WORKSHOP XV: Walking Away From Art: Falling in Love

The democratic, free gift of art is on my mind lately. Two things have brought this on:

A visit to an art fair in Edinburgh last week. A jam session at the local pub tonight in Dunipace, Scotland.

Cause We Got Free Tickets
At the art fair this year we just went because we got free tickets to the opening reception and we had such a good memory of going last year. We knew we couldn’t spend any art money this time, we’ve “blown our wad” lately on other life events like USA/UK travel that’s required, daughter off to University, house repairs and repainting, etc. We have bought quite a lot of art and spent a lot on framing art this past year so...we have had to rein ourselves in a bit in that category of spending...for now...

So we went to enjoy. I found about £15,000 worth of art I would happily have purchased if I had won the lottery. My husband saw one painting for £3000 to which he really responded. We spent a lot of time lingering around the pieces we loved. I went back two and three times to see the ones that had grabbed my attention particularly. Mostly these were scenes of ordinary things that are “Scottish” - telephone wires in fog, chip shops, city scapes, even a little painting of a steak pie on a plate! Lots of landscapes made me smile, they looked like areas where I walk Shaka. Some work of Russian painters and a Czech painter were very intriguing in their mysticism and fairy tale preoccupations.

The painting that my husband particularly liked really took us both away, a figurative piece by a Serbian artist. He was taken with its political and psychological and existential aspects. I was taken with the spiritual aspects, and also the existential message. Between the two of us, we got our money’s worth out of just staring at it, then exchanging meaningful glances, then looking at it again. I could imagine living with that one for a very, very long time...and felt so emotionally invested in it that, in a way, I felt I owned it. That was a feeling that lasted a few days, especially after I Googled the artist, even got to see his studio in cyber space!

Even now, a week later, I recall - several times a day - the particular pieces that spoke to me. I realize, as time passes, that the art is truly a gift. Even if I could not purchase it with money and take on the responsibility of ownership this time, it gave so much to me, for free...like the Joni Mitchell song, “...he was playing real good, for free...”

Cause Gus Said to Come
Tonight we followed a lead and went, Bob’s guitar in hand, dog on leash, to the local pub called The Red Hoose. We heard there was a jam session to happen. It’s apparently been a long time - years - since a jam session happened there. We missed the first one two weeks ago, but a musician named Gus told us to come tonight.

A small pub, crammed at one end of the bar we had six guitars and a fiddle and that many musicians. Everyone nonverbally sized each other up and began to play this piece and that...a mixture of folk, American blues and rock, Scottish tunes, UK blues and rock...quite a range. To my delight I knew most of the words to everything they played, so sang along happily. Shaka made the rounds, sipped a bit of Guinness, sniffed everyone’s knees and other parts of their anatomies, and lay down in the center to sleep through the music. We kept hoping the E Flat on the fiddle would make him sing but he was in a quiet mood tonight.

We left there quite high on the music, with invitations to play at another jam this Saturday night at someone’s “just a place”, then next Thursday at another pub, then back at this pub the following week. Email addresses, phone numbers were exchanged by all...but not names! Quite funny!

And everyone played real good for free.

Money, professions, careers had NOTHING to do with this experience tonight. Just pent up music energy, the need to sing, the need to play...and it is a STRONG need.

So it’s a gift, like the artwork.

Give the Gift
Yes, I know how important it is that we artists, writers, musicians find a way to earn a living doing our art so that we can feed our art, keep body and soul together, not get caught up 100% in making the bucks to survive. But we lose touch so often with the gift of our art. That’s what it is and must be, the bottom line. One must do the art because one has the gift, needs to express, has something to share, needs to GIVE the GIFT. Because one’s art makes other people feel good, feel alive, feel worthy, feel life is to celebrate - even the hard parts of it.

It makes us all feel connected.

Walking away from art - no painting for the wall, no book to read, no CD to play - walking away with the sheer gift of the one-time energy of you and it...is like falling in love.

DO WHAT YOU LOVE AND LOVE WHAT YOU DO!

Michelle Miller Allen
http://www.greenphoenixproductions.com


(IMAGES: Bob McCallum Giving it Laldy; Chagall's "Painter to the Moon"; Rick's Saturday Morning Ritual)

WORKSHOP XIV: THE COMPANION ART OF FRAMING

THE COMPANION ART OF FRAMING

It was because of my transition, back in 1979, from Chicago, Illinois to Albuquerque, New Mexico, that I first became interested in the companion art of framing.

I had a day job as secretary at the University of Chicago, which just paid my bills. So I decided I needed a moonlighting job to make enough extra money to relocate to New Mexico - which had grabbed my heart - and took a night and weekends job at "The Great Frame Up", learning to build frames and cut mats and glass, working with customers in the do-it-yourself frame franchise in the Hyde Park neighborhood. The owner was a young up-and-coming inner-city artist herself, who taught me a lot about the business. She was also a savvy businesswoman, and planned to turn the place over to a manager so she could open an art gallery next door, to showcase the work of other Chicago artists and her own. She had her eye on me for the job. She almost talked me into staying on after six months, said she would make it worth my while and it would be the start of a new career for me at age 29. But my eye was on New Mexico, so I had to say no. Still, I was tempted. A career on the art fringes of Chicago was definitely one of my "roads not taken", and there have been more than a few!

A Passion Discovered
At TGFU, I had to exercise my own discretion and "eye" for what went with what, as I helped customers build their frames - most of them for the first time in their lives. I became quite passionate about the work. People brought in photos of loved ones, pictures of places they wanted to go or had been, family heirlooms, their own watercolors (one I recall had a watercolor landscape full of small holes. She was proud of them, her budgies had pecked the holes and she did love her budgies - apparently more than, or as much as, her artwork!) As we chose the frame styles and mat colors, they talked to me about why they were framing this particular thing. Some were framing pictures of newly-departed husbands and wives, so the stories could become quite emotional. I loved the stories as much as the artwork.

We used to rotate the manager shift (probably while the owner was checking each of us out, grooming one of us for the job) from night to night. One Friday night it was my turn, and I was not entirely pleased at the "honor", as it meant I had to kick butt with some younger workers who wanted to play loud rock and smoke joints in the storeroom. I had to insist we keep the music more low key - in keeping with some of our elderly customers, and generally keep them in line. That night an older woman wanted a particular frame for her husband's portrait, and the kid in the stockroom nonchalantly said we didn’t have any more of that style and she would have to select something else. As it was, she and I had spent an hour finding the exact right frame. The kid hadn’t even looked...he knew that particular style was way in the back, up a ladder and hard to get to. I made him go dig it out anyway, although he stayed miffed at me from that day forward. I felt her urgent desire for THAT frame and I agreed with her choice. It was important. That was the night I realized I was feeling passionately interested in my work!

To Honor the Work
So I have come to love browsing in a well-stocked frame shop - with a wide range of international styles - as much as a good fabric store or art supply warehouse. As I have befriended visual artists over the decades, many of them have taught me about framing - how to frame or not frame their particular works. I have come to see it as a way of honoring the work, not only to preserve it, but it is a statement that "this is important, worthy of the time, thought and expense of framing it". I admit that some things I still "stick on a wall" or tack onto the back of a door, but that is usually just until I figure out how I want to frame it, or have budgeted the funds to do so. Some things only need a cheap frame from a discount store; others need archival preservation, a professional framer's touch. And some things just need to be hung from a branch or a tapestry rod, or sewn into a fabric collage (some of my favorites above).

The variations on the ways we "frame" a piece of work are endless and as broad as the imagination.

Letting Them Be What They Are
So many of my framing experiences - especially when they have involved working with someone else - have taught me something new and have fostered significant memories. In the past year we have found a framer/art gallery in a nearby town that we have gone to for most of our framing needs. In fact, we bought our first piece of purchased-together art from them. The two women who run the place have a true bird's eye view into our courtship, wedding, marriage, as they have heard the story behind each new acquisition. Our wedding invitation, the mat signed by the guests; an oil portrait of Shaka by D. Lee; a watercolor of Castle Tioram, gift of brother Lyle Miller for our honeymoon, etc. And some not so new - a painting by Bob that was hiding in a corner is now framed in silver and grey; a still life of Cat's was languishing in dust under the bed, it is now hanging in the dining room.

Most recently I took a painting in to be framed, one that Bob's daughter did - a self portrait. She had done it while on vacation at Dorlinn one year, painting on whatever was handy which, in this case, was a cardboard box from amazon.com. I anticipated having it framed in such a way as to crop out the visible amazon.com logo, to hide the fact that it was not painted on canvas or art paper, to use a mat to do that.

But the woman at the gallery was delighted with the humour of the painting on the packing box and showed me that we should preserve that history also, that it was part of the charm of the painting. She talked me - easily - into a shadow box effect, mounting and matting in a dark purple to echo some of the purples and lavenders in the painting, with a quarter inch of under mat showing in the same caramel brown as the amazon.com box, and a thick black frame. I realized she was totally right, because Bob himself had been so amused to see what she had painted it on, some of the charm would have been lost if we had hidden that history (see above). It was an important lesson for me - counteracting that part of me that wants to make things "nice" sometimes, to the detriment of letting them be what they really are. And it delighted me, as it was the first that I realized how truly artful this woman is, that she has a real aesthetic sense and heart gift in how she approaches her work at the gallery.

Grey to Green: Coming to Life
I love the way you get to know a piece of art more intimately by going through the framing process. For example, there is an old linotype print of a medieval ballad singer performing in a king’s courtroom that Rick’s best friend gave him years ago. Rick always had it propped up or tacked to the wall wherever he lived. Sometime after he died I rescued it from a tack behind his office door, slapped a plain black Walmart frame on it, and was quite pleased to have it on the bedroom wall. However, that room was quite dim and, in the corner, it was barely visible. This summer while back in the USA I decided I really wanted that print with me and would frame it right, here in Scotland. So I sent it to myself. The day I took it in to my favorite framer’s and we pulled it from the protective paper, in the good light of her gallery I suddenly realized that print was not grey tones but a beautiful forest green ink on cream-colored paper! I had never seen that before, I wonder if Rick ever even realized it. So we selected archival papers - she said it looked valuable so I should preserve it - and a thin stripe of green under mat with cream mat on top, and a burnished silver wooden frame. Now it hangs quite peacefully in our Scottish living room, where there is a lot of green in the drapes and furnishings. While she and I were selecting the frame, we both noticed - I for the first time - that whatever the ballad singer was singing was really upsetting the people in the court! Every single person in the picture (and it is full of courtesans, jesters, lords, king, queen, etc.) looks either very angry or very worried or is whispering conspiratorially with someone else. There is quite a story being told by this print. Again, pondering it, I wondered how carefully Rick may have looked at it over the years...he spoke a lot about the bardic poets and the role of the traveling minstrels to spread news, their role in political intrigues, etc. I suspect he had become quite intimately familiar with this print. And for me, grey had become green and the true story of this print had come to life.

To Frame or Not to Frame
There is just something about holding various bits of frame sample up to a piece of art and knowing, immediately, what will work and what will not. It is a mysterious science or art...and one in which I love to engage. Unfortunately we have pretty much run out of wall space here in the wee Scottish house, so my trips to the gallery will be curtailed...until we turn the garage into a new room, that is! (Bob cringes!)

I also love to check out the outrageously ornate frames on very old artwork in public galleries. Often the frame is part of the piece, was commissioned and designed and built - with fancy engraved metal plates - to go with the often-commissioned painting. The frames are timepieces, indicators of periods of decor style. Many of the older ones cross a line between ugliness and beauty. Of course, more modern choices are simple, almost invisible framing. And sometimes that is correct, too - the painting of the castle over our bed, for example, just felt to me like it did NOT want a frame. I love the bareness of it hanging there, it seems somehow even more powerful that way. (And Bob worries less about it falling on our heads.) I also like the way some artists extend the painting around the hidden frame, suggesting in a not-too-subtle way it should NOT be framed once purchased!

Why Do We Frame?
After all, art is created to be seen, and a frame - or the way it is presented or showcased - is just a way to point the eye, to say, "Pray, perceive..." It is also a loving, respectful thing to do...a way to say to your friends, "I love this, let me share it with you."

Any thoughts from any of you about how we frame, why we frame...or not? Or stories about hidden treasures you pulled from oblivion and graced with a good frame job?

I’d love to hear your stories. And, as usual in this salon, wherever this takes the conversation is quite fine with me!

PS--You might check out some of the interesting comments by an artist, "seabows", left in the last few days at an old workshop here, our "True Colours" workshop. I love what she says about painting in different light, and most of you will have missed her comments since we have moved along since then!

DO WHAT YOU LOVE AND LOVE WHAT YOU DO!

Michelle Miller Allen
http://www.greenphoenixproductions.com