Curiouser and curiouser

The fabulous Miss Yo-Yo!

I've written seven pieces so far for a collaborative project that will result in a solo show in September, one that mixes visual arts (pen and ink, with colored inks) with poems and stories. Though I can't say anything much about it in public now--because we all love good surprises, and I can't spoil this one--I will be writing about it more privately in The Rollipoke, no. 3, for those of you who are subscribed.

It's one of the odder series of works I have committed to doing, and has certain challenges that are unusual. I was invited to do this work by Detroit-born painter Yolanda Sharpe (who also sings with Glimmerglass Opera and is the highly successful head of the SUNY-Oneonta art department, so she's formidable--see her work at yolandasharpe.com) and am finding it interesting and sometimes amusing.
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Tales of men and women

Cold morning with something unusual for here: a couple of orioles in the lilac bush. Lilac bushes are about as common as dandelions in the northeast (hence the lilacs of Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," but a morning with orioles in the lilac bush and goldfinches at the feeder? That's like a flash of sunset at noon. Despite the cold and yesterday's snow flurries, this has been a good week for songbird color with goldfinches and purple finches. I'm drinking tea and reading the distressing article in "The Atlantic" article on "the collapse of a large, wealthy, seemingly modern, seemingly democratic nation just a few hours’ flight from the United States"--socialist Venezuela. If you are drawn to Kafka on the toils of a man caught by the system, or else want to know about exactly how helpless a mother and father can be in the face of government corruption and abrupt loss of essential goods like drugs and food, have a read. The stories are heartbreaking.

Interesting to me for a number of reasons, most of them obvious--one of them local, as there is a Cooperstown connection--is this article, "The Diminution of Women Writers: An American Tradition." I'm not surprised that the author mentions Hawthorne's influence on Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, and his dislike for much of the "scribbling" mob of women. I adore Hawthorne and always feel congenial with him, but wouldn't it be good to have some stories by Sophia, and not just her paintings? The writer gives Constance Fenimore Woolson, named in part after her great-uncle, James Fenimore Cooper, as a prime example: "Woolson’s work and career are a reminder that women’s literary ambitions are not a recent phenomenon. She was a writer who aimed for and reached the heights of literary recognition, despite even greater obstacles than those facing women writers today." She and Henry James were very close friends--close enough to have destroyed their letters to each other--and she influenced his work. Various people have suggested that The Beast in the Jungle is based on his feeling for Constance Fenimore Woolson. I have read that it was William Dean Howells who buried her reputation as a writer after her suicide, and unfortunately James did not defend her in print. Now her books are at last on the rise again.

Painter Yolanda Sharpe reminded me of the case of married painters Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, and how Pollock received far more attention. So I dug up this marvelous little quote from ARTnews (1949): "There is a tendency among some of these wives to 'tidy up' their husband's styles. Lee Krasner (Mrs. Jackson Pollock) takes her husband's paint and enamels and changes his unrestrained, sweeping lines into neat little squares and triangles." Aren't those phrases interesting? The name of the show, the tidying wife, the "Mrs. Jackson Pollock," the neatness, the "littleness." "Some of these wives." So the reviewer "sees" that masculine lack of restrain and "sweeping" lines beat female, so little and neat. (I find it hard to apply either adjective to Lee Krasner.)

And painter Ashley Cooper reminded me of the much-shared article about Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, "Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art."  I went back and looked at it again, Frida Kahlo photographed in what the journalist calls her "foolish little ruffled apron," tied over a black silk dress. She is "a miniature-like little person." Her "miniature-like technique" is opposed to the "heroic" figures of Rivera. The author clearly admires the work, though, describing "a skillful and beautiful style." Perhaps the most interesting element in the article is how well Kahlo knows that it is useless to defend her work or expose her secret ambition, and how she employs truth and laughter. He is the art star, come to Detroit to paint his Detroit industry murals in the Detroit Institute of Arts, and her own work is just beginning to flower. Listen to how she tells the truth of what she knows is inside her, beginning to break forth: "Of course, he does pretty well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist." She laughs and mocks her questioner, but in the end she is right. At that moment, he is the better artist. Later on, she will surpass him.

***

And for a postscript, a little Emily Dickinson and Billy Collins...

For the second day of Christmas: the river of culture

Yolanda Sharpe
Watercolor by a local friend--
soprano, painter, SUNY-Oneonta professor in studio art.
Blue, Red, and Yellow, 26 by 40 inches, watercolor on paper, 2014

And words by another friend--nihongan painter Makoto Fujimura, founder of International Arts Movement and The Fujimura Institute:

The words at left and below are
from Makoto Fujimura's Culture Care,
the lovely result of his Kickstarter campaign.
Available here.

An industrial map in the mid-twentieth century colored New York's Hudson River black. The mapmakers considered a black river a good thing--full of industry! The more factory outputs, the more progress. When that map was made, "nature" was widely seen as a resource to be exploited. Few people considered the consequences of careless disposal of industrial waste. The culture has shifted dramatically over the last fifty years. When I share this story today, most people shudder and ask how anyone could think of a polluted river as good.

But today we are doing the same thing with the river of culture. Think of the arts and other cultural enterprises as rivers that water the soil of culture. We are painting this cultural tier black--full of industry, dominated by commercial interests, careless of toxic byproducts--and there are still cultural mapmakers who claim that this is a good thing. The pollution makes it difficult for us to breathe, difficult for artists to create, difficult for any of us to see beauty through the murk.

It is widely recognized that our culture today is not life-giving. There is little room at the margins to make artistic endeavors sustainable. The wider ecosystem of art and culture has been decimated, leaving only homogeneous pockets of survivors, those fit enough to survive in a poisoned environment. In culture as in nature, a lack of diversity is a first sign of a distressed ecosystem.

Many of the streams that feed the river of culture are polluted, and the soil this river should be watering is thus parched and fragmented....

Yolanda Sharpe, Neighborhood, encaustic on panels
(center panel: 23 by 22.5 by 3 inches), 48 by 43.75, 2013

Yolanda Sharpe, new watercolors--

Peach Confections, 26" x 40"

Last week I enjoyed a visit to Yolanda Sharpe's house and SUNY to see artwork currently underway. Here's a peek at some new watercolors, not yet flattened and mounted. It is intriguing to see how her large pen and ink and encaustic works appear superficially very different from these, yet show innumerable connections through boldness of execution, color, shapes, and composition. You can take a look at her wonderfully varied work at yolandasharpe.com.

Big Purple II, 26" x 40"

Blue, Red, and Yellow, 26" x 40"

Music while writing--and while not writing--

follower of Hieronymus Bosch, "Concert in the egg."
Wikipedia Commons, from Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

Q: What sort of music do you listen to while writing, and how does it vary? (The question is from Sienna Latham of the fascinating Hindsight, located at the intersection of art and museum on the web. Have a question of your very own? Leave on in comments.)

A: Perhaps I am a bit strange in this regard. I'm always seeing online playlists for writers--what they listened to while writing such-and-such a novel. But I have a great capacity for blotting out background noise (very useful when one has been raising three children, though one needs to have internal radar set for the "wrong" sort of noise, and also possess the ability to move back and forth between children and the depths of a manuscript) and so I never trouble myself with playing music. In fact, it seems strange to me to think of doing so.

What would I do it for? To me, it seems like the attempt to find a distraction when I neither need or want distraction, and I would tune it out anyway. But what do other people who don't blot sounds out want it for? Is it that one doesn't quite like writing and wants to be distracted to some degree? I'm always bemused by the many writers who claim to dislike writing and to love having written. (I don't think I would write if I felt that way. Should one admire people who write despite that feeling, or be troubled that they force themselves to do what they don't like?) Two of my children like music when they do homework... So is it to be amused? Is it to set a mood? Is it to let words ride on sound that "fits" the subject? To be "inspired"? Aside from the fact that I would block out the music anyway, I don't need mood or inspiration to be created by something outside myself. There's something I am missing, it seems. Writers are alike in some ways, different in others. I suppose this is a way I am different. (But I never think the particulars of how people write are significant.)

That said, I do sometimes find myself writing a poem after listening to music. Because music is an awakening force... and in me, it tends to wake up words.

What other part does music have in my life, then?

Some time ago I was shanghaied into the soprano section of a choir at the little Episcopal church that James Fenimore Cooper turned into a Gothic bandbox on his return from Europe. I have two or three practices per week and sing in public at least once a week. So I probably sing more than most people my age. The choir sings Haydn, Humperdinck (the real one), Bach, etc. I'm continually surprised to find myself in a choir (me?) and singing in public, and I have threatened to write a comic novel called Choir. In the time I've been singing, we've had quite a few people in the arts in the choir--painters Deborah Guertze, Yolanda Sharpe (a wonderful mezzo-soprano), and Ashley Norwood Cooper.

As for my life at home and on the road, I hear a good deal of music but not in any systematic way. The last CDs I bought for my fall book travels were Mike Scott and the Waterboys, An Appointment with Mr. Yeats, and also an anthology of songs made from Yeats poems.  Obviously that's because I have a Yeats mania. (I sometimes pick up other intersections between books and music, like the Tiger Lilies version of Edward Gorey--or, for that matter, as when composer-videographer Paul Digby sets one of my poems. See five videos of poems at youtube.) I don't bother with being "up to date," but my daughter makes me CDs of her favorite new music for book trips, and I listen to a lot of classical music--medieval and Renaissance music, along with Mozart, Britten, Taverner, etc.

Finding the thread--

detail, The Big Purple. Yolanda Sharpe, 2011.
26 x 80 inches, watercolor on paper

I have been feeling quite unlike myself in my work--wayward, disorganized, unsure of what's next--due to an excess of meets and tournaments, ferryings, volunteering, and extended periods of being a single mother while my husband travels. Sometimes life becomes labyrinthine in complexity and just a little too packed with labor that is tiring, no matter how good it is to do. I expect this sort of over-crammed sensation is especially true of women who pursue the arts, and most especially true of those of us who have children because children are, as Bacon wrote, "hostages to fortune" and must come first.

Ashley Norwood Cooper, "Deer in the Headlights"
casein on board, 2012

And so on Thursday, two friends and I started a project of setting goals, roughly following the International Arts Movement's Working Artist Initiative. I'll be meeting weekly with painters Ashley Norwood Cooper and Yolanda Sharpe. Ashley is, like me, the mother of three children, so we have similar problems with organizing time, though her children are younger than mine. Yolanda has a different set of issues as a full-time academic who is both painter and singer. But the three of us know one another well and won't have to become acquainted with one another's work because we know and like it already.

It's good. I can feel our little project working on me already--the need to organize, the expectation of sharing our progress at the upcoming meeting, and the simple but beautiful idea of that somebody else cares whether I make something of worth this week is energizing and helpful.

Box of gratitudes no. 1: art kindred

Here we are on Christmas Eve Day--a good time to say thanks. I'm starting with a few of my art kindred.

• To Yolanda Sharpe (artist and singer based in Oneonta but frequently in Cooperstown), and Ashley Cooper (artist and classicist around the corner) for going on their own wondrous paths with resolution, and for being part of my everyday life in the arts.
• To Clive Hicks-Jenkins, for the deep pleasure of collaboration across the Atlantic, especially this year for his marvelous work in making beautiful The Foliate Head and Thaliad.
• To novelists Peg Leon and Alice Lichtenstein and sometimes Ginnah Howard for the Occasional Lunch Club Frolic that reminds me that I'm not alone as a novelist in the wilds between the upper Adirondacks and the Catskills. (Let's have lunch!)
• To Paul Digby for doing exactly what he wants in the realm of composing (and various other arts and crafts that catch his fancy), and for the fact that making videos for my poems is one of the things he wants.
• To Mary Boxley Bullington (Mary, bad thing! Update that blog...) for making a painting inspired by The Book of the Red King, for introducing me to the work of potter Steve Mitchell, and for visits in Roanoke. (If you want to see more of her work, visit facebook.)

Yolanda yacks--

Please pop by to take a look at the first part of an interview with Yolanda Sharpe, artist and mezzo-soprano, at the IAM-Otsego website. Interview by brand new webmaster Benjamin Miller. Please leave a comment there if you enjoy their work! Comments off here.

Rounding up the little doggies--

THE BUSY-FRENZY
"Oh! the Duchess, the Duchess! Oh! won't she be savage if I've kept her waiting!"

THALIAD vignette, Clive Hicks-Jenkins

And now I need to go readreadread and also snag a ticket for "Aida" at Glimmerglass Opera... Hurrah for friend Yolanda Sharpe, who is not only a grand painter but is a spectacular soprano and is the really big-bodied voice you hear in the chorus. Also on the weekend burner: a quick trip to Crumhorn Mountain to see the Scouts in their fireside frolics. We won't mention the need for house-drudgery and a total dearth of house elves: too daunting.

THE BEST CAMELLIA LINK OF THE WEEK
The best new link for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage is Ben Steelman's review at The Wilmington Star, "Youmans's novel might be her best yet." And I also updated the book page for the novel this week.

CLIVE and BETH and THALIAD
Both Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Beth Adams have posted lots of interesting news about Thaliad. Clive's Artlog overflowing with new work for the book. Beth's Phoenicia Publishing site also has a number of posts about progress on the book.

WHOOP-EE-TI-YI-O
More web-wrestling today. Boring! I managed to ruin my Val/Orson page after pasting in a post from novelist friend Philip Lee Williams that no longer existed except as a cached copy, as he has taken down his blog... That one little action gave Blogger unnatural fits. I finally made a new page for the book and chucked the old one. Ridiculous. So go look at the new one with Phil's post; maybe I won't feel that I wasted so much time! 

Miss Yo-Yo & Marly at Yew Journal

If you click and catapult over to Yew Journal, you'll discover some poems from my series, "The Book of the Red King," and artwork by friend Yolanda Sharpe. The editors always ask for an unknown biographical fact for the contributors' notes, so you may also ferret out secrets.

* * *
Ghosts and Gaslight was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award, and now Charles Tan interviews Nick Gevers about the anthology. Nick refers to me and Theodora Goss as "grand mistresses of the mytho-poetic." I think we need some old-fashioned calling cards. Some lovely curling script:  Theodora Goss, Grand Mistress of the Mytho-Poetic. Etc. Nothing like a proper calling card.

The news of poetry--

I just sent off my response to Makoto Fujimura's request for a poem honoring the 100th anniversary of Japan's gift of cherry trees for the Tidal Basin in Washington, D. C.  Good commissions are inspiring, and so I wrote a poem in six parts, mingling modes and including dryad and kodama, grafting and planting, journeys and deep-growing, war and peaceful ease.

Thanks to Dale Favier for taking a look beforehand--very helpful to have a California Buddhist read one's cross-cultural poem! I am enjoying his poetry book, Opening the World, which you may inspect at the Pindrop Press site.
Update:
Dear Mole,
Mea culpa! 
Oregon! Oregon! Oregon! 
Yrs,
Ratty

Fascinating or terribly depressing or both, sales for poetry books are so slim compared to fiction that one can figure out exactly what is happening a good deal of the time. For example, according to Bookscan (which counts a large number of reporting bookstores but not all), I have just sold seven copies of The Throne of Psyche in New York and in unnameable rural places--part of that's obvious, as The Anesthesia Book Club in Fly Creek has invited me to visit their group in March--and one in Albuquerque, New Mexico. If I knew somebody in Albuquerque, I might have a chance of guessing who had bought that copy! Lesson: be sure and buy yourself a copy and be counted? Get seven copies and be of staggering importance? Nab eight and rule the world? XD!

My friend Yolanda Sharpe and I put our heads together and submitted to the collaborative journal, Yew, and so now will have three poems entwined with three paintings there some time soon. Fun!

CHOIR

Yolanda Sharpe, Pear and Apple, 2007
pen and ink, colored pencil and acrylic painted paper, 15 by 15 by 15 inches

Some time ago I agreed to join a choir, my arm having been twisted into strange configurations by an otherwise quite gentle and pleasant choirmistress. I had friends in the choir—my painter friend Yolanda Sharpe, who has appeared on this blog and The Lydian Stones, and who has a marvelous voice and does recitals, and many others. But right away I discovered that a choir is such a mixture of many parts--apples and oranges and pears and pomellos jumbled together.  We have such an unusual number of pronounced eccentrics (a conventionally polite word for lunatics) in our choir that I have threatened to write a revelatory comic novel called CHOIR.  Each member must be made to blend into a whole: into a kind of family, if you will.

I didn’t particularly want to plunge into the choir, as participation demanded a lesson once a week, practices twice a week, and performance once and occasionally twice a week. Then there are unexpected things called choir festivals and sundry other stray performances. That’s a lot to add onto the heaped plate of a mother of three who has many village activities and also just happens to be an obsessed writer. I did not know how to read music, though I was perfectly capable of bumping along if given the first note. Luckily I was a soprano, which struck me as far easier than being in any of the other sections.

Since then I have discovered something that lots of people know who are not obsessed artists of some sort, bound to a vocation.  I have found out that it is a pleasure to add some focus and discipline to one’s natural feeling for an art that one is no expert in. Likewise, it is enjoyable to learn something new; at the moment, I am grasping intervals and doing much better with duration of notes and rests.  These things remind me of poetry, and I certainly aspire to song there.

Each of the arts is a fertile sea in which strange, beautiful beings may be found—some immensely great, others quite invisible to the naked eye. Without the sea of culture and its innumerable small creatures, no great one could survive. 

Sharpe chooses Gautier

Yolanda Sharpe, Neighborhood, encaustic
and mixed media on double panels,
48 by 43.75 by 4 inches, 2010

YOLANDA SHARPE, AGAIN,
this time on THE LYDIAN STONES

Yolanda Sharpe is the chooser this week on The Lydian Stones. Please fly off there and leave a comment... Yolanda is a remarkable person who is a painter and longtime head of the SUNY-Oneonta art department. She is also a notable soprano and writes poetry to boot. I somehow could not hold her to one poem...

UNDERSTANDING POETRY, AGAIN

Once upon a time I had a mustard-colored copy of Understanding Poetry. Maybe you did, too, way back when. Garrick Davis has interesting things to say about the book and its authors, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren.

(And long ago I had a class on Faulkner with Brooks... He was elderly but in possession of quite sound marbles. Our first assignment was to do a timeline for the somewhat wayward Soldier's Pay. I did a maniacal, detailed version--and learned a lot as a writer about keeping time in line and how easily it can go astray.)

Clips:

This was the official call for literature teachers across to the country to drop the scholarly pretensions of their profession, and return to literature. Though it seems a modest opening paragraph for a letter now, it was heard at the time as a rallying cry by the young, and a declaration of war by the old.  John Crowe Ransom, in a review of the book, said as much: “The analyses are as much of the old poems as the new ones, and those of the old are as fresh and illuminating as those of the new; or at least, nearly. What can this mean but that criticism as it is now practiced is a new thing?”


and

To open its pages now and compare it to our new textbooks is to suffer vertigo—our educational system has fallen from a very high place. (What would the authors have made of colleges that don’t require English Literature majors, even, to take a course in Shakespeare?) What they never set down was a reason why college undergraduates should study poetry at all. In our own, more dissolute, day—when the humanities have fallen into disrepute—we have need of such reasons. We have need of teachers like Brooks and Warren again, who would explain to us why freshman should always be forced to climb the summits of literature together. If you think that textbooks are invariably dull affairs, you owe it to yourself to find this book.

VILLANELLE, AGAIN

Update: Poet Maryann Corbett wrote me that the link wasn't working for her. For some reason it takes a minute to come up. I tried linking to other pages with the same result. Just wait, and it will come up instead of just giving an about: blank message.

If you are interested in formal poetry: I am dipping into Amanda French's online dissertation, Refrain Again: The Return of the Villanelle. And I am finding it enlightening.  Thank you, Amanda! Here's a snip:

It is in fact the case that the vast majority of poetry scholars know only as much about the villanelle as is to be found in handbooks such as Adams’s Poetic Designs–and the handbooks are all wrong.

Handbooks and anthologies and scholarly surveys–reference texts of any kind–that mention the villanelle almost unanimously assert or strongly imply that the villanelle has nineteen lines and an alternating refrain on the scheme A’bA” abA’ abA” abA’ abA” abA’A”, and that this scheme was fixed centuries ago in France through then-common practice, though it is now a rarity. Here is a sobering truth: only a single poet of the Renaissance wrote a villanelle by that definition, and he wrote only one. Jean Passerat’s “Villanelle,” also called “J’ay perdu ma tourterelle” (probably written in 1574), has come to represent a nonexistent tradition of which it is the sole example.

Thanksgiving, 2011

Detail from "Still and Green Moon" by Yolanda Sharpe.  Photograph by Gilda Snowden.

Did I say that I have joined a choir?

We have been diligently working on "Lessons and Carols," and more and more I think that a choir is a fantabulous subject for a comic novel. We have the usual mad people and eccentrics and quirks and characters that one finds in a good-sized group devoted to the arts, and I do a lot of laughing along the way as the choirmaster-organist-composer attempts to rein in such varied personalities and abilities and steer them aright. Truth be told, Roberta Rowland-Raybold has a more difficult job than most! I admire her sacrificial work, giving tutorials to the needy...

My favorite piece is "There is no rose," the medieval poem that has been inspiring to various composers. We are singing the ethereal music of Hal H. Hopson, and I cannot shake it from my head.

There is no rose of such virtue
as is the rose that bare Jesu;
Alleluia, alleluia.

For in this rose contained
was heav'n and earth in little space;
Res miranda, res miranda.

By that rose we may well see
there be one God in persons three;
Pares forma, Pares forma.

Transeamus, Transeamus,
Pares forma, Pares forma,
Res miranda. Alleluia.

So today it is Thanksgiving, and I give thanks especially:
for Hal Hopson
with the hope he will write many more ravishing pieces in his time;
for the invention of children
and especially for my three, two at home, one with my mother;
for Featherstocking the turkey who stalked around Cooperstown
until he was (sadly) struck by a car in front of Stewart's last week;
for the gift of word-twisting;
for you (for I feel friendly to the world most days!);
for waterfalls and rains of inspiration;
for blessed common sense;
for collaborations with Clive and Graham and Paul and Mako;
for the help of Andrew;
for husbands who love to cook and do so
and for the safe return of my husband from Morocco and Egypt;
for my mother, weaving and gardening and scaling mountains at 82;
for all that is most wonderfully secret and most aspiring;
for cranberries;
for joy;
for all that is annealed in me.

Res miranda!

Frolics and News

Graham Ward, "King of Finisterre,"

1.  My husband is back from Morocco and Egypt, trala, where he did have many curious adventures. And he has brought home interesting loot, of course. Curly shoes and bazaar jewelry and fezes (fezi? fezzes? fezzies? fuzzies?) and paintings on papyrus and chunks of indigo and shawls and so on.  Who knew that there was such a strange, sweet-smelling thing as papyrus oil? (Well, Egyptians, for one. No doubt.)
2.  I'm about to go sing in honor of Thanksgiving, lalala, so this will be short...
3.  I am now working with UK painter Graham Ward on a collaborative project, and it is proving to be fun. I have already written one piece for him (plus I had one that was finished earlier) and plan to do some more as he produces new paintings from now through spring. Ekphrastic revels. It will result in a little book accompanying his upcoming show.
4.  I have been so busy being a single mom for the past two weeks that I have not finished my second pass proofs for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. Wah.  Must get on to that this evening, rather late. Time for the night-owl oil.
5.  Somebody posted a rather rotten blog post about one of my books last week (luckily The New York Times and Washington Post etc. were hot on it) and I made the marvelous discovery that I did  not mind, not even one little tiny whit of a whit. Somehow I must have outgrown feeling bad about such things somewhere in the last decade...
6.  Had Yolanda Sharpe (a painter friend) for Sunday afternoon dinner and once again can say that she is one of the most amusing people ever! She ought to be in a comic novel. (Wouldn't it be fun to write a comic novel?)
7. It's almost Thanksgiving.  So thanks for reading--I'm giving thanks for you, whoever and wherever you are!  Don't forget The Lydian Stones will begin on Tuesday. If you want to take a look at the design and put in your two cents of criticism, feel free.

Still and Green Moon

Oneonta artist Yolanda Sharpe recently had a major watercolor in "Watercolor Revisited: A New Perspective," curated by Linda Mendelson. The show just closed at the James Pearson Duffy Gallery at Wayne State University.  In case you were not in Detroit, here is a look through the eyes of photographer Gilda Snowden.  Lush, playful in its dance between realism and abstraction, drenched in color, it is "Still and Green Moon" (2011.)

Yolanda is quite well known in Cooperstown because she attends Christ Church (yes, the one that James Fenimore Cooper tinkered with and turned into a little Gothic treasure box) and often is soprano soloist there; she also has sung locally in the Glimmerglass Opera chorus, and has performed in recital in the U. S. and abroad.. She recently came back from a Fulbright fellowship to Siberia, and she has just finished up more than a decade as chairman of the SUNY-Oneonta art department, where she was a great leader, establishing a foundry and much more for her department. (Did I say she also writes poetry? Can we all take our toys and go home now?)

Yolanda Sharpe: Ink and Wax

Yolanda Sharpe: Ink and Wax
Selections from Foliage and Still Life Drawing series
and Urban Fragments Painting series
September 24-November 5, 2011
The Earlville Opera House
Opening September 24th, 6-7:30 p.m.

Note on the photographs:
I took these before the start and after the close of the opening to Yolanda's show in the upstairs gallery. The photograph of two artists speaking with two pieces from The Urban Fragments series shows Lee Yardley with the curator of the Painter Picks Painter show in the East Gallery downstairs at the Opera House. Unfortunately, her name tumbled out of my head... Two other shows are now on display, so a drive to Earlville lets you meet with the work of five artists. The Painter Picks Painter show features Steven Ginsburg, Sarah McCoubrey, and Gary Trento. In the West Gallery is Fleeting Dreams, a solo show of the paintings of Chun Arthur Wang.

Yolanda's note on her encaustics:
The Urban Fragments (2009-2010) painting series examines change and flux when urban environments experience loss. Many of the paintings are remembrances, my meditations of Detroit.  Some images invoke billboard image remnants, architecture, and the way natural forces impose upon change and neglect. Non-representational abstractions show visual fragments and cues. The encaustic medium helps to describe passages of time and layers of visual history. Paint layers, objects, and drawing remnants are derived intuitively. Also, Urban Fragments fuses drawing remnants (from my Foliage and Still Life series) with the paintings as objects with physical depth of colors and surfaces. I want the paintings to convey solid forms and shapes that are diaphanous and luminous. This series promotes colors than are pared down to vibrant essentials. While some colors are mixed and layered, others are blunt and vivid.

Yolanda's note on the drawings:
The 2008 drawing designs focused on re-inventions and improvisations by combining fragments of other drawn images. Many of the drawings are part of the still life tradition (using a collection of various objects from the home environment: glass, patterned structures, cloth, metal surfaces, ropes, and woven structures) and nature (foliage and various plant life forms.) Geometric spatial constructs helped to build the compositions and feed my intuitive approach of working. The dominant medium for this series is pen and ink, with some mixed materials.

The wedding of pen and ink with encaustics:
While I had seen pieces from each series separately, it was interesting to see the two groups of works brought together, since fragments of drawings crop up in the encaustics, half seen through layers. Meanwhile the drawings also work in a collage style with images cropped and fitted together, but they often utilize the idea of collage in a playful way. Yolanda feels that she works intuitively, but she brings to bear a keen intelligence and her decisions--while arrived at by instinct, perhaps--are clearly conscious ones.  Some of the selvages between fitted pieces appear almost invisible, and yet there are teasing faux selvages that are "artificial" or not selvages at all but simply (or not so simply!) the tantalizing work of pen and ink.

More Yolanda Sharpe:
To look at more of The Urban Fragments, go to my prior post on that series (including poems by Yolanda.)  Yolanda is having a big month for shows, as she is also included in the On the Mark group show at the Martin-Mullen Art Gallery (12 artists from The New York Foundation for the Arts Mark Program 2010, including Ashley Norwood Cooper of Cooperstown) at SUNY-Oneonta, September 6-October 15.  In addition, she has a large-scale watercolor in Watercolor Revisited: A New Perspective, curated by Linda Mendelson at the Wayne State Art Gallery.

Ink and Wax: Yolanda Sharpe

 

 

Yolanda Sharpe has an opening at the Earlville Opera House Gallery on 6:00 p.m. on Saturday, and I hope there will be a good turnout. She is a remarkable person, a local artist who also writes poetry and has sung locally with the Glimmerglass Opera and performed recitals in this country and in Russia (where she was just on a Fulbright Exchange) and who knows where else... The Opera House brochure describes her as intuitively constructing "abstract images through re-invention and improvisation, by combining fragments with attention to geometry and color."

If you want to see more of her encaustic work, I wrote a post about her "Urban Fragments" here. Her website has much more to see: www.yolandasharpe.com.  The image above is view five from her magically folding and unfolding hexaflexagons... (If you would like to see the feature I wrote about another opening featuring an area artist, go here.)

If you are in Earlville-Cooperstown-Oneonta-etc. region, please go! We need to support our local artists and galleries more than we do at present.

"Paintings from the Urban Fragments painting series examines change and flux when urban environments experience loss. Many of the paintings are remembrances, my meditations of Detroit. Some images invoke billboard image remnants, architecture, and the way natural forces impose upon change and neglect. The drawings represent the Foliage and Still Life series that I did in 2008. The work combines refined lyricism with bold marks, and layers of drawing collages."

                                -Yolanda Sharpe

Corey Mesler & more

Corey Mesler is one of the writers I consulted on my upcoming posts on writing and publishing--I asked him about the small press world from the point of views of writer and bookseller. You'll see him again later. But now he has a new interview up at Flutter. He is both poet and novelist, and Flutter asked him to put on his poetry hat. Here are a couple of bites from the pie:

10. What is your ultimate goal as a poet? Are there any specific awards or prizes you strive for?

Oh, I don’t know. I feel like I have been so lucky already. My goal as a writer, years ago, was to have one book in print, one ISBN that I could call my own. So, to have, as my loving wife calls it, a body of work, well, it’s just too sweet. Of course, I would love to have a novel published by FS&G, or Dalkey Archive, or McSweeney’s, or Dzanc, but, what writer wouldn’t? But, realistically, I am not going to land at Knopf. I am very happy with every single publishing credit I have ever received, with every press who has ever published me. I am a small press author and that is, I believe, a fine thing to be. I have received many Pushcart nominations, and, I suppose, just once appearing in that formidable year-end tome would be grand. Oh, and an Oscar. Someday I want an Oscar.

2. What is your writing process?

After years of late night, sad bastard, flesh-lonely, darkly scrivened verse in imitation of whomever I was currently reading, after years of zero discipline, I finally, after marrying my current wife who, among other things, centered me, became an early morning writer. I get up before anyone else, make the coffee for my wife and daughter, and then go to my room. I am normally in front of the keyboard by 6 a.m., every day of the week. Discipline came late to me but, at least, it did come.

* * *

And now I must go write some more and also whisk about the downstairs, attempting to make house-drudging light, before I dash off. Good week for lunch: had a lovely one with painters Yolanda Sharpe and Ashley Cooper and now am going out with novelists Peggy Leon and Alice Lichtenstein. Happy (slightly belated) birthday, Peg! Her new novel from Permanent Press is here.

12 Readings in Advent: Yolanda Sharpe

Broad Stroke

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Mullen Gallery at SUNY-Oneonta to see several of Makoto Fujimura’s Nihongan paintings and enjoyed the “Shadow” group show, of which they were a part. I went with Yolanda Sharpe, whose “Urban Fragments” one-woman show preceded “Shadow.” Yolanda is one of those people who is interested in a number of art forms; she is a wonderful soprano, and she often writes poetry to go with her paintings.

For the “reading” for today, I’m posting images of some of her encaustics from 2009, along with the poems that accompanied them in the show.

Of her 2009-2010 encaustics, she says, “I grew up in Detroit, Michigan, relocated to upstate New York, and yet continue to celebrate the vibrant, creative energy of that city. This current series is part of the continuum of this energy. My creative impetus is shaped by my formative years in Michigan, and by a desire to capture Detroit’s beauty in the midst of decay and re-ruralization.” Yolanda Sharpe holds an MFA from Wayne State and has had many solo and group shows. She also has received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Currently she is ending a long stint as chairman of the art department and will soon go to Russia on a Fullbright scholarship.

01 More Miles
More Miles and Fat Times,
jamming to swirls, blurry, heavy metal and wax.
His tempos insist on porosity,
on time and space,
and move past fabrications
called walls to rule my mind

02 Miles Davis’ Fat Times (Part 3)
You are way cool, too cool by far
By paint, rhythm and blues,
Jaaaaaaazzaay (sing this if you want to).
I nod my head, shrug my shoulders,
pour halos and love that lava that bees make.

03 Miles Davis’ Fat Times (Part 4)
Drywall screen, framed by decisions,
Mood shifts, chroma and funky bee nuggets.
Fat Times you play infinity’s rim
rediscovered in every layer

04 Stars
I see my Star and I sing oracles,
and fly through orange fields,
to polish golden corners.

05 Inverted U-Shape
Inside the Inverted U,
I step on sidewalks and cracks like rocks in riverbeds.
The blue edge is the city.
With chunks I swim, glide, and am frozen.
Crayola slabs are sewer grates
and I am transformed from the mundane
into a glorious letter that is both C and U.

06 L-Shape Foliage
Look under the L-Shape Foliage,
behind an old idea turned into new.
Spring is on Kirby Street,
and the city’s thin air and grass is green and cold.

07 Ropes
Ropes hang from shadows locked in yellows, reds, nets, and roots. I cannot forget the urban tempo,
a syncopation and angular insistence against the sky.
Not even just for a while.

08 Broad Stroke [picture at top of post]
The jet stream is bold, white, fat, and flat.
It paints across the sky as it flies to God-knows-where,
and I go with it too.
I wish that crumbling bricks were bejeweled, or whole gems.
The Broad Stroke is a sea of billboards where paper is ripped,
and new ads are slapped on phone numbers, and faces.
They make promises ancient layers could not fulfill.

09 Sunflower and Leaf
Sunflower, you are the sun I look at.
You bathe the spotted leaf with red, gold, and black showers. Round boxes catch your glow
before your cousin
sets her table on the horizon.

10 Adrift
The act of painting is often like floating.
It is fabulous, uncomfortable, unknowing.
I paint adrift in questions.
Blue raft, let me know when to sit on both sides.
Let’s ride down the middle of the river
where whirls and eddies don’t stop.
Make us move, stay, and move again.

11 Grass and Brass
The diamond glistens in the grass,
and rainbows hover over blades,
green and sure of summer.
Pink is the color of love, I am told.

12 White Field #1
Say it is not winter!
No. I was fooled.
This is residue from the river at Belle Isle.
This is when I remember to squint before the shore of the other side of the island.
This is when I look at footprints from the river.
I choose colors for this memory of refreshment felt briefly,
when the muggy hot air dissolves into this one cool, cool, second.

13 The Rose
They told me they liked it funky.
So, I obeyed and kept it that way.
Rose, you are turned upside down
from the time I first drew you
the year before.
Now, you are on a thin veneer
and fused into the funky groove of white and black,
next to the yellow fence and sky below.

14 Red Raft #1
Red square, turned diamond, you are frozen,
and more hip than I thought you could be

15 Red Raft #2
Because your cousin is so much hotter, saucier too.
Her raft says she will race you, beat you,
with her blue and yellow boxes.
The white “L” comes from you
so that you can beat her instead.

16 Yellow Brick
I took this road to get away, to destroy decay.
My road is from the sun, from the east where it is born.
Blue hope and amber brick knit another wall.