Art All Around Me stories & news
Spring is turning fast to summer, and I wonder where the year is going. Intentions for 2024 remain unfulfilled, including many improvements to Art All Around Me stories and newsletters, but so it goes. Here’s what I’ve got to share!
A New Landing Page
This link makes it easy to access Art All Around Me stories from one place.
You can bookmark this landing page, of course, and find the link on my Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn profiles (called a “link-in-bio,” naturally) Please share with anyone who might enjoy!
The most recent story link will appear at the top. And here -
The Body in Art and Life
Inspiration, Healing, and Play
published May 25, 2024
Growing up, I wanted to be fast, graceful, and effortless in motion. Alas, I was none of these. Every year, I dreaded the 50-yard dash at school, praying just not to come in dead last. Any sequence of dance steps was hopeless, anything requiring flexibility even worse. When cool girl currency was an explosive run of handsprings, I couldn’t so much as complete a cartwheel.
My older brother teased me mercilessly, as only an older sibling can. His imitations of my run (in a defensive state of chase) and my dance across the living room (thinking myself safe behind Dad’s back at the piano), still make me wince. I was a serious little girl, often shy, yet irrepressibly expressive.
“You were rather easy to tease,” Dad admits, mildly contrite.
Watching those who could do these things — sprinters, gymnasts, dancers — I felt profound appreciation tinged with a curious longing. Not envy so much as amazement, at how beautiful power could be in the human body. Interestingly, I first recall registering this as a small child looking at my grandfather’s sculptures, particularly loving the grace of his female figures.
My paternal grandparents’ home, here in Nashville, was called Roundabout because of the circuitous route to the front door. It was a washed brick house set amidst rolling countryside, with broad vistas and giant trees in every direction. Roundabout was a magical place, full of creative whimsy but also a bit wild, sometimes spooky, as eagles circled and crows called across the wide open sky.
Gramps’ sculptures were all over, on bookshelves, spinning in mobiles overhead, and presiding over the ponds he also liked to build. He mostly modeled portrait busts, full-body figures, and other creatures in clay before casting them in bronze or concrete. He also liked to experiment; carving soft stone, molding scraps of window screen, or working with even humbler materials.
Unlike his older brother Goode, sculpture was just a hobby for Gramps. He’d become a lawyer, in accordance with parental expectations. After nearly 30 years of it, he’d grown bitterly unhappy; Dad recalls him chain-smoking and roaring with anger on the regular. I can hardly conceive of this. By my lifetime, Gramps was a different man — open and playful, deeply compassionate, like light — having quit the law to become an Episcopal priest, the call he’d felt since childhood. It was transformational.
Gramps’ sudden death in 1977 was a profound shock and loss in our family and a defining marker in my childhood. Just the year before, he’d baptized me in a family service, outdoors at our home. I was five, late to salvation and glad for it, because I still can feel the pressure of Gramps thumb marking my forehead with the sign of the cross. Shaping me, like clay.
One day, I was surprised to see Gramps’ old stool and sculpting podium, smeared with clay and spattered in plaster, standing in the bright, windowed alcove of my brother’s bedroom. I was 14 or so. My envy dissipated quickly because it made perfect sense. My brother’s blossoming talent for sculpture echoed Gramp’s own. It was like a friendly ghost had come to live with us.
This glazed ceramic sculpture by my brother is among my favorites of all — the easy stretch of her body, lithe and strong, a whisper of Gramps’ influence inflected by Auguste Rodin’s muscular style, the clarity of my brother’s own emerging talent.
My brother gave her to me as a high school graduation gift, a surprise that touches me still. She’s been with me in every dorm room, apartment, and household for the past 30 years. Mysterious like a cat. Resonating with cherished memories of our childhood.
Speaking of Rodin — I visited his home, now the Musée Rodin, in Paris after college. The house, all echoey floors, high ceilings, and natural light, is surrounded by gardens. Everywhere, Rodin’s presence is palpable. The sense of place moved me as much as the art displayed indoors and out, the air suffused with a haunting creativity that reminded me of Roundabout.
I brought this print home to remember the visit.
Rodin’s creativity focused on expressing the life force of the body, its
vital energy, strength and equilibrium — just as dance explores the body’s relationship with space and weightlessness through extension, flexibility and freedom of line.
Something about the stretch of the dancer’s limbs touched the longing I still carried — the way she reaches yet binds herself, foot gripped firmly in hand like a bow string pulled taut. I’d become similarly bound over the years, coiled tight as a spring under my own self control.
At some point, my childhood appreciation for the power and beauty of other bodies had turned against my own. Pudgy and slow, I’d grown to hate my body for the shame it brought, and the promise I’d never feel such easy grace. I began to punish it with food deprivation. The boundary between one’s body and one’s sense of self is perilously porous. Quickly, this became a way to punish myself for not being good enough in any way. A way to restrict myself from being too much — too emotional, too difficult, too tense, too serious, too … me.
An unexpected pregnancy in my mid-20s catapulted me out of this self-destructive behavior. Fully at its mercy for a change, I woke to my body’s need for food, rest, and care — not just discipline. It was terrifying to let go. Astonishing to taste what existing in my body without conflict and cruelty could be. In childbirth and new motherhood, I found genuine awe and respect for the female body — its transformation, resourcefulness, brute strength, and capacity for tenderness. I can’t say I made peace with myself, but I did feel a bit more acceptance; grace of another kind.
Around that time, Eric and I bought this sculpture by Kevin Christison at a fundraising auction for the San Francisco Art Institute.
Alira 2000 stood in a corner, serene and somehow defiant, the steel of her spine hidden within the graceful curves of a body molded in plaster. The rough, golden texture, shadowy patina, and missing head and limbs evoked ancient classical sculpture and architectural ruins I loved and missed studying. This was near the time I found Melencolia by Gary Edward Blum.
Christison replied to my recent email:
I remember your piece very well. It is a plaster and steel study. I only did a few of those back in that period. Coincidentally, I am now getting ready to revisit that type of emerging figure composition but plan to do them in cast/fused glass.
Alira is an enigma, emerging from elements as earthy as our own. I was immersed in this earthiness at the time, my days consumed with nursing, changing, bathing, and caring for my infant son. Alira’s lack of limbs and head were also strangely relatable. My body was still a shape shifting mystery, defiant of my control, still tethered to the life of another. My heart and mind were just as altered, the fierceness of love for my son rendering me new and mysterious to myself, tapping into something deeply essential in me.
I’m reminded of one of Gramp’s sculptures, a woman’s reclining form emerging from a lump of soapstone, that stood on a small cane-topped table in the Roundabout hall. It was a deep green-gray color and satiny smooth, inviting little fingers to touch. I wonder whatever happened to her?
When I was recovering from childbirth, I started doing pilates. This was long before it took on the craze for sculpting, burning, and such. For the first time, I felt calm and steady in exercise rather than booby-trapped, captive to scores, times, or stakes to win. I ended up training as an instructor, loving the anatomy studies and learning to recognize the mechanics of my own body’s movement. Pilates also satisfied an ongoing drive for self-control: with disciplined effort, I could become remarkably strong and balanced, even find a moment of grace now and then, however fleeting.
A few years later, we encountered this sculpture, A New Dance, by Lorri Acott Fowler in Park City, Utah, and brought her home. She was my birthday gift.
I still catch my breath when I come around a corner and see the reach of her limbs, soaring like wings. The tensile strength of her legs, from pointed toes to muscled thighs, her broad hips a fulcrum, the seat of power in the female body. The arc of her abdomen, chest, and neck is wide open and vulnerable; her head flung back, chin up, face to the sky.
Her perch is also a feat of balance. Stacked like a cairn, the rough, irregular stones are drilled through the center and fitted on one end with a steel rod, each threading onto the stone below. The stacking order is neither labeled nor obvious, and the stones turn easily on the rods. Finding the steadiest position for each one — and the dancer on the top — requires balancing the weight, shape, and turn of each stone.
Tapping into that old, familiar sense of longing, A New Dance reminded me of Gramps’ twirling mobile of screen dancers, and of the powerful pose of the verdigris woman made by my brother.
I was drawn, I think, to the uninhibited joy and grace of A New Dance, something I longed to feel and trust in myself but never had. By then, any moments of grace encountered in pilates had grown heavy with expectations and self judgment. I’d even sold my reformer to a new mom so she could keep up her practice at home.
In reply to my recent query about A New Dance, the artist shared her own story of emerging:
I made that sculpture at a pivotal point in my life. My daughter had graduated from high school and I was finally going to quit my teaching job and begin sculpting full time. I was just stepping into a new life, and it felt perilous and beautiful.
Since then my life has changed completely. I have been sculpting full time since 2010. I married the love of my life, who is also a sculptor, and we started a business called Dream Big Sculpture
… The long legs in all my work are about rising above life’s challenges, and the cracks that are in your sculpture represent the idea that we all have them on the inside- a reminder to be kinder and gentler with each other.
I have all kinds of other symbolism in my other work referencing hope, peace, love, our wild and authentic selves, as well as our own magnificence.
I remember very clearly where I was in my life and what I dreamed for myself when I made “A New Dance”. I think the most wonderful thing for me, is that in writing this, I see so clearly that I am living the dream that I had when I created it.
“Perilous and beautiful.” These words pull at my gut. The longing.
A few years ago, I hit a wall, exhausted by unhappiness and shame with who I was, how I’d sabotaged myself in life, struggled in relationships. It was more physical than depression I’d experienced before. Like nausea so bad you’re begging to throw up — but can’t. I felt trapped in the cesspool of myself. Doubtful but desperate to believe a kernel of light still existed in there. In me.
A mid-life crisis? Perimenopause? A particularly dark recurrence of depression? Who knows. I’m profoundly grateful for the care of an exceptional physician. In addition to our work, she nudged me to attend Al-Anon, where I began to understand how alcoholism had affected my childhood family, shaping my sense of self and those around me, to this day. Al-anon remains a beacon, a raft, and source of healing wisdom. I also re-engaged my faith, never abandoned but certainly unmoored, as I’d grown uneasy with Church doctrine over the years.
Heart and mind were healing, but my body was slow to accept, much less embrace, any change. My neck and shoulders remained knotted, hips painfully tight; nerves pinching and old injuries flaring, stubbornly resistant to therapies, practices, and tricks to release its tension and vigilance. So I decided to give yoga another try.
Over the years, I’d repeatedly found yoga unsatisfying, even outright irritating. I chafed against encouragement to be “in my breath” or “in my body” because this meant marinating in how inflexible, uncoordinated, and uncooperative it was. Nor could I make sense of yoga’s talk of discipline and practice. In my lexicon, these were punishing words, meant for relentless self control and striving for achievement, approval, and acceptance. My body wasn’t going to get there. Yoga simply wasn’t for me.
But me as I knew it wasn’t working anymore.
Researching classes online, I was struck by one local teacher’s bio. Writing in the first person, she seemed refreshing and real, unconcerned with signaling or self promotion. She left no room for doubting one’s fitness to attend.
At some point, you may just want to try. My first class was comical. I was not flexible nor strong and sitting on the floor was excruciating. And I savor the fact that I came from this initial feeling … One day, it all comes together by simply showing up for yourself.
Showing up, I could do.
It was a mixed level class in the evening, with about 15 people spread across the spacious, candle-light dim studio — perfect for going unnoticed. The music, so good I’d spend hours hunting the songs on Spotify, synced perfectly with the class. The teacher was excellent, her manner easy. Occasionally, she remarked on alignment or the balance of strength and flexibility, like a guide pointing out marvels of architecture (which our bodies are). For the first time, I never felt lost, compelled to catch up, slow down, or do it better. After 75 minutes, I felt like I’d been flying.
“You made me love it,” I whispered as I moved past her, beelining for the exit before coming up short, surprised to see her eyes fill with tears.
At first, I struggled with the absence of mirrors. How could I check my alignment or track my improvement? When I realized that not having a mirror is central to the point, an entirely new landscape began to open. I started to feel, without thinking, how my bones fit into sockets, my muscles wrap, and my tendons secure. How breathing literally moves me from the inside out. How a shift as subtle as a whisper can realign everything.
I’m still amazed how practice and discipline can be processes, sequences, not to judge but to grow, deepen, and steady myself. My respect for what my body can and cannot do is gradually rising, and seeping into how I think and feel about other things, too. Learning to trust in my muscle memory is both freeing and a bit scary, like attempting to make three dimensional art after a lifetime of only working in two; a risk I never really allowed myself to take. Why did the stakes seem so high?
A few weeks ago, my still-favorite teacher said she saw more “lightness” in my body. I wonder if this is the budding sense of curiosity and play I feel, trying poses just to see what happens, not to get them right. I think of Gramps sculpting, puttering about his pool and ponds; the light in his eyes, his sense of play.
Interesting, how learning to see who I am removes the sting of accepting all that I’m not.
I imagine I brought these art works home because they spoke to that old sense of longing. They offered bittersweet, beautiful consolation; even if couldn’t be graceful, nimble, or capable of soaring, free and unafraid, I could imagine the feeling through art.
When I look at these pieces now, I don’t feel the longing. I just feel joy. A surge of energy, the swell of my breath, and my cheeks lifting in a smile. A somewhat weary contentment, gratitude for this art’s reminder that strength and beauty are in me. I just have to be fully in myself, welcoming grace, for it to unfold — and play.
Maybe this is why my brother gave this sculpture to me, infused with the same love and belonging I felt under the seal of Gramps’ blessing thumb.
The Rodin print is a light-hearted dare to release my bind, and laugh at myself with affection, not scorn or shame. Who knows what could happen, A New Dance whispers, if you’ll just leap?
I’m already more than halfway through my life, yet I feel myself emerging like Alira.
Just looking at these art works tethers me in the present, another kind of healing mindfulness. Perhaps that’s what Art All Around Me is, an invitation and a reminder to look and marvel, opening the space where hope and play and meaning dwell. Thanks for joining me.
Stories from earlier this year
In January, I wrote about this Billy Renkl picture in A Surprising Memento Vivere:
I realize now the story title is overly obscure. While writing, I kept thinking of memento mori, which wasn’t exactly right. What did we call the opposite, a reminder to be alive, just because we are? Grumbling awake, too many years of Latin threw out vivere (to live). Was memento vivere actually a thing? A quick Google confirmation pleased me so much I had to use it — likely putting off readers justly annoyed by obscure terminology. Ah well.
I can also see this story is a precursor to The body in art and life, inasmuch as the two show what thoughts were simmering, ever slow to crystalize, over the early months of 2024.
Like making caramel, this simmer to crystalize process is often a messy struggle. I get frustrated, irritated and embarrassed by my inefficiency. To ease my unease, I put it aside and wrote The Frog in the box, posted in March, about this etching by Warren Burnham Davis (no relation).
This was simply fun to write, as I envisioned all Art All Around Me stories would be. Learning to roll with the surprises otherwise seems to be an art unto itself, requiring much practice and patience. As art often does.
Until next time, friends. Thanks for reading!
