A gift for the ages
When art begets art, vibrant with new life
A couple of Aprils ago, Eric surprised me on my 50th birthday:
This intricate, three-dimensional collage by Billy Renkl is constructed on a background of antique letters fitted together and sealed with a translucent wash of blue and green. Cyanotypes of pen and ink orchid illustrations were then painstakingly cut out and watercolored, arranged, and fixed in a perennial celebration of springtime.
Collage and cyanotype are distinctive features in Renkl’s work. I particularly love the way he speaks about paper:
Vintage and antique paper can be surprisingly beautiful, and I find the way that it carries its history with it moving. It is almost like a body, the way that it ages, gets scarred, bears the marks of what has happened to it, who has owned it and how they used it.
This lush tangle of orchid plants is rooted in private mysteries of the past; some discernible, others not. Every letter is an author’s unique expression in bloom. It is beauty given and received. It offers nourishment to feed the creation of new beauty by another.
This is a love letter from my Love, who asked Renkl to show me what words could not. It makes my heart sing … a bit like this:
Deep in the pandemic, I found refuge in Late Migrations — a Natural History of Love and Loss, a resonant collection of essays by Margaret Renkl. The book’s knockout cover art and elegant illustrations were as captivating as her writing, and intriguingly in sync. The artist is Renkl’s brother, Billy, who appears in several stories as a little boy. Sister’s writing and brother’s art reflect shared influences of love, loss, and beauty while growing up in rural Alabama, surrounded by nature and a deeply rooted family.
I’d known about Margaret Renkl for decades, but her brother’s work was new to me. Curiosity piqued, I visited Billy Renkl’s ‘s website, where I found fine art and illustrations of attenuated elegance, bold and gorgeously colorful — but not loud. I felt drawn into them, assured of depth and riches without the blaring insistence to Notice me. Eric’s and my taste in art often diverges when it comes to color, so I sent him the link to see colorful art we both might enjoy.
We met Billy a few months later, but I’ll leave that for another story. For now, it’s enough to say that Billy’s appreciation for old paper, ink, and letters; the alchemy of printing, light exposure, layering, and collage; botanicals, birds, and architecture spoke directly to my heart. If I were a fine artist, he would be my lodestar. As I’m not, Billy Renkl is simply one of Eric’s and my favorite artists and people.
If Eric’s choosing Billy for help with my birthday is not surprising, what lay in store for us certainly was. Billy Renkl created a gift for the ages, from the ages, vibrant with new life.
Chatting about botanical art at that first meeting, I showed Billy some of the prints of orchid drawings my great-grandmother, Blanche Ames, did in connection with her husband, Oakes Ames, a botanist and world authority on Orchidaceae. This was hanging in my study at the time:
I’ve alluded to Grand B, as we call her, in other stories — staying in her Cape Ann, MA painting studio; her being the likely source of an original Audubon and a defining figure for our family ethos. Grand B died before I was born, but she’s always been a living presence in my life, mostly through my grandmother, great aunt, and dad, but other family who knew her, too.
More with every passing year, Grand B is an inspiration to me, the kind of woman I wish I were / strive to emulate. She was a devoted, actively engaged wife, mother, and community member without ever sacrificing the creative pursuits that were her lifeblood. She was a fearless advocate for women’s freedom, undaunted by social judgement. Mostly, she never stopped learning — exploring ideas, trying new techniques, finding solutions, or even inventing them — not in the name of achievement but for the joy of doing it. Living fully in this spirit requires courage that for me, requires a lot of cultivation.
I didn’t tell Billy any of this, but I imagine he sensed her significance, which Eric would corroborate. More importantly, in her art he saw an opportunity to create something entirely new; a work of art with depth and delicacy of form and meaning, bold and subtle at once. Deeply personal for me and an intriguing, visual delight for anyone.
Renkl seems to enjoy the unpredictabilities of cyanotype, embracing the challenge of responding to it as he does the vagaries of antique paper. Blending art, science, and the ineffable magic of sunlight, cyanotype does seem like a medium meant for this project. It also taps fond memories of making sunprints with my grandmother, Grand B’s youngest child and a talented photographer herself, and then doing the same with my own children.
Describing “A Letter to Kate from Eric About Beauty,” Billy wrote:
I found a copy of her book from the 1930s, made cyanotypes from the pen and ink illustrations, watercolored the cyanotypes, and built this piece with them — 24” x 36", collage with mixed media on wood panel.
The original orchid drawings were indeed executed in the 1930s and ’40s as illustrations for her husband’s research. The book Billy references is Orchids at Christmas, published in 1975 by Harvard University’s Botanical Museum and the Ames family, reprinted with additional articles in 2007:
It’s a slim little volume about the Christmas cards Blanche and Oakes Ames sent to friends and colleagues from 1937–1949, each card featuring one of her orchid illustrations with a poem chosen by Oakes. They were a remarkably progressive couple for their time and place, partners not only in marriage and family but in numerous working collaborations. In Orchids at Christmas, Pauline Ames Plimpton (aka Aunt Paunie, a firecracker formidable woman most dear to me) reflected on her parents:
In the beginning, after trying water-colors, [Blanche] did etchings, teaching herself this intricate and exacting medium. One of my earliest memories is of her dipping the copper plate, to which she had transferred her drawing, into a pan of acid and brushing it with a soft brush, doing all of this on the brick fireplace hearth in the “Old House” at Borderland, in North Easton, Massachusetts, the early American white farmhouse where they lived from 1906 until the main house was built in 1911. Later, she made pen and ink drawings, using a microscope and sometimes a camera lucida for scientific exactness.
… In Oakes’ diaries he always mentions the moment when she has completed a drawing. He was so interested in her work that he almost resented any distractions — children, household duties — that interrupted it.¹
All of this instills “A Letter to Kate from Eric About Beauty” with uniquely powerful meaning for me, of course. Even more meaningful is this: Billy Renkl could have created a gorgeous piece of art drawn from his own inspiration, and I’m confident Eric and I would have loved it. But that’s not who Billy is. Nor did he simply use ideas, images, history, and techniques that would delight me, such as botanicals, rock formations, antique paper, and ink. That he chose to create with such painstaking care, using material so deeply resonant for me, reflects a generosity of spirit that catches my breath, every time I look at the picture.
Feeling truly seen by one’s life partner is miracle enough; seeing it manifest in a gift of art is breathtaking generosity all its own. Marriage is hard. Twenty years into ours, I began to realize just how much I’d lost myself in Eric’s dreams and pursuits. Not because he’d asked me to; I abdicated this on my own, telling myself his surely are more relevant and alluring than mine, and hiding behind he is much more courageous than I! Living to shield my fear of failure, playing not to lose rather than to win, I ended up lost and flailing against regret. My coming to terms with this and finding a way forward hasn’t been easy for either of us.
I think this was when Grand B emerged as a role model for me. She was an artist who learned to make botanical illustrations in order to participate in her life partner’s passion, support his life’s work, and enrich it with her own. Any number of accomplished illustrators could have done the drawings for Oakes (early on, he did several himself). Blanche joined the thrill of discovery and challenges — scientific, artistic, academic, technological, logistical — for the joy of working with her husband in his element. From this bloomed an “extraordinary harmonization of art and science in a highly unusual husband and wife team.”²
Oakes himself said, “I have been blessed with a companionable, gifted wife, who has been my colleague and playfellow for nearly half a century.”³
All along, Blanche continued to paint portraits, interiors, land and seascapes. She collaborated with her younger brother, Adelbert Ames, Jr., to develop a System of Color Theory, mixing and charting over three thousand different color variations. She sculpted stunning panels for funerary monuments and emblems for the American Orchid Society; published political cartoons in support of women’s suffrage; and served as the first president of the Birth Control League of Massachusetts. She invented patented devices, designed houses, gardens, and waterworks and oversaw their construction.
Blanche Ames was fortunate in having the resources to allow time for these pursuits, as well as Oakes’ unwavering support, which would have been essential at the time. An actively engaged mother of four and sister of five, Grand B was remembered by her children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews with awe, yes, but mostly with warmth and intimacy. She had a way of welcoming them into the curiosity and excitement of whatever she was doing at the time. A life so blessed, I think she would say, is to be lived fully, with genuine curiosity, creativity, and care for all living creatures — people, animals, and plants alike.
“A Letter to Kate from Eric about Beauty” is a love letter written in a uniquely personal language for me. A gift from my husband, original art inspired by art that emerged from the vital and mutually enriching life partnership of my great-grandparents. I will never not be overwhelmed by this, or the sheer beauty of the picture itself.
As if that weren’t enough, I also think this picture represents Eric’s recognition of the sacrifices I made to support his passions. It calls on my recognition of them, alongside appreciation for how doing so enriched my life, too. It feels like Eric’s encouragement, confidence, and belief that I, too, am deeply rooted, full of creative life and beauty yet to be realized. A bold and gracious command to cultivate my I and live, knowing this will not deplete the soil, only make way for more flourishing still.
¹Orchids at Christmas, reprint edition by Descendants of Oakes and Blanche Ames (2007), p. 1.
²ibid, p. 2.
³ibid, p. 59.
