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. 

Fiftieth Anniversary Of My High School Graduation...

I have been noting that my Colby Community High School classmates had the class of 1963 fiftieth reunion in the cool Rocky Mountains rather than the hot, dry plains of western Kansas where we went to school... thus confirming at least part of my residual prejudice for the predominately flat experience of childhood & youth.

I did not attend, for any number of reasons, but now a small part of me regrets I did not expose myself to the possible soothing of those old abrasions. I was never actually wounded by classmates, nor do I have any particular scars... I simply never felt like I fit-in, or connected well with high school & have found many better life experiences over a half-century!

It was a great joy to have Catie & her partner Jacgues, travel here to visit Soundcliff after the reunion. She was the exchange student from France & was my senior prom date! We have been writing letters & have visited each other several times over the years... meeting Jacques when Stephen & I twice traveled to their village. The three of us [Stephen was in San Francisco with the film] had sweet quiet hang-time, celebrating her birthday. She conveyed news to me about the reunion.

Fifty Years Since CCHS...
[Open Letter to classmates.]

Congratulations to us! None... perhaps least of all myself... could have imagined our journeys to this significant time. That I write too late for this assignment demonstrates my perpetual propensity for procrastination. That is not my best choice to reintroduce myself, yet the intricate weave of my own knotty path to now has seemed too daunting to contemplate sharing, even as I’ve been writing it in my journals since turning 30. To address myself at 18 or 20... 30, 50 or 60 means opening so much which would be difficult to tell, much less explain.

All of you must experience similar conundrum.

Long Story Short:

Graduated with a BFA in painting from the University of Denver 1967.

Lived in Denver, painting & designing custom jewelry & gardening until 1974 when I moved to Sedona, Arizona, where I did not do much gardening...

I began a production line of small silver bells in 1983, which beings still keep me in their thrall.

Occidental [west Sonoma County], California, became home in 1989. Bells & a more serious coastal garden.

Following the bells & a great love I moved to Seattle in 1989, then to nearby Vashon Island, where I perch with my partner, Stephen Silha, celebrating 18 years together.

Cooking, gardening & entertaining, working with the bells, jewelry & calligraphy are my continuing passions. I’m recently playing with digital drawing/painting on my iPad’s touch-screen.

I have no children or grandchildren of which to boast or show photos... unless you consider the bells.

Now, if you wish more, I’ve written a much gabbier version:

JOURNAL... LIVING ONE'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY...

TO JOURNAL IS UNIQUELY ACTIVE
REFLECTION BACK-FORWARD IN TIME
LIVING WHILE RECORDING ELUSIVE MOMENT
BIOLOGY AUTOGRAPHED

I find myself piqued to quill by a questioning post on cousin Anjana's blog... was the bride of the wedding which we went to India to celebrate...

How much do you want to document your experiences ? Will recording them help you make better sense of your own evolution ? Has it helped you evolve in the future ? How much do you [return] to the documentation and is reviewing it interesting enough that it was worth the effort?

How much nostalgia is healthy and appropriate for you ?

I've kept a rather regular journal for most of thirty-five years, beginning seriously when at 30 I embarked on a rare journey of rich exploratory travel into a new period of my life.

While there are several other small volumes with some few pages written during my late teens, such attention was obviously short lived... only beginning dreams toward this time of my turning 30, leaving Denver, evolving toward a less urban, more solitary mode. I was ready to bring new maturity to the process.

What began as a typical road-travel diary came to include the I-Ching readings I made for contemplation during this extended solitary road trip. I was in a Jungian stage of individuation. I was working with an already well developed ego & had the time to indulge myself in deeper work, much of it dancing out of my involvement with a play therapist named Austin Delaney, making two dusty drives down to his remote retreat in Baja to spend time sifting & soaking in sandbox symbology.

My use of words like "play" & "dancing" for describing such adventure of my life began then & I celebrate that they still are some of my most preferred & useful verbs.

I now have a trunk tightly packed with the collection of bound volumes accumulated over these years, plus another matching trunk of photocopied letters written back when I tried to share similar writing with family & friends. I consider these papers part of my journal.

All these pages are handwritten, usually in the india ink [I wonder if I am I a fan of India first by default of a misnomer?!!] from the rapidograph technical pens to which I was so long addicted... reassured by the sense of permanence that ink suggested. My fingers became almost as permanently stained. Flying with one of them was quite an adventure, as they often reacted to the changing cabin pressure by leaking or even burping exuberantly... I dedicated myself to the ritual of holding the uncapped pen bedded in a handkerchief during takeoff & landing to prevent the cap from filling with that dangerous black to ooze out when next I wanted to write. A handkerchief which long lived inside the book's covers became an archive of marks & blots from years of grooming the nibs of those tetchy writing instruments!

I've had sleek leather slip covers [barely seen in the photo above as background for a datura blossom] made to hold my chosen size of standard blank books, one for each, writing & drawing.

I became quite serious about my journal & perhaps, even obsessed!

I developed the calligraphic block style of my handwriting from my father's curious mix of caps & lower case handwriting & my art student's fascination with the rather standard draftsman's block style & those old speedball pens we used for making posters in high school. I lettered myriad signs for the department store where I worked during High School. I abandoned cursive when my handwriting was quite young, as can be seen if I try to use that form now. After years' habit & development, my handwriting has developed a strong familiarity as part of my identity & even a certain fame.

Long before any sort of writing style with the ideas words can convey, I was developing a sense of how they should look... indeed, that is no small part of how I think with words now. Committing one's everyday thoughts to such ink invites fastidious forethought... even as the first mandate is to capture the moment.

I wanted it to look good as well as being legible. At first I tried the notion that each page was a calendar day, but the accumulation wasted of paper quickly became evident as I would almost never finish writing that much in 24 hours... even as I attempted using the blank trail to guilt-trip myself into more diligence.

I began to read the unwritten tales of some pages... analyzing my state or mood by the slant of the lines. I sometimes tried to project my life through it, making affirmations. That was as iffy in ink as it is in the ephemeral world... but I appreciate the clarity of idea that notion teaches: "Be careful what you wish for..."

I studied my calligraphy, practicing nuance to reveal or disguise the word's wells & walls, to enhance one glyph's relationship to its neighbors. Early on I needed to consider whether I would draw in my journal, or reserve it for words alone. I love that the proper verb for making an Icon is "to write" rather than "to paint"... so I appreciate how drawings can be "literal, but I decided that the obviously more messy process of drawing was better kept out of these pages... I maintain other books for that kind of thinking. Still my love of symbols & glyphs required some visual notes.

I played with my journal. I studied myself inside it. I was often literally living it.

Over the years the questions about to whom & for what I'm making all these words has been omnipresent & never quite answered. Writing for oneself must be what brings one to writing in the first place. Before writing what one wants to say, one must say/write those things to oneself. God knows I often sermonized & still can. I veer not enough toward poetry. I write dialogue between parts of myself & with a second person, trying to clarify what I do not say so easily in actual conversation.

For all my lack of it, I practice to simplify & clarify... realizing that is a life's work. I long wrote in curiously punctuated [or often not!] stream-of-consciousness rambles: Sentences full of parenthetical wanderings [inside more & more brackets... ] strung vaguely out between a noun & its far flung potential verb, which needed to change tense several times for all those clauses. It has taken me years to learn to think in paragraphs... indeed, my early journals & letters were often nightmare rides through my immature mind!

Because I wanted to watch the accumulation of words representing myself in ways unlike, if parallel to, my visual work, this archive has often been useful to help me see myself more honestly. As I write toward Anjana's questions about the values of the journal processes to explain one's experience, I feel my own sense of those values. I'm obviously still doing it, so I believe in it even as i must suppose I will never know the end of its story. I've heard stories of the destruction of journals in apocalyptic ritual or fits of pique & fear. I'm happier never yet to have had one of those.

I've always had faith this trunk of books would find its own journey into the unknown after me, my gift to the plague & blessing of words humans have unleashed as history. Accepting as well that they might not make it beyond the next flood [in spite of that potential protection of waterproof Indian Ink!] or fire or a slide over our edge & down the cliff, much less into another century. As an art history lover I've always wanted some of my own work to pass the test of the ages, being chosen again & again to save. I peg my second chances on my journal...

I do occasionally go back to read in the writing, especially when I'm trying to remember some detail of time or relationship... but I've learned that I often do not write what I would want to read later, being so busy with the doing that I did not have time or presence of mind to write much at all in such memorable times... I trusted to unsupported memory itself the very things I later wish I hadn't forgotten. To my frequent dismay I find boring menus or guest lists rather than the spark of excitement I want to recover. So the process is inevitably flawed, or at least, incomplete.

I have found it useful & fun to read from my old journals to someone aloud sharing selected notions of my earlier life. I see change & growth. I see ever old habits & ideas cycling new through the sense of time which has days quite full of words & those left inexplicably equally blank.

Journalizing renders present into immediate past while inviting past to remain present toward the future.