Independence Day 2013 / "True Independence of The Spirit"

"I started out in silence, writing as quietly as I had read, and then eventually people read some of what I had written, and some of the readers entered my world or drew me into theirs. I started out in silence and traveled until I arrived at a voice that was heard far away –first the silent voice that can only be read, and then I was asked to speak aloud and to read aloud.  When I began to read aloud, another voice, one I hardly recognized, emerged from my mouth. Maybe it was more relaxed, because writing is speaking to no one and even when you’re reading to a crowd, you’re still in that conversation with the absent, the faraway, the not yet born, the unknown, and the long gone for whom writers write, the crowd of the absent who hover all around the desk.

Sometime in the late nineteenth century, a poor rural English girl who would grow up to be a writer was told by a gypsy, “You will be loved by people you’ve never met.”  This is the odd compact with strangers who will lose themselves in your words and the partial recompense for the solitude that makes writers and writing.  You have an intimacy with the faraway and distance from the near at hand.  Like digging a hole to China and actually coming out the other side, the depth of that solitude of reading and then writing took me all the way through to connect with people again in an unexpected way.  It was astonishing wealth for one who had once been so poor."

(p. 64-65,  The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit, 2013)

ON BEING AN ARTIST AND ON HAVING PARENTS WHO ARE ARTISTS

During the first week of November, I visited my middle sister who lives in the town of Ocean Springs on the Gulf Coast in Mississippi. While I was there, we participated in a yoga class at River Rock Yoga. On the wall of the entryway of the yoga studio were engaging drawings by Lief Anderson, a daughter of Walter Inglis Anderson whose art and life have been meaningful to me recently. It turns out that the yoga studio is owned by Moira Anderson Miller, daughter of Lief Anderson and granddaughter of Walter Inglis Anderson. Before the yoga class, as my sister and I filled out the forms required in order to take the yoga class, I had a brief conversation with Moira, in which we affirmed that yoga had brought healing into our lives and in which I felt I had met a kindred spirit.

Since then, I have enjoyed reading DANCING WITH MY FATHER, by Lief Anderson, described on the book jacket as "a daughter's remembrance of life with the eccentric genius and artist Walter Anderson." It makes me think of the documentary, "The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack" made by Rambling Jack Elliott's daughter, Aiyana Elliott, another daughter with an absent artist father. Both women's memories of their fathers remind me of my father and mother, who didn't called themselves artists but were artist nonetheless.

Although the painting I have posted today is titled "Imaginary Brother With Fish With Open Heart," I also think of it as a portrait of my father, a man who loved gardening, music and God. During my childhood, my father was frequently away on business trips and was present and distant in the same way my mother was. I am beginning to see how much I am like them, except that I don't have children. There is something about me that is present and distant, too. I am most at ease with people who have that quality of being both present and distant (bloggers, for example!) I spend much of my time in a joyful and creative and fulfilling solitude. The painting also reminds me of my first boyfriend, an artist who spent a year in Vietnam in 1970. I would like to post some of the artwork he did during his first days in Vietnam but it is not my place to post his work without his permission.

Black and White Series: Solitary Angel (2005)

My mother and my mother's mother:

Untitled Ocean #4 (1997)

This is my only painting from 1997.