Tree frog and mindfulness

Tree frog with spruce needles

This morning Pete the Wondercat woke me up at 3:30 and 4:30 with his howling.  I checked his water bowl at 3:30 and refilled it.  He has a special bowl that must, at all times, be filled with clean water or life, as we know it ends.  But then at 4:30, more howling in spite of the fresh water.  I turned down the fans thinking that they might be hurting his ears, because they were starting to bother mine.  More howling.

I finally got up at 4:45, which is at least an hour earlier than I wanted to be awake, but sleep was not coming back.  I did my morning things – get dressed, take medicine, start fans going again to air out the house, feed cats, eat banana, check email, start a load of laundry, wash dishes, open back screen door, open windows, and voila!  A little tree frog had been stuck between the window and the storm window.    

Peter doesn’t sleep through the night except in deepest winter.  His paces and prowls around, checking on everyone and everything.  I have to keep the window shades down in one bedroom or his sits up all night watching the deer, skunks, groundhogs and rabbits in the front yard.  My land is apparently Grand Central Station for wildlife.  Sometimes he’s up all night catching mice.  Sometimes, he just patrols the house and periodically goes back to sleep.  But last night on his rounds, Pete must have noticed the tree frog stuck in the casement window and had been looking at him for hours.  Hence the howling.  And I had been unmindful.  I had not noticed a little life form hanging out on the window. 

Note to self:  check windows more carefully for frogs before shutting them.

Tree frog with spruce needles

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Children, language and poetry

"Bella Principessa" red and white chalk

I’ve never known a child who didn’t love to rhyme.  Toddlers have a special affinity for poetry because they’re really listening to the sounds of words, having just learned them.  With the magical thinking of childhood, it’s possible that the more beautiful and fascinating the words are, the more powerful the child believes them to be.  And the child would be right.  Words can be magical.

I always sang or said children’s songs, nursery rhymes and poetry to my children when they were babies. I sang when I was changing them and dressing them.  They listened with great attention, little bodies quiet, eyes huge, and I thought they were fascinated with poems and songs.  Now that my children are grown, and I know who they are as people, I realize that my infant neurosurgeon and baby genetic research biologist were probably thinking, “What’s she talking about?” and “That makes no sense at all!” 

It never occurred to me that not everyone sings to their babies and toddlers, so when the grandchildren came along I naturally sang to them, too.  Possibly they are listening with the same skeptical thoughts my children had, but the babies seem to like it.  I remember lying in a hammock with my oldest grandchild one morning soon after her baby brother was born, and singing each and every song of our repertoire.  She wanted to hear them all.  I also remember my grandmother singing to me the same songs.    

A couple of months ago, my granddaughters and I were talking discussing something I no longer remember.  What I do remember is this.  “Are you telling me the truth?” the older one, a stickler for details, asked me incredulously.  “Yep,” the younger one said emphatically.  “She’s a thruther.”  I love the exquisite logic:  someone tells lies = liar; someone who tells the truth = truther.  I wish it were that simple. 

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Mental Furniture and Necessary Poetry

I’ve been feeling starved for poetry, so I’ve decided to post one poem a week on Facebook.  Don’t worry, not my own!  Real poetry.  Different people find different things necessary in their lives – art, music, kitten videos.  I’ve found that I need really good poetry to chew on mentally.  I feel very sorry for the children growing up today who don’t have to memorize poetry.  The poems and Bible verses I had to memorize as a child are part of my mental furniture.  And how often do you replace your furniture?  I don’t know what a plane ride would be like without John Donne, Swinburne or T. S. Eliot.  I used to know a whole lot more poetry than I can remember now, which is why I’m posting poetry.  Maybe somebody else would like to refresh an arid memory. 

Until I was 17, I shared a bedroom with my sister.  As long as I can remember, my sister and I both loved poetry.  When we were very small and neither of us could fall asleep, she would demand from her bed in the dark "Say a poem!"  One of the first ones I remember "saying" (this was before we could read) was Wee Willie Winkie:

Wee Willie Winkie

running through the town

Upstairs and downstairs

in his nightgown

Crying at the windows

Crying at the locks

"Are all the children in their beds?

It's now  8 o'clock!"

Years later, just before her first child was born, my sister handwrote out her favorite poems on index cards in her beautiful handwriting so that she could read them to the baby while she was breastfeeding.  Eight years later before my first child was born, she gave the index cards to me so that I could read them to my baby, too.  One of the poems was "Innisfree” by Yeats, which I have always loved.  I always associated Yeats' love of Innisfree with my wanting to go "home" to our childhood summer home in Ephraim.  When my sister was in the hospital, shortly before she died, she was having a bad time.  She felt physically awful; her son hadn't arrived yet from the airport, she was restless and uneasy.  "Say a poem!"  she said, too exhausted almost to speak.  I "said" Innisfree.

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.”

"That sounds like Wee Willie Winkie!" she said indignantly, and fell mercifully asleep. 

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There’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all

After a month of brooding over Leonardo, now I’m mulling over artistic success or failure.  How do you measure success and failure for an artist?  Some of the most commercially successful artists are also the worst artists, so it’s not that.  Some of the most highly recognized and most acclaimed artists are not the best artists, but the best at PR – writing press releases and advertising every single thing, including getting a hangnail. And some of the worst artists I know specialize in shameless self promotion.

Mentioning no names, I’m in the process of disposing of the work of an artist, let’s call her Jacqueline, who died several years ago.  She was an unmarried, childless retired schoolteacher who spent her summers playing artist in Door County, WI.  She donated her work (paintings, drawings and prints) to a nonprofit organization in her will.  The nonprofit organization had an auction and a gallery had a sale of Jacqueline’s work, but there was still a lot left over.  “Most of it never should have seen the light of day” in the words of one curator.  So, I was asked to store the leftovers in an unused storage space in my studio as a favor for an old friend.  Years have gone by, the mice have been busy and the nonprofit says get rid of it, so now I’m throwing out the work of an artist whom I never met and whose work I didn’t respect.  This shouldn’t be a problem, right?  Wrong. 

I feel terrible.  I apologize to Jacqueline with each trip to the trash can and recycling bin.  Her work is insipid and unoriginal, and most of it is now quite dated.  The 1950’s, ‘60’s and 70’s are particularly well represented in pseudo Picassos, Pollack wannabes and attempts at I-don’t-know-what but you can almost heat the disco music.  All of it looks like something I’ve seen before, mostly in art class, by somebody who wasn’t good at art, but something else, like Home Ec or Typing.  Still, I feel bad.  I hate throwing out someone’s labor of love.  And I hope it was a labor of love.  I hope that Jacqueline enjoyed painting and painting was fulfilling her heart’s desire.  Because, actually, it’s just trash on several levels.

Jacqueline spent a fortune matting, framing and shrink wrapping things for her gallery, which was a “vanity gallery”:  it exhibited her own work, which probably was the only place she could exhibit.  Tourist areas like Door County are full of vanity galleries which illustrate the entire spectrum of artists – the good, the bad and the ugly.  So I wonder, as I’m tossing and tearing, did Jacqueline really think her work was good?  How did she not cringe at how bad it was and crawl away to hide in a bottle or book or something?  Or did she feel like a success because she had her own gallery?  Didn’t the lack of awards, commissions and exhibitions tell her something?  Or did she think, schoolteacher that she was, that the only important thing was Effort? 

I’m haunted by the stacks of Jacqueline’s paintings that nobody wants.  I don’t know whether I hope Jacqueline was happily fooled with her own self delusions, believing her paintings (she would have called it her “artwork”) were good, or whether she knew how bad they were and carried on painting, anyway.  I kind of hope she knew and said, “the hell with it.”  But I’m not seeing that degree of self-awareness.  I’m seeing imitations of Utrillo, Modigliani, Chagall and Klee, but no original Jacqueline.  I’m also seeing no solid skills:  no accomplished draftsmanship, no anatomy, no perspective, so she may have been a victim of the free wheeling Abstract Expressionist years.  When I get to the Big Studio in the sky, I’ll ask her.  “What were you thinking?”  But while I agonize over all each contribution to recycling, I have to remind myself that earlier this year, I cleaned out my own portfolios and contributed heavily to recycling and municipal garbage for a couple of weeks.  I don’t want my kids to have to plough through all this junk!

“He only moves toward the perfection of his art whose criticism surpasses his achievement.”  Leonardo da Vinci

And one last question:  did Leonardo think he was a success?  And if he wasn’t, who was?

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PS.  Ha!  Over the July 4^th weekend, I put a half dozen of Jaqueline’s large paintings on masonite by the side of the road with a “FREE” sign.  They all found homes!!  I’m so happy about that.  I’ll do it again in August during a dry, sunny weekend when the tourists are zooming around everywhere.

Choose your battles

Rearing horse, graphite and white chalk

I started my “Rearing Horse” relief sculpture with a drawing based on Leonardo’s study for the “Battle of Anghiari”(see previous blog).  Then I did a drawing study of the skeleton of a rearing horse, and then a drawing study of the muscles.  Once again, I try not to look too much at Leonardo’s drawing after I start the clay, because my work is never going be anything like his.  It’s presumptuous to make a sculpture based on Leonardo’s work.  However, all of my life I’ve looked at Leonardo’s horse drawing and thought that it would make a terrific relief sculpture.  So I finally decided to try it, with thanks and apologies to Leonardo.  I'm one of many artists who have attempted to work from Leonardo's drawings.  It's almost a rite of passage.  Kind of like a violinist trying to play the Brahms violin concerto - you have to try, if only to find out how much more work you have left to do.

Meanwhile, I had a challenging week.  My “Trotting Horse” relief was rejected from an exhibition, which really bothered me, even though it’s the only exhibition rejection I’ve had this year, it’s late June, and I’ve already been in many exhibitions.  I was so disgruntled that I didn’t even check to see the results of another show, consequently, I didn’t know I’d won an award the same day I got my rejection.  You can’t have a fragile ego or thin skin to be a practising artist.  Rejection is part of the game, and you have to accept your losses and move on.  But this one got to me.  So I trudged around, feeling like a failure for four days when I could have at least felt good about the award I won.  Dumb.  I chose to hang on to that pain instead of feeling positive, or at least neutral – one win, one lose.  Very dumb.

Meanwhile, I’ve been glazing, firing and mounting the “Trotting Horse” to ship next week to an equine art exhibition across the country.  These horse reliefs are an experiment.  I don’t know anything about horses except that they’re beautiful.  I've never done any horse sculptures before.  I’ll find out what the equine art people think of my horses; they will let me know if I’ve made some anatomical bloopers or not.  I’m also experimenting with porcelain for the first time with these reliefs, which is techincally difficult and challenging.  This makes me think of Leonardo.

It’s difficult to associate Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest of artists, with failure, but not everything he did was a glorious success.  Two Leonardo drawings that I used as a basis for relief sculptures were preparatory drawings for lost works of Leonardo’s that were not successes.  One drawing was for the monumental “Gran Cavallo" horse sculpture that was never completed and which 16^th c. soldiers used for target practice.  The other was a preparatory drawing for the lost painting of the “Battle of Anghiari” in which Leonardo experimented with painting materials new to him and which literally slid off the wall.  As I’ve worked on these two reliefs, I can’t help thinking about this:  Leonardo, the greatest of all great artists, had failures, too.  Both the Gran Cavallo and the Battle of Anghiari were failures largely the result of experimenting with new materials and/or new techniques.  It’s interesting that Leonardo forged ahead trying out new things, apparently without a backup plan in case something didn’t work.  And he did his experiments in public, for the whole world to see.   

The Battle of Anghiari was intended to be part of a tryptich for a huge long wall in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.  The opposite wall was supposed to have been painted by Michelangelo, but he didn’t finish his wall, either.  I like to think of these two guys backing up to see their work, as painters do, and bumping into each other.  What a shame they didn’t like each other and instead of commenting, “Hey, great leg!” or “Wonderful horse!” there was only silence and hostility.  But the space is dark and unpleasant.  I can see why nobody wanted to work there.  And if the paintings had been finished, nobody could have ever seen them properly, because there isn’t enough room to step back and look at the painting from a distance.  (Like the Guggenheim, another stupid exhibition space by Frank Lloyd Wrong many centuries later, but that’s another story.)

Leonardo’s final self portrait drawing in red chalk does not show the face of a happy, peaceful man gratified with the rewards of a life well spent.  I see an embittered, discouraged man, his unflinchingly clear eyes haunted by failure and his lips pulled down with disappointment and disillusionment.  His expression is one of almost grim determination.  This is a man who is discouraged, but not beaten.  When I was young, I thought this drawing showed Leonardo’s sorrow and exasperation with the ignorance and foolishness of his time.  Now that I am the same age he was when he drew it, I think it was probably his own failures, frailties and errors that created that expression.  Those are the hardest to live with. 

"I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have."

    Leonardo da Vinci

Rearing horse, about half finished Perfectionism is not easy, and no one aimed higher than Leonardo.  He tried to draw everything he saw and he saw everything.  But not even the supremely gifted Leonardo was always successful.  He wasn't afraid to experiment or risk failure.  You can’t win them all.  But you can’t win if you don’t enter.  Failure is part of learning.  So go ahead, make mistakes.  Learn from them.  And then do it again, only this time, make new mistakes.   deborahdendler.com www.facebook.com/DeborahDendlerSculpture "Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind." Leonardo da Vinci