Aerial Bruststrokes

Yet another cold, rainy morning and I sit at my studio window watching tree swallows circle and loop, skim the water, and splash. They could be practicing touch-and-goes as if taking part in some aviation exhibition, but I prefer seeing them as painters dipping their brushes to color the pond and trees.

            I first met swallows soon after I met Blase, my husband. We were sitting on the front step of the farmhouse and I asked, “If you were to be reincarnated as an animal, what would it be?”

            Blase didn’t pause for very long before he said, “A swallow.”

            “A swallow? Why?”

Blase has a deep voice that resonates in his broad chest. He played football during high school and college. He’s physical and strong, so I imagined he would say, a lion, or some impressive creature.

            Blase answered my bewildered look, “Because they are so playful.”

            I didn't know a swallow from a wren but took in his comment as something significant.

Then he turned to me and asked what animal I would choose.

            I replied, “Maybe a lion.” I needed to be strong and able to fight for what I needed not only for myself but for my pride of three children.

            I have completely come around to Blase’s point of view. For the swallows, regardless of the lack of warmth and sunshine, do their thing, eat insects, and dazzle us ground walkers. The secret of the swallows’ contentment seems to be their willingness to fly in any weather, to be a complete expression of joy no matter the circumstances. I know how hard that is to do, especially when strong emotions come up, especially when the suffering and grief I feel increases with every bit of news from around the globe.

Navigating the currents of difficulties that arise is our daily practice. The storms will never disappear, but we learn to be better fliers. Like the swallows, we practice our take-offs and landings, until one sunny day, involuntarily we grab a brush, paint the pond pink, the trees purple, and the sky an emerald green, even when it is raining.

Pink Pond, watercolor, LH

Simple Pleasures

“I nurture simplicity among the gardens and fields”
                         —Chinese farmer and poet, T’ao Chien, 365-427 C.E.

These days, many of us have no choice but to bring simplicity into our lives. Many of our favorite activities have been taken away whether this means no gym workouts, no visiting with friends and family, or no shopping at a favorite store. We scrounge through the pantry shelves for something to cook, making do with what is on hand. Or go outside like I did the other night to gather parsley and a bit of coriander that overwintered, new shoots of spearmint, and a large bowl of stinging nettles, to add to some sad looking basil leaves in the back of the fridge. The greens, smushed into the Cuisinart, along with oil, garlic, lemon juice, and pecans made a hearty pesto. Our creative meals can bring us great delight.

Simplicity can also mean living more intentionally, with more discipline and purpose. It can be unburdening our lives as well as decluttering our minds. Usually our minds flit from one thought to the next, from one sensation to another, moving quickly and erratically, but there is the silence when all distractions and desires fade. In many spiritual traditions, one sits in meditation to calm thoughts in order to experience deep silence. Sitting still, not moving, is the aid to find the stability of simplicity that allows for an opening to that great Silence.

For me, the concentration required by sculpting, painting, and writing creates the fertile ground for merging with the work, and within that merging, I find stillness. A musical score gives structure to mark periods of sounds and rests. The German-born pianist, Artur Schnabel (1882–1951) wrote,

“The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides.”

The great jazz musician Miles Davis said it this way:

“Don’t play what’s there; play what’s not there.”

Lao Tzu, the Chinese sage advises, “Become empty of yourself and realize inner silence.” It sounds straightforward, but who knows how to empty themselves. I can’t sit myself down on a meditation cushion and say, I’m going to find silence: I only find myself in the midst of a great amount of activity. That’s why cultivating the earth always feels like cheating, the back door: the simple act of weeding as the antidote for the anxiety of our present times. But even weeding can be a challenge. I was talking to a friend yesterday and said,

“You know, weeding is not always that easy. It’s not just pulling the long white weed thread. Some weeds like vetch are impossible, impenetrable. It’s exhausting to dig through their density of roots. And when it’s that difficult, there’s no quieting the mind.”

Meister Eckhart, the Christian contemplative wrote,

“It’s not what we do that makes us holy, but we should make holy what we do.”

Ariel, grafting Olympic Asian pear scion wood onto rootstock in the Asian pear orchard.

So I return to the words of T’ao Chien: “I nurture simplicity among the gardens and fields.” I remind myself that he is surely weeding the gardens and plowing the fields, and he is nurturing simplicity. When I only concern myself with getting the work finished, checked off the to-do list, I take no pleasure in it. When I forget the to-do list, then the merging that I so love takes place. We can make holy everything we do. We can nurture simplicity everywhere.

Baby snapper turtle Ariel found when we were moving a pear tree to plant new peaches. The turtle stretched and then we quickly dug it back into the soil.

Forest Tales

Our quartet, my stepfather Bill, daughter Ariel, and partner Blase, returned one week ago from our trip to Tibet. However, condensing two intense weeks of pilgrimage into a brief blog, like making a few jugs of sweet juice from bushels of ripe apples, takes time. The apples need to sweat, I need to distill the experience.

Meanwhile the Catalpa tree with its large heart-shaped leaves outside my studio window is no longer green and leafy, but is sending brown flying carpets everywhere. And in the woods, the sight-lines are clear as tree branches lay bare the sky, and the spiced air welcomes the forest walker.

Next Sunday morning, November 17th at 11 am, I invite you to join me for a forest walk in one of Stow, Massachusetts’ conservation areas, The Leggett Woods. Here along a meandering trail, I installed thirteen sculptures, a world of acorn-capped acrobatics, a mother and child, a boy and a turtle, a frog, each one fixed onto a forest stone. The storyteller sits near the beginning reading to three acorn-capped children.

Caps for Sale

The paths are cleared and covered with wood chips so discovering each one is not difficult. The Stow Conservation Trust, the private land preservation organization in Stow, hopes to attract more families to explore their trails by creating special places to visit and enjoy. 

The genesis of this project began along Old Frog Pond Farm’s woods trails where a series of bronze meditating figures are permanently installed. They are small, and you would think go unnoticed, and perhaps do for some people, but most others notice one sculpture, and then another, and another, and are delighted by the shift in scale, the quietness, and simplicity of these bronze figures on rocks.

Vita Matisse sitting with sculptures.

My granddaughter enjoys sitting on the large rock among them. Other children add acorn caps, a perfect fit for the bowed bronze heads. We don’t encourage interaction with the sculpture on exhibit at the farm, but I thought these acorns caps were a charming addition and have since cast a few figures topped with them. The wood burns out in the lost wax process.

When I was considering a possible sculpture for the Leggett Woods, I thought about a village of sculptures that might encourage children to get down on their hands and knees, and play. Perhaps add some more acorn caps, or build a little house of twigs, or add stones and leaves—an artwork to encourage interaction with the forest life.

The Stow Conservation Trust worked hard to find volunteers to help with the land clearing and creation of the trails. I am especially grateful to the committee I worked with directly, Janet Kresi Moffat, Ann Carley, and Carol Gumbart, and to the Alice Eaton Grant Funds for supporting the commission.

Another person I have worked with for many years is poet, Susan Edwards Richmond. In the first issue of Wild Apples, the journal of nature, art, and inquiry we founded and edited with two other friends in 2006, Susan wrote poetry for a series of my bronze boat sculptures. When I told her about this commission, I hesitantly asked if she might like to write a poem—I knew her creative focus was now on children’s books (Bird Count published by Peachtree Publishing Company came out last month!). As the date for installation got closer, Susan wrote, “Where are you installing the sculptures in Stow?  Could you use another hand? I can meet on the 11th as long as it's after 1:45 pm.”

It was a kind offer, but among Susan’s many talents is not operating a hammer drill or epoxy gun. I didn’t reply. She wrote again a few days later, “What time? Would you like some local help? :)”.  This time I answered, “Sure! Maybe around 11? You follow the trail then take the left fork. Can’t miss.”

Susan arrived when John Lowe, my assistant, and I were well into the installation. We’d been there since 9 am. Of course, Susan and I both knew she wasn’t coming to help with the install, but with notebook in hand she immediately knelt down in front of a sculpture.

Susan will be reading the Forest Tales poems at the opening next Sunday. There will be kids’ activities, refreshments, art, nature, and poetry. Hope to see some of you on Sunday, November 17 at 11 am. And I promise a Tibet blog soon!

Directions: Leggett Woods is on Whitman Street just off of Gleasondale Road (Route 62). If you are driving South on Route 62 from the intersection of Route 117 in Stow, go about a mile, turn left at the fork with signs for Honey Pot Orchards , and the Leggett Woods parking area is on your right.

The Storyteller



Generations

Dedicated to Annette Barbara Weiner (1933–1997)

I was recently prompted to read “Once More to the Lake,” the essay E. B. White wrote about returning to his childhood summer home, this time with his eleven-year-old son. For White, then 43, memories flooded back as he gazed at his son’s hands on the fishing rod. White no longer knew who he was—the son of his father or the father of his son. Disturbed by this unsettling dichotomy he wrote:

I looked at the boy, who was silently watching his fly, and it was my hands that held his rod, my eyes watching. I felt dizzy and didn't know which rod I was at the end of.

What is passed between parent and child, and how does this happen?

Generations is the title of the current exhibit at Hopkinton Center for the Arts, and the title refers to the relationship of the two exhibiting artists, my daughter, Ariel Matisse, and myself. Less than two years ago, Ariel decided to make an outdoor sculpture for our annual sculpture exhibit at the farm. This was the summer after she helped with the exhibit, After Apple Pruning . Taken with using wire while working on a collaborative sculpture for that exhibit, Ariel wanted to make a wire tree and asked to use a hollow log I had in the studio. I’m always fascinated with hollow logs—the form and the emptiness. The heart sutra, chanted daily in all Buddhists monasteries, says, Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Ariel wanted to gold leaf the saw cut, the way I have done since making the six-part Inside the Ordinary Maple in 1998. 

Inside the Ordinary Maple, wood and gold leaf, LH

 “Of course, I will show you.” First you sand it smooth, gradually using finer sand paper. Then it needs to be urethaned to seal the wood. Moisture seeping up into the gold leaf will lift it. Then you need to apply the sizing and wait for it to be the perfect tackiness to receive the leaf.

Gold leaf is between .1 and .125 millionths of a meter or micrometers. One thousand sheets will equal an ordinary piece of paper. It’s not something you can grasp with your fingers. To pick up a small fragment, you will find a soft watercolor brush is useful, rubbing it first in your hair to create some static electricity. For large areas, I use a rolled leaf that comes with a thin backing material. Once the leaf is placed down on the sizing and pressed in gently, you lift off the backing.

Ariel and I sat around the log each on our stool, our hands moving together. I watched her fingers. They knew how to hold the tools, to feel the smooth surface of wood, to lift the backing. I showed her how to shine the gold, to burnish it with a cotton ball.

Then the project was all hers. Cutting wire to length, hanging this Medusa head of tangled wires from a hook on the ceiling, bending, shaping, counting the complex pattern. Twisting the roots and drilling the ends into the trunk. Where did she learn all of this? When? What is transferred between mother and daughter? Or, father and daughter ? Ariel’s father is a gifted ‘maker of things’, as he likes to say.

When the director of the Center, Kris Waldman, needed a show to fill the slot from January 25 to March 15, my name was suggested.  She came to the studio on December 24th and took photos. As she was leaving, I said I’d like to do the exhibit with my daughter. She was surprised at first, but then I pointed out two of Ariel’s pieces, Spiral, on the wall, and Willow, her first tree, the one we had gold leafed together. Ariel then sent Kris photos of her newer work.

Tempo V, Ariel Matisse

Kris chose sculptures from each of us and suggested the title for the exhibit. One of my pieces is, Filling the Vessel, a large five-panel sculpture I made in memory of mother. In the gallery, it faces the wall of Ariel’s sculptures. I feel I am in between the two of them. I relate to E.B. White’s uncertain feeling of no longer knowing who he is. 

I seemed to be living a dual existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act, I would be picking up a bait box or laying down a table fork, or I would be saying something, and suddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture.

Recently, my art no longer feels like something I own; it belongs to something more fluid, a stream, a flooding of creativity across generations. I’m playing my part, doing what is in front of me, inhabiting my life as fully as I can, yet letting it flow. E.B. White describes how, while in the boat with his son, “A school of minnows swam by, each minnow with its small, individual shadow, doubling the attendance, so clear and sharp in the sunlight.” He seems to be seeing himself as one of these minnows, insignificant, one of the schooling fish. It’s points to the conundrum of form and emptiness. The shadow and the real are inseparable. White is not father and not son; and both father and son—a beautiful rising and falling of creation. The living and the dying, and the what never dies.

 We hope you will see the exhibit at the Hopkinton Center for the Arts, Hopkinton, MA, and perhaps join us at our reception on Friday, March 1; 6–7:30 p.m. The gallery is open Monday–Saturday, 9–5 p.m. and during the center’s evening events. The exhibit is up through March 15.

Left: Ariel Matisse, In the Garden, 2019, copper wire, walnut, 11" x 6" x 5½". Right: Linda Hoffman, Long-Legged Man, 2006, bronze, branch, wood block, 65" x 16" x 16".

My mother, Annette Weiner, would be so happy to see the exhibit. If I had thought of it earlier, I would have suggested we exhibit one of her paintings along with our sculpture.

Tree, Annette Weiner

When my mother went to college, she already had two children ages six and nine. Starting out as a Fine Arts major at the University of Pennsylvania, she then changed to anthropology and went on to earn a PhD the year I graduated from high school. As in the orchard, the cycle continues from seed, to blossom, to fruit. This poem by Dawna Markova says it well.

 I Will Not Die an Unlived Life

                       
I will not die an unlived life
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.