Postcards from the Vineyard

Rita Watering the Garden, c. 1930's

Chilmark Pond, c. 1950

Trumpet Vine, c. 1941

Menemsha Harbor, 1951

The Butterfly Chaser, 1951

T.P.'s Beach, 1950

After the Storm, 1952

From My Mother's House/The Clammer, 1952

The Bicyclers, 1961

Lily Pond, 1969

Sunrise at Menemsha Pond, 1969

Benton at Menemsha Pond

If you notice: The careers of abstract artists so often end in a kind of bitter emptiness. It's the emptiness of a person looking into himself all the time. But the objective world is always rich. There is always something round the next bend of the river. ~ Thomas Hart Benton

This morning I completed reading Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock, Henry Adams' excellent story and exhaustive study of the complex relationship between these two powerhouses of American art. Benton was Pollock's mentor and teacher - a potent father figure to the mentally ill young man. I would have never guessed that Pollock's drip painting had its roots in Benton's teaching and methodology. Reading about Benton has made me want to see more of his work - he's an artist I had known about only marginally (being a figurative artist myself, you'd think I would have been more familiar with his oeuvre. Whenever I thought of Thomas Hart Benton, I only conjured up rubbery figures that seemed to have no bones....). It's been fascinating to learn about his process and his connection to Synchromism (yes, I've taken my art history classes, and for the life of me, I did not remember this term...) and how, like certain Renaissance artists, he would make clay models of his figures for his compositions before creating his paintings and murals.

Posted here are some lesser known works by Benton, paintings done on Martha's Vineyard, where he spent his summers from 1920 until the end of his life. The young Jackson Pollock spent many of these early summers on Martha's Vineyard with Benton and his wife Rita, and their son T.P. An excerpt from Tom and Jack states:

Benton later wrote that the happiest times of Pollock's life were the stays on Martha's Vineyard:

It is quite possible that the only really happy times of his life were had there, taking his end of a two-handled tree saw, swimming in the surf, gathering clams for chowder or wild berries for pies - times when alcoholic stimulation was unnecessary.

(wow, reading this makes me feel less guilty that I've been picking berries and swimming lately, and making jam, not art...)

I scanned these images of Benton's island paintings from a book I found recently at the Joanne Waxman library at MECA - it's a catalog of the 2008 exhibition, Benton on the Vineyard, which focuses on the paintings Benton did during his summers on Martha's Vineyard. I think they are magical - so rhythmic, pulsating, and alive! And what color!

Henry Adams writes in his opening essay in the catalog:

This gathering of Benton's paintings from Martha's Vineyard provides an occasion to see a Benton who stands outside the usual stereotypes of his personality and art - to take a fresh view of his inventiveness as an organizer of visual forms; to look anew at his intense engagement with the world around him; and to appreciate more fully his uncanny skill for zeroing in on the essential essence, the inner soul of things.

On the Line with Nancy Spero

I’ve always wanted my art to be something that would not be acceptable in the usual daily, ordinary, polite way of ­communicating. ~ Nancy Spero

Nancy Spero

Sheela-na-gig at Home

Martha Miller

Untitled, 1984

Mentors show up in various guises at unexpected times and places, and we sometimes don't recognize a mentor until after the fact. I've recently been wracking my brain trying to remember Nancy Spero's name. One of my professors at MECA showed me pictures of a mural that she'd made. And when she died last year, I saw images from her riveting Maypole installation that have stayed with me. Today her name finally came up to the surface and when I researched her a bit, I found Sheela-na-gig at Home. Timely, in that I was taking pictures of my women ancestor portraits under the clothesline yesterday. While I've been working on these portraits of the older generations of women in my family, I've been wondering alot about the emotional truth of their lives, searching their faces for clues. What was it like to be a woman in the late 19th century? What loving habits and what painful dysfunctional behavior got passed down to my generation? Did these women yearn to be something other than housewives and mothers? I have struggled mightily with the duality of being a mother and an artist. When I was a young mother I had a fury inside that was so powerful I thought it would destroy me if I allowed myself to feel it. It frightened me terribly and I tried to keep it pushed down for years. It would not stay down and erupted as panic attacks and depression. I did not have balance in my life. I was not doing my art. Not the art that I needed to do.

Seeing Spero's work on-line today made me pull out this old painting of mine once again. I really need to attach it to a board - it's been folded up in my closet. This speaks to the level of shame I still harbour about creating it. When my father saw it years ago, it must have frightened him, because he looked at it and said, There is something wrong with you. This hurt. My father loved me, but he was a man of his generation. He was quite controlling of my mother, and she dealt with it by being passive and secretive and she went underground with her needs. I sometimes wonder, what would it have been like to have a mother like Nancy Spero? Someone who would have celebrated the imagery in this painting, which I made after the birth of my fifth child, and then found the courage to return to school and take this one class? But other mothers, and as I mentioned above, mentors, show up at unexpected times and places. I am amazed this morning to see Spero's sheela-na-gig's on the clothesline. I painted that crouching figure in my piece all those years ago without ever having heard of a sheela-na-gig. I painted her at the top of that doorway to say, See? See here: this is your destiny. I was trapped in the old patriarchal system, and raging to bust out. I wanted to be a mother, but I wanted to be an artist, too, and I was just starting to figure out that I could do both...

The Moon The Sun and Sweet Synchronicity

a mail art masterpiece! lucky me!

the full moon at 4:59 this morning...

my Bright Shadow spread...

first card of the spread! no fooling!!! love the Tarot...

Majo playing Music, by Ramon Bayeu Subias...

Two packages arrived late yesterday afternoon, just before the rise of a brilliant full moon: a CD of comic Mozart rarities that I ordered last week, and this stupendous piece of mail art created by the funny, sweet, and talented Dean Grey. Wow! Isn't this drawing a stunner?? I took it straight away to my backyard where there was a remaining smidge of sunlight and placed it on the ground to photograph. Looks like this white beauty stopped to rest in the grass after his long journey from Chicago! This morning I knew that I would post about receiving Dean's mail art, so I put on my new CD and began processing my digital images. (I've meant to buy this CD for years. When I did my Monhegan residency, there was a shelf full of old Mozart records that I played daily while I was there, and this particular record was my favorite. It made me feel so HAPPY! I had forgotten the name of the record until last week when I saw the title scribbled on a slip of paper in an old journal found during my recent cleaning spree: The Comic Mozart. I went immediately on-line and found two CD's; The Lighter Mozart, which has many of the tunes from The Comic Mozart, and the original, The Comic Mozart, which hasn't arrived yet - it's coming long distance from Australia...)

So back to Dean's drawing. The white horse/unicorn reminds me of a piece I worked on a couple of years ago as part of the collaborative doll project I was involved in with 17 other artists. The doll is named Kiki Jung (daughter of Carl) created by my close friend (who happens to be the woman whose portrait I burned recently). Just before her doll arrived in the mail, I had a dream about a white horse, so I was determined to include this horse in the project somehow, even though I knew nothing of the doll. When Kiki arrived, I decided that I would make her a white horse. I researched the symbolic meanings of the white horse, and while looking at images, I researched the meaning of the white horse in The Sun card from the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, and learned about Jung's concept of the Bright Shadow. I knew about our Dark Shadow, and the importance of acknowledging our dark side, so this notion of a bright shadow , and our unrealized potential, really intrigued me. I named the horse Bright Shadow.

All of this was running through my mind while looking at Dean's beautiful white horse. And the backside of his envelope reads, Run free Run free Run free, Tears blowing in the wind. Run free Run free Run free Shine brightly and run free! Dean writes openly on his blog about his great struggle with depression and suicidal ideation, so his image of a tearful but determined white unicorn, charging, with glowing horn cutting through black ink, is moving indeed. Here is a potent symbol of Dean's fierce will and the courage required to face his darkness!

This morning I returned to the site where I had read up about Bright Shadow work a couple of years ago, and decided right then, in the middle of writing this post, to pull out my Tarot cards and do the Bright Shadow spread. I shuffled the deck, and made my 4 piles, and I kid you not, the very first card I turned over was The Sun (having The Sun card show up in this first stack of cards means my untapped potentials lie in the physical realm - I won't go into all that this means to me, this post is rambling and "Phoebe from Friends" flakey enough as it is. Suffice it to say that syncronicity is afoot!). Then I thought, Hmmm, perhaps the music I'm listening to has something to do with this flow of events, and decided to scan the CD cover. Now, can you see the similarity to my spread, and the images from the CD cover? A naked golden haired cherub with a red plumed feather, a gent wearing red, and two robed women...

So many connections, so much grist for the mail art mill...

Look out, Dean! I feel another piece of mail art brewing! This may very well turn into a volley! :^)