Vacation: All I ever wanted

An Agnes Pelton, Transcedental painter of the 1930s

Since I have only a handful of readers, which is fine with me--I actually enjoy living under a rock-- I feel perfectly safe in expressing semi-publicly that as of this afternoon, my vacation begins. I have a lot to do before I leave--pick up canvases, pack, clean up my apartment, but I am so excited. Tonight I am beginning my week of fun with an outing with friends to Layali Dubai and I can't wait to have mezze and dance the night away with friends. I plan to stay out most of the night and splurge on a cab home from Astoria.

The opulent Layali Dubai!

If I can carry it, I'm thinking of bringing my cane to the beach. Here are my cane and the cane I bought for one of my good friends and a wonderful cane dancer, ViviMar, en route to our dance class this past spring. People always give you a seat on the bus when you travel with a cane; occasionally I accept. One funny story is that I overheard a student saying I was "buggin'--bedazzlin' ma cane," as I carried it onto campus. Despite the questions I may be asked or the strange looks I may receive, the outdoors is a great rehearsal space, even if the small quarters of a New York are more realistic considering our mostly small venues.

Saidi is appropriate for a shore vacation. It is the sound of sun and sand. Below is a cane/ saidi video that I watch a lot. I love Orit's glow and earthy energy.

In Virginia, I always make paintings, too. I am excited about the free schedule I will have next week. And the time with my family. Last year, when I had my paint box out, my niece, then two, kept exclaiming, "I LIKE IT! I LIKE IT, AUNT JEAN!" So perhaps and hopefully, nothing will have changed and I'll have an adoring audience for my painting. That would be sweet and fun, but really I paint to find a connection between human interior worlds and nature. It's not just a response to the beauty the environment offers, which it is, but the space within me that responds to the outer world. I really love the works of Agnes Pelton, and aspire to that kind of clear expression.

This song makes me extra happy and ready to party and swim:

Open

In my first year of graduate school, I spoke a lot about wanting to make "open paintings." I am interested in making paintings that invite the viewer in rather than those that defend their space as separate from the viewer compositionally. I was making work that I felt opened up to the viewer using techniques like radiating points and not "engaging my edges."

I learned about engaging my edges in art school, when my drawing professor kept giving me this compositional note. I was perplexed--I was using the whole page, including the corners. Finally, I asked my painting professor about it. He used a Baroque landscape painting like the one below to illustrate the concept. (This painting a Van Ruisdael, The Jewish Cemetery, 1655-60). "Do you ever notice how there's a fallen tree in so many landscape paintings?" "Sure." "Well, that's there for compositional reasons--to engage the edge." "And there's a tree branch in the upper corners, and a cloud formation, each of which form a triangle shape that cuts off the edge." In the case of Ruisdael's "Jewish Cemetary," a tombstone and a stream engage the lower left edge.

I was exploring this process of opening paintings in graduate school. It was hard because in the first part of 2007, I was making work that it seemed no one liked, with a few exceptions of people who "got" it or who like unkempt studio production. I dreaded studio critiques because I feared the remarks of my classmates who weren't supportive of my studio practice. I am a sensitive soul who invests a lot of personal care into my work. I was used to more gentle or constructive forums for critique for the most part.

Openness and transparency as aesthetic values are so expressed in Middle Eastern dance. This is a dance about bearing your inner personality, making eye contact with your audience, opening your body, and echoing, radiating moves. I have also come to trust and love each and every dancer in my Thursday night class as a classmate. We watch each other with a critical eye, but with love.

Recently, an audience member who is trained in Middle Eastern dance told me that my chest (my heart) seems very open, but that I need to open all the way down the spine. I think there may be some truth in that statement. I hold onto a lot of defenses--those daily worries from being untenured faculty, past judgments, current people in the dance world who have made it known they do not love me, my inner critique of my own dance, my body. I have some letting go to do to disengage my edges as a dancer. But as surely as it exposes these things to me, this dance teaches the body through pleasure and the sensations to which it attunes me. Through vulnerability comes strength.

A dance friend sent me the link below. It reminds me how safe it is not to care about the "haters" or just "non-fans" that I have.

Like a good meal (above is my eggplant manicotti, a South Beach recipe which I served with sauce), self-regard is a fortifying experience. It is a muscle that my dance flexes just as much as my physical body, probably more. By letting go of boundaries and immersing myself in pleasure, that wonderful manicotti and snap peas, and my dance, I open to all that is possible.

Below is a poem by one of my favorite writers.











Marie Ponsot
[from Springing: New and Selected Poems by Marie Ponsot]


Entranced


1


For openers
any wall has doors in it.


Openers who want
a door (not for air
but for passing through)


open & shut it
forcefully, under
heavy pressure
from the atmosphere
outside.


The ideal opener investigates
those osmotic waterfalls
which infiltrate
doorless walls.


2

To enter the enclosure
of the garden
or the citadel


be door, be son
or daughter


to the dearness
of pleasure.


Exits are disclosure.
Making an exit
can unlock you—
the way entrances do—


to being
outgoing.


In verse & reverse
word and worm
both turn.

A beautiful, open arabesque of a sugar snap stem that was mixed in with my lunch.

Busy

A friend recently posted on a New York Times article on busyness. While I understood it in the context of her own values (as a slow-foodie, crafter and a homesteader), I thought that it touched on major arteries of our society that resonated with me. But I felt that it tapped into the major truths of society, with the wrong spin. The article more or less critiqued the over-scheduled scenario which comprises most peoples' lives, indicating that it was ambition that drove people, and that they were not "smelling the roses" because of this over-scheduled state.

See, I am one of those people who is "busy-busy." I do find myself scheduling in loved ones for next week. And while I do have evening hours at work, it is mostly because of commitments that are what the author of this article would view as optional. But.

My college painting professor said to our class, "Society only creates as many artists as it needs." He talked about how mechanized and detached our society has become, and how it drives people to seek connection in the arts or creative pursuits. He stated, "The health of a society is indirectly proportional to the number of artists it produces, and our society has the greatest number of creatives in history." I believe that this busyness that is becoming "normal" is actually a good sign for consciousness awakening, bad sign for the state of our jobs and society.

People are seeking out creative outlets to strive, yes, for ambition, but not simply to compete, or least in my case, but to find meaning. I am grateful daily for having a career that lets me help people. I am a guide in someone's academic career. But there is a wide area of daily work that I fear does not truly provide value, or "matter," as the author says. Except in art. Except there.

There, a trance turning cape can make a blind child gasp with wonder. I'll never forget my own lesson in the power of painting.

I visited the rooms of Rembrandts in the British Museum while on vacation in London in 2003, excited to see skill, to see the things that underlie ambition: the swashbuckler strokes, the rich glazes, the draftsmanship. I wasn't expecting just the image of a small, thoughtful boy, Rembrandt's son, Titus, to simply communicate with me, to the point that I was fortified and also brought to tears. All I wanted was eye contact with this soul, this soul remembered by painting.

I think that many of us are indeed crushed, and seeking soulful experience that means something. I agree that our society is too ego-driven and ambition-focused. However meaning is something we have to strive harder to create for ourselves amid that crush. That is why that yoga lesson, that cooking class, the knitting circle, that solace of the studio may be the way that we are all, in our own way, "saving the life that is our own" in the words of Alice Walker.

Abundance

Well, it's here, the swelter and accompanying fruits of summer. I was planning to spend yesterday afternoon in relative quiet after a farmer's market visit. But Layla, my teacher, had other plans for me. A casual facebook comment about her visit to a class quickly solidified into a reservation for me for a class with a master teacher, with whom I had not yet studied, Anahid Sofian.

Suddenly, it meant early rising, with no room for a lazy Saturday if I was to get to market and to Anahid's master class. Layla officially kicked me into gear. As my mom said, "There would be no grass growing under either of our feet." And boy, would that be true with the footwork we would do. Aside from workshops, this was my first professional class (although Amar's classes in New York were also advanced, she embraced baby dancers, too). Layla had requested "sixes"--6/8 musical tempo, Moroccan music. One of the songs we danced to, Mach Mach, is featured in this video.

It's really fun to dance to this music because you don't count, you just try to learn to embody the rhythm. And we then did trance turns, where you turn until you shift consciousness. I did touch upon the place Anahid mentioned, going quickly and not caring much about the world around me. It felt wonderful until intense nausea set in. She said it takes practice for your inner ear to learn to adjust. Below is a photo of her company from her website, performing, I believe, a 6/8 number, based on the costuming. She told a beautiful story. She said that when her company performed and did trance turns, the black capes flew and whirred. They performed for children with disabilities at one venue and when the turning began, the children, many of whom were blind or deaf, audibly gasped. They could feel and sense the company's turns.