The Visitor

After moving to a rural area last year, having lived in the city all of my life, the differences were obvious, there is a unique rhythm couched on either side by the rising and setting of the sun.  Morning brought the song of finches and robins, the sharp crow of the rooster, a distant neighing of the herd of horses down the lane and the soft hum of the bees swarming the lavender.  The evening was quieter with the solitary hoot of the owl and far distant howl of one or two coyotes.  But, in the evening, just as dusk settled in, the deer would come. Every evening they come to graze, a few at a time, taking their turns over the unfolding of the evening.  

I really did not pay too much attention, just looking out of the corner of my eye as they appeared beyond the windows, until my dog passed. Buddy was the best dog.  He had been with me through raising three kids, a extended illness, spending his days keeping me company in my studio. He enriched our family’s life with unconditional love in that way that  dogs have shown themselves to be far superior to humans.  

After he was gone, that empty spot, that sense that there is another being quietly sharing your space was so pronounced, but I realized something one day.  I was paying attention to the deer.  When they came I stopped what I was doing and just watched them.  Sometimes I waved to them or went out on to the porch to talk with them.  They stopped being startled at my presence and shared their space with me, ignoring me or sometimes just making eye contact. 

Among these visitors was a young buck. He was the only one who would sit and stay sometimes for 3-4 hours.  He watched me as I had learned to watch the others.  One evening he followed me from window to window as I would walk through the house.  It was magic and reminded me of the gift of a creature’s presence.  The next day I started this painting.  This seemed like the right response to my gratitude to these majestic ones and my faithful and loving pup for their gifts to us.

Winter Days: Beginnings and Endings

I usually experiment and produce studies which serve as important building blocks for final paintings. This time I completed one painting with an idea in mind and then returned to the idea itself by going back to the most basic elements of the darkest darks and lightest lights; a taking apart, so to speak so that I may start to build back. We will see how it goes. See the video below.

Tulips!

I love the shape of tulips, been painting them in my sketchbook for years. I went a little abstract last week. I’m sure there will be more to come. They are all 22 x 30 on paper.

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DEADLOCKED and Loaded @ ArtRage Gallery Syracuse, NY

I am so happy to be included in the collarborative exhibition: Deadlocked and Loaded_Disarming America (Artrage Gallery, Community Folk Center, Point of Contact Gallery, University of Syracuse) I painted this after my experiences on lock downs and lock down drills.

FUTURE UNFOLDING: Flak Jacket Required

Before becoming a full time working artist, I spent several years as an elementary and middle school teacher.  Last year, I returned to the classroom in a one year teaching position at an elementary school. I found that the lockdown drills that I had previously done with students were laced with an urgency and sense of importance that was not  felt in years past.  In 2019 there were 45 school shootings.  This awareness hung in the air as I approached our first lockdown of the year. 

The next day was our twice yearly lockdown and active shooting drill and I knew we needed a thoughtful conversation and practice for this practice.  I asked my students to show me where they would go?  They all lined up along the wall. In a year of 45 school shootings, I immediately thought of the article I had read the night before that said students sitting or standing in a line assures that all will be killed at the same time. I started over, "I want you to go the place you feel most safe in the classroom." They easily split themselves up, went with a friend and choose  their own hiding places in cubbies, under desks, in closets, behind the steel laptop cart.  A few lingered until I made sure the doors were locked and blinds were pulled and settled with me between a desk and bookcase. It was silent.

Students take these drills seriously and they become a source of high anxiety for many.  I try to prepare them and also contact their parents so they can reassure them at home.  I always include a conversation to hear their perspective and invariably someone suggests wearing flak jackets to school, "We can make them pretty with pictures and different colors."  This usually leads to "Why don't we have bullet proof backpacks or special shields at school. Let that sink in. These are the thoughts of children trying to keep themselves safe. 

I have been in two lock downs which were not drills, including fitting an entire class of young children in a windowless closet knee to knee.  These are experiences no child should ever have.  Surely, this society can agree to a solution for the most vulnerable, for the future of our children and the future of our nation.  I have always felt that if the decision makers could spend a day with us during a lockdown drill the politics may give way to a  a stronger yearning for real solutions so that our children can be children. 

Amy Pleasant

The Bitter Fruit of Beauty and Pain

(An essay from Beauty and Pain by Amy Pleasant, RE: a collection of photographs by Swedish Artist Nathalia Edenmont.)

Roses rarest essence lives in the thorn.

Rumi

To look deeply at the work of Swedish-Russian photo-based artist Nathalia Edenmont is to see beyond the intrinsic beauty of the images. Her process is complex and dependent on a team of assistants to carefully build each garment under the artist's exact instruction. Each shot can take up to 18 hours to create one photograph, using a large format Sinar camera and a multitude of lenses. The artist recognizes that her work and life are intertwined and that she is compelled to create from this perspective.

At first glance, much of her work is full of wistful young women wearing ballgowns of spectacularly vibrant flowers and fruit. However, art is not always about what is readily seen, but more often about what lies beneath. If the bounty of nature serves as the metaphor of life in these images, a closer look at the covert and delicate details reveal a compulsion to wrestle with the nature of loss and death. In this work, death and life, pain and beauty are presented as flip sides of the same coin. This broad chronological collection of Edenmont's career becomes an intimate window into an artist's soul, a roadmap of loss and a testament to the resilience and courage of the artist.

Edenmont's work cannot be separated from her life experience. She displays an openness about the sweeping details of her own life, a life marked by significant losses. After the death of her mother, she found herself alone in the world (Yalta, former USSR) at the age of 14, becoming a ward of the state. She readily admits that her art is an extension of her personal process to carefully consign the pain outside of herself. Her work is markedly autobiographical, rooted in the primal grief of losing a mother at a most vulnerable time of life.

She tells the story of a childhood experience which indelibly set her on her artistic path. When she was 14, living in Russia, she attended the funeral of her best friend with the rest of her classmates. Her friend laid in an open casket dressed in a wedding dress as was the Russian custom for unmarried girls. She was puzzled when the teacher exclaimed for the whole class. “Look how beautiful she is.” The dissonance between beauty and death were too much for a young girl to understand in that moment. She reconsidered this, when two weeks later, her own mother died. Edenmont took great care to dress her mother in her most beautiful flowered dress and filled the room with flowers and music. She reflects, that from that day on, she formed the belief that, “There is no beauty without pain or pain without beauty and in her mind, they are the same.” This idea was cultivated into a philosophy which informed her art throughout her career.

The first photographic series produced in 2007- 08 returns to that day, substituting dark, emotionally raw images with the memory of the flower filled room on the day of her mother's funeral . The stark images reveal the seeds of the journey of a young girl navigating a life alone. The seminal tableau

titled, Death is recognizable immediately as a deathbed scene. A wash of muted lifeless grays is broken by the copper red of mother and daughter, the artist herself playing the role of her dead mother. The daughter fully gazes at the viewer with both sadness and resignation. Edenmont also places herself underneath the gauze wrapping in a fetal position in Still Born, a metaphor for what death leaves in its wake to those left behind. A child's grief, marked by a great feeling of aloneness with the implication that the effects of such a loss have no expiration date. This thread continues in Family. This is the first use of a red haired body double who sits in oversized mourning clothes between two empty chairs. The girl is unable to move beyond the moment as the chairs sit on the skirt of the garment. A more explosive approach is evident in Lost, in which the portrait in red serves as the backdrop for the dead rabbit in the model's arms. This particular piece could be interpreted as a transition to a more stylistic approach and an incorporation of color and beautiful garment to serve as distractor from the gravity of the subject matter.

This metamorphosis is complete with a new series which continues thematic elements of death and grief through the lens of young women dressed in spectacularly beautiful floral ballgowns. The visual feast provides a diversion from the hard reality these images speak to. Flowers became her metaphor for both beauty and death. This focus on the fragility of life is perhaps best revealed in a seminal piece titled, Requiem. Taken on its own, it is a beautiful portrait of a young woman surrounded by a garment of flowers. But on closer inspection, Edenmont explains that the use of flowers is reminiscent of flowers piled upon a grave. The materials she chooses for the garment offer clues to the viewer of the embedded narrative. In Consciousness a young girl is clothed in Forget Me Nots. The hair upon her head is woven into a nest holding three dead birds giving the impression that they are a part of her. Four have fallen out of the nest onto her garment. In Grief, a nest containing dead birds is placed within the brilliant but dead foliage. The colorful vibrancy of Eden gives a false first impression in view of the dead insects embedded in gown. All of these ancillary details serve as a coded language implanted with the sting of loss, an acquiescence to the fragility of life and the finality of death.

Edenmont's walk through this world continued and her work followed as she turned to the personal and collective experience of coming of age as a woman in a misogynistic world. Once again, the first of the series is stark without embellishment of flower or fruit. Duty Free, one of 14 photographs of a young women's head wrapped in plastic cannot be mistaken for anything other than a calling out of a culture which treats women as objects. In Bouquet, this message was transformed by flowers in its portrayal of an asian woman who has morphed into a withered and decayed bouquet of flowers. These images, however, are not the last word. The artist flips the narrative with the snake like creature in Huntress and the emotionally withholding woman in A Rare Smile. On closer inspection of Excellence, the beautiful wedding dress made of toilet paper is a not too subtle commentary on marriage or more to the point, the end of a marriage. These women fuel their narrative and emanate power and are fully in control in gesture, expression and garment.

This thread continues as she turns her attention to the maternal, marking the confusing rite of passage for young girls in Devine and including a reinterpretation of the Eastern Orthodox Madonna icon in her Mother series. This pivot towards the maternal reaches a crescendo in her most recent series, Fruitfulness. The models once again serve as an armature, however, the floral motif of the garments is replaced with fruit. This body of work reflects her own struggle with the aftermath of a late term miscarriage and the resulting infertility. Once again, the art becomes a means of expression of the heartbreaking grief. The other models of this series (Juicy, My Mind's Eye,Prosperity, Dolce Vita) are dressed in a bounty of the most luscious radishes, carrots, grapes, tomatoes, strawberries and cabbages, a direct reflection of the fertility of the earth, all rooted in Mother Earth. The artist has portrayed what is painfully out of reach.

Memories of her childhood in Russia remind her that she was raised to believe in the importance of young women’s fertility and the oft-made comparison to a flower in full bloom. On the other end of that metaphor, women were described as “old potatoes” when they aged beyond their childbearing years. She explores this idea with a bit of irony in the piece, Propaganda, a self portrait which makes her seem larger than life surrounded by mounds of potatoes. Besides bringing a stereotype to life, she hints at the time in Russia when for two years they ate only potatoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in spite of the rosy economic outlook which the Soviet Union presented to the rest of the world. Her work serves as witness to her pain, yet an intention to imbue hopefulness is evident as well. The potatoes have new sprouts and the model’s youth speaks of renewal. In Edenmont's view, the power of the universe is on full display in the cycle of the seasons, from life to death, to life again and this perspective helps every thing make sense. As she observes, “Even old potatoes will yield new fruit.” When we are gone the worms will do their work and life begins again."

Now, Edenmont sees her life's body of work as her children. She is not the first artist to see the connection between art and soul. Her ideas are fully formed in her mind. She estimates that they number in the hundreds and each year she sifts through these images and focuses on the twenty to thirty which she says, “I can’t live without.” The intimate and personal nature of her work provides the scaffolding beneath the process. Few people are aware of the complex process behind these images and how all pieces must come together like clockwork for a successful conclusion. In her words, "I work in a bloody serious way. There are so many risks in each piece that I create. I am always thinking this may be the last one. I do my best like there may be no tomorrow." Her life experience lends to the notion that life is not beautiful in itself, however, she has done her best to remind the viewer of the beauty as well, to boldly lay the dark and the light next to each other.

She shares this kind of courage and honesty with the world through her person and her work. Without children or family, she sees her artwork as her legacy. She understands that her presence through her art will continue in books, galleries, and museums long after she is gone. It is her hope, that future generations can see that honesty and creativity can transform life’s pain into beauty.

by Amy Pleasant

Cigarettes & Roller Derby

My grandmother, Jewel lived with us most of my childhood and teen years. We faced a daily uneasiness rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of who the other was. She was not your average "cookie baking, sweet spirited granny". She was a good, generous woman who had lived a life full of very hard work. She raised her children alone supporting the family as a waitress and cook and did her time on the factory floor. Men had not been kind and she lived within her well earned independence.

Her passions, in this order, were cigarettes, baseball, roller derby and politics. Whenever I think of her I can see her sitting under the maple tree in her green and white strap lawn chair smoking her Pall Malls, sipping on Pabst Blue Ribbon and listening to the Indians game on her small transistor radio. Her every movement accompanied by the continuous click of her long glossy red polished nails and the jangling of the multiple bracelets on both arms.

Everything stopped on Saturday afternoon for roller derby. You could hear her yelling at her TV downstairs in my room in the farthest corner of the house. She was also fond of big time wrestling and pulled me in to watch with her, telling me the stories behind each match and trying to convince me that "this was not fake". She and my father used to sit under the maple tree and argue politics past dusk on summer evenings. She was a personality which filled any room she ever walked into.

Since I was the youngest and both my parents worked , it was just me and Grandma every day, all day in the summer. We had a tentative relationship regardless off all the time we spent together. In my 11th year she announced to my parents that she thought I was "weird" because I spent so much time in my room drawing. (well, yeah?) She saw art as a waste of time and the resistance she consistently communicated could not help but feel personal. In the end, her attitude made no difference. I found my way on my circuitous journey.

I had such mixed feelings about my grandmother growing up that it really wasn't until after her death that I made peace with the incongruities and realized what a strong woman she was. She loved fiercely in her own way, even “the weird one.” I return to something when I am faced with someone I just don’t understand. We do the best we can with the place we are in our life and our heart. Nothing is more complex than life itself. I learned much from her as she showed me how a woman can walk strongly through a biased and not always easy world.

Shaking it up . . . New York Studio School Marathon Intensive

I just finished the most intense, art filled, production oriented 5 days since Art School. This past week I attended the NYSS Marathon Intensive lead byBritish painter Graham Nickson. It was virtual, of course, and I was in my studio at 6am (9am EST) ready for long 11-12 hour days full of lectures, assignments and critiques embedded with Art History. It was a most challenging and wonderful week. It pushed me and inspired a new way of thinking about my art and reflection on why and how I do what I do. I am excited to see how my new learning and thinking finds its way into my work.

HOME: more than meets the eye

I left my hometown in the midwest when I was 18. I began planning my exit quite young. The back porch had a territorial view, not that far, mind you but over a couple of hills and a definite horizon in view I ended every long summer day watching the slow and steady sunset sitting on the step of the porch holding my transitor radio to my ear and longing for what was further away. Cleveland and even more exotic Chicago seemed so far off, but I was determined to find my way there and beyond. My travels and settlings took me to pretty much the farthest point west and north as possible and it took my mother a couple of years to forgive me. I may have left the midwest, but some things linger. Most years I have returned to visit family and have provided those connections for my own children.

Whenever I return home I walk . . . and walk. Each morning I take a new route until I have covered the town, the pieces and parts of my childhood, the good and the bad, the sweet memories and ghosts of trauma past. It is somewhat of of a pilgrimage of reconciliation. I look at the houses along the way and they have always been a source of fascination for me. So the saying goes, No one really knows what goes on in other’s houses. A house becomes a perfect metaphor for exterior versus interior, the outside display and the secrets it holds. Over the years, I have taken at least a hundred pictures and videos of house in my hometown. During this pandemic I returned to these photos and started rethinking the container of a house and how to bring the inside out so to speak. Its thinking in progress, a work in progress. More to come I’m sure. (Studies are below.)

My Grandmother’s house and my childhood home.

HOMe @ Woman Made Gallery

I began this painting at the beginning of the pandemic. I have to admit it was a bit cathartic, taking away, adding, a bit here, a bit there. It seems most appropriate that it was accepted into an exhibition called “home'“.

From Juror, Jennifer Wiegle: How we see our homes is very much a reflection of how we see ourselves. What is important to us? What dark thoughts lurk in the closet or under the bed and keep us up at night? What lights our way to carry us through our dark times, and what gives us cause to sing and dance in the kitchen? Home is a reflection of where we are in our lives, where we have been, and where we are going.”

I created these two pieces below in response to HOME. They are called Night Garden and in a nod to my optimistic bend in light of the evidence I reach for what still grows in the darkness, perhaps what grows just outside our window.

My palette through the years has been pegged as colorful and vibrant with a noticeable lack of neutrals, however, my subject matter has often dealt with the shadow sides of life. It would seem as if the bleaker reality shows itself to be the brighter the color and I would have to say that is a fair assessment. I first picked up a paintbrush in order to make ends meet in the middle of a divorce and the adjustments of single parenthood. Working as an elementary teacher, trained as a designer/computer animator I had the impulse to paint. Five days a week I painted from 4:30am to 6:00 am until it was time to get my son up for school and both of us off to school. My first exhibition was held in the back of my classroom and the staff was generous and bought most of the still life paintings. They could have been just being supportive, but it was a start. These paintings were bright and bold in the middle of my own darkness, mostly because I could only afford the primary colors, white and black, five tubes of paint, but something else was at work. This brightness came out from a small space of hopefulness within myself. That space has been nurtured through the years and has helped navigate me through all kinds of waters. Art is a reflection of the artist and so it goes.

Night Garden

The kid's are alright . . .

I stepped out of the studio this year and back into the classroom. I traded in the quiet and solitude for a cacophony of kid chaos and enthusiasm. Their unending chattiness was matched only by their creativity, persistance and deep care for the world they were growing up in. These sixth graders took life on in all of their push pull pre adolescent glory. This was a “hit the ground running” year full of new learning, relationship building and always wondering what new challenge was ahead. In 2017 I wrote an article about my previous years in the classroom and how I left every year behind recognizing that my students always gave more to me than I could have ever given to them. This year was no different. I learned that I still love teaching and by far the best part is working directly with students, helping us both find the very best parts of ourselves in the journey together. This year turned out to be one none of us will ever forget. When I think of my student’s it is all I need to have hope in our future.

Notes from Blue Mountain

Waking up early each morning, I often heard the last loon's call and its mate's response off in the distance, marking the end of their day as I was just beginning mine.  It was always a fitting start in this near magical place in the middle of the Adirondacks called Blue Mountain Center.  The setting, surrounded by forests, mountains and lakes, provided the perfect place for writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians and actors to unplug, reflect, rejuvenate and to work. The thread binding the 15 of us was reflected in our work which was rooted in social justice in some form or fashion.  We added our names to the long and storied list of others who had gone before us since Blue Mountain Center opened in 1982.  This was a very special place. 

I came to begin the last series of three around the issue of healing sexual trauma. This series, The Body as Talisman follows She's Come Undone (2018) and Terrible Beauty. (2016) I worked daily in my own private, very large studio with the woods right outside my door.  I moved all my things in (which I had shipped) on my second day like I was going to be there for years.  I spent the first week thinking, writing and doing drawing studies in preparation for the work. The rest of the time was spent doing both printmaking and painting with 11 new 14"x 17" pieces and two 3'x 6' scrolls. It was heaven, having the luxury of time, space and quiet to work.

Although I was so grateful for the full days in the studio I had another equally important intention to aid closure to my particular journey to healing.  I challenged myself to do things I had never done or had stopped doing since the time of the sexual assault when I was 10.  It was time to let go of all the smallish residual fears which had followed me since that day.  I had a list and I went for it. I went bike riding every day, hiked in the woods alone several times, swam in open water daily and went canoeing.  So, although my time at Blue Mountain Center provided an incredible opportunity to work on my art and to meet the most amazing people, it also left an indelible mark on my soul and for that I am forever grateful.  

View from my studio, woods to the lake

Presentation night at the halfway point of the month long session.

Presentation in the main house. It included poetry readings and showing images from Terrible Beauty and She’s Come Undone.

I offered a monotype workshop for the other residents one afternoon.

Lots of laughing this month.

Redeeming the Woods

The Body as Talisman

Through the years, I lost count of the times my mother told the story of their first year in the house I grew up in.  It was the first house built in the neighborhood.  I imagined a thick forested area interrupted by two strips of barren land bulldozed into the shape of 24 neatly arranged plots.  According to the story they lived in the neighborhood alone for several months surrounded by forest and wildlife.  She delighted in recalling the menagerie of animals who made their home in their backyard during hunting season.  Four years later, after I was born the neighborhood had filled in and looked like many of the neighborhoods that dotted my hometown and the rest of the mid west, a one story ranch with a long driveway and a garage.  The front and backyard combined to form an acre of manicured heaven.  But right beyond the yard was the woods.  Someone had bought the land behind our street of neatly horizontal plots which ran the length of the entire neighborhood.  Apart from their single family home about 1/4 mile away they left the woods as it was, thick, dark and wild.  

I had strict instructions to never go into the woods alone and so it retained some mystery as I was growing up.  There was somewhat of a small clearing between 3 trees on the edge by our house that I used to sneak out to, working out various scenarios of imaginative play.  It was the 60’s and children had a great deal of freedom to roam the neighborhood and beyond.  I spent my summers on my bike all day with a daily routine of going uptown, hitting the parks and the pharmacy's penny candy aisle.  At least once a week, I checked the appliance store for oversized boxes that my father would pick up on his way home from work so that I could build houses with them.  Typically, I was out in the morning, home for lunch and back on my bike until dinner time.  Again, it was the 60's.

The day of note started just as any other.  I had a full day doing my rounds and was excited about a refrigerator box that had just become available that day.  Almost home, I rounded the corner on my street.  A group of boys stood blocking the sidewalk about 4 houses down.  I assumed they would move and let me pass.  I slowed down, but did not stop.  They did not let me pass.  Instead, one grabbed my handle bars and another pulled me off my bike, dragged me along a side yard between two houses, through the weeds and into the woods.  On that day the hot and humid woods became the setting for a sexual assault which haunted me for years, marking the loss of innocence.  It was the day the world became a dangerous place.

On that day, my fondness for the woods changed dramatically and by association, all forests became a living metaphor for my anxiety and fear.  Over these years I have worked through my complicated relationship with the forest.   I have spent many weekends hiking in the Pacific Northwest. I relish the wonder of the woods; the faint musty odor of the dark soil, cascading beds of the greenest ferns, repetitive fungi spread out like a beautiful fan and a single trail breaking the plane between grasses and weeds.  Looking up at a kaleidoscope of green and blue above. Although I have made friends with the forest, it was a conditional friendship.  I have  never been able to walk in the woods alone since the day of the sexual assault.  As much as I loved the forest it still was not a safe place.  I nurtured that belief that all these years it was unthinkable to ever enter the woods alone. It seemed fitting that it was time to put that long and tightly held belief to rest. 

I was grateful to be awarded a residency at Blue Mountain Center in the middle of the pristine lands of the Adirondack State Park in New York.  This special place is known for its soft edged emerald mountains, clear and clean lakes, thick, lush forests and an ever changing sky which reflects its own majesty to the water below. 

Much like the slight sense of courage it takes to overcome the hesitation of jumping into to the cold waters of a freshwater lake I put my hiking boots on and went for a hike into the woods at daybreak on the day after I arrived. I set out alone, my anxiety cloaked in doubts about my ability to find the trail, worrying the grade might be too much for a recent ankle injury, will the black flies torment me. (They did.)  Looking back behind me every so often to make sure no one was following me, all the while tamping down those thoughts of that day,  Swatting at the flies while swatting the repetitive thought of what if something horrible happened today.  My internal work was much like the hike, rainy, sweaty, uncomfortable and steep. Taking it one step at a time I developed a slow and plodding rhythm with a mind that never quite settled down.  The trail was called Lookout Point Trail and my intention was to reach the top that day, however, between the bugs and my monkey mind I had enough and decided to turn around half way up.  Perhaps a metaphor for the healing needed, often in pieces, spurts, not a continuous smooth arc as we would sometimes wish.  I did, however, walk out of the woods with a feeling of satisfied exhilaration for having started this journey. I was finally putting the ghosts of the past to bed.  Two days later, I went back to the trail and was pleasantly surprised to find less bugs and less intruding thoughts, a truly more pleasant experience and after more sweating, plodding and encouraging self talk I made it to the top.  The view was well worth the walk through the woods.