Bonavista Biennial

Summer ended on a perfect pitch with an August trip to  Newfoundland.  We were greeted with a miraculous (for Newfoundland) string of sunny days and found “the Rock” covered in an amazing array of berries, most of which we’d never heard of before we started traveling to Newfoundland, and most of which can be eaten raw or made into famous Newfoundland jams.

These are Crackerberries. The trails were paved with them.

Though berries would be enough of a reason to go to Newfoundland in August or September, it was the chance to see the Bonavista Biennial which drew me up this time.

Here is the Godmother of the  Bonavista Biennial, Catherine Beaudette,

who also is the founder of the 2 Rooms Artist Residency where I had the delicious pleasure of working last summer. Catherine had shown me the catalog for the first iteration of the Biennial (2017) and I knew I wanted to catch the Biennial the next time around.  I thought it was very brave of Catherine to name the first Biennial a BIENNIAL because that meant she HAD to rally for this enormous effort even before she saw how the first one shaped up. But rally she did, with a whole troupe of volunteers, to bring world class art to Newfoundland. One of the things that makes the Newfoundland Biennial so special is that geographically and culturally relevant work is installed up and down the Bonavista Pennisula in predominantly untraditional venues: a chapel, a breakwater, a root cellar!!!  All this art is interspersed with the quirky pleasures that Newfoundland has to offer: strolling miles of board-walked trails ringing most every town and village,

following the Devil’s Footprints in Keels,

convening with puffins, and did I already say counting root cellars?  There are over 100 of them in Elliston, which proudly calls itself of Root Cellar Capital of the World, a claim, I for one, am not going to dispute.

With my down-loaded Biennial map in hand we started our scavenger hunt in little Duntara (not far from the devil’s playground in Keels) where I had done my artist residency last year. In the evocative space of 2 Rooms, a beautiful heritage house that Catherine bought several years back and rescued from it’s likely trajectory into demise,

we found our first installation: the work of  Jason Holley.

Holley’s chains are both powerful and vulnerable. They look for all the world that they are painted metal, but on very close examination one discovers their fragility, as each link is hand crafted in clay.

Just the walk up the steps to the second floor of 2 Rooms made me squirm with pleasure. The souls of this heritage home are curated by layer upon layer of paint and wallpaper lovingly left clinging to the walls.

Catherine Beaudette called forth these souls with her Crib

and accompanying watercolors whose palettes echoed the surrounding paint chips.

After a reminiscing walk around Duntara, we headed to Bonavista, the largest town on the peninsula, to see Anna Hepler’s installation, “Mooring” which filled the salt storage warehouse of the historic Ryan Premises. I loved that this big, bold, voluminous ship hull cum whale rib-cage was constructed of re-purposed cardboard boxes which no doubt, like ships criss-crossing the Atlantic, had found their way to Newfoundland’s shores via eCommerce.

We tried to find Robert Hengeveld’s outdoor installation in Bonavista and discovered his lived sized house frame had moved! Very fitting for Newfoundland which has suffered the heartbreak of resettlement (a program which began in the 1950’s and continues today, in which the government pays residents of “outports” to abandon their heritage property and move to more populated communities).

We found Hengeveld’s house beautifully sited in Upper Amherst Cove.

We took the short cut across the peninsula which means driving though the boggy, forested, whole-lot-of-beautiful-nothing landscape and were reminded why we love Newfoundland so much. First, we passed this sign:

Then this:

Then this:

We arrived in the little community of Catalina to see the work on exhibit at the Salt Fish Plant. Drawing on a typically meticulous boat-builder’s approach to craftsmanship (as opposed to Hepler’s DYI approach) was the work of Ian Carr-Harris. Carr-Harris presented an exquisitely built model of the ship Theoris, the ship that carried Theseus on his quest to vanquish the Minotaur. I’ll let you read here why Carr-Harris has entitled this work “A Paradox”.

Showing alongside Carr-Harris was the equally well-crafted sculpture of Yvonne Lammerich, a forced perspective model of Champlain’s fort in Quebec.

We drove on to Port Union, one of my favorite Bonavista Peninsula towns (you just gotta love the birthplace of Newfoundland’s first labor union, no? In fact, Port Union is the ONLY union-built town in north America!!) Besides the wonderful interpretive center at the Fisherman’s Protective Union Factory and home of Fisherman’s Advocate Newspaper (back when newspapers were the heart and soul of democratic ideals. Hey! Why aren’t there more newspaper museums?!?)

One can easily spend all day in Port Union hiking the magnificent shoreline trail (top photo in post), hunting the water’s edge at low tide for the world’s oldest fossils–560 million years old.  (Yup! Don’t doubt me on this one)

Across the street from the Fisherman’s Protective Union Interpretive Center lies a long block of row houses which used to house the office managers at the fish plant and newspaper press.

On one end of the row sits the newly established Union House Arts. In the gallery of Union House Arts we saw the work of Meghan Price, who recorded the surfaces of erratic boulders, then carefully stitched her papers together to create alluringly ephemeral “rock” sculptures.

Besides these erratics,  Meghan Price also spent a couple weeks in Port Union drawing on trail marker imagery to create kites.

I too am drawn to the cryptic trail markers.

Behind Port Union’s main street with its hopeful renovations lies the less lucky boarding houses of Fishermen Protective Union’s workmen and their families.

But wait! What’s that pink shimmering at the end of this sagging row?

Ah!  Artist Robyn Love has stitched and hung  drapery which wafts protectively in the breeze enshrouding what used to be someone’s home.

In Port Rexton, just south of Port Union, we saw entirely different work of Meghan Price in the old post office. You had to look really, really hard at these geologic layers to discern that they were made from sliced up New Balance sneakers.

Finally we headed to Elliston for a long hike where we were rewarded with huge patches of Newfoundland’s most prized berry, the bakeapple, AND an escort of spouting and  breaching whales. On our way to the trail we stopped at the lovely St. Mary’s Church

photo credit: Brian Ricks

 to see the work of collaborating artists Jane Walker and Barb Hunt.

photo credit: Brian Ricks

Ringing the interior of the chapel with the ubiquitous artificial funerary flower petals, Hunt and Walker have spelled out (in Morse Code) “This slow loss reminds us to move”.  It’s a quiet, mournful piece, but not without a touch of Newfoundland wit.

Still counting root cellars in Elliston we headed over to the puffin viewing site

and right there at the start of the path are two well preserved root cellars with the telltale Bonavista Biennial placard announcing we’ve found another  art installation site.

Leaving the door cracked a bit to adjust our eyes to the dark we reached out for the cord dangling from the ceiling, waved the wand about and presto! Drawings appeared on the phosphorescent rocks gathered by artist Sean Patrick O’Brien.

Oddly satisfying. When we finished our rock/light drawings we stood outside the door for a while to watch others’ responses and ended up serving as art ambassadors, encouraging parents to let their kids in. One by one we heard them exclaim, ‘Wow! Cool!” No need for didactic art criticism here! That’s what I love about the Bonavista Art Biennial.

Enough of this high brow stuff. You can’t go to Newfoundland without having a good chuckle. There is a reason why I do so many Newfoundland posts in a blog I’ve entitled “Quirk”.  What can I say–Newfoundland is a quirky place! Our first helping of quirk offered itself up on night two of our Newfoundland stay on the less touristed Eastport Penninsula, just north of the Bonavista Penninsula.

 We poured over the recipes to see if there was something new we could try. There was no shortage of options. We did NOT try:

Luckily for us our host came by with some freshly caught cod and not seal flippers.

Fancy Rice Salad might have been a good accompaniment but, alas, we had not picked up Dream Whip on the way in.

And we  were oh so tempted by “Sex-in-a Pan”: (hmmm, is Dream Whip the same as Cool whip? Well, as I said, we didn’t have any.)

Instead we joined our lovely hosts, Linda and Cyril for a sunset boat ride, where we passed around a chocolate bar.

and then finished off the night laying on our backs in the mosquito-less yard watching shooting stars. Better than Sex-in-a-Pan!

Siren Call, Part 2

I know, Part 2 was a long time coming, but on this dank and dreary November day, what better place to visit than Newfoundland (again!) where art  is made from a gray day.

Walk the paths of Keels and you’ll surely discover the poetic sculpture of John Hofstetter, tucked here and there, in and of the landscape.

The little settlement of Keels (around 60 year round residents) is just down the road from Duntara where I spent two weeks last summer at Two Rooms Artist Residency.

Before this summer I had never heard of Keels, but interestingly enough I had already seen Keels on the big screen  the previous year in one of my recent  favorite movies, “Maudie”.  “Maudie” is a wonderful accounting of the true life Nova Scotia folk artist, Maude Dowley Lewis. When the first rugged scenes rolled onto the screen I turned to my husband and said, “That’s not Nova Scotia. That’s Newfoundland! ”

Indeed, when the film makers went looking for a setting that would feel like Marshaltown, Nova Scotia of the 1930’s they turned to lovely, unspoiled Keels.  So when I pulled into Keels I saw a familiar site– the general store which had played a major role in the movie.

The store, shuttered prior to the filming, has now been rejuvenated and re-opened by Selby Mesh who has nicely combined the movie props with everyday essentials. Hannah, my art partner, and I set about shopping for our dinner. We got right to dinner planning:

  

  

When we brought our supplies (including that lone bag of dates on the upper right–what a find!) to the cashier, she studied us very carefully and asked, “You’re not by chance, Hannah and Jessica, are you?” How did she know???? She turned and pointed to the bulletin board where we found our mug shots hanging.  Nice!

Turns out Keels has a lot to offer beyond the charming general store.  Folks drive a LONG way to order up Clayton’s hand cut fries at his cheerful Chip Truck. Never mind that our fingers were freezing as we sat in the 40 degree (sorry, Canada–that’s Fahrenheit) drizzle—mmm, mmm, mmm! Those fries were GOOD!

As we finished up, Clayton invited us to tour his lovingly restored home, one of the crown jewels in Keels.

Clayton’s hand-sponged and stenciled ceiling.

 

Besides the renown of Clayton’s Chip truck, Keels is “famous” for its Devil’s Footprints.

Long, long ago Satan emerged from the sea and walked through Keels. His cloven hoof prints can be followed along the shore.

We took Satan’s path  and found astonishing geology along the coast. Underfoot and forming walls to our sides were richly textured surfaces of slate.

 

Our slate trail grew narrower and narrower til it ended at a “V” at the edge of the sea.

I think we found the crevice from which Satan emerged!

And who knew? Slate comes in gray AND RED!

Lured by Keel’s craggy landscape I came back the next day to try my first  “Float”. I had been assembling a big Tyvek map in my studio shed in Duntara.  I had just lifted the Newfoundland section of the map  and levitated it over the rest of its watery surroundings.

Now I wanted to let it be carried by the real tides–its fate up to the whims of the ocean, as Newfoundland’s fate has always been.

My tentative first attempt with a test section was encouragingly successful.

The Tyvek floated perfectly! The ink didn’t run! It didn’t need to be a attached by strings!

So back to the shed I went to fetch a larger section. I had fretted over this work and here it was floating in this beautiful austerity–visual poetry! The map undulated in the gently lapping water like a jellyfish.

How would it take to the surf?

       

Well… like Newfoundland itself:  Fragile but scrappy and RESILIENT!

        

      

 

 

TransAtlantic

I don’t usually write about my own work on this blog, but a recent opportunity to install a large scale installation of my sculpture in a church in Normandy, France

was sufficiently quirky for me to make an exception.

First and foremost this is a tale of collegiality and why artists can be , should be and ARE each others’ best allies. And so I start this post with a big THANK YOU to German artist Ulli Boehmelmann

who reached across the Atlantic to make a connection and offer a recommendation to an American artist she barely knew.

I was lucky enough to meet Ulli through Boston Sculptors Gallery when she came to Boston from her home in Cologne to install her work as part of a collaborative exhibition that several members of Boston Sculptors participated in with German artists. Her Boston hosts invited her to tour their studios and were nice enough to include me on the tour.  Ulli was a super great visitor–interested in my work, interested in well, EVERYTHING. It was a short little visit, but we really hit it off–then I had the good fortune of being able to visit with Ulli in Germany a few months later on an adventure with fellow Boston Sculptors artist, Hannah Verlin, to visit medieval crypts. (and now you get to go back to my very first post–this is the trip that launched this blog “Quirk”. If you’re spending three weeks underground in Europe with skeletons the very least you owe the folks back home is some kind of accounting of yourself.)

As Hannah and I mapped out our route we discovered that one of our prize destinations, the Crypt at St. Ursula’s, was in Cologne, the hometown of Ulli Boehmelmann.  Any chance we might visit, Ulli? Yes! Ulli not only met us at the crypt, she did a fine job of translating the unbelievably intricate, (and I hope it’s not too judgmental to say)–bizarre story of St. Ursula and why this poor martyr is now surrounded by hundreds of artistically arranged bones. Two days with Ulli in Cologne and I think it’s fair to say we moved beyond artist colleagues to become friends.

The following year, one more artistic opportunity brought Ulli to Boston to give a talk at the TransCultural conference. Once again Ulli came to visit my studio where I was in the final stages of preparing for my upcoming exhibition, “Uh Oh!”  at Boston Sculptors Gallery.

Ulli noticed the freshly minted pile of catalogs of my work that I had swung for (it’s a lot of $$ to put one of those glossy things together, and one always wonders if it’s worth the financial outlay) and asked if she could take one back with her to show the curator in France where she was going to be exhibiting her work that coming summer. There’s only one possible answer to that question: “Sure!” But, truly I thought it was just a nicety. Nothing ever comes of  unsolicited hand-outs of catalogs to curators. And so I promptly forgot about it.  Then one day, about eight months later, I’m jolted out of my doldrums by a  splendid email from France, from one Benoit Delomez, Director of “Vaertigo”,

inviting me to spend a month in Normandy creating  a site specific installation for the 7th iteration of ArTerritoire  in the summer of 2017. Yow! I come up with a million reasons to say yes and a million reasons to say no. Basically I go down the freak out path of  indecision.

Reasons to say “no” :

1. the WHOLE month of June?!? I’m a fanatical vegetable gardener and June is the most important month in the garden!
2. I’m a control freak when it comes to my sculpture. I like to know that I’ve dotted all my i’s and crossed all my t’s before I show–There will be so many unknowns–how can I feel confident that I can really pull a large scale installation together over yonder?
3. This is a tricky, tricky space that is being offered to me–a church with uneven, multi-leveled  floors, a high vaulted ceiling and a stone wall behind the plaster–what do I know about attaching things to those surfaces?
4. Sure, I’ll get to make the most critical pieces ahead of time and ship them but what if they don’t arrive–and yikes the expense of overseas shipping!

Reasons to say yes:

1: Hmmm, maybe June is NOT the most important month in the garden. Maybe May is, and I could work like crazy to get everything planted before I go. And, Oh! I won’t exactly be suffering from garden withdrawal if I go as the directors of “Vaertigo” also happen to be gardeners extraordinaire and proprietors of “Le Jardin Interieur de Ciel Ouvert” one of the most beautiful and creative gardens in Normandy!

   

      

 

2. How can I say no to an opportunity to spend a month in France: a chance to be an “internationally exhibiting artist” in my mother’s homeland–a country I adore! A chance to speak French! Yay! I mean–Uh Oh! I mean–yay?

3. And read the fine print, you nay-sayer:  a stone cottage to stay in,

a car to toodle around in, and a charming village with everything I will NEED like croissants and Camembert–yes–this is Camembert country–OK, OK, so the answer is OUI! J’accepte!

But before I accept the invitation– I must clinch the idea for a new body of work. Usually I need to ponder and pace for weeks, but this time the idea comes to me like lightning. Here’s what I’m struck by: It’s election season and though I feel absolutely secure that He Who Will Not BE Named won’t be elected (ya, I know, I’ll revisit that thought a little later) , it’s been a down right depressing election season, filled with xenophobic, nationalistic rhetoric. If I’m about to traverse the ocean to one of America’s oldest, strongest allies I want to go forth with my own declaration of allegiance. I will present a piece about the long history of friendship between France and the USA. I know immediately that I want to cover the floor with a coast to coast map : east coast USA to west coast of Europe, separated by the great expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.  I can see in my mind’s eye the iconic monuments I’ll sculpt for critical moments of allied support each nation gifted to the other: General Lafayette tipping the scales in America’s favor in our struggle for independence, France’s love affair with Ben Franklin, the first American diplomat, whose democratic ideals helped paved the way for the French Revolution, the magnificent gift France made to America of the Statue of Liberty–what better symbol do we have of the America I want to live in?

— the reinforcements that the US sent to France during World War One that helped turn the tide of the first “Great War”, and ultimately the enormous involvement of Americans in France in World War II which began with the debarkment in Normandy in which my father took part, his march into Paris with Eisenhower, and his serendipitous meeting of a French student–my mother .

OK, so I’ve got my idea–and then OH NO!  The Elections! The unthinkable happens: He Who Shall Not Be Named (fondly referred to by the French as “Agent Orange”) wins. He will be the American President as I set out to be an art ambassador. I am ashamed!  I resolve to strip away any images from my artwork that smack of his “America first”  and “military might” rhetoric. So no battleships landing in Normandy, no military anything.  I pare down my idea to the most personal part of my story:  My mother and grandmother reaching across the ocean to keep themselves tied together. Their allegiance will be the stand-in for the allegiance of nations that brought my parents together, that helped keep France French, that helped birth the democracy that is America.

As I get down to work, my first concern is my  quest for the perfect map. I want to find a map with the graphics of the 1940’s. It must show both coasts. It must be available online, open source, so I can print it out myself. And most importantly it must be of a super, super high resolution so I don’t end up with a pixelated mess. I search for days. There are zillions of maps–none of which fit all my criteria. I complain to my son, Isaiah, who gallantly takes on this needle-in-a-haystack challenge with supreme confidence in his superior googling ability.

And Bingo–in one hour he comes up with a map made collaboratively in 1938 by the American and British armies for their joint efforts in WWII. The map is currently owned and digitized at a crazy high resolution  by the University of Texas, Austin and open all to reprint. (The resolution is so high that the tiny village where I install the work–Athis de L’Orne, popoulation 2,000, is clearly written on the map. That’s exciting!) Well, it turns out practically the whole world is available to print out except for two copyrighted countries: Spain and Canada, a mystery which I never solved and which took days more of sleuthing to find good alternate maps of these countries. Pictured above with my son is my husband, David (also gallant), who offered up his Photoshop wizardry to retro fit the Spain and Canada sections to fit the rest of the map.

               

But that’s not all that needs to be accomplished in this daunting task. All the Mercator lines (the pesky curves that the longitude and latitude lines take as they wrap around around a sphere) need to be straightened as my Atlantic Ocean will be FLAT.

This is the look on your face you get when your ship reaches the edge of the flat Earth and you know you’re going to fall off with the next puff of wind:

Besides flattening the globe I need a system for organizing the hundreds of map quadrants I’m going to be printing out . For this I have my faithful “tech guy”, Rick:  

I turn three rooms of our home over to the map project: Isaiah’s room becomes Canada, Nora’s is the USA, the study is Europe, and the ocean, well, no room for the ocean–it’s relegated to a stack which gets higher, and higher, and higher. I work on the map every evening and weekend, all winter.  I go through a zillion cartridges of ink. I get friendly with the Epson help center in India. I dream in 13″ x 13″ grids. And when I need a break from all that blue, I scan and print the envelopes my grandmother and mother saved from their life time correspondence:

During the week I’m in my studio in Somerville, MA constructing and carving the iconic symbols of our two countries, the Statue of Liberty and the Tour Eiffel.

I’m also making airplanes to fly overhead but, not military planes. They will be passenger planes, each one carrying a letter my mother wrote to her mother describing her new life in America.

And instead of battleships I will put in the Queen Elizabeth Ocean liner (which played an important role in the WWII efforts when it was commandeered by the British Navy) that my grandmother took the one summer she came to visit. It will trail life boats carrying her letters to us.

All these components, the ocean liner, the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the hundreds of maps squares I will ship ahead of time. I decide to go with an international art shipping company rather than risking Fed Ex–I’ve heard stories that make me decide I better spend the money and really be sure my work arrives at its destination.   So what still keeps me tossing and turning at night is the puzzle of how to hang the planes from the high,  vaulted, stone ceiling and what to do about the uneven, multi-leveled stone floor. I know one way or another I’ll have to build out a new wood floor to apply the map to–that notion alone is enough to drive me to sign up for weekly French tutoring sessions where I spend the weeks translating my various neurotic emails as well as trying to get a handle on lumberyard terminology. I mean, really you can’t go in a French lumberyard and say I’d like ten 2×4’s please. First of all–everything is in centimeters and who the heck knows what the standards are there. Furthermore, if you look up the word for stud in the English-French dictionary you come up with either a horse or a sexy man, and that is not what I want to be asking for in the lumberyard. I spend every Wednesday morning with my tutor, Christine, laughing. I never do re-master the subjunctive, but, hey, when I have dinner with my French cousins in Paris they say they cannot believe how much my French has improved!

I need (note the word need instead of want) one more thing: my reliable partner in crime, my artist friend and colleague, Abbie Read, to accompany me.

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She agrees to eat the aforementioned croissants and camembert with me every day AND help me install the work! Besides being a gluer extraordinaire, Abbie painted beautiful cloud friezes for my planes to fly in front of.

 

You can tell by these images that despite my worries the piece worked out.

I arrived in Athis de lOrne:

Found my crate waiting for me   

at the beautiful home of Dominique and Benoit Delomez:

Met my church, Le Temple Protestant:

Discovered their politics were exactly in sync with my own:

 

Got the floor built:

:      

gave the parishioners an ocean to walk on:

Got the planes hung (giant c-clamps around the gothic arches):

Posed in front of the roadside publicity which made me even more nervous about the opening:

 

Took deep breaths and  tried NOT to over anticipate my artist’s talk In French:

These are the other  two artists in ArTerritoire 2017–Vincent  Bredif and Anne-Lise Dehee, both from Paris, who shared our stone cottage and a lot of laughs as they struggled to get me up to speed with more correct and current French. On the right is the wonderful Domique Delomez, co-director of Vaertigo who spoke so eloquently and poetically about the endeavor of bringing contemporary art to rural Normandy.

The last thing I did before the opening of my installation, “TransAtlantic”, was to hang  this amazing photo of my mother:

It’s a photo my sister’s family discovered after my parents died. It appeared in Yank Magazine, published by the military for the benefit of the soldiers to keep them updated on the war effort. It’s the Victory Day issue. My father had sent it to his father back in Erie telling him that the girl looking at the camera was a girl he had fallen in love with. And that is both the beginning and end of my story.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More Underground

My last post featured three quirky cave environments in France. You might think that would complete my postings on the French underground, but two more visits must be described: both with top ratings on the quirk-o-meter.

The tiny village of  Dénézé-sous-Doué , a village in the Loire region for which Wikipedia can find nothing to say except; “Its church and the attached cemetery have the distinction of being away from the village.” Really, the entry is just this one sentence! I have never been so disappointed by Wikipedia and Geez–are they ever missing something!  Dénézé-sous-Doué is home to one of France’s most intriguing mysteries: La Cave aux Sculptures. After poking around a bit we found the non-descript entrance leading to steps down, down, down, deep under sleepy Dénézé-sous-Doué.

This is only sign of business I saw in Dénézé-sous-Doué. Things are not exactly hopping in Dénézé-sous-Doué, at least not above ground!

In front of us a 24 meter long, multi- chambered cave revealed itself , carved every inch with hundreds of bas-relief figures emerging from the walls.

 

 

Despite serious archaeological efforts, no definitive explanation or even dating of these carvings has been agreed on. There are no other examples of similarly carved caves in Europe so no clues can be found elsewhere. Clothing , hairstyles and musical instruments typical of the Renaissance era

This lady is playing a medieval bagpipe

help date the sculptures to the 1500’s. One of the archaeologists dated the sculptures based on his observation that some of the female characters are wearing underwear (!!), the  practice of which did not take occur until the 1500’s. Oh, for close archaeological scrutiny! I did not discern any underwear but I don’t know if that tells you more about my observational skills or about the keen eye of the French archaeologist. I can tell you one thing though; given that the French word for “bra” is “soutien gorge”, which translates as  “throat supporter”, I would say there’s a cultural divide between the American and French understanding of underwear.

It is generally agreed that these three figures:

are a blasphemous representation of King Henri II (in the middle) with his wife, Catherine de Medici (depicted scandalously with her breasts exposed–no soutien gorge for her!) on the left, holding hands with Henri’s mistress, Diane de Poitier, on the right. This is not the only scandalous bit of carving.

I might add, besides love-making couples there is at least one depiction of self-pleasuring. I have spared you the full frontal, but here’s the fellow caught in the act:

There are several screamers such as this breastfeeding mom:

  

And several heads with no bodies and limbs strewn about and some devilish monsters that I was unable to photograph for lack of lighting. Incredibly there is even a sculpture of a Native American– the first known depiction of a Native American in Europe! Apparently there is documentation of a Native American who was brought to live in Anjou, France in the 1500’s so finding his likeness in this cave is not so far-fetched a notion.

There’s plenty of Christian references, but they are loaded with parody. The customary figures in the sculpted Pieta– Mary, Joseph, Jesus– have been replaced by Catherine de Medici as Mary, holding her son, Francois II as Christ and the Cardinal of Guise sits in for Joseph. Mary Stuart as Ste Jeanne, looks on. It makes my head hurt to try to untangle the unseemly relationship between the French royals and the church during this period of the Religious Wars. If you’re determined to try to wind your way through this Gordian Knot, here’s a good synopsis that will help you.

All this was enough to get the cave sealed off in 1633 by a priest who felt his flock might be led astray by  images of debauchery and blasphemy. Hmmm, the cave closure, according to another account was perhaps in 1740. Well, what’s a hundred years between archaeologists?  Whatever the case, La Cave aux Sculptures was completely forgotten until 1956 when–you guessed it–village children, playing in the fields, stumbled upon the underground passage.  The site was opened to the public in 1973. Here’s a terrific video shot with much better lighting than I had at my disposal. (Don’t worry about the French subtitles–the images are excellent.) There remain passageways blocked with debris which hold the promise of countless more figures to be discovered.  Much research still needs to be done to determine the meaning of this work.  Current theories include:  a work of political satire, a site for pagan rituals, a holy site of miracles and cures, a meeting place for initiation rites for the fraternal order of stone masons (there’s a few ram sculptures, the medieval symbol of the stone mason), a 3D illustration of Rabelais’s tales of devilry (he came from the neighboring village and made references to the demons of this region)

After dwelling in the ancient subterranean world of La Cave aux Sculptures my visit to the nearby site, l’Hélice Terrestre felt like futuristic travel to another planet. However l’Hélice Terrestre is just a few a few kilometers away in the village of Saint-Georges-des-Sept-Voies.  As one would expect in troglodyte country, l’Hélice Terrestre (translation: Earth Helix) is underground, except, well, the part that’s NOT underground! Here’s a view from the highest point of the helix.

And like any good troglodyte helix should, this helix spirals its way down, reaching deep into the bowels of the earth.

  

  

  

  

  

As I tunneled my way down the light receded til I was in pitch dark, feeling my way down by inching my feet forward and running my hands along the damp, mossy walls. I was only able to see the carved forms for the split second of the flash of my camera. ( I must admit that when we visited there was no one (except one black cat) at the site. I’m not entirely sure we were supposed to be wandering around l’Hélice Terrestre on our own. If you have the good fortune of visiting you will hopefully have your path more illuminated than I did.)

  

 

  

L’Hélice Terrestre  is the work of Polish sculptor, Jacques Warminski  who had spent some of his childhood vacations in nearby  l’Orbière, one of the last remaining Troglodyte villages in France. L’Orbière was completely abandonned in 1950, but kept alive in Warminksi’s imagination. It served as the inspiration for his life’s culminating work.  Warminski created this mind boggling sculpture in four years time in the early 1990’s. It doesn’t seem possible that stone carving of this intricacy on this scale could have been accomplished just in four years, but unlike La Caves aux Sculptures, the dates for L’Hélice Terrestre are not in dispute. Jacques Warminski died in 1996 at the age of 50, just two years after completing L’Hélice Terrestre.

Currently l’Hélice Terrestre is being maintained and kept open by Warminski’s widow, Bernadette Alberti and is  used as a site for comtemporary art performances.

Hubcap Ranch

This post ends with a story of how a good deed turned into an art environment. If you’re impatient to find out how this could be, skip to the end, but you’ll be missing some pretty cool art along the way.

A recent trip to California to visit family and  to tour the fabulous new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art turned into a glorious road-trip. In just three days the Bay area and surrounding countryside offered  up the most glorious array of artistic diversity.

The undulating SFMOMA is now my favorite renovation of the myriad of museum upgrades that have swept the country in the last decade (shout out to Deputy Director Ruth Berson,  for her incredible leadership in this project).

I really loved the little display of idea “sketches” for the museum renovation presented by the architectural firm, Snohetta:

              

              

              

              

Across the street from the SFMOMA is the wonderful Yerba Buena Art Center which–jackpot!– was showcasing at the time of my visit one of my very favorite artists, Tom Sachs.

Whacking together unbelievably complex and massive sculptures with little more than packing tape, cardboard and soda bottles, Sachs has constructed his visionary “Europa”, as part of his ongoing fixation with NASA’s space program. He has thought of “everything the astronauts will need to successfully complete their mission to Jupiter’s icy moon” including the all important outhouse which bears an uncanny and satisfying resemblance to a jet plane’s lavatory.

         

Ruth Berson also introduced us to her beloved “Creativity Explored”, a studio workshop  and gallery for artists with intellectual disabilities.

     

      

We loved it so much we went back for a second visit on Monday and saw the studio buzzing with productivity.

I doubt you’ll find another group of artists anywhere more intent on their work than here.

With the couple extra days I had  to tool around in California I headed up to Napa Valley. The drive through Napa Valley vineyards

is a visual feast in and of itself. But we went to drink in a couple other sites. Our first stop: the Di Rosa Museum. A San Francisco friend had brought me there a couple years ago and I wanted to revisit with my son, who has inherited my penchant for all things quirky.

Situated on the shore of Winery Lake, the Di Rosa Museum houses the estate collection of the vineyard owning,  art collecting, bon vivants Veronica and Rene Di Rosa.

One has the feeling as one tours the estate (and one can only see the DiRosa collection as part of a museum tour–don’t just show up there unannounced), that collecting art served as a great excuse to the Di Rosas for non-stop partying. It’s a wild ride following the twists and turns of the DiRosa’s art tastes.

Art car master, David Best retooled this Cadillac for Veronica Di Rosa.

And Rene jumped into the act of art making with this one creation of his own:

Well, his hanging car may  not be great art, but just about everything else in his collection is top notch–some of my favorite  artists and so many great artists new to me, all hailing from  northern California.:

Viola Frey :

           

These next two are Sandow Birk’s. Though created many years ago, they were apt viewing during our miserable campaign and election season.

 

And this is Chester Arnold. Where have you been all my life, Chester?

And Mildred Howard’s luminescent Bottle House:

OK, finally! The real destination of this trip through Napa Valley (you will now be rewarded for slogging through this post to get to the bait tangled on the hook of the first sentence).  Litto’s Hubcap Ranch!  

 Located just one hour’s drive north of San Francisco, in Pope Valley, Hubcap Ranch was the retirement home of Emanuele “Litto” Damonte.  Litto,  came to California from Genoa, Italy in the early 1900’s. His father passed on his stone mason trade to him which provided Litto  with lucrative work, including marble carving for the William Randolf Hearst mansion.

A smooth ribbon of a road now passes by the ranch but at the time that Litto settled in Pope Valley the rough and winding dirt road was pitted with potholes which tended to pop the hubcaps off  passing automobiles. Litto thought he’d do a good turn by collecting the hubcaps and affixing them to his property fence.

He assumed that folks who had lost them would pick them up the next time they drove by. Apparently nobody came to reclaim their hubcaps and soon the collection grew to the point where passers by thought Litto just LOVED hubcaps, so they started dropping off contributions for his “collection”. These too, he affixed to the front fence til that was full. He then extended the collection to the barbed wired that looped around the ranch.

Before Litto knew it he had become a hubcap connoisseur. He singled out the most select examples for special placement on his out buildings and his home.

No one’s got an exact count, but it’s said there may be as many as 5,000 hubcaps catching the rays on Hubcap Ranch.

Two years after Litto’s death, Hubcap Ranch received the official designation of  California Historic Landmark.

Hubcap Ranch is currently the residence of Litto’s grandson, Mike Damonte, who does his best to maintain the property

in all its quirky glory.

 

 

 

 

 

Magic in Philadelphia

Isaiah Zagar’s Magic Garden in Philadelphia is one more fantastic example of the power of art to turn around a neighborhood’s fortune.

Back in the late 1960’s, Philadelphia’s South Street was a derelict area, lined with vacant properties. This is when Julia and Isaiah Zagar moved into the neighborhood to live and to start a small business selling Latin American folk arts. Inspired by the work of Spanish architect Gaudi and outsider artist Clarence Schmidt and the famous French art brut builder, Ferdinand Cheval, Isaiah began his mosaic work decorating the storefront for Julia’s store, the Eyes Gallery. (Eyes Gallery is still thriving today. It has expanded its offerings to global folk arts, carefully selected by Julia Zagar–well worth a visit!)

Teaming up with other artist activists, the  Zagars helped transform South Street into an artists’ enclave  Together they successfully protested the construction of a proposed highway that would have ripped through the neighborhood. Continuing on with his mosaic work, Isaiah began his ambitious transformation of two vacant lots at 1020 South Street.

Here’s what you first see when you encounter 1020 South street from the sidewalk:

 

Look up:

Keep looking up and turn your head:

Turn your head again:

Now walk in:

and drink it in for a couple of hours, winding your way through the arches, tunnels,and pathways of the Magic Garden.

 

The story goes that after nearly a decade of obsessive work  at 1020 South Street

the Boston-based property owner caught wind of what was  transpiring on the property he had assumed was vacant. He tried to force Zagar to buy the property on which he was squatting and threatened to demolish the whole thing if Zagar refused. After a two year legal battle the friends who banded together to save Zagar’s masterpiece won their fight by purchasing the property and founding the non profit, the Philadelphia Magic Garden. And so began the  “Renaissance of South Street“, now one of the hippest, most vibrant and fun neighborhoods of Philadelphia.

Time for a little more touring–there’s so much to see at the magic garden.

Here and there is evidence of Julia and Isaiah’s time spent in Latin America:

 

And everywhere you can see Isaiah’s distinctive, fluid, linear style as he draws and re-draws the human figure:

  

  

Time for a bathroom break? Well, take your time:

I no longer know which way is up…

And don’t be too sad if you’re up against closing time at Magic Garden (open every day except Tuesdays), because there’s 20 more humongous Isaiah Zagar murals scattered throughout Philadelphia, starting with several other buildings just down the street:

 

You’ll just keep stumbling upon Isaiah’s work as you walk about town:

    

Thank you Isaiah Zagar and THANK YOU ARTISTS EVERYWHERE for making the world a visual feast.

 

PS If you wish YOU could mosaic like Isaiah, you can! He offers weekend workshops monthly, spring through fall, in which you’ll participate in the creation of new murals about town. Check his website for info.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Collector/ Creator

As long as I’ve got you focused on midcoast Maine (see my last post on Davistown Museum and Liberty Tool Company), I wanted to give you a tour of the studio one of my most inspiring artist colleagues, Abbie Read, who lives in the little town of Appleton, Maine–just inland from Belfast.

She also happens to be the person who first introduced me to Liberty Tool Company and Skip Brack. Like myself, Abbie always has her eye out for quirky beauty. She is a gardener, a collector, and above all else an artist. You will see from these images of her home and studio that these three pursuits are all rolled together into one seamless existence. Rather than using too many words I’ll let you stroll with me through Abbie’s gardens and studio and you’ll see what I mean.

Roadside view of Abbie’s studio, surrounded by her remarkable garden.

I was paddling with Abbie in the great northern woods of Maine when she spotted this fish-shaped driftwood on the shore. It could not be left behind!

I’ll get back to her gardens before this post wraps up–but time to poke around inside Abbie’s studio:

 

Here and there I recognize some great finds from Liberty Tool Company.

What I love about visiting Abbie’s studio is that you can’t quite  tell where the collections leave off and the artwork begins.

The arrangements are shape shifters, social gatherings, little galaxies of starlets.

The found objects become installations become artworks, but even so, at any moment a comfortably bedded down little object might be plucked up, manipulated,  and given a whole new context:

           

          

So much more to see, but I promised to get back to the gardens:

  

Trellises                          (no problem for Abbie who can whip out willow chairs)

 

And the gardens are great homes for her collection of whirlygigs:

 

The real show stoppers are the flower beds, raised bed vegetable gardens and containers spilling blooms everywhere…

 

 

Ah!

Oh Ursula!

Last post from the infamous Ossuary trip!

I’ve been back home for a week now but couldn’t keep up with the flood of post-worthy material while traveling–and I just cannot leave the ossuary trip behind without due recording of our last encounter with beautiful bones. The big oval-shaped route we took from Frankfurt , across Bavaria, over to the Czech Republic, with a day to dip our toes into Poland, looped back through northern-ish Germany and ended in culturally rich Cologne (Koln, as you’d say in Deutsch). We had the good fortune of meeting up with fellow artist and Cologne resident  Ulli Böhmelmann who stood patiently waiting for us outside the Basilica of St. Ursula as Hannah Verlin and I once again showed our muddlement with the map. (Cologne, like Boston, favors nonparallel streets which challenge any logic one tries to apply to the cause of getting from here to there)

These few pictures cannot do justice to what one encounters as one enters the side chapel (the Golden Kammer) of St. Ursula’s. The blue-gray night sky walls framed with arches which reach to a vaulted ceiling are completely covered with an impossible number of bones arranged in beautiful patterns and words.

 

And just below the bones the room is ringed with wooden and silver reliquary busts.

 

Between these, cloth-wrapped skulls peek out from windows in ornately carved and painted wood columns or gold reliquary boxes.

To take in the full measure of this incredibly beautiful, incredibly poignant site one must digest the story of St Ursula and her eleven loyal virgin friends whose very bones adorn the walls and fill the reliquaries. (pay no attention to those pesky anthropologists who after careful analysis declared the bones to belong to a whole array of beings from newborns, toddlers  and–WHAAAT! Matiffs?!?!! Save yourself the trouble of verifying the martyrdom of Ursula story by looking it up on Wikipedia or elsewhere–there are so many confusing and conflicting accounts of Ursula that she was removed from the official “General Roman Calendar” of saints in 1969–Harrumph! And oh, let’s not quibble about the number of virgins which started as 11 in the 5th century telling and grew to 11,000 by the 9th century. Well, all this  has not hurt Ursula’s status in Cologne where she is still considered their patron saint.)

–and here is why:

As you can see from the above sculpture, Ursula was incredibly beautiful and was pursued by innumerable suitors (it probably didn’t hurt that she was also a princess). Ursula turned them down, one after the other, ’til one day a particularly aggressive, and oh dear, pagan prince declared that if Ursula would not agree to marry him he would see to it that Cologne was destroyed. Talk about pressure! Her father the king, who until this point had indulged Ursula, begged her to reconsider. She could see his point but still, being a pious Christian princess, felt a trip to consult with the pope was in order. She gathered her 11 best friends and off they sailed to Rome, a bold, bold move– a pilgrimage of WOMEN–unheard of!  While sailing down (or was it up?) the Rhine, their ship was attacked by Huns, whose leader, Attila, was also smitten by Ursula and asked her to marry him. She did not need further consultation on this one–the answer was NO and Attila’s response was swift and not surprising, given his bad reputation. Ursula and the eleven virgins (who also refused to couple with the Huns) were all beheaded. Attila declared that Cologne would be stormed and destroyed. But this is not the end of the story. That night every single Hun soldier had the SAME dream about Ursula. I cannot tell you what exactly she did in this dream, but it was enough to scare every soldier into disobeying Attila’s orders to torch Cologne. Cologne was saved!!! What I can’t understand is the papal problem with recognizing Ursula as a saint. 1969, the whole western world is pretty much going to pot and the Vatican decides now’s a good time to tighten up on sainthood requirements? Geez!

As I mentioned earlier, our visit to Cologne was greatly sweetened by the two days we spent with Ulli Böhmelmann who shepherded us here and there throughout her interesting and vibrant city, poking around the contemporary art galleries, design center,

 

and, most lovely of all, a visit to her studio. Ulli will be coming to Boston to present at the Transcultural Exchange in February 2016 if you want to hear her speak about the sculpture project she did in Russia last year.

Melnik Bouquet

I’m back home. Happy to see that our piles of snow melted in my absence. However, I’m not quite ready to put the bones behind me, and hopefully you’re not either since I have a couple more ossuaries to tell you about (what a relief to post from a desktop computer rather than pecking away on the phone.)

One of our last outings in the Czech Republic brought us to the small town of Melnik (spelled with various tick marks and accents over the vowels and pronounced as if you had a mouthful of honey),

   where the 10th – 11th century cliff-side church of St. Peter and St. Paul’s sits atop a densely packed, little-visited ossuary holding the bones of 10, 000 to 15,000 deceased and one dessicated but still brilliantly red bouquet of roses.

Hannah and I paid the modest entry fee and stepped into this dirt floored, cob-webbed crypt                                               accompanied by piped in funereal music. We were on our own and Hannah got right to work documenting all the teeth with photos and sketches. This can take some time, but hey, this is what we were here for. 

 

  (you see the skulls spelling in Latin, yes?)

Suddenly the music stopped and the ticket taker, who was well out of view, called out several sentences to us in Czech and then we heard her feet ascend the stairs, leaving us undisturbed and wondering what on earth she had just told us. Once Hannah finished her teeth documentation we headed up and found that the ticket taker had apparently closed up “shop”, but luckily just with a rope which could easily be untied–no wonder we had had the crypt to ourselves!

From the crypt we headed next door to the  Lobkowicz castle. Replenished by our coffee break in the castle parlor for which we were the only guests and woefully under-dressed,

 

we poked around (no other visitors during the whole visit and no guards in sight–I think we could have taken up residence and no one would have noticed) to see what sorts of things the Lobkowiczes collected. I think this qualifies as quirky and at the very least fit in rather nicely with the ossuary theme of the day:

We were not

ed  all day.