Art in the Woods

Witch hazel is in bloom. I just saw it as I walked my dogs along the wood’s edge and my heart leapt as it does every fall. Witch hazel blossoms are easy to miss. They are small tufts – more like bits of yellow thread than flower petals – attached up and down the dark limbs of this under-story bush.

You need to be up close to appreciate the subtle witch hazel blooms. They appear just as the color bullies of the woods are at their strongest – maple, black cherry, sumac, beech and ash - each elbowing for attention. Those are too easy. You can appreciate their color with a drive-by, even from a tour bus window with people yakking in your ear and someone on a speaker explaining temperatures and geographic history (an occasional joke thrown in.) In a week or two, after a heavy rain or wind, their fifteen minutes of fame will be over for another year and the trees will be left empty handed. Witch hazel blooms will remain until about Thanksgiving. It’s not uncommon to see them holding up through a light snowfall or locked in a glaze of ice along their parent stems.

I remember finding our hillside of witch hazel. It was our first year on this property. We had moved into the house in early winter; I had open-heart surgery ten months later. I was taking my first post-operative walk outdoors, alone, wondering how my life would change and mostly, what was I spared to do? Even more disturbing, what if I never found my life’s grand purpose? That’s when I saw the witch hazel and I wanted to tell everybody about it – no joking.

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Debra Audet’s memorial service was held Saturday in a grand gothic cathedral on East Avenue. Her friends and family spoke eloquently about her life, her gifts and the meaningfulness of her life in theirs. It was a fitting tribute.

You can tell a lot about a woman from her haircut and humor. Debra was class all the way – style that never goes out of fashion, tastes that transcend fad. Her laugh lifted the very air around her and she intuitively and magnetically attracted an army of people like herself: talented, bright, quick to savor life.

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Here’s a photograph of a garden “folly” in a tiny city backyard in Davidson, North Carolina. I have christened it “the cathedral” and somehow – in my mind’s maize – the witch hazel, Debra’s life and the garden cathedral all tell a similar story.

COMFORT ZONE: Right or Wrong?

Bill Stewart and Kathy Calderwood opened the fall season with an exhibition of their work in the spankin’ new art gallery at Nazareth College. Kudos to Nazareth College for having the good grace to include such a class space in the re-do of their art center and to the Sands’ family (Wine anyone?) for underwriting this brilliant facility. I am, however, unclear about how the gallery will operate. Is it to be used strictly for Nazareth College faculty and students? What a shame that would be! And who is serving as its director? Experience tells us that unless a qualified dictator is hired, the gallery space will fall into an art cow pie. So let us be positive and assume that the future quality of the exhibitions will be top rate with art that inspires, challenges and informs us all – faculty, students or voyeurs.

But is that what we truly want? Or do we really crave “comfort art”? Otherwise, how else can you explain Thomas Kincaid (the “painter of light”) with his cheesy cabins sitting in moonlit snow/English spring garden/fall foliage/beside a stream, animals peeking through windows, the top money-producing artist in America today? (Yes! It’s true!) Or the quilt show at Memorial Art Gallery being the largest attendance draw they had all year?

I was asked today to give my opinion about an up-coming tour of art galleries in our region with the caveat that “some members really don’t like that far out stuff.” So is the steering committee right to avoid subjecting viewers to the art fringe? But how and when does the fringe become mainstream? Has our definition of "fringe" changed in the last 5 years? 10 years? How did that happen?

Is it true that the greater our exposure to art of all ilk, the more refined and informed our art tastes? Then are museum guards the MOST sophisticated art audience in the world? Must I keep staring at the “white on white” painting until I understand it or can I simply walk away and admit that it’s all bunk?

Mihaly Cskszentmihalyi, the “happiness professor” at the University of Chicago reports that the longer we experience happiness (read his books on “Flow” for full description of that loaded term), the higher we evolve as individuals. Looking at art makes me happy and I've seen a bunch. Playing golf makes my friend Fred happy. He thinks my art taste is weird. Who's to say which of us is a more highly evolved individual? Can we respect the differences among us without being judgmental? Or does staying in a comfort zone too long give you brain sores?

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A word or two about the Nazareth show: Bill Stewart is a friend of mine, someone I’ve known well for nearly twenty years. A few years ago, I feared – and wrote publicly – that he had entered a “comfort zone” of his own. This body of work dispels those fears. They scream “Catholic saints” – size, presentation, even the spare use of red and gestures of hands look like Stations of the Cross. It’s difficult to infuse artwork with humor, subtlety and intellectual content. Stewart manages all those things with this group of all-American saints.

The very best painting in this show is Kathy Calderwood’s little girl in “Green Shoes,” a painting of her 3 year old granddaughter. There isn’t a grandparent alive who could resist this picture and there isn’t an art critic anywhere who wouldn’t be happy pointing to this painting as an example of the essence of excellent contemporary portraiture.