ONE LONG TIME a'COMING WALL...

We've been living with the major wall in our bedroom remaininging "a work in progress" for several recent months, while a selection of smaller pieces in our collection has been curated & framed & ready to hang. We've chosen several recently acquired pieces, like the amazing David Griessel drawings we bought in South Africa in December of last year... as well as some much older drawings by my doppelgänger named Leo Toye, which I inked in Sedona, stored for three decades waiting to join others in that series on the wall. 

I'm pleased with this collection, which will now be finessed with several landscape prints we brought from Stephen's mother's collection, recently re-framed as well. One is a lithograph by Birger Sandzén, an artist whose history in Kansas she & I share an interest in.  He was an art professor at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas, near Manhattan, where Helen's father was head of the Dairy Department at Kansas State Univerity (KSU, where my sister graduated), so Helen spent her younger years living in Kansas. 

That is a link between Stephen & me, predating our 31 years together. Helen is so sweetly & spiritually important to us! Her & Otto's proclivity to collect art certainly influenced Stephen's & my ongoing resonance with similar appreciation.

So... a view of this wall... generous, under our condo's spacious 10+-foot-high ceilings, which might first suggest choosing big artwork; but being a jeweler, I love smaller art works. I invite you to tour with me to look more closely.

 The grouping must work viewed from all angles as one moves around the centrally positioned bed [in spite of Feng Shui warnings about protection from assassination] because that gives both of us the best views of Tahoma -- our mountain. [Indeed, we do nonetheless honor Eastern thought...]

 An initial bit of explanatory orientation begins at the doorway to see the simple old chest of drawers which I claimed from the attic on the farm. I've long loved this piece & have hauled it with me through each & every move of the seventy years since. 

 Its drawers have funky action, but the top has habitually collected small objects, precious to some moment. It functions much like an altar, having long been presided over by a wood sculpture of a bald head with a beard, which might be seen as a possible portrait of me, carved well before I ever saw it, by a acquaintance named Michael Urchioli in Sedona. The watercolor above it is one I made while also living in the Arizona Red Rocks. 

The current arrangement has a reproduction of a Pre-Colombian figure; a black Acoma pot; an acrylic skull by my friend Cigale; an egg; a whimsical plaster sculpture; & below that an Maori bone carving which was an early gift from Stephen; then, in the center, a Chinese ivory carving of five spheres carved one inside the other... a quite baffling accomplishment to this craftsman! 

 

Of course, as you see, I have a thing for collecting small boxes... in which to keep yet tinier objects! Thus this becomes only a tiny mania...  

Moving to the right, first a painting of an elephant we bought in Udaipur, a favorite city of ours in India, where we know a family of traditionally trained painters from several visits to their gallery. Above my favorite exotic animal hangs another watercolor, by my high school prom date Catie Boufault, who was the Colby Kansas High School exchange student from France. She & I have retained our relationship through years of correspondence & several visits between both countries, through 60 years of life changes, predictable & not. 

The next two identically sized frames also have other obvious similarity in that both have circular composition & even resonance in subject; both are images based on tree forms. The upper is a drawing by South African artist David Griessel, whose work we met there late last year. The cat-like image in the yellow frame is another of his. Both are parts of a larger collaborative animation art production.  

These quite affordable drawings would be even more odd choices for us, but for the further facts that we'd become intrigued by the complicated digital aspects of a lively form of storytelling... Stephen being a filmmaker & both of us being writers of various sorts. 

The actual experience of discovering this work, on a similar image, with a digital link on a shadowy wall as we walked along the water back to our hotel after dinner in Capetown... the link took us to a site opening to an exotically active visual and audio introduction to new stories. All of that enticed us to visit the gallery on the day we flew home. We purchased these rather more impulsively than is our usually more studied manner. We continue growing into them...

This wall also contains much history! 

Continuing down the line brings us to our iconic Indian painting by Jeetu who, with his brother Naresh in Udaipur, were trained by their father in the traditional style, as his father, in turn, taught him. Deep tradition... 

 

 

They grind their colors by hand. We love their vivid blue... & the perspective which can be implied by its many values of intensity. I've seen numerous compositions using not only that color, but telling stories of wedding processions through the symbolic landscape containing actual architectural parts of the palaces & temples of Udaipur... including the royal barge. The formula becomes lively in a wealth of subtle options in the light, spacial perspective placing the action in the time of one event, with potential emphasis on qualities of royal court or religion. Tradition works well because it has history's confidence in variability... India is an ancient teacher. I am a happy a student. 

 

Here is the brothers' website: https://www.pacificartudaipur.com/  

  

To the right of the subcontinental wedding hang the drawings which my doppelgänger, Leo Toye, made as newspaper "columns" in the 1980s. The plain white frame holds a fragment of a gold foil acanthus from some unknown archaeological source. A gift long ago.

 

  

The wonderfully gutsy oil below it was a gift to me a few years ago from our Downs Syndrome brother, Mark Silha, who is delightfully wise & a loving character, whose big love is popular vocal music from the Broadway shows, Sinatra's "rat pack" & rock & roll dance music up through the Seventies... but no later. He's educated himself about details which he's studied from the album covers. We often test his facts & become impressed with his arcane bits of knowledge.

 

The Kansas image with which I began this post completes the tour while the wall still awaits a couple more  frames... the corner space contains more calligraphic images & another drawing I made decades ago. There will always be adjustments & potential additions... possibilities which have not as yet presented themselves.

That is what entices our own history of collecting & culling interesting objects--found, gifted, made or acquired. Some are more "valuable" by dint of various reasons... our individual tastes or changing critiques. It is a process of how we present our life histories at home as a couple. Our teach/learning collaborations help fine-tune our mutual definitions. All becomes part of our fun.