Category Archives: Art

Seven years ago

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Well beyond time to show up here if I’m going to call myself a blogger, but honestly, nothing original is urging itself upon me to say. How about a few days of my journal from seven years ago then? The prose is a bit loopy in places, but it’s a journal — one is talking to oneself! My words from the past often seem strange to me, events already over and long forgotten, but there I was, in those days. (Do you remember these episodes in “the news”?)

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

8 p.m. Enjoying cool air of balcony. Fallen flower petals litter the floor, cherry tomatoes now eager to ripen. Helmut at Habitat [for Humanity work site] today and I did revisions [to a story and essay].

Per David Brooks, who opined at NYT that he was trying to divest his brain of Trump, and Garrison Keillor who had a great column about his high school reunion and how the man’s name didn’t come up at all, and then how what’s (more) important is tomatoes, I didn’t watch news in the afternoon hour I often allow myself to puzzle, but listened instead to an Eleanor Wachtel interview with Edna O’Brien. “Oh wow,” I said to myself when it was done, “that was good.” Truly rich in ideas, emotion, compassion-capacity. – So all good, and turns out I have an Edna O’Brien short fiction collection on my shelves. –

But during my brief victory away from the news, there is a new “development” that occurs. Bombast from North Korea, bombast from D.T. who promises “fire and fury…and force,” “like the world has never seen.” Shock, for he sounds just like Kim Jong Un. It’s really quite frightening, this build-up of tension, both of them nuclear powers.

Friday, Aug. 11, 2017

Two quite opposite emotions today—one a sense of fear/sick/disgust/worry—who knows how to describe it, as the rhetoric continues, and continues—ON THE U.S. SIDE. It’s quite frightening really, and as leaders urge the rhetoric be lowered, D.T. carries right on. His poll #s continue to drop, as markets are too, and it’s as if he thinks he’ll gain people back by talking tough. “People like it,” he says…. It really did quite bother me. I bleat it all Godward, yes, but am mostly bothered by piety [when someone says] well we’re in the last days, we don’t understand, just “watch and pray.” That is good advice, but are we really in the last days? I think we have to resist warmongering like that. Poor Koreans and others in Asia, Guam, etc. Lord have mercy.

But, the world is coming to an end, so why not buy a painting? Was compelled by a “R. Lake” I saw in the thrift shop yesterday, a landscape, flat though low mountains on horizon, a large tree centre, some small buildings. It’s not like real detailed, you have to stand back, but there’s something about the blues. Anyways, it was still there this morning, had in the meanwhile looked up R. Lake, which is Randall Lake, born 1947, of Utah, ex-Mormon, his paintings recently more political—gay man, taking on Mormon Church for their damage to LGBTQ etc. $65. So happy with this acquisition, now in our bedroom.

Haircut today too, some puzzle fun, and some work (revisions), though not as much as I should have, if I wasn’t so anxious about nuclear war or busy rearranging our walls.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

So yesterday I posted my feelings on FB—re North Korea, my cries for Korean people, opinion that DT brought world to brink—….quite a few comments, which is always a little surprising… Karla B. alerts me to tomorrow’s Sunday of Prayer for Peaceful Reunification of Korean Pen. Betty B. says Australia feels very close. John L. proposes how both leaders will spin this. Carol Ann W. recalls Cuban Missile Crisis, how she played Bach. Dayna D. shares Anne Lamott:

What to do in the face of Locked and Loaded? The usual: Help! Thanks. Wow. Radical self-care. Trust & surrender. Serve the poor. Breathe.

 So, interesting conversations that FB provokes. I just “like” everyone and leave it at that.

BUT, End of the World is so yesterday, she says (to herself) sarcastically. Who’s even thinking about that?! Today it’s Charlottesville, VA. Neo-Nazis, KKK, Alt Right gathering, violence and counter protests. A car rams counter-protestors, a woman killed, 3 deaths in all. DT generically calls for unity and condemns violence “from many sides, from many sides.” Dos not condemn white supremacists who chant Heil Trump and wear MAGA hats, David Duke who reminds who elected him. I listened to the statement and agree, it was tepid, he who can be so specific in his criticisms. He… can’t name it for what it is.

Someday, maybe 10-20-30 year from now, if someone reads this, they may say, well is she just hyperventilating, worrying… Believe me, it is this bad on this continent, this sense of division, this sense of something terrible unleashed from the top. “Blood and soil,” they chanted, as they walked with their tiki torches. And “Jews will not replace us.”

Well, the Sabbath nears. Breathe, dear heart. Read your Edna O’Brien book. Think of your new painting-print. Your kids and grands… [Gratitude] for this day. For the blackberries we picked this morning. For the Staples store that opened nearby today. For a pot of yellow mums. For Helmut.

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Ellsberg, Sister Wendy, & my great-grandmother

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This post will be is a ramble—no fixed destination, simply one thing reminding me of another and another. I begin with the death last week of Daniel Ellsberg, 92, former military analyst and whistleblower. Troubled by the Vietnam War and what he knew were massive government lies, Ellsberg secretly copied thousands of pages of what became known as the Pentagon Papers and released them to newspapers.

I certainly remember well enough the news in those years about anti-war protests and Ellsberg’s name and notoriety as part of the chain that led to Watergate and eventual U.S. withdrawal, in defeat, from Vietnam. I experienced a tiny protest event of my own at the Bible school I attended when I criticized an American missionary who had championed the war from the pulpit during chapel, and was angrily criticized in turn by some loyal American students standing with me in the line for lunch.

Generally, however, U.S. news and the release of the Pentagon Papers seemed a long way from the basement room I occupied in Calgary in June, 1971 when the New York Times began publishing excerpts, a truly long way indeed from the boring summer job I had for the City, mainly, as I recall, outlining in colour on a large city map the streets that the men in their street cleaning machines had cleaned during their last shift. I also remember that a couple of the women in the office took me along to a mall during our noon break one day and urged me to buy the dressy hot pants outfit I tried on, hot pants being all the rage that season. At that stage of my life I still had the legs for hot pants, but on account of my upbringing did not have the freedom and inclination, so while it was fun to model I demurred to purchase.

dearest-sister-wendy-sideI was alerted to Daniel Ellsberg again this past year by occasional mention of him by in the book Dearest Sister Wendy…, which consists of letters exchanged between Daniel’s son Robert Ellsberg, publisher at Orbis Books, and cloistered nun Sister Wendy Beckett, whom I had come to admire from the BBC documentaries on art she did back in the 1990s. She would stride into art museums with her black habit billowing behind her, about as far from hot pants fashion as you can imagine, bringing love and insight and utter lack of pretension to all she saw. (These can be viewed on YouTube.) Hers was a brief and unlikely fame, and come to think of it, in that unlikeliness, she was very similar to Daniel Ellsberg, who a friend of his called “one of those accidental characters of history who show the pattern of a whole era.” (Read an interview with Robert about his father here.)

IMG_0236There’s a wonderful painting of Sister Wendy on my “mantel” (over a television, not fireplace), painted by my artist friend Melody Goetz. I’m finding that hardly anyone who sees the painting has heard of Sister Wendy, but she’s been an inspiration to me through the documentaries and also her books about art and now this recent book of letters, compiled by Robert. Her cloistered world was small, yet large in its generosity and assurance of God’s love for and within people. As, for example — opening the book at random — in these sentences in response to his frustration over the then-president:

…dear Robert. Perhaps you should put Mr. Trump on the altar and sacrifice all your reactions to him. Where does it get you? He needs love as does everybody…. God despises nothing “that he has made.” 

My friend Melody is a great admirer of Sister Wendy as well, hence the many hours she spent on this fine rendering of the nun, posed against a heavy door where she waits, slightly bowed, hands at rest, for Mass. When I saw it I said if it were ever available for sale, I’d be in line for it, and then one day, she felt it was ready to leave her house, and now Sister Wendy presides in mine.Scan I’m drawn to her prayerful composure, to her enviable peace about aging, to her hands. And I’m reminded of the hands of my great-grandmother, Katharina Mandtler Derksen, who led a very different life than Sister Wendy (a difficult marriage, and birthing 11 children with only three surviving to adulthood) but exhibited, according to my mother’s recollections as a child, a similar calm and praying presence in their home in the last years before her death.

Stories monuments tell

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I’m home again after a two-week “highlights” tour of Britain with friend Eunice Sloan, and reflecting now on personal highlights – Evensong at Westminster Abbey, for one, Stonehenge, for two, and so on and on. I won’t bore you with a list but want to share a few thoughts instead about public monuments, erected for commemoration, which become for tourists a kind of stand-in for whole swaths of history and meaning.

Ever since taking a course about memory and commemoration for my history degree, I’ve been intrigued by the art of monuments. They both reflect and shape public memory; they’re never entirely neutral. (Think, for example, of the religious imagery wrapped into many memorials of the First World War.)

Some statues of persons we saw on the trip did the work of reminder, of a “big” person but also everything associated with that life, as with the figure of Churchill across from the Parliament, which was being polished and waxed the day we viewed him, or a possible likeness of William Shakespeare in Stratford on Avon, where I just barely managed to squeeze in a photo before yet another tourist rushed forward to pose beside him as if to imbibe his genius or signal they’d had to study one of his plays in high school.

In the case of the Beatles, I couldn’t resist rushing in either, to claim a connection I suppose, however tenuous. The monument to Prince Albert in Kensington Gardens seemed complicated, inaccessible, layered – to my mind – with the sentimentality and obsessive ornamentation we associate with Victorian attitudes to grief.

Two monuments, each involving two men, told me stories that have been playing in my mind, as stories do.

One was at Trafalgar Square in London, where the fourth plinth brings contemporary art to the public square. A new piece called “Antelope” had been unveiled just days earlier. It shows two men, backs to one another, one considerably larger than the other.

Here’s the description from a London press release:

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Samson Kambalu’s bronze resin sculpture restages a photograph of Baptist preacher and pan-Africanist John Chilembwe and European missionary John Chorley, taken in 1914 in Nyasayland (now Malawi) at the opening of Chilembwe’s new Baptist church.

Chilembwe is wearing a hat, defying the colonial rule that forbade Africans from wearing hats in front of white people, and is almost twice the size of Chorley. By increasing his scale, the artist is elevating Chilembwe and his story, revealing the hidden narratives of underrepresented peoples in the history of the British Empire in Africa, and beyond.

John Chilembwe was a Baptist pastor and educator who led an uprising in 1915 against British colonial rule in Nyasaland triggered by the mistreatment of refugees from Mozambique and the conscription to fight German troops during WWI. He was killed and his church destroyed by the colonial police. 

It’s a powerful piece, not particularly subtle about its anti-colonialist message, but inspiring and necessary in our time. I’m glad I got to see it.

I’m also glad I got to see a relatively recent sculpture on the Isle of Man which celebrates the achievements of two British mountaineering “legends,” John Mackenzie and Norman Collie, who climbed together in the Cuillin mountains of Scotland for many years, making various discoveries in the terrain and developing climbing techniques. Their story as told us on the tour related the large difference in class between scientist/professor Mackenzie and crofter/guide Collie, and perhaps it could be said that the way the men are posed (Mackenzie standing) pronounces on that, but we were also told about a friendship so deep they were buried beside each other. What speaks to me here is not their relative positions as much as the way each gazes upward in the same direction, to the mountains, as if to say it was the intensity of that shared love that united them.

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photo: Eunice Sloan