More Pictures (Continued from below)

I couldn't get all these posted.

Here goes another try.

The North Carolina Cottage

We're packing to head north. The house there is still not sold and it sits where we left it - half furnished, probably full of dead flies and smelling stale from five months of disuse. We will refresh the place, rearrange to fill spaces and hope that by some miracle, a buyer will materialize within the next few weeks and we can get on with the next step in our strategic downsize plan.

Meanwhile, many of you have asked to see where we live down here and so here are a few photographs. Questions? I'll be glad to answer. (New art: the large painting in the dining area is by southern painter Charles Ladson.)

Art by Any Other Name

I think I fell in love last week with W. Gary Smith. He’s a garden designer and in one short hour-long presentation – his keynote address at the 26^th Annual Davidson Horticultural Symposium – he expressed everything I hold as truth about gardening and by extraction, life itself.

I’ve been to a ton of garden lectures and frankly (and I cross myself as I say this) I could not care less about the MOST IMPROVED PLANT OF THE YEAR or the VERY LAST WORD IN DAY LILIES or TEN PLANTS YOU SIMPLY MUST HAVE IN YOUR GARDEN. Who cares? They live, they die, and they get replaced. I don’t need to know their Latin names or the latest cultivar. I like hostas – I just don’t need to COLLECT hostas (or roses, or day lilies). Does this make me a bad gardener or worse, an unworthy gardener? Should I drop my memberships in Perennial Society, National Garden Conservation League, or the Monroe County Garden Society to make room for someone who is more attuned to the soil?

There’s one major problem with that (in my mind at least): THEY NEED ME because I AM A DISCIPLE OF W. GARY SMITH. He preaches the gospel of design. He explains why certain shapes and patterns – repeated mysteriously and omni-presently in nature – please the human eye and lift the soul. He illustrated nine basic patterns in his presentation with exquisitely chosen words and pictures. The message was simple enough for the beginner gardener to grasp but old-timers were nodding with sudden insight as Smith spoke.

And if all that isn’t enough to make my heart flutter (or is that the by-pass surgery talking?), I learned a new word: NUMINOUS. An adjective that means filled with a sense of supernatural presence, spiritually elevated, sublime.

These are the reasons scientists everywhere need people like me – and Smith – and artists – and writers, musicians and day dreamers. Life is much more interesting when you squint your eyes, look for the patterns and discover the numinous spaces.

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Here is an installation that defies category: is it art or gardening? By any measure, it is creative and NUMINOUS. It’s the labor (and yard) of Robin and David Wilgus. David is an illustrator/artist by day but at night, he must be a major scavenger. The fence across the front of his house is fairly new; I saw it first last year when it was nearly pristine. In the intervening months, it’s sprouted curly iron debris (Wilgus sees this as “growing vines.”)

That construction at the back of the Wilgus house is an outdoor room. It glitters, shimmers, and is a real-brought-to-life version of “can you spy….?” Or “find 32 white doorknobs” or whatever your experience is with that game. He calls it the patio. I call it a cathedral.

ART PLACES

Before I left Rochester in January, I visited a few friends. Beverly, my former business partner and BFF, was deep into living room renewal. Out with her purple suede Italian modern sofa and chair! Away with an oh-so-appropriate oriental area rug! Track lighting? Dated and harsh. Now she’s cocooned in a pastel green jellybean sofa that sits on a shaggy meadow of a rug, the kind that could hide small pets. And in place of track lighting, a huge cloud of white frosted twigs forms the chandelier over her dining table.

Tom Burke and Barbara Fox changed EVERYTHING beginning with their home address. This urban (urbane?) couple sold their city house, a 1900’s late Victorian with fireplaces, moldings, a front porch and lots of woodwork. They skipped right past the suburbs and set up the nest in a chic, open lofty townhouse three or four villages away from the city core where they’ve lived for as long as I’ve known them.

Nancy Kelly and Peter Pappas went the same route – but kept right on going. Their local quirky little cottage surrounded by woods, a ravine and wild life galore has a new owner. Nancy and Peter are excited residents of a swanky 6<sup>th</sup> floor condo in the heart of a major west coast city. They will leave their car parked in the underground garage and walk to everything – right after they finish oiling the teak cabinetry and stop staring out the glass walls at an elegant cityscape.

Change. Most people say they want it. Few actually pursue it. Whether it’s a color on a wall or a change of zip code, most of us keep to the shoulder of the road where it’s predictable. Nothing at all wrong with that decision as long as it’s honestly come by. It’s the saying of one thing and the doing – or not doing – of the other that I object to. To any of us who have jumped into the whirlpool of change, good luck and I hope we all find what we seek. To those who stay planted, roots can be admirable. Those of us out swimming need to know that you’ll welcome us back to familiarity.

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Belinda Bryce is another friend who has changed her shirt – and address – a few times this past year or two. She’s been busy making her little city cottage homey. The first time I visited her there, I teased her about a powder room wall papered and decorated with the clichés of early Americana. Last summer, she stripped the wallpaper and after visiting the Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art and the huge Sol le Witt installation, she decided to Sol her powder room walls. Here’s a photograph of the result. And yes, that pattern you see is about six layers of “scribbles” with various pencils – over every inch of all four walls. I’m not sure if this was a labor of love from start to last or one of endurance. Maybe both?

Soon after moving to our new winter home here in Charlotte, NC, we went to the downtown Hodges Taylor Gallery fete: the closing of the group show that featured among the five artists, works by Judith Olson Gregory.

Many of you know Judy; she was a Rochester resident and very active artist for twenty or more years before she and her husband Fred left for a warmer winter. Judy turned to hand-made paper casting sculpture years ago and in the past three or four, she’s used the kimono image as basis for expression. She showed three newer pieces in the H-T Gallery show; this is one. Paper was cast using a large hosta leaf as the form.

FROM THE DEPTHS OF WINTER

Do you believe in universal images? Are there animals, symbols, signs that crop up in art and dreams the world over regardless of culture, religious disposition or politics? Do they transcend time? And do those same images represent the same things to each participant?

How does this make you feel? Do you scoff at such mumbo-jumbo? Or are you comforted knowing you are not alone in the human condition, that ultimately you are bound inextricably to the family of humankind? Does it change your politics? Or how you look at art?

This is the time of year for such contemplation and – oh ho! – I am admitting another link in the march of human development! The fear of extinction parallels the Winter Solstice – the shared ancient panic at the death of light.

Belinda Bryce just sent me images of her new paintings. She marries unexpected colors in ways that always knock me out and combines pigment with melted beeswax – encaustic painting. The result is depth and surface value that’s wonderfully tactile and she makes the most of the medium.

As for subject, she’s in the hip pocket right now of the rabbit fetish. I immediately jump to the symbolic meaning of rabbits = hearth, home, procreation, femininity, and fertility.

Here’s the question: are rabbits merely the artists’ theme of the week (think back to dogs, often with bloody fangs, birds, especially black crows)?

Or are rabbits one of those intuitive symbols too strong to resist?

(Belinda’s solo exhibition opens in February at the Little Theater Café.)

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No silly platitudes from me about spring being right around the corner! It’s really cold. The scene from my window is black, white and gray – maybe as monotone as nature ever becomes. I am wallowing in ice-ness. So is my brother in Tulsa, Oklahoma, my friend in Florida and people in China that I don’t know yet. But be hopeful; we all looked out our windows on December 23 and voila!, the sun didn’t die after all.

Happy New Year!

ART STEW

The Annual Members’ Art Show is installed at Rochester Contemporary Art Center. This is a democratic exhibition: if you are a dues paying member of RoCo, you may deliver one piece of your art to include on the walls for this show – no judging, no art jury, no work ever denied (except for possible size restrictions.) As you might expect, the show is a free-for-all, art hung cheek by jowl as far as the eye can see from floor to nearly ceiling.

The result: it’s hard to see any art for all the art.

I have some trouble with art democracy. For most of my adult life, my job has been to judge the work of artists – either to sell or critique for publication. I’ve spoken out against the wasted opportunity for excellence in places such as the Gallery at High Falls where no exhibitor is ever turned.

But I’ve also written recently about art elitism – particularly the Memorial Art Gallery Biennial where, from hundreds of artists’ entries, under fifty make it to the wall with an exhibition meant to showcase regional art talent.

I’m not alone in the philosophical mush of uncertainty. RoCo claims that this is a totally unjudged show but is sponsoring a public “vote for your favorite” contest – by any definition, a “Best In Show.” Several individual prizes are awarded as well. Sounds a little hypocritical to me.

So is there such a thing as a successful, truly democratic art show? YES THERE IS! And it’s RoCo again. The 6x6 fund raising exhibit equalizes size, price (every art piece is sold for $20.) and total anonymity between buyer and artist. It’s such fun that good artists are happy to submit work even knowing that it may hang alongside that of an 8 year old from an elementary school art class. It's not even a close contest between the quality of the two RoCo shows: the 6X6 wins hands down.

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I lie awake these nights mentally sorting through rooms of furniture, rugs and art work. Some will stay in Rochester to live wherever it is we end up and the rest will land at our new house in North Carolina. I feel like I’m sending half my children off to a foster home – or worse, breaking up twins or dragging babies away from mom.

As excited as I am about setting up a new place “from scratch”, I also realize that many of my art treasures are rooted in Rochester/Upstate New York soil and they give me….what exactly? Credentials? Snob appeal? OH, NO! I AM ABOUT TO BECOME ANONYMOUS.

Well, that’s part of “reinvention” isn’t it? You roll the dice and you accept the challenges.

HOUSES: ANOTHER ART FORM

It’s time to move.

We bought this house five years ago. Our former house – a unique 1960 California contemporary where we’d lived for seven years (before that, a city townhouse and once, a 100-year old farm house) – was sold in a week. We moved into an apartment while we planned the “ultimate home for the mature couple.” It never got built and after living with rented furniture and even worse, rented artwork, we were ready to jump out our sixth floor window. Instead, we jumped here.

Once more we’ve poured ourselves into a house. It’s taken us five years of hard work – and more money, naturally – and now it is as close to perfection as I can make it and so, time to move on.

My best friend accuses me of self-sabotage. She claims that I can’t deal with success, that I manufacture reasons for turning perfection (whenever I get too close to whatever-that-is) into chaos and I wonder if she could be right.

I read somewhere once about achieving women who bore additional stress as they tried to keep up the face of success while, internally, feeling like an actor in someone else's play.

Do women feel like frauds most of the time? Is this the true curse of Eve?

Maybe Eve felt unworthy of all that perfection. Maybe she got tired of smiling and hosting all those garden tours while all the time thinking "this could be better. I can see the mistakes even if no one else can. I mean...poison ivy? How can I hide THAT one?"

But I prefer to believe that she looked around one day, dusted off her hands and said “There. It’s the best I can do with this place. Time for me to find a new challenge.”

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The lead photograph is our current Colorado contemporary house that is “for sale.” It’s pretty grand. Our plan is to buy a small something in Upstate New York for spring/summer.

We’ve already made a commitment to purchase a little cottage in North Carolina for the cold months. My ideal is this rustic cabin. I love the textures and the piecework look of the place. If anyone knows of such a place near here, send me the information.

Meanwhile, prepare for more house images - real and imagined - in my upcoming blogs. Here's one that I like: Christina Brinkman's charming sculptures. They look like toys. She does her own woodworking. The slab-formed houses are porcelain and she collects antique wheels from on-line auctions.