Willard Midgette

Willard Midgette’s wall-sized painting, *Processing Sheep, at The Phoenix Art Museum reminded me of a painting Byron made while he was living in Casablanca, Morocco. In Byron’s painting two men butcher a goat behind a larger image of a young girl standing in the foreground, staring. Partly I liked Byron’s painting (which I believe recently became fuel at the bonfire party) because of the unusual subject matter. And I was initially interested in Midgette’s painting because of the similar subject. Now that I have read something about Willard Midgette, I am both fascinated, and unable to find a copyright free image of that painting online. But, I read an interesting excerpt about Willard Midgette taken from Ann McGerell and Sally Anderson’s book, The Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program: An Anecdotal History.

In some of his paintings, Willard Midgette included both a still image and the living,  moving world around that image. For example,  “Sitting Bull Returns” – at the Drive-In, 1976 (Smithsonian), and Pow-Wow, on view at the Roswell Museum and Art Center in Roswell, New Mexico.

Pow-Wow Willard Midgette

I know a man who traveled overseas to Madrid, Spain simply to view his favorite painting,

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch, Museo del Prado (Madrid)

The Twentieth Century Christian writer, Henri Nouwen traveled to Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia to study his favorite painting, Return of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt.

I liked reading about Willard Midgette in New Mexico, https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0826341667. His painting in the Phoenix Art Museum is visually intriguing; the subject matter is unusual. Even online, the ether somehow disappears between his work and the viewer. I would like to see more of Willard Midgette’s paintings. It looks to me like it’s worth a trip to Roswell for a look at Pow-Wow.

Nobody wants to be remembered by the sadness that surrounds them.

*available on flickr.

Playing with Color

I’ve been thinking about colors. Rebecca asked me, “What are your favorite colors?” I had no idea. I’m sure I’ve thought about a favorite color a lot over the years, more in the past than recently. It has never been pink, although I loved seeing my mother in pink because of the way that color made her complexion glow.

A few years ago, when I was walking through Target with Byron, he picked up a coral colored golf shirt and handed it to me. “Here,” he said. “This is a good color for you.”

I’m not that good at clothes shopping. I’m mostly watching the price, and leaning toward black and white, until my hair turned white and I noticed my photograph started returning from Target in the image a glowing white creature, rising heavenward.

I always had my mother to help, and more recently, sometimes Laurie. I need help. After the trip through Target with Byron, I mostly just continued to wear sale items of good quality, leaning heavily toward coral.

More recently, Byron said, “You know there are other colors that look good on you.”

“Really,” I said, “like what?”

“I don’t know. Navy.”

“Okay, good.” Now I wear mostly black, white, coral, and navy, as long as I’ve gotten a really good buy.

I still don’t know my favorite colors, but I’ve been splashing and pouring paint onto the paper, as Rebecca suggested. The results are ridiculous. But, when I turned these two a quarter turn, creatures appeared. A good laugh. I’m moving on.

Control

Ten years ago I enrolled in a three-day watercolor painting workshop through the University of Minnesota. The class included several graphic designers, a number of experienced painters, a professor from Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and a couple of rank beginners, like myself. Graphic Design turns out to be based on control and Spartan use of color. Today I’m thinking about what I liked about that class. I liked to watch colors run around on the paper and mix with each other.

This year I’ve been making paintings instead of “little bits on paper.” I’ve been trying to control the paint and where it goes on the paper. Largely, I’m in love with the time I spend back in my room painting, and the rest of the time I want to sit around and look at my paintings, deciding what I like and what to do next.

This month I’ve joined Rebecca Tolle’s bi-weekly painting group, where the goal as I understand it, is to try different approaches and mediums in order to discover our inner artists. Rebecca has suggested I approach painting as play time and try some more geometric shapes because I’m happy with the painting I posted a few weeks ago, the one I called Kubism because I drew a couple of pencil lines through the paper.

This week, I’ve scrubbed most of the colors off the first paper I filled with triangles. Then, I quickly drew out a second, smaller paper with triangles, to practice mixing a few colors. I liked the first two spaces, so I kept on going across the paper. In the final result, it’s still the first two spaces that look interesting to me. Now, I’m deciding what to do with the mostly scrubbed down first piece. I’m not much at throwing paintings away until I finish doing whatever I end up doing with them.

Most of the things Byron likes that I’ve painted were done in minutes or less. The loveliest paint I’ve laid on paper mostly occurred when I was cleaning my brush. Control is an interesting thing. My favorite paintings usually have a fresh, loose, and colorful qualities about them. But, it’s very difficult for me to allow myself that freedom on paper. Right now, in life, however, the most important thing I do for myself every day is the practice of giving up control. These pages with all the spiky triangles,they’ve got to go.

A Night at Northrup

Our friends, Kathie and Jon, invited us to the 35^th Season Concert presented by Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus on Saturday night: A Night at Northrup. I’m not very musical, and I am definitely not a critic in the professional sense of that word, but I live at the bottom of the hill beneath St. Olaf College in Northfield, and I have enjoyed a lot of choral music in the past twenty-five years.

I was inspired and entertained by the concert on Saturday night. I might say enraptured. A lot of that music vibrated inside me. Every time a soloist performed, I thought, “that man could carry this whole performance on his own.” Hardly ever (if ever) do musical lyrics communicate the depth, breadth of feeling, and meaning that these numbers carried. Inefficiently, I tried to take notes in the dark, and I looked online, without luck, so I would have these bits right.

Favorite pieces with inspirational lyrics (paraphrased):

This Body. Music by Timothy C. Tacach, poetry by Joyce Sutphen.

Check the phonebook. My address in this world. I’m alive right now.

 Music in Me Singing. Music by Ysaye M. Barnwell, lyrics by Robert Malbin.

More than music in me singing.

 The Kushner Trilogy. Music by Michael Shaieb, lyrics by Tony Kushner.

III I Want More Life: So inadequate, but bless me anyway. I want more life.

 When Jeff Heine, The Executive Director, asked for a show of hands for singers who have been performing with the chorus through different decades, he did not ask for a show of hands from the first season, and that made me sad. Before the performance, I had not counted back thirty-five years. On Saturday evening, I sat down, opened my program, and looked at the display of collected program covers: First performance, May 15^th, 1981.

For many years I’ve liked to say, “Be careful about what you dismiss on the back page of the paper. Pretty soon, it’s going to be a big part of your life.” In my family, we were lucky, in the end. But, I was pregnant that year, and I received blood products a few months later. My father received eight pints of blood by transfusion, and I think that was the year I read an article near the back page of The Oregonian about the new mysterious cancer that was killing homosexual men.

Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus did not begin in 1981 by accident. One of the first gay men’s choruses in the nation, TCGMC began at least partially as a cry for help, because nobody wanted to help us. Of course, in the end we learned that same bit we always have to learn.  Us means US means ONE.

Favorite Short Story ever: In the Gloaming by Alice Elliott Dark.

VALUE

Byron Anway recently held a bonfire. He invited friends over and burned a bunch of his old paintings. At least one person had too much fun with the idea. It was an emotional event for Byron, but he says those paintings held memories, but no value.

Of course, it’s too early to determine if that statement is totally true. Byron is young and it’s early in his career. But, I’ve been thinking more about his bonfire, in light of our recent visit to Phoenix Art Museum’s fabulous and growing collection of Western Art, where four Georgia O’Keeffe paintings are on view, Canyon Country, Apple, Pink Abstraction, White Rose.                  

The paintings are displayed in a very noticeable place, and, like the ones at The Chicago Institute of Art, it’s largely a pretty lifeless and disappointing lot. I only stopped to look because I remembered that at some point after she lost her sight, and while Juan Hamilton was away on some other business, O’Keeffe hired a former Carleton College student who was hanging around Abiqui as her assistant. They made paintings together. O’Keeffe instructed and the assistant applied paint to the canvas. I was looking at Canyon Country to determine if it had possibly been made during that late in life collaboration. Painted in 1965, it was obviously not one of those paintings, but something about it made me stop and wonder.

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, Byron says that the more people become interested in art, the less attention they pay to Picasso (for later discussion), Renoir, and O’Keeffe. I’ve always liked her art, and found her life and work interesting enough to take a class during graduate school.

I’ve seen a lot of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work. Some of her paintings (the ones that look so much better in the books) are pretty lifeless and bland. Georgia O’Keeffe both sold and gave away a lot of paintings during her lifetime, and I remember reading that toward the end, she took back the ones she had given away.

The concept of Value comes into question here. The words gain, and profit, are synonymous with value, but so are merit and worth. Of course, anything painted by Georgia O’Keeffe is worth a lot of money. But, if I’d been invited, I could have picked a couple of things to throw on her bonfire, an action that could have strengthened her legacy.