writings

Excerpts from The "Think Visually, Act Locally" Newsletter, issued irregularly

No. 1, Winter 2002. My favorite quote from recent reading -- "The first requirement of duty is fitness for the task before us" -comes from Owen Parry's fascinating Civil-War-era detective story, Shadows of Glory (Harper-Torch, 200, p. 66). As an artist, I have tried this past year to keep fit for duty and hope this newsletter finds you thriving as well, fit for your own endeavors.

September 11. Bond Street is about a mile and a half north of Ground Zero. I watched the great fires from our roof, realizing to my horror that there was no way the towers could withstand such heat. I will never forget the moment of awareness that thousands were dying in front of me and that I could do nothing to help them.

Once it was apparent that the city was not going to be further bombarded, like most people here I felt the most intense gratitude that I was alive, and that my family, friends and neighbors were as well. And also a great sadness, for the dead, the injured, and for their near and dear. Relief was tempered by realizing, as we turned toward the smoke downtown, that we were breathing other people. This is difficult to explain, but I finally understood at a visceral level how intimately all life is connected.

It became imperative to many of us to remain planted here in the city, somehow attempting to hold onto "normal" life. My response as a painter was, first, to go to the Liz Christy Bowery-Houston Community Garden near our home to paint what was still growing in the ground, and then, for a number of evenings, to our roof. During a series of eerily beautiful September sunsets, I painted in watercolor the smoke that continued to billow from where the twin towers had stood. By day, as a photographer, I was drawn north to Union Square, the point below which traffic was prohibited immediately after the attacks. The south end of Union Square was transformed, during much of the rest of September, into a spontaneous memorial to the dead and bereaved, and was a focus of the will of the people here not to allow the nation to go into the war that has unfortunately ensued.

All of this is by way explanation that I entered 2002 with the firm conviction that is more important than ever to be creatively active, to counter destructiveness in all its forms. I'm pleased to have sold thirteen paintings last year, to have been invited to join the Salmagundi Club on Fifth Avenue, and to have had a chance to experiment with new watercolor techniques. Lest I grow cocky, I continue to take tap dance lessons, where my performance in class reminds me that no life is so dreadful that it cannot serve as a negative example to others.

No. 2, Fall 2002. After a recent kitchen-counter conversation with my husband Keith Crandell about why US society is so violent, I found I had a great deal to say on the subject. Sparing you the full blast of my analysis of what's wrong here, I will suggest that one reason why we have become so violent is that, as a society, we do not value the expressive arts or recognize their role in developing flexible, cooperative human beings. A lot of people in the USA cannot read and write fluently, and those whose natural modes of _expression lie elsewhere, such as musicians, visual artists, dancers or acrobats, have had very little support, especially in early life, from society.

Consider how unique the learning style of each person is. I can use myself as an example. Despite having needed corrective lenses since infancy, I still had an easy time learning to read, have a good visual memory, an ear for identifying unannounced voices on the telephone, and I generally remember people's birthdays and telephone numbers, once I learn them. On the other hand, I start screaming if spoken to between the time I look up a number in the phone book and when I start to dial it, because I can't retain the numbers. I can be reduced to tears by trying to learn a new computer system, tap dance movements or yoga postures that require whole-body coordination.

In an ideal society, when a child whose learning style does not fit the word-and numbers-based curricula of most US schooling has difficulty mastering basic information, he or she would be offered other paths to learning, especially through visual, musical and physical activity. But in this country, when money is tight, it is precisely these approaches that are jettisoned first from curricula as non-essential "frills," further jeopardizing the futures of the students already most at risk of becoming disaffected by structured learning while their intellectual and emotional capital is all but ignored.

From where I sit, it looks something like this: if you don't understand, you have trouble paying attention to a group agenda. If you are unable to learn to express yourself, you become increasingly frustrated and angry. If you are forced to spend seemingly endless amounts of time in circumstances in which you fail constantly because your personal emotional and intellectual wiring cannot be plugged into the system, you are bound accumulate quite a head of steam that needs an outlet. In the absence of universal health care and curricula that teach the thing young people really most need to know - like basic hygiene and nutrition, where babies come from, how to resolve interpersonal conflicts, and how to handle money - and in the presence of polluted air, a food chain rife with pesticides and hormones fostering chemical imbalances in humans, and the stimulus of toxic media programming, it does not surprise me that so many people resort to violence.

This is not to say that helping people express themselves creatively will magically neutralize all of everyone's vile impulses, but I do think that we the people are better served by putting more national resource behind true universal literacy and the arts than instruction at the governments expense in how to kill other human beings or construction of more facilities for incarceration of those failed by our society's woefully inadequate support of the vulnerable young.

No. 3, Spring 2003. ARTnews recently sent me a survey that included the question, "Should artists who receive government support conform to standards of decency?" My reaction is that, until everyone who is paid out of my tax dollars is held to such a standard, the answer is a resounding "no." Given what is coming out of Washington these days, I see abundant cause for concern about where and how government monies are being disbursed. Decency appears to have little to do with many of these decisions.

Some of you have heard me say," Let's vacuum the cat, instead of the furniture." No anti-cat sentiment this, but a pro-housekeeping, cleaner-environment, solve-problems-at-the-source position. If you brush your cat regularly, its fur does not turn up as alien protein in the soup or on your best pinstriped jacket. When government does its job by meeting the needs of those least able to care for themselves, it forestalls many larger problems down the line. As repellent as the image of a vacuumed kitty may be, it keeps coming to mind these days as we see the societal equivalent of loose fur left by inappropriate governmental agendas getting all over the national furniture as indecent levels of functional illiteracy, addiction, unemployment, domestic abuse, crime and incarceration.

No area of government domestic decision-making could make so great a difference in the quality of life of more Americans than instituting universal sex education at all school levels, access to birth control information and materials, retention of the right to abortion on request and genuine health care. The current drive to overturn Roe vs. Wade is obscene. Presidential calls to "leave no child behind" might carry more weight with me if public policies truly fostered a national reality in which all children born were wanted children, able to be economically and emotionally supported by their parents and healthy enough to be educated. As it is, governmental gutting of public school sex education curricula, curbing access to birth control information, and interference with the right of minors to obtain abortions are contributing to a situation in which a great many children are being produced by very young parents incapable of or uninterested in caring for their offspring.

Consider the daily nightmare for millions resulting from the absence of timely information about human reproduction or protection from venereal disease, the lack of universal health care, and the lack of access to abortion - unwanted children, infant mortality, exacerbated poverty, AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, and skyrocketing levels of child abuse being just a few of the most obvious consequences.

Consider instead what a vast - and novel - shift could be achieved in a matter of weeks - then months - then years - if every child born in this country were a wanted child, if every child's parents had access to adequate nutrition, prenatal care and parenting training, if every child were regularly given age-appropriate information about human sexuality, and if everyone of an age to be sexually active were reliably protected against sexually transmitted disease and could truly decide whether or not to reproduce. To me these priorities seem obvious, yet our current administration appears to regard women's bodily autonomy as a concept with scant legal value, the lives of little children as unworthy of full support, and the consequent geometrically higher costs in tax dollars of redial education, high-tech medicine, joblessness, incarceration, and feeding the insatiable maw of the military-industrial complex to be preferable to preventive expenditures.

So demand decency at all government levels and keep the nation's fur off the furniture.

No. 4, Spring 2004. Many of the things I had planned for this past year happened as envisioned - I had a wonderful time painting in Provence, had two solo shows at Paula Barr Chelsea, sold 16 paintings and drawings, ran two Noah's Ark/Art workshops in New York and two watercolor workshops for the Pahaquarry Foundation in New Jersey, excavated a great deal of physical dross from our loft, and, with the indispensable help of my assistant got my art inventory computerized. As is often the case in life, however, not all plans came to fruition - there was no watercolor course in Assisi, and the website is not yet up. And some unexpected things happened instead. My dear, witty mother, Alice Crafts Shaver, died on 26 November in Oberlin, Ohio, leaving a big hole in the fabric of my life.

During the worst of the winter weather I painted flower still-lifes, especially white ones As the days now begin to lengthen perceptibly, and I can begin to think about working outside once more, plans on all levels for life-repairs and new creations are inspiring me to lay out my intentions for the work of this new year. Contemplating a bouquet of flowers or engaging in plein air work can be a form of meditation. My own mood is general much improved after painting or drawing in the company of nature. I like to think that my images can also make a difference to others by reminding them of the spaces in our hearts reserved for peace and quiet.

Like many other people, I am worried sick about what humans are doing to one another all over the globe on every level - domestic violence, outrageously greedy corporate behaviors that contaminate our food supplies, terrorist suicide bombings, wholesale environmental ravaging.

So here's my intention for 2004: since the work I do is intended to foster healing, and I perceive a global need for shift in our collective consciousness, I want to see that work move out much widely into venues where healing traditionally happens, and I want the places where my work is shown to become environments for healing because the work is in them. Among my own plans to have the work better known are licensing of images for reproduction, Internet selling and a web-site, in addition to my usual program of exhibiting.

If you'd like to help me realize my vision of getting healing art out into the world more widely, I'd like to invite you to consider buying a piece from me for your own environment or as a gift to a friend, health care provider or an institution where people spend time healing. If you don't want to wait until the May exhibition at Paula Barr Chelsea, please call for a private viewing appointment on Bond Street (212-677-4045). You could also commission something from me that might be of healing help to you or to another person or a healing venue. In addition to landscape and still life, I do abstract works dominated particularly one color that can be used as feng shui corrections in domestic or work settings.

I quite liked the following quote from the new book by Twyla Tharp and Mark Reiter, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, A Practical Guide (Simon & Schuster, 2003), p. 136: "Generosity is luck going in the opposite direction, away from you. If you're generous to someone, if you do something to help him out, you are in effect making him lucky. This is important. It's like inviting yourself into a community of good fortune. "No coincidence that I was given this book (thank you, Ann Arlen) in this year in which I had begun to tithe. In addition to sending off ten per cent of basic financial resources to causes and institutions that I care about in the wide world, it has been especially gratifying to contribute from my art-derived income more specifically to organizations and institutions that support my creative work. Keeps the energy moving.