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

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.

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.*

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.

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.

6: Patterns

It took about 2 years for Chicago to feel like home. In this period of time I produced many small works on paper as paintings, drawings, and silkscreens. My technical approach of layered & obsessively thin lines with small brushes and delicate tools matched the hermetic introspection I was experiencing as a newcomer. But now my new world was expanding and I instinctively needed a larger scale and different approach. I started cutting out paper images of fish, birds, and other natural objects, and interwove them with bits of sewing notions such as ribbons, hooks, pins etc. I also dyed my own transparent rice papers to cut up and collage with these other objects. These resulting works, some examples shown here from the CutOutSeries, were an important growth spurt, pushing me to try bigger brushes & larger fields of canvas, and oils—for the first time.

5: Threads

I knew I wanted to create a body of work which was essentially about landscape. The pieces here are from a series called "The Lake is Not the Ocean". As I worked, I imagined flying over all the places I had loved and tracked my movement with a vocabulary of marks--wavy & straight lines, verticals & horizontals, dots & dashes. I used a paintbrush like a pencil, and the works were small & intricate. Chicago & Virginia melded together into unique places. Looking back on these & other works like them from this time period, I realize that my technical approach was not unlike the sewing & needlework projects of my teen years.

4: Going to Byzantium....from Chicago

2: Preparing for art school...

After leaving university I set off for Chicago, with a conviction that I wanted to study art. How I would enter a great institution and with what means, was still rather vague. I worked odd jobs and, for the first time in my life, rode trains every day. My point of view changed. From the elevated train windows I was starting to see the world from an oblique angle often looking down — a bird’s-eye view. When the trains went underground I became acutely aware of the difference between blackness and night. When we shot out of the subterranean tunnels, the night sky was luminous.

Over the next 2 years, I created a portfolio of works on paper to submit for graduate school admission. These works started in black and white and evolved into color. I assuaged my homesickness for the Virginian Blue Ridge by intertwining the soft, graceful curves of their hills with the pulsating dots of city lights and the lines of the Midwest plains.