's and 60's abstract painting.

In my own work, I noticed something calligraphic about the black brush marks so decided to add finishing touches with prints of stone seals that I had carved last fall. They read Gold River and Black Water. Inclusion of these two prints makes this newly revived work something of a cultural overlay. In recent weeks I have been teaching more Chinese so integrating these disparate units of different times and far away places into my painting just seems natural.

The Other Collage Squares

From my previous writing, including some blogs, readers will know about my ongoing desire to keep from accumulating too many materials in the studio and home. This is of course a daunting challenge because of the nature of my work as a mixed media and found object artist working in several genres. I just keep finding stuff and making more stuff with it. So in keeping with not keeping too much around, I chose to cut and paste old pieces of previous painting studies on paper and use them in the last two collages squares I made for the Kansas City extension of the "Homage to Squares..." exhibition. These two compositions were simply called "Expressions" as they were simple experiments with limited color palettes. Green and orange have always been favorite colors of mine and I made liberal use of these colors for the square painting above. I knifed through the paint in several areas as well to make primitive scrawls like those seen on neolithic pottery or the etchings on ancient Chinese oracle bones.
The predominantly black and white pattern to the right looks forward to an exhibition idea for next year, "Basically Black."

Opening Day: Squared Away

Today marks the opening of the second installment of my exhibition, "Homage to Squares: The Poetry of Paintings and Mosaics." The down side of not selling much work at an exhibition is that it can be difficult to cover exhibition costs, let alone make a profit. The up side is that the artist still has a body of work available to travel to a new venue. If one is lucky enough, another gallery/museum will host the continuing saga of the ever growing body of art.
Regardless of the fact that I could just recycle the same exhibition in a different setting, I generally pull some old work out and replace it with some new things to freshen it up. In the case of Kansas City exhibition, pragmatism prevailed in this regard because everything had to be shipped to location. Small works on canvas were ideal for shipping but even mid-range mosaics, with their plethora of stones and ceramics, were problematic. As a consequence, only five of these were shipped out. What I made to fill the wall space usually taken by these heavier works were a series of small square collages weighing just ounces each. I took as inspiration for this small run of collage work, the paintings of the abstract expressionists I had reacquainted myself with when I taught this subject at the Columbia Museum of Art last August. Using a decidedly automatist technique, I painted small square non-objective compositions with acrylic on paper then mounted these onto a tinted museum board base. I then reinterpreted elements of the painted colors and composition with painted papers cut in various shapes and sizes. These were pasted onto the background in mosaic designs, sometimes tessellated, other times cut in haphazard patterns. There was something very peaceful about the act of assembling these small compositions in the joy of working only with shapes, textures and colors. Objects are fascinating but sometimes worrisome for artists- having to get something that reasonably evokes recognition.
The first square in this series is influenced by Gottlieb - the rounded forms with their definitive black outlines. But the color palette is decidedly different, more earthy. The painting to the left was purposely done in counterpoint to the first one, in soft pastel colors redolent of the comfort of flannel pajamas. I will look forward to having these paintings back again but would rather they find homes in the midwest.

Allergy Shots and On-Line Diaries

Allergy Shots and On-line Diaries
2010 sprung into being about two months too soon. Here it is March and I am finishing up projects and starting new ones that I thought would be welcoming the advent of the new year. We expect to keep up with things and finish what we started but sometimes life gets in the way. A protracted respiratory illness beginning in December and ending in February, along with various and sundry little setbacks and a heavy schedule of obligations caused two things that I generally keep up with to fall by the wayside: allergy shots and my blog site. Why these two things would be the ballast of daily life that ended up being jettisoned in order to keep moving forward I cannot say. They aren’t exactly related. But in either case, getting on board again will require catching up and starting over. New vial of antigens, new paintings, new drawings, new writing.
So to catch up where I left off in December, after I participated as a juror in the International Mosaic Arts contest, the saga continued with my renewing my membership in the venerable old mosaic organization that I had founded ten years ago and joining a new on-line mosaic group, the Contemporary Mosaic Arts. It is good to be social again after such a long hiatus. Sadly, I will be unable to join my colleagues in Chicago and to see my selections in person. But I am hoping to get to Kansas City to catch up with graduate school classmates from twenty years ago. Perhaps the twenty year reunion, due to a sense of seniority, takes precedence over the ten year one?
The biggest project that was brought to fruition these past months, is the catalogue and digital archive of my work, which now includes about 1600 entries. It occurred to me that if I wrote a story about each work one day at a time it would take about four and a half years to get through my life story in art - what a journey that would be! I might try it if I can finish uploading the drawing collection.!
The second big project for 2010 was finishing the work for my Kansas City exhibition, crating it and shipping it out to location. This exhibition opens tomorrow evening at the Thornhill Gallery at Avila University so I will begin my blog again by posting some of the new work for 2010 now out in the midwest. The three paintings posted are three views of a parade from 1984 viewed from Tian An Men Square in Beijing. The paintings are based on photographs that my husband took on site those ages ago and which I posted on my earlier blog, "Sixty Years and Three Parades: The Long March to Conservative Reporting on China." In the paintings I kept the people crowd-like and nebulous, to emphasis the massive group of humanity moving forward with these ridiculous floats. My favorite painting is the one of Red Balloons over the portrait of Lenin.

Eyes of Blue I.O.U

This December one of my commissions was actually an IOU - a painting made as an in-kind service to graphic designer Rachel Bair Ficek. It is nice to have this painting finished and feel that everything is squared away and even for the end of this year. The painting was of Rachel’s two children and her sister’s three children - five little portraits to get right on one canvas. How daunting!
Because portraiture requires accuracy I spent a long time making a transfer grid and preparing a grisaille. For the grisaille I used red and umber earth tones with touches of shell white over a rose colored ground. The painting above is this painting sketch, or underpainting. Besides making certain that everyone is sitting where they ought to be on a canvas, the grisaille also brings out any defects in the canvas such as scratches or uneven paint that has to be corrected. There were two areas that had to be patched and allowed to dry before proceeding.
One by one, the children appeared in full color as I applied pigment over the grisaille. The second child to be completed is the pleasingly plump boy to the right. I found the children’s hands to be very expressive and included them in the painting to add an extra dimension of personality.

A Dog Named Bear

A Dog Named Bear
Artists’ work in December often runs towards the small and intimate. It is the Christmas market. Craftsmen busy themselves turning out trinkets. Large and ponderous work falls by the wayside as all hands work for the immediate gift giving market. It is a strange time of year for artists-for-hire; fulfilling the desires of others.
Unexpectedly, I had small commissions and large commitments to complete on short notice. As they were gifts for other givers the subject matter and execution was somewhat outside my usual repertoire. They consisted of two small paintings of beloved dogs for their person companions and one group portrait of five children to be given to their grandmother for Christmas.
It was a challenge at first to become motivated to paint subjects that were of much greater sentimental value to people other than myself, but times being what they were, and still are, I rose to that challenge. One of my subjects was a little dog named "Bear." As I sized up Bear and began to paint his visage on a small panel I reminded myself that although I don’t know him, I could at least do a decent job of making an oil painting of him. In order to interpret the photograph I was given in a more artistic manner, I eliminated some of the floor board lines that were cutting across his body and created deeper shadows along the edge of his form.
As I painted that perky little face I was surprised that I began to see something of a presence of animal consciousness. It was looking at that curious consciousness that pets have when perceiving their person companions and aware once more of the mutual adoration of human with animal. It then occurred to me that I was painting something like a small icon. Little Bear reminded me of how emotionally attached people become to their animal companions despite the folly of investing so much time and heart to a living thing with a limited life span. The painting I had completed the week before was of a deceased pet and poor Bear was also not long for this world so I was told. I do hope that he continues to bring his family joy for just a little longer and that my painting will warm the heart for years to come.

Slips Showing

I recently participated in the jurying of an international arts exhibition and wrote a blog about the fascinating process and the extraordinary art work that was included in the entries. I uploaded this writing after I heard that the judging results were officially posted. Apparently at that time not all of them were and I may have inadvertently scooped a part of the show. I had also been interviewed about the exhibition in the mistaken understanding that this was something that everyone had agreed to do for the membership. It hadn’t been agreed upon. I apologize for any inconvenience these slips may have caused. Words cannot express how embarrassed it makes me feel. The only word I can think of to capture the feeling is a non word often uttered by Homer Simpson, "DOH!"
In any case, I’ll publish the article I wrote again some time later when feelings of acceptance and rejection are not so near the surface nerves of everyone’s skin. I’ll add to the article both sides of the art competition equation - with shows that I had been juried into or juried out of. In the mean time, in honor of slips, I am for now posting a revised version of my short piece on Freudian Slips.There is a fine meeting of human psychology and creativity in one of the theories of Sigmund Freud. It is perhaps the only theory (or should I say observation?) of Freud that I actually find so entertaining and amusing that I put it into unconscious practice. This is the serendipitous art of the Freudian slip. These slips of the tongue purportedly point to unconscious desires and feelings about a subject as the speaker inadvertently mispronounces something. Truth? Or is it freudulent ?
So what does it mean when I say to my husband when we get into the car, "You drive, I’ll nagivate.?" Of course anyone can be free to nagivate with a captive audience in an enclosed space on a long trip. What better time to bring to light that laundry list of unfinished business?
Another one of my favorite Freudian slips, albeit unconsciously created, is my reference to our beleaguered utility room. This is the room that most people are familiar with. This is the very room where everything that you don’t know what to do with ends up. This is that limbo space where you put things that you don’t know how to deal with , and would rather not see or have anyone else see . This is where everything that confuses and frustrates belongs - things that one unconsciously wishes to lose - equipment that you can’t figure out or have forgotten how to use. Things that can no longer be matched with written instructions can be put there, and maybe a few hopeless people, too. When my husband asked where such a thing could be put I answered with my characteristic fatalistic charm, "Oh, just put it in the futility room." I am quite confident that I am not the only one in this world with a futility room.
A very odd word construction came spilling out of me when someone described to me a group of language teachers who had gone back to school to retrain in a different field because their university no longer had a use for their skills. I tried to use the word "recycled" but instead the word "resuckled" came out. So is this the fate of people who have lost their usefulness in this world? Send them back. All the way back...to mother’s breast...to relive infancy, childhood, adolescence and young adulthood so they can get it right this time. There are definitely those who need to be resuckled.
A woman who was abusing her power of attorney in order to withhold medical information about a sick parent from other family members I was "slipped" into describing as "Sarah’s Power of Eternity." The distress she caused that was described to me most assuredly seemed like it would last an eternity. There is something in the nature of unpleasantness that causes it to seem without end. And it is often the feeling that a reprieve is no where in sight that makes an unpleasant thing all the more intense. That is the power of eternity.
And what of those days spent chasing down information lost to bureaucracy? Or days spent catching up on tedious chores put off? I spent an entire day recently doing both. I described it to someone as a day spent "running errors." I quickly corrected myself and said that I was running errands. These errands including returning an overdue library book, filling a lapsed prescription, tracking down reports that were never faxed to the appropriate office, tracking down a check payment to a credit card company that got lost in the mail and getting the late fee from the said credit card company dropped. On second thought I believe I was right the first time. I was "running errors."
Sometimes errors of the human unconscious can even come from non-human sources - like spell check on my computer. Whenever I type in my description of my art specialty, "mosaicist," I see a red word flashing in the corner of my screen that says "masochist." Et tu PC? Considering the fact that we live in a fast paced, time is money capitalist society, specializing in an art form that slowly pieces together hand hewn chunks of rocks and ceramic does seem to encourage a sort of artistic suffering. My PC also insists that my surname is an erroneous spelling of the word "cheesecake," but I was never able to figure out what the digital unconscious was trying to tell me. Whether digital or human, the hidden truth is uncanny.
My story of slipped truths is illustrated by my painting of a young man sporting a gar fish on his head. Why it strikes me that a gar fish, that useless fossil-like weird thing, should be Freudian I cannot say. Perhaps it is something in the surreal juxtaposition of a man out of water and this fish on his head. Perhaps there is something secretly phallic about the strange shape of the gar. Or perhaps it is meaningless. After all, sometimes a gar is just a gar.

Sarah Palindrome: Updated

Okay. The news about Sarah Palin's new book is irresistable and I have to run an updated version of my blog Sarah Palindrome:

Some politicians like to drop the "g" off of words in order to sound folksy, or talk in long meandering sentences that are indeed bridges to nowhere. One politician who often uses those spoken devices is Sarah Palin. (Although it must be noted that towards the end of his own bid for the presidency, Barack Obama started spinnin some folksy banterin around as well). But what interests me about Sarah Palin is that there is a word with her surname already built into it - the palindrome. The palindrome is a rare oddity of language in which a phrase or a word reads the same forwards and backwards...
Ya know...a word that says the same old thing goin away from ya as it does comin right back atcha...words like kook and boob. I was just thinkin how someone could use those if she were in public office. Wow!
If she could get a gig like that just think what she could do. She could put a gag order on anyone in health care thinkin they would advise a pregnant teen on options other then if the teen didn’t want a tot she just shoulda just behaved like a nun. But if the teen did the deed , well, we wouldn’t want a peep out of a provider about any such thing as a morning after pill either unless it’s a dud. Mum is the word on that. Then we can have happy young teens proud of just bein a mom puttin a bib on a baby and a dad cleanin poop outa diapers.
The good thing about livin in Alaska is that you can see Russia on the radar in your own back yard! And its cool in the summer too! But even if it gets to where its 90 degrees at high noon on a winter’s day up there, don’t blame it on man-made global warming. Cause our Sarah of the north don’t believe the stats on that, whether they come from a sir or a madam.
Our Sarah is a master of tit for tat. Just look at the pep rally she has around that book thats poppin off the shelves right now. Now she has a chance to toot her horn too. But ya know, sometimes a person you think is a kook or a boob writes a book or two. Just the right person in office can pop on over to the public library and pop those books off the shelves and pop them right on into a fire. It would be enough to make a soccer mom bob up and down and holler.
Harrah for Sarah Palindrome!
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
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The Price of Cultural Ownership: The Guenall Lioness Part II

I recently touched up pencil sketches that I had made of the lion-headed goddess some years ago at a special exhibition at Princeton University. There was something powerful in this ancient figure - a union of a male upper torso with female hips. The hands on those powerful arms folded into fists and pressed together accentuated the solidity of the sturdy well-muscled form. There was not much I knew about her except that she was from Iran and that she was created five thousand years ago. Was she an early object of worship? A venerated warrior? What does her stance reveal? Is she animal, human or both?
Seton Lloyd, in his book The Art of the Ancient Near East, published by Oxford University Press way back in the 1960's described  the Lioness as a "monster" which was "...the first and perhaps the most striking of many monstrous forms in which the Sumerians symbolized the malevolence and hostility of nature towards humanity." He was alluding here to the commentary of Henri Frankfort, who studied the object when she was still in the Brooklyn museum: (she) "stands at the head of a long line of monsters which appear in all the great periods of Mesopotamian art and convincingly express the terror with which man realized his helplessness in a hostile universe."
It was interesting to read this early commentary and yet see nothing particularly hostile in this statue in her rather self assured pose. Her posture, with fists folded in front of her body looked mighty to me, but not particularly threatening. One wonders if these men themselves felt disconcerted by a form that was man/woman/animal/human all in one. What did strike me about the pose was that it prefigured the classic archaic pose familiar to Egyptian paintings, with frontal upper torso and legs twisted sideways. The mystery of what she actually signified was equally alluring as the question of what it is that she was doing.
On the latter subject, I had a conversation with my Tai ji quan instructor. He put forward the theory that she was dancing some sort of marshal arts dance. He came to this conclusion by noticing that the fists together across the chest and the twisted torso was almost identical to a position in the Wu style of Tai ji quan. His own instructor had a theory that these movements of Tai ji quan were evolved from ancient goddess dances. It was an interesting theory but might just be as difficult to prove conclusively as the "terror and helplessness in a hostile universe" one.
It was engaging to speculate on whether she was striding or standing at attention with the legs apart. Just for fun I put both fists together in front of my chest, turned my head over by left shoulder and took several paces forward to see what a dance like that would feel like. It did indeed have a powerful effect and felt almost like the determined stride of the Tango.
I am grateful that I went to the museum the day that the Lioness was on display for little did I know that I would never have an opportunity to see her again. Of course I can still look at reproductions but they are misleading for not showing the figure from various points of view and for nearly always depicting the figure almost twice actual size - making her indeed more menacing than intimate. The real Lioness is quite small. At just a few inches high she could fit in the palm of a hand or in a shirt pocket.
What is provocative for me and for anyone else who loves to see artifacts first hand is that because the Lioness was sold to a private buyer for the princely sum of fifty-three million dollars, she is out of the public viewing domain - maybe forever. I was reflecting on this as I reviewed my sketches. Is such a pivotal icon of the culture of humankind a precious part of our collective legacy that everyone should be able to share, or is she another commodity that can be sold to the highest bidder? Does money give a person the right to own history?
I wonder still today about who the anonymous buyer of the Lioness might be. We only know that he/she is someone in Great Britain. In my flights of fancy I imagine the Queen of England with the Lioness on her dresser next to one of the Queen Mother’s exotic hats. Or perhaps she rests in a red velvet lined case in a secret hideaway owned by Harrods department store. In considering this, I realize, too, that by making drawings of the Lioness from life I share an unusual bond with the mystery owner of the work. We obviously share a love for the object. But we share to some degree, ownership as well. This is because I have found that when I sketch a work of art, the slow process of rendering makes that work a part of me in a way that simply buying a reproduction does not.  I too, am part owner and it does give me a small sense of satisfaction that this particular kind of ownership cannot be sold away. It also gives me some sense of gratification that I captured a side view of Lioness before the opportunity to see that disappeared.  It is a small miracle that only the mystery owner and I can see Lioness’ back.
I wonder about what inspires someone to pay such a large sum of money to own something like this rare statue. Is it simply because one is able? Is it an expression of power? Or is it perhaps for a love of art and ancient history so deep that one would spare no expense for the privilege of forever being able to hold it in the palm of his or her hand at will? Whatever the reason, I hope that Lioness is loved. I will miss her.