My Chronicle as an Artist

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

∞T.S. Eliot

31: My Neighborhood

…” Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision; there remains for us yesterday’s street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.”
~Duino Elegies: The First Elegy Rainer Maria Rilke

I live in a residential area with views of the downtown city. The raised necks of cranes stretch across the northern skyline with a backdrop of the rolling hills of Tennessee. It is a perfect panorama of the coexistence of the old and the new, and everything in-between. I love living here because it is the union of the neighbourhoods that I have lived in since the beginning of my memory. When I look outside as far as I can see I am also looking inward to my personal experience and what I imagine of my past, present, and future.

On my street there are small bungalows, large duplexes, and contiguous town houses. Each building has roughly the same amount of land; therefore the small houses have adequate yards — I grew up in one of these. The larger ones have room for a driveway and garage and very little ground left over — I am renting one of these today.

I painted the houses that I could see within the window frames of my second floor studio. Over the last 3+ years these houses have become so familiar to me that I see them as distinct personalities. Perhaps they reflect the true spirit of their occupants. But outside of the occasional hand-waves and exchanges of brief pleasantries, I don’t really know the occupants, my neighbors. I can only imagine some aspects of their inner lives by reading the outer shells of their homes.

Sharon’s House is an island of self-possession and completeness. There is a perfect balance of comfort and material possessions without the burden of excess: One very large tree for protection and beauty, a chair on a deck for relaxation and daydreaming, a fenced-in backyard to mark boundaries, and an open front lawn to allow for the freedom to wander away. It speaks of solitude as a necessary respite from external stimuli, and yet there is an implicit welcome to all who desire a share in this oasis of uncluttered simplicity.

Mac’s House stoically serves as an anchor to his truck, a large vehicle which almost qualifies as a home addition. I have seen this great white leviathan move around his yard but never out of its unfenced confines. The desire to journey away from home is implicit, but the house faithfully stands by, stable and cave-like, offering seasonal hibernation until the desire to take to the road becomes overpowering. The world beyond beckons, and one day the truck will be gone.

***Paulina & Otey's House ©️ 2022 LSAuth.***

Paulina and Otey’s House floats in an atmospheric world unfettered by its four walls and yard. This little bungalow serves as a trailhead marker to an enchanted magnolia forest. The greens stay dark all winter and are deeper than the luminous night sky. When the flowers are in full bloom, they add their light to the moon and stars. I often wonder if this dense beauty is sometimes overwhelming for those awake in the middle of the night; if the impenetrable darkness is terrifying.

Beyond the magnolias there is a journey up a steep hill to reach the top, where all are left behind to dream below while a vast sky sails above. The heaviness of the magnolias evaporates into the approaching dawn like wispy boats of water vapor. All earthly things will soon disappear and the infinite sky will serve as home.

30: Shoebox Manger

There’s a little bit of magic in every box! ~Adam Rex

manger in sky with birds trees and fish — ***Manger*** *©️2021 LSAuth.*

✍️When we were young children, my father would drive me and my siblings to Kenny’s shoe store at the start of the school year in September. It was always a special time for me. I always loved the smell of brand-new and the gift of wearing something that no one else had worn before me, even if they were only non-stylish saddle shoes—“the only kind suitable for walking” my father said.

I was equally happy to bring home a brand new shoebox, careful not to damage its pristine perfection. For the next few months, it was my container to hold all the trinkets and materials I had been gathering to build my Christmas crèche. I would collect anything that could remotely be fashioned into a human figure or animal or stable. Some of my core treasures included old corks, crumpled aluminium foil, wooden spools, Popsicle sticks, clothespins, wire, dried grass, and twigs that looked like miniature trees. Although I never succumbed to the temptation to use my readymade plastic Disney caricatures or my tiny troll dolls, I did think that the white haired, gnomish faces of the trolls looked like Wise Men.

When Advent season arrived in December, I would open my treasure trove, spread all the contents over the floor and begin to arrange and compose. Infinite possibilities were unleashed while my imagination built grander mangers than I would ever be able to accomplish in reality.

Painting and drawing the details of the facial features were the best part, followed by making clothes for the Magi and the shepherds from the bag of mushrooming fabric scraps and notions. Animals were hard for me. Sheep didn’t seem well served with a mere cotton ball — but they glued well to cardboard. I was often happiest with my donkey — a woven “blanket” on its back could cover many mistakes in my anatomical forms, and the “realistic” mane and tail made of embroidery floss seemed perfect. The lid of the box was always the crowning pediment roof, just like all the houses I drew obsessively on the blank back of the weekly school luncheon menu handed out every Friday afternoon.

My memory could be inaccurate but I don’t recall this endeavour ever being a required homework project even though I attended Catholic school. I just loved every opportunity to create and make something, to mark and celebrate a special time. The Christmas season added even more magic to my engaged imagination. I can’t remember any particular one of the finished mangers in any one of all those young years. Nor can I remember if I ever felt happy with the result or if I ever anointed any one of them “my favourite”. How long any one of them survived beyond their completion was never important for I tacitly understood that my homespun creations couldn’t achieve the gold standard of being put away safely with the other more standard and worthy Christmas ornaments. I don’t remember feeling sad about this inadequacy— or their inevitable fate in the trash can.

I am sure I didn’t even realise that I was learning one of life’s lessons — that so much of the hope and fulfilment in creative pursuits begins in the slow and non-linear process of becoming, with all the unforeseen discoveries and surprises along the way. All the days leading up to Christmas culminating in Christmas Eve was the best time of all. Christmas Day held the shadow of sadness for me back then because it seemed so final.

With each completion I have learned that I need to start all over again, in every endeavour, every day, so that the destination or goal is just a short break before I start another journey.

I wanted to share this recollection of my childhood, if only to say that this memory is revived every year at this time when I look at a shoebox, in December, before Christmas.

May this holiday season bring you joy🌲

29: My Fallen Birds

Flicker ©️2021 LSAuth. Oil, conte, gouache on rag paper. — ***Flicker*** ©️2021 LSAuth. Oil, conte, gouache on rag paper.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

I spent a large part of my childhood discovering the outdoors, trying to save the animals, including insects, from premature death. Every summer the ants would resolutely march in and out of their hole-hills burrowed in the interstices of our sidewalk. I would examine their minute movements along their chain gang thread and marvel at how hard they worked. How could my brothers drop water balloons on their homes? I tried to thwart their efforts by constructing roofs over the openings, made of twigs and grass. My passionate yet naive efforts could not prevent the cataclysmic destruction —and so the ants’ colonies were doomed.

My crusades expanded when I was old enough to explore beyond my yard boundaries. Most of the time, all of the kids in my neighbourhood played together rather peacefully. But kids can be occasionally cruel. Various atrocities including pulling legs off of spiders, pinching wings off of butterflies, extracting lit abdomens from fireflies, to name a few, would bring out the warrior in me. I knew that I could not save the victims in their hands, but I could scream at the bullies and withhold future friendship if they continued in these barbarous acts. Some of us kids would have funerals for the unfortunate creatures and bury them along the creek bank. Insects, frogs, birds, drowned puppies & kittens, were some of the many to whom we solemnly and tearfully said goodbye as we sent them back into the earth, housed in a cardboard coffin with dandelions on top.

These drawings and paintings from My Fallen Birds continue my ritual of bearing witness to the brevity of a life. These birds are found on my walks, often on sidewalks and driveways, which I promptly document with a sketch and photograph for a later studio painting. I place them on an imaginary “map” to bring them out and beyond their local resting place.

These birds are not dead by a child’s hand, but rather by a domestic cat let outside by its owner — or a crash into some glass window. There is something about the absolute stillness of a creature that is normally in constant movement that always deeply affects me. As a youth, I never cared for the still life paintings in major museum collections with dead birds, rabbits, and other animals. With the exception of admiring the technical mastery, I didn’t feel the emotional thrust of what the paintings were saying about our own human mortality. Perhaps, I was too young.

I reflect on how childhood cruelties and adult indifferences have similar consequences on how they affect the life around us. Although I give to bird conservancy organisations, and I do not own a cat, and I try to prevent window collisions with films and decals, I am not an animal activist in any public way. I was more of one as a child, than I am today as a 60+ adult. Why this is, I am not sure, except I’m uncomfortable with anything that smacks of virtue signalling. I know that I am guilty of having done harm in my own life with my actions. Cruelty and thoughtlessness can be perceived as one and the same to the recipient of those actions.

In the end, I don’t know why I want to paint these birds. I just know that I need to. I am not making a particular statement. I am merely trying to live fully by observing my surroundings. Maybe it is my form of a prayer, an offering to the great unknown.

Above left to right: Hummingbird, Final Flight(Starling), and Robin.

28: Digital Collages

I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.
~ Mary Oliver

When the 2020 pandemic shut down the world, it was almost impossible to see art in museums and galleries. Of course most of us artists had been sharing pictures of our art online for years before CoVid hit, but this has never been a substitute for showing the actual work. The life force is inextricable from the physical work; I missed hearing about and attending my colleagues’ shows all year. I felt the void and the depression everywhere. I am lucky to live in a city that opened its art museum last summer 2020, and I experienced some amazing exhibits. But the local art galleries remained shut down until May 2021.

I decided to take this past year as an opportunity to update my printmaking skills. In previous blog posts I have written about my early training as a printmaker ( blog posts 7 and 8 )

I subscribed to the PhotoShop app this year — paying a monthly fee was an incentive to learn enough skills to create an image. I had done a little PhotoShop before this, making cards and posters, but nothing that I would call “my work”. PhotoShop is the modern printmaking medium for me — it is silkscreening without the solvents and inks. Of course, I will never be anything close to a master of PhotoShop, for it is truly a wonderland of infinite magical possibilities — and all the overwhelming frustration that goes with this. I had to discipline myself to keep my boundaries quite limited so that I could concentrate on building an image that I could live with and be willing to share.

Whether I am painting or silkscreening, image making is a process of adding and subtracting many layers of various objects. Each of the 5 images shown on this post contain pieces of individual works that span my portfolio over several decades, as well as my own photo studies of landscapes and objects that I have loved and collected in my visual diary. Photos are forever, even if I no longer own an artwork anymore, I own the image and I can recreate it in a different context or setting.

So, I digitally cut up photos of past works and recombine them with my photo studies into a single piece, the same way I did traditional collage in the past.

All my work, no matter what medium, starts with an imaginative concept and ends when I can go no further. That is, I know the work is finished when I cannot do anything else to make it better and attempts to do so make it worse.

Discovering the end point in any work I do is an integral part of my process. When I surprise myself I feel a glimmer of success. In the end, the goal is never to let anyone see or know my effort; I only care that they enjoy my work.

I am grateful to the developers of this marvellous tool of Photoshop. It has not replaced my drawing and painting by any means, for I will always prefer the tactility and presence of a painted surface to a digital one. But it has given me another way to represent my vision, a different way that I can only exploit in PhotoShop, and this has contributed greatly to how I see and imagine my next endeavour.

above l to r: Between Heaven & Earth, Starling Rock, Explorer, and Bargaining for Stars.

27: A New Dark Age

***Between Heaven and Earth. ©️ 2021 LSAuth.***

“O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant…” TS Elliot FourQuartets/East Coker III

✍️I love the night when it is luminous and full of light. Thousands of nights with points of light have filled my head with visual inspiration, fueling so many of my works.

I found solace and hope in these nights.

I am struggling to see the light these days — even on the most sun-drenched days.

Art can only survive with freedom of expression, which is freedom of speech, which houses freedom of thought.

Otherwise, the luminous night turns to total blackness. Sun-white days turn to blankness.
I am still holding onto the flickers of light within — dying embers to be sure, but not ashes — at least, not yet.

The struggle to find the light never ends.

26: Birds of Paradise

Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

Birds of Paradise ©️2020LSAuth — ***Birds of Paradise*** *©️2020LSAuth*

I have never seen the exotic birds named Birds-of-Paradise, native to eastern Australia and Papua New Guinea. But while in Santa Monica, CA, two Januaries ago, I saw the plants by this same name on every street. So many green stalks arced over neighbouring yards and sidewalks like the outstretched necks of cranes and herons. Their flowers were uniquely beautiful: Brilliant yellow-orange petals mimicked feather plumes, vivid blue-violet arrowheads targeted unsuspecting prey, and sword-like variegated bills waited to skewer the fallen victims.

I sketched and painted these plants often that month of January. I found their beauty beguiling because there was a subtle edge of malevolence in their elegant, yet hostile, gestures. I had to stop and stare at them every time I walked outside our building. I soaked up their color and warmth in hopes that it would sustain me for several months when I returned home to the dreary Connecticut winter.

I have been thinking about this place called paradise. I have been there millions of moments in my life. Seeing something beautiful brings me there, even if the experience dissipates quickly. Paradise starts with that beautiful sight or sound, which is usually one in the natural world. And then, often, that initial sensation triggers a memory of another time, another place. Paradise and visual poetry are, for me, one and the same.

Over those few weeks in Santa Monica, the birds of paradise brought me to the endless acres of the green and ripening cornfields of my childhood, when my parents and siblings would take occasional Sunday afternoon drives to the country in our overstuffed station wagon, with all the windows rolled down, while we sang the familiar repertoire of family songs. This freedom of movement along with the heady smells of summer were experienced as pure joy as far back as I can remember.

When I walked those residential streets of Santa Monica, the yellow-crowned floral heads with their limb-like, green stalks walked with me to where my destination always ended — at the beach. There, the gulls screamed with mixed cries of greeting and outrage, depending on whether they felt my presence to be benign or aggressive. The early evening stars twinkled their replies to the lights on the distant pier. When I walked along the water’s edge, the sounds of birds and water melded with ocean spray, salty air and sand — creating a roaring primal music which swept me along with the tides. I was cleansed, uncluttered, and detached from earthly concerns. I was a swirling speck of grit in a timeless universe. Dreaming.

I was in paradise.

25: OsageOracle

Maybe some of you are familiar with the Osage Orange tree. I was not, before coming to Tennessee. Of all the trees I draw in the arboretum, this is the strangest. Its bark is gnarly and deeply furrowed, resembling the skin of an ancient biblical prophet. There are two that I see on every walk, but this one is my favorite— a female tree that yields warty, greenish-yellow fruit. These orbs are the size of small grapefruit which will fall to the ground soon.

Scientists have theorised that this fruit probably fed gigantic herbivores which roamed the mid-southern land of North America more than 10,000 years ago — like the American mastodon and the giant sloth. So why didn’t the osage orange trees vanish from the earth along with their imbibers?

I was mesmerised by this creature even before I read anything about it — and I continue to be. I often feel it has secrets to tell me about luck and survival.

I am listening very hard.

24: SouthernMagnolias

SouthernMagnolias ©2020 LSAuth. — *SouthernMagnolias* **©2020 LSAuth.**

“… In the pale evening gloom, when the soft fragrance of magnolias hung in the air, my heart would swell without warning, and tremble, and lurch with a stab of pain. I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and wait for it to pass. And it would pass –but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache behind.” Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakami

✍️

In the yard of my childhood home were all kinds of flowering trees and shrubs—dogwoods, lilacs, azaleas, forsythia, roses, and Japanese magnolias. Honeysuckle vines cascaded over and concealed the ugly chainlink fence, and my siblings and I would often lick the nectar out of the flowers. We would thread violets and lilacs to make miniature Mayqueen crowns, hoping they wouldn’t be too brown by the time we placed them on the heads of the Blessed Mother icons at school.

Besides flowers, there were wild fruit trees. There was an alley behind our house which ran the length of two or three blocks, and we kids knew every backyard that had a mulberry tree for us to climb — we competed with the birds for those berries and I would routinely stuff myself until the time I actually looked at the inside of a beautifully plump one. There seemed to be hundreds of the tiniest white “worms” fully alive and cruising through the remaining half. I think that ended my thievery of the neighbourhood edibles, and the birds were quite happy about it, I am sure.

Spring was a magnificent time to witness so much natural beauty in Virginia. It had a way of being a curtain which hid ugliness and even sadness. In a way, a freshly fallen snow in Chicago or Connecticut did the same thing—until the snow started to melt revealing the mud, the filth, and the trash.

And here I am, back in the land of a real springtime again. I had never really experienced Southern Magnolias before coming to Tennessee.

They are huge and evergreen and the flowers are as large as porcelain cups and saucers. At night, on our walks in the arboretum, some of these trees stand in groups of three or so. The foliage is as dark as a cave, but impenetrable — and the flowers are luminous, especially in the moonlight, and look like alien celestial bodies.

I am often not sure if the magnolias are welcoming or foreboding. But they are beautiful, and I love them. For me, they are constant reminders that such magnificent and other-worldly beauty also possesses at least a hint of malevolence.

23: Edvard

Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul ~ Edvard Munch

Edvard ©️2020 LSAuth. — ***Edvard*** ©️2020 LSAuth.

The first time I viewed The Scream by Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch, was on a large projection screen. I was 18 years old, taking a year “off” after high school graduation, feeling a bit lost. I was living with an older sister in Charlottesville, Va. While she was finishing her last year at the University, I was trying to figure out how to structure the next chapter of my life. I worked a day job as a dental assistant while I took evening classes at the University night school. One of the first classes I took that fall was Modern Art History.

Of all the formal classes I had ever taken before that time, this was the first one to really change my life. I had never experienced such challenging and rigorous material before. With endless reading material of literature, philosophy, critical essays, and art, it was truly my first taste of what a University life could be about. I adored this class and thrived.

My professor welcomed my thoughts on Munch’s Scream. I remember telling her that I thought I understood the originality of Munch, and the expressionist “angst“ of its time, but with all that expressed internal turmoil, I still saw it as cartoonish, and was not emotionally moved.

All these years later, with many glimpses of The Scream reproduced on everything from canvas bags to coasters, I still feel the same way.

Several months ago, I was slapped with a large dose of irony when I walked by this huge catalpa—the largest one on Vanderbilt campus. There was Munch’s figure, perhaps laughing at me, mocking me, getting his revenge. The only way I could exorcise this nagging vision from my mind was to attempt to paint this magnificent tree, riddled with sapsucker drill wells, as faithfully as I could.

But I still see The Scream…do you?

22: Names

Many of the trees that I’ve been drawing and painting for the last few months are standing on the grounds of Vanderbilt arboretum . They are becoming as familiar, and as mysterious, as old friends.

After my daily observations of these creatures over a period of time, they reveal their names to me. These old souls have ancient names.

Cerberus is a painting I finished a couple of weeks ago (mid-May 2020). I have observed this tree many times against an evening sky of deep pink light. There are centuries of images illustrating this mythological dog guarding the gates of hell. My rendering is just another interpretation to add to a very long queue.

Cerberus ©️2020LSAuth — ***Cerberus*** ©️2020LSAuth

Didymus, in my last post, is a lone tree standing at the edge of a parking lot. Whether an ancient Greek philosopher or a Christian apostle, he is a Stoic who sometimes lacks conviction,

Didymus ©️2020LSAuth — ***Didymus*** ©️2020LSAuth

Charon is a riverboat watchman who ferries points of light across the darkness.

Charon ©️2020LSAuth — ***Charon*** ©️2020LSAuth

Casper, whether a king, scholar, or priest, is wise and other-worldly. Perhaps the creators of the cartoon, Casper the Friendly Ghost, felt the same about their character… I wonder?

Casper ©️2020LSAuth — ***Casper*** ©️2020LSAuth

Pontos is a primordial sea creature. Its leaves blow about and fall in pools of golden ochre and raw sienna, resembling schools of shiny fish.

Pontos ©️2020LSAuth — ***Pontos*** ©️2020LSAuth

Bolbe stands at Radnor Lake State Park. In ancient Greek mythology, Bolbe was a beautiful sea nymph who lived in the Macedonian lake, and mothered a long line of fresh water nymphs. Thousands of years later, she moved to Tennessee.

Bolbe ©️2020LSAuth — ***Bolbe*** ©️2020LSAuth

Part II ☞ Where I Am Now

…“ As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment”… T.S.Eliot “East Coker”

⚘⚘⚘

Didymus ©️LSAuth2020 — ***Didymus*** *©️LSAuth2020*

Two years ago, I started my website blog, Part I, as a means to reflect and comment on the work that I had been making for over four decades. More emphasis was given to my foundation years. Part II, for the most part, will be musings on my present works and the new surroundings that are informing me.

I am now living in Nashville, Tennessee— the 8th place that I have called “home” since leaving my parents’s house. When we arrived in late October 2019, Nashville was in autumnal glory. For the following months to this present day, I have been walking the streets within a several mile radius of our house, from the downtown cityscape to the lush university grounds of Vanderbilt and Belmont.

It always takes time to absorb a different environment and start a new body of work. Just as in times past, I always have unfinished things to complete while I get over the jolt that moving always brings. I have not lived in the South since college days and so much urban growth has occurred over the decades. But I don’t have to go very far to find the old landscape of mountains, rivers, and trees.

I have forgotten how much I have missed this landscape; its familiarity is comforting, and yet I feel like I need to get reacquainted with all that I have lost touch with, or rather, had seen differently in my youth.

I know I have to start with the trees.

21: Houses That I Once Lived In

“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.” —Matsuo Bashô

When the peaks of our sky come together My house will have a roof. — Paul Éluard

The house is the first image that I can remember drawing obsessively as a 6-year-old child -- it was the stereotypical white square with the pointed roof, and sometimes a central door flanked high on either side with one, multi-paned window. Many children draw this pentangle house even when it has no resemblance to the house in which they live.

But I really did spend the first 18 years of my life in such a house -- a white, stucco bungalow -- the longest amount of time that I have ever spent in any single place. As a very small child, I remember this house as my entire universe in which to imagine and invent other worlds unlike my own. When I started school, house and home were interchangeable words with the same meaning — a place of refuge and security. Then later, like many teenagers, I could not wait to leave it.

I did finally leave this house as my permanent residence when I was twenty, but over the following decades as my childhood receded at an exponential rate, the house as an image remained within me, and I think will probably stay to be rediscovered and recreated. Its significance to my creative process has expanded and contracted according to the needs of specific time in my physical, everyday life.

In my gallery slideshow video, the 30 images are arranged in chronological order over a 35-year period, starting in Princeton, NJ, as a newly fledged artist, to my present place in New Haven, CT. In between those two points were Baltimore, when I became a young mother of two babies, then Fair Haven, NJ, where I walked them to their little primary school, and then BlueBell, PA, where my close-knit family of four individuals each doggedly pursued and developed their own interests.

As I look back on these works of drawings, paintings, and constructions, I remember that some of the earlier house images are almost actual portraits of neighborhood homes, especially in Baltimore, where our first residence was a rowhouse and life was gritty. In a few later works, especially during the last couple of years in Bluebell after our children had fledged for college, the house becomes part of the constellations, with no physical walls.

I do not know what the house of the future will be, but I hope that I can continue to seek it out and live there awhile. For now, it remains a box of infinite possibility.

Vagrant (©2019 LSAuth) Painted Wood cutout mounted on painted wooden panel. — ***Vagrant (****©2019 LSAuth*) Painted Wood cutout mounted on painted wooden panel.

20: "...You can never go home again..."

… And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.”
―Thomas Wolfe, You Can Never Go Home Again
“The only journey is the one within.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

I lived across the street from the Gothic architecture of Princeton University, which was very beautiful & serene but I also needed my gritty urban fix to create enough of an opposing force out of which to create. The train station was a short walk down the street from our apartment and I would try to visit New York once a week, spending a full day in the SoHo and Village art galleries. I would always end my day at Pearl Paint in Chinatown and savor every minute while there, studying the organized chaos of new stock items, breathing in the turpentine, and talking to the employees who were always some brand of artist. I still miss the informative social interaction that kind of store provided, which was so much more gratifying than the gallery scene.

Pearl Paint on Canal in Chinatown around 1985 NYC.

I walked everywhere in NYC and felt at home there as much as I did in the woods of Princeton. But I think I loved the train ride between the two destinations the most. It was always dark when I headed home, just like in Chicago times, and my legs & feet were tired. I saw & learned so much in one day. The amount of visual stimulation in NYC was always overwhelming and I would jot down my reflections in my sketchbook-journal on the way home. Everything seemed possible when I was moving, and I always equated train rides with hopefulness and freedom. I must have realized (didn’t I?) that those feelings were an illusion, that train rides were more of an escape from reality — the reality that no one really cared about art but the artist who made it. I always had a mini-emotional let-down the day after these trips because it was always clear to me that there was so much good work hanging in unpeopled rooms, unnoticed, unappreciated, and unloved. Why did the world need another artist?

But then I would get back into my studio the next day, with my new brush or tube of paint, and focus in on the pieces I had to finish and the new ones I had to start.

On October 29th, 1985, after 17 months of living in Princeton, I went back to Chicago to exhibit my mixed media figures. Concurrent with this show was a 6-week "workation" as a resident artist at Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois — 30 miles north of Chicago. Michael & I loaded up a roomy & reliable one-way rental car with my carefully packed works, art supplies, and clothing, and drove for 2 days to Chicago. When we unloaded my work at the gallery, I felt like a visitor rather than a returning native. I missed Michael already as I left him at the airport for his flight back to Princeton. I returned the rental car and hopped on a train to Lake Forest. Through the window I watched the city buildings quickly metamorphose into trees. My new surroundings looked more like Princeton than Chicago and I walked the short distance from the train stop to Ragdale, eager to meet my fellow residents and share my first dinner with them.

This was to be my home for the next 6 weeks.

Ragdale was such a gift at the right time in my life. It provided a beautiful setting of woods and autumn foliage for my self-imposed limbo. After drawing all day in the studio, I would leave the grounds in the late afternoon for a quotidian walk to Lake Michigan. It occurred to me that my life was not all that different than the Princeton one that I had temporarily left behind. The primary difference was that I did not feel as solitary because almost everyone at Ragdale was an artist — even many of the staff and maintenance people. This collective connection was comforting to live around. We shared an enormous respect for each other’s needs of time & space. At night we all came together to sit at a very long dining table for supper and conversation. We talked about everything — except our work. Often it was the only time I spoke to anyone for over 12 hours. It was a true break from our inner demons and we laughed easily. After dinner many of us would go back to our private studios for a few hours and then meet back around the fireplace to listen to readings by the resident writers of their works in progress before going to bed.

Several of the residents came to my Chicago show which opened a couple weeks after I arrived in Ragdale. The reception was very festive and my co-exhibitor, Alex, & I were elated to have such a large crowd and enthusiastic response to our work.

*Night of the Chicago opening November1985.*

( Below are some of my works included in this show: Barabbas, Vesta, Cornstalker, and StarGazer. ) .

Of course, there was the late night train ride back to Lake Forest, and then the letdown the morning after the show. I learned that if a body of work that took several years to create gets you a party and an audience for 3 hours, then that may be as good as it gets in terms of recognition. I was back in my studio the next morning, facing lots of virgin white paper tacked onto the walls.

I am grateful to Ragdale and the people I met there. This particular residency provided me with the security of belonging to a community which I thought I needed at that time, to tacitly affirm that I was real. When I moved away from Chicago, I had not been confident that I could create totally on my own, every day, away from a particular locale, and away from other artists. I had not realized that I had already developed beyond that fear. Ironically, going to Ragdale brought me farther away from Chicago and closer to Princeton and other towns I would live in subsequently. Everything I needed was within all the layers of myself — not in a geographical location.

I had been making a life as an artist all my life. That is what I realized at Ragdale.

In The Wake Of Clouds ©1985-6 LSAuth. oil/linen — ***In The Wake Of Clouds*** *©1985-6 LSAuth. oil/linen*

19: Building Trees

I was fortunate that I had begun the 3-dimensional figures at the end of my time in Chicago. It was the body of work that was the most creatively stable, that could weather this big disruption of being uprooted. I was excited about developing them further.

Neptune ©1984 LSAuth — ***Neptune*** *©1984 LSAuth*

In Princeton, these figures became my largest body of work. Drawing and painting, although always important, were not my main focus in those 3 years. I am not sure why this was so, because my canvases were so vital in Chicago. But now, in such a different nature-filled landscape, I found it more difficult to paint inventively, and the mixed-media assemblages seemed to come more easily. Creative blocks are inevitable, but always so difficult & frustrating to go through. When they occur, I have always been able to rescue myself with another medium. My canvases had to wait until I was ready to reconcile them again. Works in various stages of completion were set aside for what seemed like an interminably long time.

PrincetonSketchbook: In the Corn ©1984 LSAuth. — ***PrincetonSketchbook: In the Corn*** *©1984 LSAuth.*

Into the Woods ©1984-5 LSAuth. — ***Into the Woods*** *©1984-5 LSAuth.*

Tree branches filled every view from every window dormer in our attic apartment. There was a very large window in our bathroom that dropped down to a roof overhang that looked out to the treetops. In the afterglow of twilight, Michael and I would step out onto this landing and lie back to watch the little brown bats, not that high above us, in a beautiful display of flight & feeding. It was like being caught up in this arabesque of movement between bats & insects against a backdrop of intertwining branches and leaves. To experience this frenzied dance was pure joy. Such moments were my most profound source of creative inspiration.

NightWindow ©1985 LSAuth. — ***NightWindow*** *©1985 LSAuth.*

I decided to create my figures in the spirit of all the folklore that I loved and remembered from my youth, from mythology to fairy tales. As I mentioned earlier, our apartment was like a treehouse, and the the woods were part of my daily walk.

It therefore seemed totally natural to build more trees.

Here are some of the first ones from left to right: WellWisher, Giver, and CrownBearer.

18: Walking Back

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

- Albert Camus

All But the Blue Heron ©1985 LSAuth. — ***All But the Blue Heron*** *©1985 LSAuth.*

My Princeton life was somewhat monastic—at least in the first year of 1984. After filing several applications for teaching positions in various local art centers, I set my focus on creating a body of work for an art show which was scheduled to open in Chicago the following year of 1985. It was to be a show of my 3-D figures. I had also received a 6 week artist residency 30 miles north of Chicago which spanned the time of this exhibit. As I looked forward to these events in the ensuing months, I was acutely aware of how much I missed Chicago.

In the Clearing ©1985 LSAuth. — ***In the Clearing*** *©1985 LSAuth.*

In the meantime, nature beckoned outside my studio window. Princeton had these dark & lovely, leaf-lined paths through the Institute Woods, and I walked into them almost every day. This is when I saw my first GreatBlue heron wading in a pond in the clearing, and many songbirds of which I was to learn the names over the next few months. Families of ravens & herds of deer were always indignant over my coming upon their thievery in the fallow corn fields where my woods walk terminated.

Princeton Crows & Corn ©1985 LSAuth. — ***Princeton Crows & Corn*** *©1985 LSAuth.*

Reluctantly, I had to turn around and go back home to work. Often, I would find some treasure that caught my eye lying on the understory: a fragile chrysalis, or a whitened, sere & delicate, animal bone, or a perfectly gnarled tree branch. I would take these gifts home with me — models to draw & paint or to incorporate into my figurative assemblages. Although I was often solitary, I was never lonely.

Keepers of the Corn ©1985 LSAuth. — ***Keepers of the Corn*** *©1985 LSAuth.*

17: A Brief Flight to the Present

***StarlingNight ©2018 LSAuth. 36” x 48” oil.***

One of the motivations for starting this blog was to go back and organize years of my work so that I could reflect on the themes that have remained constant over time. It also gave me the opportunity to post old work as a visual backdrop for viewers to see how I arrived at my present.

I think StarlingNight has been in the making all my life. The image of the starling has significance to me on so many levels starting with my childhood. Even as an 8-year-old, I knew many people detested this flock bird, and my father was no exception. He loved the cardinals that frequented the feeders he so faithfully filled. The starlings would swarm in occasionally, chasing the polite & lovely songbirds away. My brothers were instructed to shoot at "the black devils" with their BB guns. Before they could set their sights I would run outside and scare them away.

I always thought starlings were beautiful—not really black but magically iridescent, with sprinkles of turquoise, ochre, and alizarin crimson, like holiday cookie decorations. And in the winter, the markings became white polka dots like heavy snow flakes and distant stars.

WinterStarling ©2015 LSAuth. — ***WinterStarling*** *©2015 LSAuth.*

Later at age 20, in a summery 3000 mile drive across the country, I witnessed my first murmuration somewhere in the Midwest. I was transfixed — I thought I was seeing a tornado, only the darkness lifted off the ground and swarmed in magnetized clouds of swirling designs. It was as if the sky had become an immense Wooly Willy backdrop and some invisible force was holding the magnetic wand. These formations were in continuous movement which never repeated in design until it floated away out of my field of vision. It still ranks as one of the most spectacular natural wonders that I have ever experienced.

When I realized that this is what starlings do, I felt even more validated for loving them for their beautiful plumage. Why murmurations occur and how they perform in such seamless perfection is still not precisely understood by scientists. It remains a mystery. Even when the why of this event is fully known, it will remain magical.

Murmurations ©2015 LSAuth. — ***Murmurations*** *©2015 LSAuth.*

In StarlingNight, the 14 starlings are iconic of my parents, my 11 siblings, and me. Even as a child I felt very protective of them — of the starlings, as well as my family. We were like a flock of starlings — noisy, noticeable, & numerous.

I wanted the landscape setting to be suggestive of the present walk I take almost every evening, even though it is generalized to represent all the tree-lined streets I hold in my memory. Past & present, birds and setting, are interwoven by the network of dabs & strokes of opacity & transparency. This painting was difficult for me to say: You are finished, release me.

I have often thought that my life can be measured by the number of miles I have walked, especially in the moonlight. I have never ceased to marvel at the everyday natural world and its fragile & sometimes, malevolent, balance. There is so much beauty in the ordinary, and the continuous movement of all living things sweeps me along in the knowledge that I must keep moving & changing also. In the process of living, I often lose hope & inspiration which I need desperately in order to be productive. But then, sometimes, I discover something serendipitously— like seeing that a black starling is full of color & light—or that on a fortuitous, star-filled walk, all my feeling for life can be distilled into one smoky & luminous night.

TransitionStarling ©2015 LSAuth. — ***TransitionStarling*** *©2015 LSAuth.*

16: Princeton

Map of a World ©1980-1984 LSAuth. Collagraph, collage, acrylic. — ***Map of a World*** *©1980-1984 LSAuth. Collagraph, collage, acrylic.*

Out the door in ’84 was our moving slogan to get motivated to clean out 7 years of accumulated stuff in our spacious apartment. Michael received the call from Princeton University to be on their faculty in the coming fall term. Knowing that our next apartment would be much smaller, the necessity of downsizing was mandatory. The flurry of activity helped me to bury the aching feeling of loss over leaving Chicago — emotions I knew I would have to deal with later.

We embraced our dear landlord-owners, Roger & Dorothy, who had lived below us on the 1st floor, and knew we would probably never see them again. They waved us off in our loaded up ’74 AMC Matador, recently purchased from a car garage mechanic for the sum of several hundred dollars, and we drove the 800 miles to a new beginning.

The drive back East felt more like driving back in time to my Virginia girlhood. It was May and all the trees were in their full springtime glory. The Midwest endless & changeable sky sunk below softly rolling curves of earth. Gone was the urban, vertical, cityscape which had overwhelmed & scared me 7 years before. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be back in a place that made me feel like Chicago had only been a dream. I felt rootless & disconnected.

Our garret-style apartment on the 3rd floor of a Victorian house was romantically idyllic with its sloping dormers and 4 large rooms, one of which was my studio. Tree branches and dappled light were the view from every window, and it felt as if we were living in a tree house. My work’s imagery would eventually respond to this environment. How do I transition from where I thought my work had been? This was the first time that I was fully conscious of how big an impact this change in location would have on my creative process.

Princeton was a very self-contained & sleepy college town back then, and when you got past the University, you could walk a long time and never see another person. I started walking at least 5 miles a day, stopping to draw portions of what were becoming my favorite models — the huge, ancient trees. As a child, I loved to play in the woods and trees were always necessary to any game of strategy or make-believe. I had forgotten about them in Chicago because there was too much urban newness to absorb. And to my eye, Lake Michigan & snow eclipsed all other forms of Mother Nature.

I filled my sketchbooks those first 6 months. Against the backdrop of this historic town, the trees had no competitors for my attention. They became my spiritual sages, steadfastly pointing to my past & its relevance to my present. Just by being a rich source of detailed imagery, they helped me find a path to productivity . I began to feel less alienated and ready to build a new body of work.

15: Leaving Chicago

The time remaining, 1982 until May of 1984, was productive for me. I exhibited in several shows and was creating some of my best work, free from the constraints of art school. I was happy to sell many of my 3-D figures and some paintings as well. I had even found a terrific buyer for 4 of my very large canvases — an entrepreneur who wanted them for his new restaurant that he was about to open in Chicago.

And then tragedy hit hard. AIDS. It became the plague of my generation. So many colleagues, especially those in the arts, were affected—either by developing the disease themselves, or having loved ones who did. I lost a beloved cousin and many childhood schoolmates.

The restaurant that was to be home to my large works never opened. They were rolled up and put in storage. To this day I think of them as shrouds for those who did not survive to celebrate their business adventure.

I left Chicago with the memory of an image that I had created when I had first arrived there 7 years before as a youth with goals and desires. My Nocturne in Black & White was now a visual elegy for those who had died — hope had gone full circle to meet up with sorrow.

Nocturne in Black & White ©LSAuth 1978. — *Nocturne in Black & White* ***©LSAuth 1978.***

14: Interiors

So it is now 1982. I have my master’s degree. I taught a life drawing class & am now teaching a painting class. I also have a part-time job working for a dentist pouring plaster models in his lab. I am painting every day but the days are never long enough. My beloved studio companions, a parakeet & 4 canaries, are often my models — and when they are, I travel inward, to a quiet but endlessly expansive world.

I kept numerous sketchbooks at this time. I knew that my days remaining in Chicago were probably numbered — Michael was finishing his doctorate and would soon be interviewing for academic positions at universities all over the country. I wanted to document my neighborhood surroundings as much as possible, from inside & outside. I was to have 2 years in this home & studio after leaving art school, and I wanted to take note of every day before saying goodbye to my beloved Chicago.

13: Unglamorous but real...

After moving my work space out of the Institute into my apartment, I managed to complete two 10-foot long paintings by tacking them onto the available wall space in my home studio. These canvases completed the body of work I created during my first 5 years in Chicago. These years were the foundation upon which I built my convictions about how to keep learning what I needed to learn—what I needed to keep, what I needed to change or reject, what I needed to seek out. Besides learning from visual artists, both the living and the dead, it was the poets who gave words to my feelings back then --and now.

“…With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate—but there is no competition—

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

T. S. Eliot. “Collected Poems, 1909-1962.

As my new work environment changed from an urban & more public space to my more private living space, my vocabulary of images grew to incorporate recognizable objects— wax bird statues on my worktable, rooftops from my studio windows, trees at the end of my street. I became more aware of particular interior spaces, and specific places & objects in my more local surroundings. These images became my sources of inspiration for my next body of work. For practical reasons, my paintings became more moderately sized ( 4-5 ft as longest dimension). Here are Anchored Spirits, Portal, Birds of a Feather, and Nests of Waves.

LSAuth Artworks