Ryo Toyonaga at The Vilcek Foundation

From 18 March to 15 May 2009, The Vilcek Foundation presents an exhibition of eighteen ceramic-based sculptural works by Ryo Toyonaga, curated by Midori Yamamura. Created in the seclusion of a cabin in the Catskill Mountains from 1991 to 2003, these works seem to arise from both organic and man-made sources. To contemplate these objects pulls the mind through the paradoxes of appearance and reality. This duality between archaic and contemporary, of organic and constructed, brings to mind the similar duality in the best work of Martin Puryear. As either fossils from the future or distant past, the question is unavoidable: How did these things come to be? And the corollary question, Why can't I take my eyes off of them? The creative impulse that birthed this work—and their organic quality makes the metaphor of birth particularly apt—had to have been a well-spring, the sculptures in this show were selected from a body of 300 pieces. Each is a perfectly conceived unity, almost with its own DNA, making sense by the force of its own presence. We all have thoughts, fantasies, obsessions, whose force on our lives is as powerful as any physical object; sometimes these unseen forces are stronger than reality. Toyonaga has given form, shape, and physical presence to the actors of our unconscious theater, and offers the chance to confront them face to face.

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From part 15 of Esthétique du Mal by Wallace Stevens

And out of what one sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.

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Ryo Toyonaga: Mephistophelean
18 March through 15 May 2009
The Vilcek Foundation
167 East 73rd Street
New York City
10021
(212) 472-2500
info@vilcek.org

Viewing from
Wednesday through Saturday
Noon to 6:00 P.M. and by appointment
Catalog available

On Paper

The crush of major art fairs is coming! Among them, my favorite is the Stanford L. Smith Works on Paper Show running through Monday at the Park Avenue Armory.

The materials an artist employs affect what she says, and paper brings out the lyrical impulse, the poetic, and the intimate. Ink, paint, charcoal, pencil, and the acts of mark making all change not just the surface of the paper, but the paper itself as it accepts the artist's marks. Stretched canvas projects a picture out into the room, creating a dramatic stage for the theater of the artist's imagination. Paper is used (or once was) for personal correspondence, for documenting life's achievements, births, deaths, weddings, for books, for newspapers, for menus, for sheet music, for money. Paper is in our hands everyday and nothing is quite as meaningful as a handwritten note from a friend, a unique object expressing a personal idea, intended just for you; no saved version on the hard drive, rejected drafts crumpled in the author's wastebasket. Art on paper inhabits this intimate touchability. It speaks in private, sometimes intense, whispers, right in your ear.

Exploring this most explorable of art fairs is like searching for just such a personal message from an artist. So many works, so many sizes, such intimate mark making, and then you see it, the message to you. It's signed and dated. You were very young when this message was sent out into the world, but it found its mark. There is a rush standing in front of an immense Titian canvas in a museum, overwhelming, transporting, a feeling experienced and shared publicly and from a distance. The private rush of realizing a work on paper speaks its secret message just to you is a thrill I associate with love and affection.

"Would you like to hold it? Bring it over into the light," I was asked.

Once in your home, the the work and its messages enrich your life; revealing its secrets over the course of a life time.

Many thanks, to Stuart Denenberg of Denenberg Fine Arts.

Nicholas Carone

"I start immediately with paint. Just get involved with that. Because I feel that it's all one. I don't separate drawing from painting. I don't separate organizing the surface from really drawing. I think that's drawing. Drawing to me is designing space really, organizing it. It's not just rendering a particular form . . . calling that drawing an arm or a head or a figure."

Oral history interview with Nicholas Carone, 1968 May 11 - 17, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.


Nicholas Carone (B.1917)
"Untitled" (1961 - 1964)
oil on paperboard
18 x 20.2 in
signed 'Nicolas Carone'
oil on paperboard

Contemplation

When a composer's music is perfectly fitted to his time, one can wonder what or even if he would have composed where he born a hundred years earlier or later. If Mozart lived in the 20th century, I expect he might have been a film maker rather than composer.

Centenary considerations are much on the mind these days, with Elliot Carter's big day widely celebrated around the city. On the hundredth birthday of Oliver Messiaen (today), I attended an sprawling program of his work at The Church of the Ascension.

Hearing the "Quartet for the End of Time" live is always a powerful experience. The performers tonight, Paul Kim, piano, Curtis Macomber, violin, Jonathan Spitz, cello, Alan Kay, clarinet, revealed the work's intense expression and spiritual questioning, within the framework of its beauty of both sound and form. After intermission, Jon Gillock played an impressive selection of movements drawn from various organ works into his own suite.

Listening, I was struck again by how constructed Messiaen's music sounds. Its madeness is conspicuous to the point of being part of its meaning. Music, by contrast, that sounds "natural" almost defies the idea of its being composed. There are songs by Stephen Foster and melodies by Mozart that seem so inevitable that it is hard to believe there was a time when they didn't exist, as if composers discovered rather than created them. The unnaturalness of Messiaen's music seems related to its task in that so much of what he writes asks us to look directly, unflinchingly, into the greatest mysteries of existence and not avert our gaze. The wrenching knowledge that such knowledge is unknowable is a difficult truth, a question with no answer. Such contemplation is essentially an unnatural act. Quite outside nature, it is supernatural.

Nature does not contemplate, existence is enough. When Messiean introduces bird song into his music, the ambivalent sounds of nature bring the personalness of our spiritual experience into sharp relief. It brings to mind Giovanni Bellini's 1480 masterpiece, St. Francis in the Desert, at The Frick Collection in New York City. The artist baths Saint Francis in one of the most extraordinary streams of light in Western art at the transcendental moment when he receives the stigmata. In the background, a crane, a donkey, and a flock of sheep stand unaffected by the miraculous transformation. The saint's moment in the light is his alone. The knowledge that nature is unconcerned about our struggles draws us to contemplate things beyond nature, beyond what is knowable. Messiaen's music is an indispensable guide. Mozart and Stephen Foster provide the perfect balm.

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Musee des Beaux Arts
W.H. Auden (1940)

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Zoe Strauss "We love having you here"


Photographer, Zoe Strauss' show at Bruce Silverstein in Chelsea opened last weekend and runs through 10 January 2009. Please stop by for a visit. Her images are beautiful and harrowing in equal measure.

Paintings by Dov Talpaz

A few years ago, I encountered the work of a young artist named Dov Talpaz as part of a show put up by a group of fellow art school colleagues.

His work is representational, often drawing on literary themes. Serious in tone, figural yet abstract, inventive in color and perspective, cohesive in vision, Talpaz is an artistic descendant of El Greco and Edvard Munch. Each picture's narrative is emotional or psychological rather than active, and is expressed through color, form, and perspective. His strongest work reveals characters caught up in the inevitable and personal workings of their fate. They seem to display themselves to us in intimate acceptance of their condition. We empathize and yet understand that their world is not our world. We can only see each other only through the window of the artist's imagination.

Dov currently has a show in New York City, details below. It only runs through September 3rd, so you'll have to hurry to catch it. I highly recommend it.

Paintings by Dov Talpaz

August 23 - September 3, 2008

Opening reception Saturday, August 23, 6- 9 pm.

Manhattan World Culture Open Center

19W 26th Street, 5th floor (between Broadway & 6th Ave.) New York, NY

Gallery hours:

Open on Monday and Friday, 12 – 6 pm.

Saturday, 2.30 - 6 pm. Wednesday and Thursday

by appointment, Please call 212.244.7200.

For more info you can write to dubitalpaz@walla.com

or call 718.789.7920

Sight and Sound

Because there are so few notes to play, the English horn part in Verdi's Falstaff offers plenty of time for sitting and listening. The first entrance is 20 minutes into the opera. It lasts for about two minutes and then there is nothing for an hour and a half (depending on tempi, rubato, etc.), which is not a bad thing in such a fascinating piece. Verdi's score overflows with delightful details. Some of these musical devices propel the story or comment on the action, many, on the other hand, are simply there for pleasure, both for the audience and the performers. Even after dozens of performances, I find new delights and relish familiar ones.

On Friday afternoon, my friend Joan Easton and I went through the Asian art galleries that overtook the Fuller Building for Asiaweek 2008. The 17th-century Indian miniatures in Francesca Galloway's gallery are breathtaking (you can see them until March 27, 2008). A small picture of a nilgai by a Mughal artist (c. 1610-12) captivated us. Joan, pointing out the array of intricate details in the background, imagined the pleasure the artist must have took in adding fanciful touches, a bird here, a branch there.

As I sat in the pit of the State Theater yesterday afternoon, with Falstaff going on all around me, I thought about the picture of the nilgai and Joan's comments. The musical pleasures were so delightfully complex as they danced throughout the orchestra, all I could think about was Verdi's pleasure in creating them. He must have thought about various musicians he knew, and those he never could, enjoying the aural spectacle he created.

Advice to young singers

From Hugues Cuenod as published in "With a Nimble Voice—Conversations with François Hudry" Translated by Albert Fuller (1999)

"I would say first of all to take music seriously and not try to advance too quickly. Then I would say not to make a recording before having matured at length in their roles. Above all, I believe it's necessary to acquire an extra-musical culture and to profit by having other activities of a refined nature. I always remember a young man in Copenhagen with whom I was working on Don Quichotte à Dulcinée of Ravel. A little while before the lesson I had gone to visit a museum where there is a beautiful canvas by Daumier depicting Don Quixote. I told this young man to go look at this picture for a half-hour so that he could understand why his interpretation was not satisfactory. He did, and sang much better at the following lesson. That's the kind of advice I like to give. Go to museums, read, don't restrict yourself by working only on music and your exercises. Take half your time for study and use the other half to see the world, to look at painting, to eat well. (I don't dare speak about the rest . . . ) All that is of the utmost importance for having a balanced and interesting life."

And then this for all of us, singers or not. Hudry observes to Hughie that "happiness seems to have been the principal companion of your life."

The singer's responds, "That's because I am content with little and turn to advantage all the tiresome things that happen to me. I remember uniquely the good moments of my life, and I believe that my existence could be summed up by a completely secular trinity: the gift of music, the gift of idleness, and the gift of being kind and agreeable with my friends. Voilà!"

Voilà, indeed.

Germaine Schneider - "Trees in Snow" (1938)

While in San Francisco with Zéphyros this last weekend, I visited the SF art galleries Saturday morning. I was delighted to pick up this small (3 inches by 2 inches), peaceful picture by French photographer Germaine Schneider (fl. 1930s-1950s) at the Robert Tat Gallery. The show, which was on its last day, featured small photographs from the early 20th Century. The picture is formally beautiful and plays with perspective and perception of size, shadow and light, in ways that appeal to me. Her work is in the collections of the Center for Creative Photography in Tuscon and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Germaine Schneider
"Trees in Snow" (1938)
3 in. x 2 in.
gelatin silver print
Robert Tat Gallery

Madeleine Moments — My mother, Museums, Massachusetts, Monet & Memory

After the performance of Romeo and Juliet with the NYCB tonight, my dear friend, flutist, Laura Conwesser invited me to her apartment for some wine and cheese. (The 2003 Canon-Fransac was a real pleasure.)

As she arranged the table, I thumbed through the impressive catalogue of a show we had seen this summer at The Clark. (The museum is a pleasurable 90-minute drive from Saratoga Springs where the New York City Ballet has its summer home.) The exhibition, called "The Unknown Monet," was a rare survey of the painter's works on paper, including sketch books, prints, and pastels. Leafing through the pages, I slipped through memory's secret passage to my experiences there this summer.

My parents made a cross-country trip to visit me in Saratoga. They wouldn't disagree if I said visual art was not one of their abiding interests. Museums were not a part of our lives growing up; my parents' prefered leisure pastimes are solidly of the out-of-doors variety: gardening, fishing, boating, motor cycling, water skiing, etc. (Wasn't it Annie Leibowitz who said that the outdoors was the space between your apartment and a taxi? If she didn’t, I might have . . .) Nevertheless, I thought an outing to The Clark would be enjoyable and on a day off we made the scenic drive through New York and Vermont countryside to Williamstown, Mass. ("MA," still doesn't sound right, apologies to the USPS.)

After lunch in the museum café, we took in the Monet show. Shortly into the exhibition, my mother tugged my arm. She had found a picture that particularly spoke to her and she wanted me to see it. It was an early pastel drawing of a farm scene. A barn was in the background and a pond took center stage. Reflections of trees and animals shimmered on the surface of the water. "What do you like about this picture?" I asked. My mother answered, "It has depth, but mostly I feel emotionally drawn to it. I feel like I know this place, it's like I've seen it before." This museum visit was becoming very interesting.

A little later on she asked what made pictures by Monet more famous and more valuable than other art? I suggested that in a single-artist show it could be hard to put the work into context, but that when we visited the permanent collection, we could look at other French pictures from the same period and see what we thought.

Sure enough, there came a moment when we were standing in front of two small French paintings from the 1880s, one by Sisley and another by a lesser-known artist. I asked my mother to compare these paintings to the Monets. In my recollection, this was the first day I heard my mother share an opinion about a work of art. "Well, these painters don't use color the way that Monet does. In fact these pictures are a little flat in comparison." My eyes widened, and my mother moved on to another painting. "But this one, this one has real depth. I love it, I feel like I could walk right into this picture." "Mother, you have very good taste," I said. "That picture is by Vincent van Gogh."

Damien Hirst—Terror and the Sublime—“The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living"

The closest I have come to understanding that poor, discombobulating shark is in its current showing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An essay posted in the gallery, "Terror and the Sublime," promises to put Hirst's grotesquerie into some artistic context, but you will not find many visitors pouring over the educational materials. They simply cannot take their eyes off the fish.

There is still the faint physical rush of fear (frissons?) to be had looking directly into those dilapidated jaws. That physical sensation is real and therein lies the important question for those interested in art. Is that physical sensation, that vestigial terror, a component of an artistic sublime? Harold Bloom when discussing literary sublime, asks of a particular work, "Is there something greater written before? Has something greater been written since?" Easy questions to ask, but difficult to answer. Through the process of parsing comes an understanding of the sublime. Mozart's C Minor Piano Concerto, Beethoven's Third Symphony, Bach "St. Matthew Passion," these works can also offer a certain terror as we contemplate the complexities of the human creative force; a force powerful enough to create works of art beyond our ability to understand, yet though which we hope to better understand our own lives.

I do not believe Hirst's is an artistic sublime at all. The animal terror he evokes or invokes, depending on your point of view, is a thrill that has more in common with horror movies, circus acts, and roller coasters. Devised as "controlled" risks, we feel the thrill of danger without exposing ourselves to bodily threat. Peering into the mouth of a dead shark, we find the same feelings. Modern life neuters so much of the ancient animal in us; these experiences act to remind us of the dangerous thrill of living. But is this the role of art in society?

Hirst's work elicits fast reactions, but lacking true beauty or mystery, there is nothing to contemplate. More a point-of-view than a work of art, once its point is made, we don't need to see it again, ever. The artistic sublime requires from us more than we can give, more contemplation than one lifetime can accomplish, more creative engagement than we thought we had. The artistic sublime is larger than we are, and when we partake of it, we become larger, ourselves.

In a sense, I am glad that the shark is at the MET. Disengaging our gaze from its facile, lurid seductiveness, we are reminded that true works of imaginative genius promise a lifetime of engagement, and indeed pleasurable effort. Great works of art will repay such efforts in abundance.

"Metro Mandala" 2007 by Gayle Tanaka

This small work by Gayle Tanaka is a photograph under a solid crystal dome, three inches in diameter and about two and a half inches tall. It is clever, charming, and, to me, irresistible. Below is an image of the photograph and a picture of all the "mandalas" on a table in the the gallery show.

Joshua R. Marks, "Honest Landscapes, VI"

This summer, while up at Saratoga Springs with the New York City Ballet, I visited the Tang Museum at Skidmore College and was pleased to discover the work of Joshua R. Marks. Joshua is trained as a sculptor and works also in photography. His work deals with perspective, size, vantage point, and plays with the expectations surrounding these elements.

In the Tang exhibition, hung six photographs in large frames made by the artist. The series was titled "Honest Landscapes" and I was immediately drawn to them. The subject of these landscapes, I came to realize, was New York City pavement, shot so close (inches from the ground) that the image could read as either immense or tiny, near or far. Manipulating elements of focus, the artist further affected viewer's perception of perspective. What were we seeing, a mountain or a tiny rock?

Visiting the works over the course of my two-week stay, I came to see that the beautiful, but quizzical frames told their own story. They suggested the interior wall and passenger window of an airplane with perfect details: the sloping concave shape, the color, and especially the representation of the window through which we see the photograph. Not only is the window's shape perfect, but there are two panes of glass (plexi, actually) with that tiny pinprick one finds near the bottom of such windows. The illusion is masterful without being over-done. In fact, the sculptural elements are in many ways, more realistic than the image contained within. The "Honest Landscapes" exist both as sculptures and photographs, blurring perspective, size, and proximity, in a conceptual whirl. What would it mean to look out a airplane window and see mountains rising—at once tiny and enormous—only inches above the Brooklyn pavement? In these works, Marks combined visual beauty with technical polish and conceptual slight-of-hand, even the title plays into the conceit. By accreting layers of illusion, he created six very strong works.

I contacted the artist to find out whether the works might be available. They were, and the process of choosing between the six was exciting. I even involved my parents in the process on their visit to Saratoga for my 40th birthday. It was a sight, the three of us, rushing around the exhibition, comparing, looking, talking about the works. Though I had to choose but one, I could imagine a space where all six might be shown in a row, taking the airplane window illusion to new heights. (Any collectors with big spaces reading this?)

I chose the sixth in the series, and when the Tang show ended, I paid a visit to Joshua's studio in Brooklyn. His wife was there assisting, and we three spent the better part of an afternoon talking and looking at Joshua's work. Totally delightful. They even drove me back to Manhattan with my new piece, talking about opera most of the way back.

I've tried to photograph the work to show its frame. I'm not sure I've succeeded, but I hope you get an idea.

Joshua R. Marks

"Honest Landscapes VI" 1/10, 2007
Photograph in sculptural frame by artist
Image: 11" x 14.5"
Frame: 34.5" x 29" x 1.5" - 3"
Artist studio, Brooklyn, NY 2007
Exhibited at The Tang Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, Summer 2007

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More: Joshua's work is currently being featured at "Whitney Art Works Gallery" in Portland, Maine.

The Helicon Foundation's 23 Season

This October, The Helicon Foundation opens its twenty-third season. Three themes unite our Symposiums next year: Music in Culture, The Development of the Keyboard, and The Voice of the Violin.

We explore music’s relationship to the wider culture through its influences in the other arts and technology. Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” which Pedja Muzijevic plays in December, is an obvious example. Inspired by the drawings and watercolors of Victor Hartmann, Mussorgsky created a moving tribute to their friendship within a musical portrait of the artist. The natural world and the contemplative inner workings of religious faith influenced the music of Heinrich Biber in his Sonata Representiva, and The Mystery Sonatas, which Colin Jacobsen performs in February. Poetry is the inspiration for Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), which closes our season. In this first instance of a tone poem in chamber music, Schoenberg vividly represents the narrative of the two lovers in Richard Dehmel’s poem of the same name. Our opening Symposium features one of Europe’s greatest pre-electronic technological triumphs, the fortepiano. In this case, musical needs influenced technology, as musicians and composers pushed builders for increasingly sophisticated instruments and an expanded sonic palette. The music on this program was written around 1800, and ushered in a century of rapid evolution in piano development, leading to its dominant position in Western art music.

This season features five different keyboard instruments. In the music of Biber, we will hear both the harpsichord and organ. Our own amazingly versatile, Pedja Muzijevic will play the fortepiano in the first Symposium and the modern grand piano for “Pictures.” I am excited to announce a Helicon Special Event that takes the theme of keyboard instruments to its grandest heights. Robert McCormick, the young organ virtuoso and Music Director of St. Mary the Virgin here in New York City, has agreed to give Helicon Members a private concert on what is one of the finest organs in America. He will introduce the various registers of this king of instruments, and then play pieces showcasing its remarkable powers.

Finally, we look at the voice of the violin through its expressive evolution over three centuries of music. Each of our four violinists this season, Mark Steinberg, Jennifer Frautschi, Colin Jacobsen, and Vera Beths is an artist possessing a strong, individual personality, and an important voice in the music world today. In works of Mozart, Beethoven, Prokofiev, Biber, Brahms, and Schoenberg, we will hear the distinctive voices of the violin in its widely expressive potential.

Helicon Members enjoy proximity to virtuoso performances, insightful programs, vibrant social interaction, and immersion in music’s most intimate world. If you’d like to be a part of this exciting season, please email heliconnyc@aol.com or write to: The Helicon Foundation, Inc., 27 West 67th Street, New York, NY 10023, and we will send you Membership materials.

Becoming a Collector—Kermit Oliver

I started buying art before I became a collector. The first work of art I purchased was at The Southern Vermont Art Center in Manchester, VT, over a decade ago. I was there for the Manchester Music Festival, and quite unaware of what I might encounter, I walked into their galleries. Off in a corner sat a small abstract ceramic sculpture by Marion McChesney that grabbed my attention. It was $175, much more than I had ever spent on a non-useful item, but I was moved by it. Gentle and lyrical, I still love it. Though it was my first art purchase, it wasn't my first purchase as a collector.

In the 2004-2005 season I was invited to play acting-principal oboe of the Houston Grand Opera. I spent ten weeks in Texas, divided into two visits. It felt as though I was at a summer festival, away from home, expenses paid, I had no "real life" responsibilities aside from the opera schedule. Houston boasts America's third largest art market after New York and L.A. The Menil Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston are great museums, and there is a lively gallery scene centered on Colquitt Street and in the Montrose district. I became a member of the MFAH and started going on my afternoons off. Showing at the time was a career retrospective of Kermit Oliver. Entirely unknown to me, I walked in one afternoon and thought, "Oh, this looks like Andrew Wyeth. It's quite nice." Well, it didn't take long before Oliver’s individual voice expressed itself and I was hooked. Virtuosic draftsmanship met imaginative visions, met literary and religious imagery; Oliver's work read like text. Photo-realism exploded into allegorical worlds that were instantly legible while promising deeper mysteries. I began attending docent-led tours of the exhibition, and one day a guide pointed to a particularly engaging work and said, " I could imagine living with this the rest of my life." I was startled by the idea, and intrigued.

With a little research, I found the Houston gallery that represented Kermit Oliver, Hooks-Epstein. I took a deep breath and drove to Colquitt Street. Bursting into the gallery, I walked up to the person who looked the most "in charge" (this was my first visit to a major commercial fine art gallery with intent to buy) and blurted out my confession: " I love the work of Kermit Oliver, and I wonder if you have anything in the price range of a new collector." The elegant, poised, Southern woman sitting behind a handsome wooden desk smiled and answered in a mellifluous mezzo-soprano, "I am so pleased to learn of our mutual admiration for the work of Kermit Oliver and that you've found your way to our gallery. What, may I ask, is the budget of this 'new collector'?" "$1000," I replied, gamely. "Oh, I am so sorry, Mr. Oliver's work demands a price many times higher than that. However, if you would like to view our inventory in the back room, I would be happy for my assistant to show you." It was a kind gesture to this "new collector," and I was thrilled to see more of Oliver's work.

While we explored the gallery's cache of significant paintings, I spied a small piece leaning on a shelf—a drawing—and I asked to see it. It was an original study on paper, pen and ink with acrylic wash about 8 x 12 inches. It pictured a coyote fatally subduing a lamb, a crane in flight overhead, oblivious, and, there were handwritten notes by Oliver in the bottom margin. Peeking, I saw that the price was within my range. "What's this?" I asked. The assistant didn't know, so it was presented at the front desk, where I learned it was a 1996 study made for a larger work the gallery sold years ago. The collectors hadn’t wanted the study, and it sat, seemingly waiting for me in the back room ever since. "I'll take it."

It displayed some of Oliver's major themes. Its title: LUSUS NATURAE or "game of nature,' expressed nature's ambivalence to one creature's fate in the face of the continuation of life. The sacrificial lamb's plight, agnus dei, is ignored by the crane flying overhead towards its own unknown end. Though depicting an assault, the picture doesn't feel violent. The artist's notes on the page add an additional layer of remove from the mortal scene while increasing the richness to the work itself.

With that purchase I became a collector. The docent’s idea of looking at a work for the rest of ones life came to life. Oliver’s study, now entirely separate from the larger work it preceded, hangs by my music desk. The oblivious crane, spared the lamb’s violent fate, suggests there can be found peace in the face of life’s tragedies and joys. What more can we ask?

Kermit Oliver

“LUSUS NATURAE — Coyote Assaulting Sheep” 1996
pen/ink, acrylic wash on paper
8 1/2 x 11”
KO97 24
Hooks-Epstein Galleries, Houston, TX, 2005

Niv Ocean Shank, photographer

Niv is a photographer who lives in my neighborhood and works in fashion as well as fine art photography. Born in Israel, his career took root in Italy. One day I asked if his images were on line. I hadn't seriously collected photographs, though I do have a several beautiful ones by Bell Soto that he gave me. Niv told me the URL of his Italian manager, and I fell in love with one image in particular. When I saw him next, I told him there was one I thought I wanted. "I know which one you like, it's the 'Boys in the Field,'" he said. I didn't know the title, but I knew the one he meant. It's a work of such youthful abandon, hope, and contentment, I couldn't resist. Niv made me a 24 x 36 print. Here it is.

Joan Mitchell – by Judith E. Bernstock

Now out-of-print, Judith E. Bernstock's survey of Joan Mitchell's work is the only comprehensive book on her art. Odd, isn't it? Copies—I covet them—are several hundred dollars at alibris.com. Fortunately, the New York Public Library delivered one almost to my door, and I can keep it, at least, until September.

It's wonderful to see so much of Mitchell's work in this book. I think her art is more difficult than many of the better-known "first generation" abstract expressionist artists. Her work does not engage the viewer easily, but as with all hard-won pleasures, hers are rich and multi-layered.

It's curious to me how little she thinks of Monet. "He isn't my favorite painter," she maintains according to Bernstock (pg. 76), "There's a much heavier conscious influence from Cézanne. I never much liked Monet." When I see a late Monet, I look for the most abstract portion of the picture. That section provides a way to see the art of Joan Mitchell, an abstract painter depicting the natural world. " . . . if you want to paint the river, paint the river . . ." (Bernstock, pg. 152)

My own (new) work by Mitchell, "Trees," engages the faintest memory of nature. The remembered, fleeting glance becomes the whole subject. When I look at the lithograph on my wall, I hardly see trees, but when I walk through the park and my eyes shift across the scene, Joan Mitchell images are impressed on my eyes' memory. In that reverse suggestive act, I am transported to the forest while sitting in my living room. Suddenly having such a strong work of art in the house changes things. Physically, it changes how I walk around. I want to look at it. I turn my head on the way to my office or the shower. I stop. In the living room, I concentrate on the lithograph. Actually, I can barely take my gaze away from it. Granted it's only been a few weeks since it arrived, so newness adds its own pleasures, but there is something about living with such beauty. I want its mysteries to inhabit my mind, and, yes, my spirit.

I brought home a white orchid plant last week. The interaction between the Mitchell and the orchid has deepened the way I see them both. Living with this kind of interaction is humbling. It is bigger than I am; bigger than my intellect, bigger than my artistic sensibility, bigger than my imagination. It invites me to enlarge myself, to consider new mysteries, to bring awe more deeply into my life.

The night before last I watched all six hours of Tony Kushner's Angels in America as produced by HBO. Pior Walter, when demanding his blessing from the angels, asks for "more life." Harold Bloom talks about the essential Jewishness of this request, not for heaven, but more earthly life. And it's not a longer life, per se, but a more abundant life he asks for.

"More life!" It's a humble request and a humbling one. Life brings a host of complications including those that are very unpleasant. "More life!" One must wrestle the angels to get it, and still you're left with a gimp leg. Crippled, but more life is the blessing worth the struggle.

How can a big piece of paper with markings on it, or a plant brought indoors jammed into a tiny pot, or, for that matter, organized noises made by 30 people surrounded by 3000, give us more life?

The unknowing is the answer.

Joan Mitchell
"Arbres" (diptych, uncut), 1991-92
Color Lithograph; 31 1/2 x 47 1/2 inches
Printed by Atelier Bordas, Paris
Published by Editions Jean Fournier, Paris
Edition: 125 + proofs
Provenance: Joan Mitchell Foundation, Susan Sheehan Gallery


Getting ready to bring her home. (Thank you Pablo Bautista for taking these pictures.)

Joshua R. Marks — Honest Landscapes — Tang Museum Alumni Invitational