INTO THE STUDIO
Journal of a Mixed Media Photographer
Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate
“I am a mad gardener. I mutter and rant, and at night, I shake dry seeds out of my unruly mane of hair. I’m constantly visiting my local hydroponics equipment supplier. The garden is in my bones, in my gut, and in my hands that pearl sweat at the first hint from the overturned soil of March that it is time to sow Cherokee beans again in the open ground. And although I am a civil person, I am at my best when left completely alone at nightfall to spread that last wheelbarrow of aged horse manure around the base of the budded-out black currant plants from England.” -Wendy Johnson
I have the great good fortune to call this darling and wise woman my neighbor and friend. Wendy just recently published a new book, both poetic and practical – Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World. A Buddhist meditation teacher and organic gardening mentor, Wendy weaves together stories and advice about cultivating the earth with spiritual insights gleaned from her many years at Green Gulch Zen Center. The writing is as rich as good, well-composted soil. I have been savoring it, reading pages before bedtime to inspire garden dreams. Her book has inspired me that much that I’m going to go out and buy the necessary gardening tools and items that I may need to help start my gardening journey. I’m already considering what dimensions I’ll need for some cut to size railway sleepers I’ll repurpose for the space, and i’m considering the different vegetables and flowers I want to bloom across the garden. It’s fun to think about, and reminds me of her writing every time. Actually, if I do this I may definitely need to think about having some storage sheds introduced to my garden so that I have enough room to store all of this new stuff that I’m going to buying to help me get my dream garden. If I do decide to get myself a storage shed, I need to make sure that I get the right one for me and for all that I have in my garden! I don’t want to get it and find out that my gardening equipment doesn’t fit inside. Looking at some Sheds For Sale can help me find the one that suits.
Last month, I invited Wendy over to my studio to be interviewed for the latest Arts and Healing Podcast. We spoke about the healing power of gardening, the benefits of community gardening, creating memorial gardens, tips on gardening with children, environmentalism, and more. I invite you listen to this podcast either by downloading the podcast via iTunes, or clicking here to listen to the podcast directly on your computer (use the audio player on the right hand side).
The Arts & Healing Podcast is part of the Arts and Healing Network and is produced by my good friend and blogger/podcaster Britt Bravo – you might also enjoy her blog, Have Fun Do Good.
Gifts of Art and Advice from Kay Bradner
Kay Bradner came to visit when my daughter Anna was five weeks old. She brought with her a copper plate and etching tools in order to make a portrait of Anna as a gift for us. I was so touched by her thoughtfulness. The true gift she gave me that evening was the way she demonstrated living in the world as an artist. At the time, I was (and still continue) to be very sleep-deprived and all of my creative resources had been channeled into parenting. So Kay drawing Anna was an especially sweet gift – both honoring my daughter at five weeks old and reminding me of my own creativity.
Kay is a wonderful painter and printmaker who has raised an equally creative daughter. That night I asked Kay for advice about being both an artist and a mother. Kay shared how over twenty years ago when Claire was born, Kay was a single parent running a printmaking studio out of her home. Each day there were about eight people who arrived to work with her there. She would just slip Claire as a newborn into the front part of her apron and carry on her business. She even taught a workshop with Claire sitting in a bouncy chair. She says she did all this out of necessity – there was no option to stop working. As an artist mom, she gave me this advice…
- Find creative projects that can be done in very small intervals of time. Long, sustained periods of concentration are impossible to come by in the beginning – but anything that can be done in small snippets of time can be really rewarding.
- More than ever it is important to make art that fills you back up, so that you are replenished by your art endeavors and can bring that energy into parenting. Have fun.
- It’s really ok to step away from an art career for a long stretch time. It will always be there to return to. But your child will never be such a youngster ever again. Give yourself permission to take as long as you need to get back to your artwork.
Stretching into Uncharted Territory
I have been deep in the initiation of new parenthood – a whole new terrain. Eden Steinberg describes this state so well – I share with you here her quote from the book Finding Your Inner Mama.
“A few weeks after I gave birth to my first child, in the thick of my exhaution, worrying whether I was doing everything right, whether or not my baby would live through the night, I realized something. I realized that if I was going to survive this thing. I was going to have to grow and change. First of all, I was going to have to let go of a lot of things I felt entitled to: uninterrupted sleep (especially at the 4 month sleep regression stage), things going as planned, a feeling of being in command, the master of my circumstances. I also saw that I was ultimately going to have to let go of my very self concept, my idea of motherhood, and my expectations of my child. All of it had to go.
The idea of shedding these burdens was exciting. The thought itself was a relief. And it suddenly dawned on me that my whole concept of motherhood had been wrong. I thought that as a mother I would carefully mold and shape my children. If I did my job right, they would turn out to be well–adjusted, loving, thoughtful and interesting people. As it turns out, motherhood is molding and shaping me. At the end of all this, I am the one who could end up well-adjusted, loving, thoughtful and interesting.”
(Image: Evocation #008, from the series Evocations, ©2007)
Blink
Poet and painter Kirsten Rian has a wonderful practice of emailing a poem to her friends every Monday. This is one she recently sent me – it took my breath away.
Blink
by Morton Marcus
You’ve got to love life so much that you don’t want to
miss a moment of it, and pay such close attention to
whatever you’re doing that each time you blink you can
hear your eyelashes applauding what you’ve just seen.
In each eye there are more than 80 eyelashes, forty
above and forty below, like forty pairs of arms working,
80 pairs in both eyes, a whole audience clapping so loud
you can hardly bear to listen.
160 hands batter each other every time you blink.
“Bravo!” they call. “Encore! Encore!”
Paralyzed in a hospital bed, or watching the cold rain
from under a bridge—remember this.
(Image: Vision II, ©1999 from the series Mapping the Body)
Art Santa Fe
A quick post to share the news that work from Mapping the Body will be on display at Art Santa Fe this weekend at the booth for Modern Book gallery. One of the nice things about working with Modern Book is that they take my work to several art fairs every year. In January, they traveled to Photo Los Angeles; in June, they were in New York City for the Affordable Art Fair (their NY booth is pictured here); and now this July they are in New Mexico for Art Santa Fe. For me, as an artist, fairs are a great way to get more national exposure. For art lovers, it is like visiting a warehouse-sized candy store. Galleries from around the world sign up for booth space and display a selection of their represented artists, so there is lots of great art on view all in one venue. Art Santa Fe will take place at El Museo Cultural at 1615 Paseo de Peralta. For more information, please click here.
Lee Miller
I took a family excursion to SFMOMA on Friday evening with my father, daughter, and husband to attend a Foto Forum walk-through of the new Lee Miller show. It was such a treat to see so many vintage prints by her. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Lee Miller and relied heavily on books for my view of her photographic oeuvre. Now at SFMOMA I could view the wonderful subtleties in her prints. I drank them in, filling my creative well.
The walk-through was led by curator Marc Haworth Booth and Lee Miller’s son, Antony Penrose. They each animated the images on the wall with background stories and information. For example, the photograph below is a wonderful surrealist image of the magic electricity found in the everyday occurrence of opening a door. Marc Haworth Booth explained that this was a door to an exclusive shop and that the explosive illusion came from light hitting the marks left by the diamond rings of wealthy women scratching against the glass as they turned the handle. I have always viewed this image as articulating the power of the hand to ignite the creative spark that generates new art.
It is hard to consider Lee Miller’s work without connecting it to stories from her multi-faceted life. Born in Poughkeepsie in 1907, she modeled for Vogue magazine, was Man Ray’s mate/muse/assistant, ran a portrait studio in New York City, married an Egyptian and lived in Egypt for several years, then became one of the first female war correspondents during WWII, and after the war married Roland Penrose and settled down in the countryside raising her son and entertaining artistic friends like Picasso and Max Ernst. The rich variety of her life caused her son, when writing Lee’s first biography, to call it the Lives of Lee Miller. I have recently been enjoying Lee Miller: A Life and the catalogue for the exhibition.
It was a treat to see this show with my father, Charles Hobson. When he created his book, Parisian Encounters, about eight famous couples who met in Paris, he included Lee Miller and Man Ray, recounting the story of their first meeting. Lee Miller was traveling in Europe and decided to stay in Paris and study with “the best photographer in the city,” which at the time was Man Ray. So she went to his studio and rang the buzzer, but the concierge informed her he had already left for his summer holiday. Crestfallen, she went around the corner to a café, and finding him seated there, she marched right up to him and introduced herself, saying “Hi, I am Lee Miller, your new assistant.” He countered, “I don’t take assistants, and anyway I am leaving now for my vacation.” She said, “Fine, I am coming with you.” And she did and so began a rich collaboration.
It was stories like these that inspired me, as a student at Vassar, writing my thesis on Lee Miller in Poughkeepsie (the city where she was born), to really go after what I wanted in life. If, at a time when women most often defined themselves as mothers and wives, Lee could burst through limitations and live such a full, animated life, then so perhaps, could I. She helped me dream bigger and commit myself to the path of photography. When I began my series Mapping the Body, it was her and Man Ray’s vision of the cropped female figure that informed the way I photographed my own body – mining inspiration from their vision to create my own. In the end, I think there are people who touch you through time, despite death and never having met. Lee Miller is one of those intangible mentors for me. It’s why seeing her show on Friday filled me with that magic electricity of exploding hands.