Elizabeth Adams on printmaking and more

Pulling a print for the Annunciation anthology

Elizabeth Adams, artist, writer, designer, singer, publisher at Phoenicia Publishing in Montreal: what an interesting woman she is! Here's an interesting, down-to-earth interview with her on the subject of printmaking and making art over time:

  Part 1 

  Part 2 

and

  Beth's Etsy shop with prints and more 

and

Phoenicia Publishing, including an art prints page

She is not yet old enough to include in the posts on "elder artists," but here's a great quote from her that applies to the topic of making art and growing older:

Printmaking always carries technical challenges, and I continue to improve my skills and experiment with new materials and techniques. There's no substitute for experience. In all of the arts, we face the challenge of not becoming discouraged, and the risk of "failure," whatever that means to each of us. We need to continually push ourselves in new directions, and not get stuck in repetition. I'm happiest when I am learning new things and pushing myself, so I try to remember that. I'm over 60 now so I've been at this a pretty long time, and hope to be a creative person until my last breath!

Beth is a great publisher / designer (my book with her press is the gorgeously-produced Thaliad with art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins) who is very particular about projects she takes on--that they "fit" her sensibility and vision for Phoenicia. She is also just a wonderful person to know.

Another one from Annunciation

Elder artists, 3: Yeats

Poetry Ireland

Maurice Harmon, "Old Age and Creativity"
Poetry Ireland May/June 2012

The question is what happens when the poet reaches old age. Does he discover new subject matter and different techniques? There are no simple answers. Very often the subjects that preoccupied him in the past still interest him although he may approach them from a different angle and in a different tone. W B Yeats made growing old itself an issue. He did not like it, hated the loss of physical strength and the waning of sexual energy. In ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ he declared, ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing’ unless ‘Soul clap its hands and sing’, unless he can counter physical decline with imaginative intensity. He proceeds to make conflict central to his later work, dramatising and imagining the contrast between youth and age, past and present, stability and change. In the process his style changed from the ringing declarations of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ to the compressed power of ‘Leda and the Swan’ to ballad forms in Last Poems. He was that kind of poet, constantly remaking himself and becoming remarkably vigorous in old age. In these years he also extended his intellectual range, placing his sense of personal loss within the contexts of civilisations rising and falling.

***

The wonderful Louise Bogan on Yeats,
The Atlantic 1938

Muse and poet

William Butler Yeats, at the age of seventy-three, stands well within the company of the great poets. He is still writing, and the poems which now appear, usually embedded in short plays or set into the commentary and prefaces which have been another preoccupation of his later years, are, in many instances, as vigorous and as subtle as the poems written by him during the years ordinarily considered to be the period of a poet's maturity. Yeats has advanced into age with his art strengthened by a long battle which had as its object a literature written by Irishmen fit to take its place among the noble literatures of the world. The spectacle of a poet's work invigorated by his lifelong struggle against the artistic inertia of his nation is one that would shed strong light into any era. The phenomenon of a poet who enjoys continued development into the beginning of old age is in itself rare. Goethe, Sophocles, and, in a lesser degree, Milton come to mind as men whose last works burned with the gathered fuel of their lives. More often development, in a poet, comes to a full stop; and it is frequently a negation of the ideals of his youth, as well as a declination of his powers, that throws a shadow across his final pages.

...

Yeats's faith in the development of his own powers has never failed. He wrote, in 1923, after receiving from the King of Sweden the medal symbolizing the Nobel Prize:—

It shows a young man listening to a Muse, who stands young and beautiful with a great lyre in her hand, and I think as I examine it, "I was good-looking once like that young man, but my unpractised verse was full of infirmity, my Muse old as it were, and now I am old and rheumatic and nothing to look at, but my Muse is young." I am even persuaded that she is like those Angels in Swedenborg's vision, and moves perpetually "towards the dayspring of her youth."

 ***

Monkey postscript

Despite the proliferation of testicular tales, no "monkey glands" were involved in Yeats's self-renewal. He did have a vasectomy, an enactment of what Susan Johnston Graf called "sexual magic," evidently a belief that the "vital energy of procreation would be channeled into imaginary, literary, and visionary work" (W. B. Yeats: Twentieth-Century Magus, p. 203)

Graf suggests that, as Kathleen Raine--a follower of Yeats and Blake, and a poet worth reading--pointed out, the operation (and other sometimes-embarrassing-to-scholars facts like an interest in the occult) may have been one element that allowed a new flowering. His belief in its efficacy, that is, may have contributed to his powers in his late writing. If you really (really, now!) want to know more, you can google "Yeats" and "Steinach operation" to find out heaps more. Richard Ellmann and others have attempted to put the wilder stories to bed, so to speak, but it seems the rumors are a bit too lively to suppress.

3 readings in time and art

Wikipedia Commons

Literature in time
Sven Birkerts at LitHub:
"Can the 'Literary'Survive Technology?"

Sven Birkerts has been depressing me--stylishly so--for many years. Here's a recent clip:

...I don’t see the literary as we have known it prevailing or even flourishing. With luck, it will survive for some time yet at the present scale, which is, in terms of societal influence and prestige, already much diminished from former times. But we should keep in mind that those were times when the seemingly sedate verbal art was not yet beset on every side by the seductions of easily accessible entertainment. In the future, literature will likely not command enough marketplace attention to make it commercially viable at any corporate level, but might rather become (and this is not a bad thing) an artisanal product that functions either as a vital inner resource or else as a status marker for its reduced population of consumers. What we might think of as old-school “serious” literature may come to function as a kind of code among initiates. At that point charges of elitism will not have to be defended against—they will have been fully earned.

Elder artists, 2
Elder Eden:
clips from Art News

Here's more on artists (sculptors and painters in this case) continuing to work well into old age:

A historical look reveals that a striking number have been highly productive and turned out some of their best work late into old age, including Bellini (who died at 86), Michelangelo (d. 89), Titian (d. between 86 and 103, depending on your source), Ingres (d. 86), Monet (d. 86), Matisse (d. 84), Picasso (d. 91), O’Keeffe (d. 98), and Bourgeois (d. 98).

“Working becomes your own little Eden,” Thiebaud says, while acknowledging the challenge of overcoming the traps of what others think and say. “You make this little spot for yourself. You don’t have to succeed. You don’t have to be famous. You don’t have to be obligated to anything except that development of the self.” 

Obliterating the past
"The Anomaly of Barbarism":
John Gray at Lapham's Quarterly

And here is a clash between ancient art and year-zero desire:

 The destruction of buildings and artworks, which ISIS has perpetrated at the ancient site of Palmyra among other places, has several twentieth-century precedents. Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks razed churches and synagogues in Russia. Mao Zedong demolished large parts of China’s architectural inheritance and most of Tibet’s, while the Pol Pot regime wrecked pagodas and temples and aimed to destroy the country’s cities. In these secular acts of iconoclasm, the goal was to abolish the past and create a new society from “year zero”—an idea that goes back to “year one” of the calendar introduced in France in 1793 to signal the new era inaugurated by the French Revolution. Systematically destroying not only pre-Islamic relics but also long-established Islamic sites, the aim of ISIS is not essentially different.

Elder artists

"Born around 1910, Loongkoonan is the oldest living Nyikina speaker
and one of Australia’s oldest practising artists. A revered matriarch
in her community her life experiences inform Loongkoonan’s
shimmering and delicate paintings of Nyikina country."
-Mossenson Galleries

I am fond of and heartened by stories of older people making their art--tales that suggest it is quite possible to keep on keeping on (even without Yeatsian monkey hormones!) Take a peek at Mossenson Galleries to see the work of Loongkoonan, who at somewhere over 100 is lively and active as a painter.

Elizabeth Adams recently pointed to the writing of retirement home resident Mary McPhee. Her latest book is in the nomination process at Kindle Scout, and you may see a sample and vote here.

And here is a picture of my mother's hands at work--hands that are still weaving and gardening and helping others at 87:

Unfinished work from her 4-harness loom

Another glimpse of works in process.

Leave a name or a link if there's anyone you especially admire in the over 80 crowd...