Hold Time – M Ward, David Hettinger, Niels Strobek, and Mark Doty

WordPress records the blog entries people read. I’m still getting regular hits on the blog I wrote about the Danish painter, Niels Strobek a year ago. Also, there has been recent activity on the Navajo artist, Michael Billie, from earlier this year. Nobody is looking back to read what I wrote about Rembrandt, O’Keeffe, Hopper, or Grant Wood.

Yesterday I discovered an Illinois painter, David Hettinger whose work I thought resembled Niels Strobek’s work. As I look back at Strobek’s website, I see the two painters do not resemble each other in style, but in subject matter. They both paint a lot of young women. Strobek’s women are severe and starkly represented. Hettinger’s style is much softer. He is an impressionist painter.

Both men are capturing moments, and as Mart Doty wrote in his lovely essay, Still Life with Lemons, (and I paraphrase), once painted, the objects (in this case women) remain and continue. They are–still life.

Girl-Talk-oil-32×40
David Hettinger

Listen while you read…http://www.songlyrics.com/m-ward/hold-time-lyrics/

Sisters
David Hettinger

http://hettingerstudio.com/

The Musee National du Moyen Age, Paris

It’s hard to choose what to like best about Paris, but I was moved by the Musee national du Moyen Age, formerly and commonly known as The Cluny. The famous tapestries that draw most tourists to this museum were out on loan or for restoration when we were there. But, I found a lot to love about this ancient building and its contents.

Stained Glass
at
The Cluny

Stand inside a dark room to view stained glass panels mounted on a black wall. I have always loved sparkling things, and at The Cluny I felt like one jewel in the cluster. Originally located in The Sainte Chappelle, the panels are more than eight hundred years old. The artists depicted the characters and Bible stories as though they were memorializing close friends and current events.

But, my favorite moment at The Cluny was when I stood in front of the statue (above) and realized The Virgin was breastfeeding the baby Jesus. What would life be like if we still felt that familiar and close to those characters, those stories, that comfortable with Our Savior?

More On Creativity-Part 3

I found the following quote written on a 3X5 card in my stuff after I wrote about this subject last week. Two completely opposite opinions about what constitutes creative work and what constitutes dictation.

The way you resume is to resume. It is the only way. To resume. If you feel this book deeply it will come as deep as your feeling is when it is running truest, and the book will never be truer or deeper than your feeling. But you do not yet know anything about your feeling because, though you may think it is all there-all crystallized, you have not let it run. So, how can you know what it will be? What will be best in it is what you really do not know now. If you knew it all, it would not be creation but dictation. Gertrude Stein

Midnight in Paris
2011

Completely opposite the view espoused by John Irving.

But, I kept this quote, not because of the creation/dictation thought, but  because it speaks to struggle, the struggle between fear and failing vision on the scale opposite hope and intention. The way to resume is to resume. So simple. I’ve never experienced this choice. I’ve always been feeling my way along in the dark. Also, I don’t like to be told what to do. And, I don’t follow directions well, even if I’m the director. Simple works for me.

More on The Creative Life (Part 2)

Back in January, when I first wrote about the creative life, I asked the question: How long was there a void before there was the world?

Creation of Adam
Michelangelo
1512

In a sermon I heard a few years ago, the minister said that God created us in spite of the fact that God is and was already whole and without need. Later, I told the minister that some people disagree. Why would God create a world without any need? The minister called my question nonsense, and pushed me out of the way.

The source of this question for me comes from Paul Fjelstad, many years ago in a writer’s group we both attended. The source of The Creation is found in the presence of the void that existed before it. According to Paul (as I remember it), this makes The Void the first creation. God is more interesting and our relationship to God is richer in an environment where there exists mutual need.

Some artists, John Irving for example, claim to make a complete plan in every detail before they begin their actual work. John Irving claims that without this planning, the work would not be his own.

Do Irving’s books turns out, in the end, exactly as he envisioned them? Do the jackets come back from the publisher looking just like he wanted? Do people respond to his books in the manner he hoped? Usually, artists claim to have been unable to produce an end product that lives up to the original vision.

Nothing is done that is not an attempt at filling a need. Creation requires action. It may not require thought, but creation is never sourceless. And, according to Garrison Keillor on the Great Lawn at Macalaster College on The Fourth of July, “We are responsible for the damage we do whether or not we intended it.”

More on What Words Can/Not.

Recently, as part of our current and ongoing down-sizing project, I’ve been getting rid of a lot of stuff. In order to, “get rid of stuff,” of course, I have to inspect every single thing before it goes. This is not always a bad thing.

Warning! I am circling back to my original subject from January, 2014: What words can and cannot do.

Yesterday I reread The Echoing Silence, by Harold Pinter, an extracted speech piece, reprinted in The Guardian, December 30, 2008. For some reason, the piece reminded me of Karen Bondarchuk’s illustration of Hubert, an imprinted screech owl, and permanent resident of Barnswallow, a raptor rehabilitation center in Illinois. According to Bondarchuk’s description, as an imprinted owl, Hubert considers himself to be one thing he is not (human) and not what he is (an owl). Hubert’s image is placed onto the paper before a background of symbols. According to the artist’s description, Neither human nor owl, his identity is as indeterminate as the cryptic language that surrounds him. Catalog: Birds in Art 2014, page 34.

Illuminati, 2013
screech owl
Karen Bondarchuk

A cryptic language is one that conceals hidden meanings, a mysterious language. I quote from Pinter:

So often, below the word spoken, is the thing known and unspoken….One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant strategem to cover nakedness….I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming.

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/dec/31/harold-pinter-early-essay-writing