May 26: A recent docent field trip took us to the Washington Glass School & Studio, founded in 2001 by artist Tim Tate and other notables. We saw splendid pieces of art that both defied and augmented the glass medium, including colored glass ground into pigments and used as paint, as well as astonishing meldings of video and glass.
The studio specializes in public art. One commission — to build a glass-paneled arch in a neighborhood plagued by gangs — prompted fears of vandalism. The artists quickly invited gang members into the studio to help create the panels. One girl attended the workshops multiple times, and the studio put her panels front and center. At the dedication, the artists watched the gang members seek out their pieces and point excitedly, “I did that!”
With similar excitement, the docents helped create another piece of art. The medium this time, perhaps improbably, was polyurethane. The docents’ job was to rapidly spread the liquid color across the casting mold before it hardened and later to tweeze out unwanted bits.
Eventually, the piece will appear in a local museum. When the SAAM docents visit that show, we’ll point excitedly and say, “I did that!”
Bonus: I did this too! Here’s an article in one of our local newspapers covering my May 24 Oakwood Cemetery tour. I’m grateful the journalist prepared people for the waiting list!
May 30: While Kevin embarked on an epic two-day, 150-mile bike ride from Richmond to Colonial Williamsburg and back again, I visited (surprise!) art museums.
Earlier in the week, I had meticulously planned every hour of my day in Colonial Williamsburg; today I tossed my plan into the gentle breeze and instead wandered for four hours in the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum. There, for example, a musician playing a viol de gamba sweetened my study of a 1750s fire engine, the inventory of a coffeehouse proprietor (who owned “36 volumes Voltaires works”), and the paw prints of dogs (and one sheep) who had wandered through a brickyard of drying bricks in the 1750s — and in 2009.
I watched a 15-minute video — kudos to the person who came up with this idea! — of six historical interpreters dressing themselves (or being dressed) in 18th century garb: a “middling woman,” an “American Indian envoy,” a soldier, Lady Dunmore, a craftsman, an enslaved woman and a wiggling two-year old. I learned that the colonial men fastened their clothes with buttons; the women — even Lady Dunmore — relied entirely on laces and straight pins (quite close to the skin).
I watched a security guard interpret an object for a curious visitor, spied a placid baby in a stroller who looked exactly like a folk art painting, and was startled by a 1960s-era directional sign that I knew-without-knowing came from the Williamsburg Lodge, where my family stayed when I was little.
I finally left the museum and heard, in the distance, a parade of drums — and fifes! My ten-year-old legs would have run toward the sound. My older self just ran to the memories.
Bonus: It turns out I caught up with the fifes and drums. For more than two hours, I enjoyed the annual Colonial Williamsburg Drummers Call, a “Grand Review” of more than a dozen costumed fife & drum corps from up and down the East Coast and as far away as Wisconsin (“bringing their Midwestern sound”) and California. I cheered the Fort McHenry corps (the official fife & drum corps of the National Park Service), the Central York (Pa.) Middle School corps (from the only American public school music program offering a such a thing) and the alumni of the Colonial Williamsburg Fife & Drum corps (in khaki shorts, blue polo shirts and a smattering of gray hair).
As the alumni group took the field, I heard cheers of “Yeah, Grandma!” When all the corps marshaled to play Yankee Doodle in the grand finale, I added my own “Huzzah!”
Double Bonus: I did adhere to one item on my original itinerary: a beer at the patio bar of the Williamsburg Inn — where this time the fifes & drums found me!
May 31: While Kevin spent a productive five hours on his bicycle today, I spent five equally productive hours at the encyclopedic Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. I broke away from American art to explore Egyptian artifacts, Russian decorative arts (including more Fabergé eggs than at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and wham-o examples of German Expressionism.
I wandered back to the museum’s outstanding American art collection, where I saw paintings that I coveted for SAAM and others that I coveted for myself. (How do these benefactors manage to remove such magnificent pieces from their walls to give to us?)
I stopped again and again. One painting, though, plopped the artist right next to me: a portrait of a confident 19th century woman that the artist — after completing only her face and one arm with luminous skill — proclaimed “finished,” signed the painting, and walked away. He even left behind his sketches of the unfinished arm, not to mention figments of her torso and background.
I was transfixed by this glimpse of frozen time. This glimpse of an artist’s undisguised choice. The contingency of it all.
Two years ago, I had had exactly the same sensation in a lavishly decorated tomb in Egypt. While marveling — from a distance of three thousand years — at the skill of artists long dead, I encountered a wall painting interrupted in mid-composition. The painting was not yet beautiful. Had the pharaoh just died and the foreman called “pencils down”?
In that moment, I experienced a profound collapsing of time. I watched the long-dead artist lower his paint brush, pack his gear, and leave behind an unfinished work: nothing but gestures, ideas and corrections. He also left behind a glimpse of a master at work that I will never forget.
June 1: Needless to say — because my only artistic medium is words, not the tactile arts — I did not participate in the glass studio project. So, when my friend Allison invited me to visit a clay studio to make our own ceramic pieces, I needed to summon all the courage and risk-taking in my little heart to say — yes.
Allison generously said she was approaching our experience with the joy of early childhood, before “perfect” became an internal standard. Well, I struggle with perfect.
I also struggle with beauty. I like to eat my yogurt and berries from pretty bowls. I like to rest my toast on a pretty plate. I like to sip from a pretty mug.
When it’s done, my hand-painted bowl won’t be pretty. It might be quirky, charming, spirited. But not pretty, as I define pretty.
Maybe, though, there’s space on my breakfast table for something other than pretty. Maybe “spirited” is a good way to start the day. Maybe “brave” too.
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Fashioned For Joy 