Among the birch trees

I recently went to The Museum of Russian Art, which if you’ve read my blog for a while you may remember some prior posts about this beautiful place (which has had a Ukrainian flag prominently painted on the front of the building for the last couple months). The first painting I saw on this visit landed my attention and my affection as well. I’ve been thinking about it for several weeks. It’s called “Among the Birch Trees” by Akhmed Kitaev in 1962. I hope you’ll click this link to see the painting before you read further.

The painting seemed at first to be a picture of a forest of birch trees. Beautiful cream, gray, and brown bark, bright green leaves, long lean trunks. But then I saw the woman. If you clicked the link above, do you see her now too? Peering out from behind one of the trees is a woman. Was she posing? Or did the artist capture her as she was walking through the forest and just emerging from behind a tree? It almost seems as if she was hiding behind the tree and just now emerged to say, “Here I am!” There’s something playful about her. See the tilt of her head. Look closely and find the bouquet in one hand and the single flower in her other hand. She wears a clear plastic rain coat and a clear plastic rain hat held under her neck with a pink plastic tie, and a black purse hangs over her wrist. Her rain gear all has a pinkish hue. She wears a watch and a dress, not pants. Her hair is dark and worn typical of the 1960s.

She looks like an ordinary middle-aged woman of her time and place who went out to do some shopping on a rainy day, but instead of walking down gray sidewalks on a gray street to a neighborhood store, she instead stepped into the forest and there takes a stroll gathering flowers and being flirtatious with the beauty of the birch. I like to think that she is playing hooky from her errand to the store. That she ditched the errand and strolled boldly into the forest. Maybe she enacted a stealth walk, veering only at the last minute away from the store and toward the forest lest anyone notice. Maybe she hid around corners of buildings, kept her head down, bent over more than necessary to tie her shoe or fix a stocking to escape the questioning gaze of a neighbor or coworker. When the coast was clear, she made a dash into the forest and hugged the birch. She breathed deeply. Lifted her face to the sky. Leaned back against a tree and rested.

Or maybe she was simply taking the long way to wherever she was going. Adding joy and rejuvenation to her day wherever and whenever she could. I much like that idea as well. I love this painting and hope you’ll look at it awhile. Maybe you’ll come up with your own story about the woman in the painting.

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[Photo: A slice of the painting described in the post. Click through to enjoy it in full!]

Malcolm Guite Reflecting on C.S. Lewis's "Learning in Wartime"

Malcolm Guite, poet and Anglican priest, offers on YouTube periodic musings and readings from his study in the UK. In his latest video from this past week, Guite reflected on C.S. Lewis's essay "Learning in Wartime"—originally delivered in December 1939 as a radio address in which Lewis advised his students on how to live in times of war—and then drew connection to today. The video is 16 minutes long and is well worth a listen.

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[Photo: Coming home this from the Ash Wednesday service at my church, I passed The Museum of Russian Art. This locally- and privately-owned museum has the largest collection of Russian Art outside of Russia. It’s very beautiful, and I’ve written about it several times. I was pleased to see this banner they’ve placed on display over their usual exhibit banner, the yellow and blue of the Ukrainian flag.]

Working Where and When We Can

Nonconformist Art

The Museum of Russian Art in my city has a new exhibit, "Concerning the Spiritual in Russian Art." The 70-piece exhibit is owned by the Kolodzei Art Foundation, which has over 7000 works in its collection. The foundation was started by Tatiana Kolodzei when at the age of 17, in the 1960s, she started buying pieces of “nonconformist” art that couldn’t be shown in the museums and galleries. The art was considered nonconformist because of abstract form and spiritual (ie, religious or metaphysical) content. Tatiana and her daughter Natalia, who now runs the foundation, were at the museum for the opening reception, which my husband and I attended. Natalia spoke for a few minutes about the exhibit and its history, while Tatiana held the grandbaby. She was dressed in black and charcoal, with sunglasses, a black hat, and black scarf. It was fun to imagine her at 17 in her clandestine mission to find and save art that didn’t fit the anti-spiritual Soviet regime.

I went back last week to have another look at the exhibit; each piece offers so much to think about. For example, there are several crucifixion paintings by Tatiana Levitskaia that were so dense with symbolism and meaning that my friend and I thought we could maybe stand there for hours and not exhaust all there was to see in just those canvases. I read on a plaque by her work that she was involved in the “Bulldozer Show,” which I had not even heard of before. I learned there that an unofficial outdoor art show in the 70s had been completely destroyed, with all the art bulldozed into the ground, because it was of this nonconformist spiritual variety. There’s a wall-sized painting of the prodigal son parable, “Return of the Prodigal Son” by Olga Bulgakova, which is probably the most powerful depiction I’ve ever seen of this story.

The exhibit gets its name from the book by Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a book that had a big impact on me when I read it about five years ago. Kadinsky saw the duty of the artist as spiritual. Art for art's sake, even when the higher ideal of "beauty" is wrapped up in that vision of art, is insufficient to deliver spiritual meaning, to avoid having "hungry souls go away hungry." Spiritual feeling must be in the artist in order for it to be conveyed in the art. Kadinsky believed that abstract art has the greater potential to express inner spiritual feeling compared with representative art because abstraction allows for mystery, for epiphany, even within the context of the most everyday actions and objects. But the spiritual feeling can only arise when the artist's spiritual feeling has been legitimately quickened and when the artist, in turn, constructs the work to evoke spiritual vibrations in the soul.

Here are a couple passages from Kandinsky’s book:

"The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being. Nor is its existance casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life. It exists and has power to create spiritual atmosphere; and from this inner standpoint one judges whether it is a good work of art or a bad one.”

and

"It is very important for the artist to gauge his position aright, to realize that he has a duty to his art and to himself, that he is not king of the castle but rather a servant of a nobler purpose. He must search deeply into his own soul, develop and tend it, so that his art has something to clothe, and does not remain a glove without a hand.

Related post: The Art of Work

 

Private Notes

I’ve long been a fan and proponent of carrying a notebook or index cards in one’s pocket or handbag. Last week the value of these hidden notes struck me again. I was quickly reading through a set of little notebooks that I’d carried in my purse over the last several years (photo above) and was amazed by how many random lines on their pages had become key sentences in essays or blog posts. Often those thoughts were written in the car or when waiting for a movie or something else to start or in church.

I’m always intrigued by what kinds of little notebooks people use and how they use them. Joan Didion wrote a classic essay on the subject, “On Keeping a Notebook,” which you can find in her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

“We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.”

Several years ago I posted something here about an essay of Mary Oliver’s in which she talks about her pocket notebook. From "Pen and Paper and a Breath of Air”:

"For at least thirty years, and at almost all times, I have carried a notebook with me, in my back pocket. It has always been the same kind of notebook--small, three inches by five inches, and hand-sewn....I don't use the pages front to back, but randomly, in a disorderly way. I write wherever I happen to open the notebook. I don't know why this is. When the notebook is fairly full, I start another....Both the shorthand and the written phrase are intended to return me to the moment and place of the entry. I mean this very exactly. The words do not take me to the reason I made the entry, but back to the felt experience, whatever it was. This is important. I can, then, think forward again to the idea--that is, the significance of the event--rather than back upon it. It is the instant I try to catch in the notebooks, not the comment, not the thought."

Of course, making notes of quick thoughts is easy to do on a smart phone, but there’s still something about the handwritten or printed word that an electronic file can’t duplicate. Charles Simic wrote a piece recently on The New York Review of Books Blog in defense of the little notebook, “Take Care of Your Little Notebook.”

“No question, one can use a smart phone as an aid to memory, and I do use one myself for that purpose. But I don’t find them a congenial repository for anything more complicated than reminding myself to pick up a pair of pants from the cleaners or make an appointment with the cat doctor. If one has the urge to write down a complete thought, a handsome notebook gives it more class. Even a scrap of paper and a stub of a pencil are more preferable for philosophizing than typing the same words down, since writing a word out, letter by letter, is a more self-conscious process and one more likely to inspire further revisions and elaborations of that thought.”

One of the sections in my book Just Think is about this very thing so I’m not really saying anything new here, but sometimes it’s good to underscore something tried, true, and so very simple.

Reading Stack: Torn

With the current controversy about Yahoo CEO’s decision to disallow all telecommuting, it’s been interesting to be in the middle of reading Torn: True Stores of Kids, Career & The Conflict of Modern Motherhood (CoffeeTown Press, 2011). Torn is an anthology edited by Samantha Parent Walravens with essays contributed by women in that active parenting age group. Some of them go into an office every day, some work a job (employed or self-employed) from home, some have put their work life on hold, but for each of them, the scenario they’ve chosen isn’t easy, particularly in this economy. If you see a woman carrying a baby or holding the hand of a little boy or girl, say a little prayer for her, whether she’s at the park or on her way to work. And as demonstrated last year by another public figure, Anne-Marie Slaughter, who told her story to The Atlantic (“Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”), the difficulty of the decisions facing women who are mothers doesn’t get any easier when the sons and daughters are teenagers.

It’s been awhile since I’ve been in the position of figuring out how to make it all fit via all kinds of fixes: convince the boss to approve reduced hours, negotiate a job share, bring work home, work fewer days but longer days, work weekends, work at night, race to work the minute the bus pulls away, race home to arrive the minute the bus pulls up, bring work home (and pay sons money to let me work without interruption for a specific interval unless of course they were bleeding). The best fix was when I negotiated a telecommuting arrangement back in about 1993, the first ever for the large healthcare system I worked for, which I sustained for about 6 years, getting more done there than I ever could at the office, before resigning to become self-employed. If I were one of Yahoo’s employees right now I’d be devastated. I hope the slackers that Yahoo is probably trying to weed out quickly get on their way so that those employees who can do it well and take it seriously can get back to their home desks.

Final Word

This passage from Mary Catherine Bateson’s Peripheral Visions seems an appropriate final thought today.

“Rarely is it possible to study all the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on the computer. The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seems to come from nowhere. When the necessary tasks of learning cannot be completed in a portion of the life cycle set aside for them, they have to join life’s other tasks and be done concurrently. We can carry on the process of learning in everything we do, like a mother balancing her child on one hip as she goes about her work with the other hand or uses it to open the doors of the unknown. Living and learning, we become ambidextrous.”

–Mary Catherine Bateson, Peripheral Visions

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The art of work

My city houses the only museum of Russian art in North America that displays individually curated exhibits of works brought in from outside the US, often directly from Moscow. It’s a lovely place. I’ve blogged before about an earlier icon exhibit (here).

Over the years, its exhibits have taught me much about Russian culture, Soviet politics, and art. One of the domains of daily life in which all three of these topics intersect is work; thus, work is the bottom-line theme of many of the pieces that have rotated in and out of the museum over the years. That this is such a verdant theme for Russian art should come as no surprise considering how labor was manipulated so forcefully during the Soviet period, specifically, and is such an important part of life, generally. 

The work-related art produced and shown during the Soviet period, particularly under Stalin, didn’t arise naturally from the aesthetic impulses of individual artists but was often directed by the State. It’s not as if artists during the time of Stalin could retreat to their studios and paint whatever they fancied about what was happening in the fields, mines, fishing boats, and factories and then show it in the local gallery. There were rules and the final outcome of those rules was art that demonstrated people were happy and determined to work hard with the goal always being corporate progress. The message was to be delivered in concrete terms, without nuanced abstraction that might introduce any deviation of the message or hint at something deeper going on. 

The current exhibit, From "Thaw to Meltdown: Soviet Paintings of the 1950s–1980s", shows the evolution of art about socialist work, from the time of just before Stalin’s death through Khrushchev and Brezhnev, eras which allowed for increased personal freedom even in matters of work and art. The pieces show movement from the idea of people as machines to people as human beings.

One picture in particular struck me, “Finished Plowing” by Konstantin M. Maksimov, 1955. A man is in his field but not plowing earnestly towards the end of a row with the weight of the Soviet socialist mandate on his shoulders. No, instead he is on a break. Smiling. Arms resting on his tool. The artist’s focus is on the man’s face, not on the field or the tractor behind him. The farmer’s face is tan, creased, and wet with sweat. This kind of art allows for leisure and restoration not only because it captured a "break" but because a system began to allow for the fact that people aren’t machines.

You can see a thumbnail of this painting and read more about the exhibit by downloading the viewer's guide from this exhibit’s page on The Museum of Russian Art's website. Here's a review of the exhibit from the StarTribune.

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For Transfiguration Sunday

The following paragraph is from an essay of mine in progress and refers to an icon in an icon exhibit at The Russian Museum of Art a couple years ago. The quality of the picture is poor because I took it with my cell phone in a room with low light.

In the “Feasts Tier,” a row of ten icons, the “Transfiguration of our Lord” hangs second from the end. Jesus takes center position, a robe as white as light, a slash of gold sash, Moses and Elijah to his right and left, respectively. Gold haloes on each. Unlike all the other icons in this exhibit, this one commemorating a late summer feast shows movement. Their robes and capes furl as the three men hover above ground in imagined wind. Mouths are closed, but there is no doubt of a conversation in progress. Hands and arms with bent elbows are caught mid-motion. As the story goes his face is glowing like the sun, but I don’t see it here. A layer of cotton-ball clouds hold the browns, greens, yellows, and reds down to earth, the background above nothing but creamy white. The clouds are just gray enough to suggest a degree of threat. Has the benedictory Voice already spoken? On the hard ground—which yet managed to bloom a flowering plant and sprout a sapling—and looking this way and that, twist the fearful Peter, James, and John. 

Mystery at the table: Rublev, Sayers, and the writer

Last weekend I went with a friend to a bookstore in St. Paul that was closing. A bookstore closing is always a sad affair, yet the owner seemed in good spirits and prices were slashed so joy was still to be had. I bought a few books and an icon wall hanging. Since hearing Dr. Roy Robson from the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia speak at The Museum of Russian Art a couple years ago, I've had my eye out for a copy of the Holy Trinity icon by Andrei Rublev, which reflects the story of Abraham's hospitality from Genesis 18. He showed a slide of this icon, with three figures seated at a round table. Two of the three figures were robed in brilliant blue. It was so beautiful I could hardly stop looking. The figures represent the Trinity, as its name suggests, and they are seated at the nine, twelve, and three o'clock positions. Left open is the 6 o'clock position. As Robson said, it invites you to "contemplate sitting at the table with the Trinity." I like that sense of invitation and so for that reason I'll hang it near my workspace where I can see it.

I want it where I can see it for another reason as well, particularly while I write. In Mind of the Maker, written in 1941, Dorothy L. Sayers examines in great detail the analogic association between the Divine Creator and the human creative process through the doctrine of the Trinity. The ideal literary artist composes his or her works in the image of the three-fold mind comprised of the co-equal and co-substantial Idea, Energy, and Power. The Idea—or the Father—is the “Book-as-Thought” in the writer’s mind irrespective of any words actually written. The thought precedes the actual activity or material production of the work, but continues on eternally after the work is written and read. The work “is known to the writer as …a complete and timeless whole." The Energy—or the Son—which “brings about an expression in temporal form of the eternal and immutable Idea,” is the “Book-as-Written." It is the creation that the writer or a reader can witness either as the material form of the work or as the passion and toil of the writer. The Power—or the Spirit—emerges from the Idea and the Energy. This is the “Book-as-Read” and is the “means by which the [Energy] is communicated to other readers and which produces a corresponding response in them.” To the writer, the Idea, the Energy, and the Power “are equally and eternally present in his own act of creation…they exist in—they are—the  creative mind itself." To ignore this co-equal and co-substantial pattern of the ideal creative mind, Sayers argued, is to invite failure to a literary work.

Much to think about and be reminded of for 50% off.

Grace on the floor and in the theater

Yesterday morning I sat on my livingroom floor with scissors and tape, cutting up an essay that I've been working on for four months, and then trying to tape it back together in some semblance of sense and order. In between the cutting phase and taping phase, however, was the despair phase in which I was quite  confident I'd been deceiving myself all along about the viability of this would-be essay. The little snippets of white, representing chunks, paragraphs, sentences, and even single words, were like so much litter along the highway.

Anne Lamott says there are really only two prayers: "Help me, help me, help me" and "Thank you, thank you, thank you." Theologicially, I'm not sure I really agree with her, but practically speaking, she is on to something. My audible prayer on the floor was the first variety. Then like a game of solitaire, the moving of snippets began. Uncountable chunks of tape later, thirteen consecutive sections emerged. Order from chaos, and so was triggered the second variety of prayer. I don't want to give too many details about the essay's subject matter (after all I will want readers to buy the book someday :)), but it's a braided essay with strands related to a meal at a Chicago restaurant and to an icon exhibit at The Museum of Russian Art here  in Minneapolis, among other things. I'm now hopeful about the essay, although much work remains to be done on it and a little voice inside nags that those thirteen sections might not really make sense when I take them out again next week.

With my scissors and tape put away, and the taped together streamers of words in a pile on my desk awaiting another day's revisions, I decided, rather impulsively, to go a movie matinee, "Rachel Getting Married," a movie I knew little about other than it was starring Anne Hathaway and involved a wedding. Many times in life there are occasions of coincidence and I tend to regard them as moments of grace. Little--or not so little--nudges or benedictions. A good way into the movie there is a scene of the rehearsal dinner. Wedding party and friends squeezed into a single long table in a small private room. The camera (the entire movie is shot with a hand-held camera) circles the table and the room over and over in this very long scene, stopping to focus on faces and conversations and speeches. The room holds all kinds of people, relationship messes, past embarrassments, future hopes, terrible grief, joy. I was fascinated by the dynamics of all this, and then I saw it: along the perimeter of the room, on all four walls, hung a row of tightly placed icons. There was hardly a shot of a face without an icon or two or four in the background. Part of the theology of Orthodox icons is that they represent divine presence. My eyes welled up when I saw this encircling of the room, not just for the "coincidental" affirmation that my essay may actually be on the right track, but for this stunning visual depiction of humanity and the presence of God. And so was triggered more of that second variety of prayer.