In the Studio

Long I lived checked by the bars of a cage;
Now I have turned again to Nature and Freedom.

                                                                        —T’ao Chi’en,  tr. Arthur Waley

I think about the purpose of my sculpture while our president-elect considers appointments of men to positions of power — men who are openly anti-Semitic, anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-anyone different from that face they see in the mirror.

Birdcage, bronze figure, wood, and found objects, LH

When I am working in the studio, I have to separate myself from the frenzy of the world and quiet my  mind. If I bring the chaos of the world into a sculpture I create more chaos. The process requires me to enter a sanctified space and focus on one thing. Post-election, I am finding this hard to do.

Two weeks ago, I submitted Birdcage along with several other sculptures for an exhibition on the theme, Home, Self, Spirit, Space. The prospectus asked for a statement about the work. Capturing what I do in a few sentences is always challenging, but I wrote, “I create small bronze figures and use either wood or found objects as ‘homes’ for these figures to inhabit. The natural materials and patina of age of the old objects give this work a context outside of the modern world. The sculpture creates a contained and lucid space the viewer can enter.” 

In the Wave, bronze figure and wood, LH

Woman in Log, bronze figure and wood, LH

An orchard is also such a space. The wood nymph, Pomona, one of those lesser gods in the Roman pantheon, was the Goddess of orchards. She is often pictured with a curved pruning knife, walking among her trees, splitting the bark, and inserting grafts. She  waters them from a nearby stream with the same attention one would give a new lover. Yesterday, my daughter Ariel and I walked through our orchard. We pruned out an armful of water sprouts, those twigs that grow several feet straight up in one year on apple trees. We’re working together on a sculpture for an exhibit using apple prunings as the primary medium. Ariel is grafting tree branches, covering the largest wall in the studio while I sculpt the small figures that will populate the tree. We work in silence, usually without stopping for lunch, only speaking when it is about the process. 

Ariel Matisse grafting apple branches.

Some art is explicitly about fighting injustice and racism, it speaks loudly and will not be silenced. And it is important! But right now, I find it helpful to sit quietly, sculpt small figures and bend apple branches with my daughter. It feels good to work in the studio where we can recharge and aspire to make art that will breathe fresh air into the world.

P.S. Look closely at Birdcage, the door is open!

Even in Darkness

A Jewish law requires farmers to keep Shemitah, to let their fields lie fallow for a full year, once every seven years. It is written in the Torah, the holy book. During the Shemitah year, the farmer opens the orchard gate to everyone. This wild fruit is free for the picking. 

Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather in its fruit. But in the seventh year shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a Sabbath for G‑d . . .

The time of Shemitah is a period for the land to rest and for the farmers to devote to their spiritual life. Of course, farmers with animals still need to care for them, but the intent is for the farmers to take a break from physical labor, and dedicate themselves to inner work. 

Winter Barn, 2016, Cloth, Found Objects, Wood, Bronze Figure, 2' x 2', LH

Taking a little time to be in quiet within the day or the week is keeping Shemitah on a small scale, similar to observing Sabbath or attending church. I like to rise early in the dark hours before the trafficking of the world begins. The noises I hear are the quiet hooting of distant owls and our parrots cooing before I slip the night blankets off their cages. It’s like going to the monastery for a few days, which I did last weekend for the Wild Grasses Sesshin.  A Sesshin in Zen Buddhism is a silent retreat when participants follow a strict schedule of long hours of meditation, ritualized sharing of meals, and work practice. Silence, both inner and outer, is at the heart of the retreat. We walk with heads down, eyes lowered, making no eye contact, trying to keep our attention within our own minds and not think about what is happening around us.

This retreat was different than the monthly Sesshin at Zen Mountain Monastery, because it was all women. The layout of the meditation hall, usually fastidious rows of square meditation cushions in formal lines, was, for this retreat, softened by forming two concentric circles. We were a community of women. We shared our pain, our joy, and our equanimity, all mysteriously in and through the silence. We ate passing large bowls of food from one to the other and ladling it out into our bowls. The hot water came at the end to clean the bowls, and we sipped this offering and were grateful for the delicious food to sustain our practice, prepared by the men at the monastery who supported this time when the women could be together. 

We noticed in taking time out from the company of men a deeper relaxation into the space of our own bodies. When I returned home and was telling my partner, Blase, and our friend, Ron, about the retreat, they both said, “That’s how men feel, too, when they gather without women.” Blase and Ron have been part of the men’s workshop world, leading programs such as Men’s Wisdom Council and Mythic Warrior for many years. It’s good for the sexes to separate and then come back together, carrying what we have learned about ourselves.

Susan Sontag said in the 80’s in response to the frenzy of large-scale art, “There is too much art making and not enough listening.” I know I need more of this deep listening, but it can be challenging to find time in a busy day to pause and be grateful, and to listen with my whole body. Poets know this kind of deep listening. I love the description of the poet Rilke, a guest in the Duino castle near Trieste, hearing the verses that later became the Duino Elegies, ten mystical and haunting poems of despair, loneliness, and ecstasy.

Farmers used to write during the winter months, the resting time. Today, growing seasons are extended with heated green houses and there’s little break between planting garlic in late fall, digging up root crops, and starting seeds and setting out early greens. It's hard to find that quiet time.

I’ve read that 21st century farmers in Israel find that keeping Shemitah is challenging, and they have ways to get around it. The reality of our time is different from 2500 years ago, but the intention remains a good one. It is necessary to push that pause button, to write poetry, to take time to taste the fruit. Especially in times of darkness, it’s good to gather with friends and communities, listen deeply, and share the fruits we discover.

Solstice Celebration, Old Frog Pond Farm, 2014

Especially as the days grow darker; remember there’s even more work to do. We must get involved with issues we care about, support women and children everywhere, and especially protect the earth — she’s going to need our help more than ever.

 . . . because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us . . .

                                                from Rilke’s Ninth Elegy, tr. Stephen Mitchell

Southern Apples, an Elephant, Monkey, Rabbit, and Bird, Two Mango Trees and a Birthday

I celebrated my 60th birthday this week. My partner, Blase, gave me a first edition of the book Old Southern Apples, written by Lee Calhoun. Southern apples might sound like an oxymoron, since not many people think of the South as an Eden of apples. But over 1300 varieties originated south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and these apples are an important part of the area’s agrarian history. Old Southerners not only talk about Bloody Butcher corn and Red Ripper peas, but the now extinct apples like Fall Ambrosia (sounds so delicious), and the still available Limbertwigs.

Old Southern Apples describes the unique features of over 1600 apple varieties (though 300 of them originated elsewhere but were grown in the South). The book divides these apples between 300 still growing or available at nurseries and 1300 now extinct Southern apples, the names and descriptions mostly taken from old nursery catalogues (a coincidence that both numbers are 300). The book also contains forty-eight plates of hand-painted apple pictures selected from the seven thousand in the collection of the National Agricultural Library. That was from the days when the United States Department of Agriculture hired artists!

Old Southern Apples, Plates 15 - 18; Photos: Jerry Markatos 

As you may know, apples grown from seed are the unique progeny of two parents, because the blossoms are cross pollinated. Most of these seeded trees crop with hard, sour, or small fruit, better for the hogs than for eating off the tree. Some apples are good for making hard cider and apple cider vinegar, but a few trees out of a thousand planted might produce unexpected, remarkable apples that would be given names and propagated. Of the 1600 apple varieties mentioned in this book, all of them grew from seed to be extraordinary apples. In the South, whether the settlers were large landowners or tenant farmers, they all planted out their orchards with seeds, they didn’t set out grafted rootstocks. It was the way it was done.

Today, it would be the rare individual who would scatter seeds to plant an orchard. After all, who would want a collection of wild apples? Large orchardists order sapling trees from wholesale nurseries in the thousands or even ten thousand. Blocks of the same variety, interspersed with another variety for pollinating, are planted. It is the researchers who cross apples and come up with new varieties for orchards to trial. A few apples become the darlings of the marketplace. This approach to apple growing is very different from the grand creativity that nature realizes with such ease. As Lao Tzu said, Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Inside my card, Blase tucked a print-out of a Buddhist tale. When King Mahajanaka, an earlier incarnation of the Buddha, was traveling through a park, he saw a monkey sitting on a branch of a mango tree. The King longed to stop and pick a few mangoes, but traveling with his large retinue, he had to continue without stopping. He decided he would sneak back alone that night to pick a few mangoes. That night, when he got to the grove, he lifted his torchlight and saw that someone had gotten there before him. The mango tree was stripped bare of fruit; its limbs were broken and its leaves lay scattered everywhere. He was saddened to think that this beautiful tree would likely not survive this ravagement. Then he saw another mango tree, one that had not been harmed. He realized that this tree avoided the carousing thieves because it had no fruit. The King returned and pondered his experience with the two mango trees. He decided he would renounce his title and give away everything he owned. He would become a tree without fruit. I love the story of the King Mahajanaka and the mango tree, but it could be taken as a teaching in renunciation. As many of you know, the orchard at Old Frog Pond Farm had no apples this year, and it was not because I renounced my title of orchardist.

The Birthday card Blase gave me was hand painted in Bhutan; he had saved it from our trip seven years ago. It is of a bird on a rabbit on a monkey’s shoulder, on an elephant (the bird and rabbit are hard to see). They are walking under a mango tree laden with fruit. It is an illustration of the “Four Harmonious Friends,” a much loved Bhutanese tale. These animals worked together; the bird planted the seed, the rabbit watered the sapling, the monkey fertilized it, and the elephant protected it until it grew into a beautiful tree with fruit for all of them.

"Four Harmonious Friends" handpainted in Bhutan

I loved my gift of so many fruit related stories. Our orchard is so much more than its acres of grafted trees. It’s a language we speak and share; a wild grove of poetry, paintings, sunsets, clouds, blossoms, and, hopefully next year, delicious fruit.

The Tools of Art

Today I live on a farm in Harvard, Massachusetts, where I tend the growth of three hundred apples trees, forty Asian pears, and a large fall raspberry crop. But fifteen years ago, I was an artist who lived in Groton with my husband and three children. Growing fruit was not on my radar, though like many New Englanders, we went apple picking every fall. 

There was always a festive atmosphere of pumpkins, corn stalks, and apple baskets on Old Ayer Road in September. Hundreds of people came with their cars packed for a day in the country. A traffic cop directed the crossing as diesel tractors pulled hay wagons filled with families to different blocks of the orchard. Long lines formed at the farm-stand windows, and customers paid for their bags before heading into the trees for picking. We picked apples, climbing often to the top of that beautiful orchard.

Then one year, the orchard suddenly closed, and a sadness blanketed the hillside. The branches no longer blossomed in spring, and fruit no longer weighted the branches in fall. What was happening in Groton was no different than what was happening all over the country. In the United States, between 1900 and 2010, the number of farms decreased from 30 million to 2 million, a staggering tsunami of change.

Living in rural New England in the nineties, I had a first row seat to witness the disappearance of farmland from the landscape. The vanishing happened as quickly as a magician’s trick; an apple orchard became Orchard Lane with twenty-five new houses. A dairy farm became Easy Acres, a sub-division with forty duplexes. It was sad to watch and there was little I could do. However,  when something bothers me, I find it appearing in my art. I put a notice in the local newspaper asking for donations of old agricultural tools for an artwork about the disappearance of farmland. From one small notice in the Groton Herald, the phone started to ring. People responded with warmth and generosity. Usually it was a single tool, a saw that had belonged to a grandfather, a scythe, or a treasured rake. One man offered me rough-sawn boards with sinuous edges.

In little time, I had a collection of tools that evoked human effort, the sweat and muscle of hand labor. I took a heavy garden fork and a selection of colors from my box of Shaker tape, the remnant material from chair-making, a gift from the owner of Shaker workshops. I wove these colorful bands through the tines of the fork and wrote a poem to accompany the sculpture.

Common Land, LH

Another tool was a gift from a veterinarian in Groton. She gave me a five-foot saw with a mosaic of cutting teeth. I was definitely a ‘tree hugger.’ I hated to see trees taken down along town roads. I bemoaned electric wires that cut through their butchered canopies. There was a great tree in the common near the Nashua River. One day a large painted orange ‘X’ appeared on it. The next day, I spray painted that ‘X’ brown to match the bark and the state highway men drove right by it. 

The second sculpture I made was Marked Trees, created with this five-foot saw blade, bands of green cloth, and long slivers of sawn wood.

green woods
old pasture
buried rust

 the saw sharp
silence
of marked trees  

I loved these tools and the stories they evoked. They brought out sorrow, loneliness, and longing. A wheel, a bucket, and an old piece of rope became the sculpture, Empty Barn.

Saving a woodlot is relatively easy; saving a farm is not as simple — you need a farmer.

Now, fifteen years later, I am an artist and a farmer with many old agricultural tools. Old Frog Pond Farm’s annual outdoor sculpture exhibit gathers artists from all over New England who celebrate the connection between art and the natural world in their work. The old agricultural tools no longer evoke sadness and loss; I work with them in the soil or plant them as sculpture.

The Juggler in the Orchard, An old cultivator and river stones. Photo: Ricardo Barros

Fifteen years ago I never imagined I would have brought a dying orchard back to health. When I put the intention to save farmland into my art, I didn't imagine I would become that farmer. I guess it’s important to know what you really want. What we really intend, does come true.