BOOKS
WOMEN WERE ARTISTS, WRITERS, ACTRESSES AND OPERA SINGERS IN THE 1800s, BUT THEY WERE ALSO DENTISTS, INVENTORS, PROSPECTORS, PHOTOGRAPHERS, INN KEEPERS, ARMY SCOUTS, SPIES, MAGAZINE ILLUSTRATORS, TEAMSTERS AND ENTREPRENEURS. THIS LARGELY UNKNOWN SIDE OF AMERICAN HISTORY IS TOLD IN FOUR BOOKS BY JOANN CHARTIER AND CHRIS ENSS.
WITH GREAT HOPE, WOMEN OF THE CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH tells the stories of people like Luzena Stanley Wilson, who, upon arrival in Nevada City in 1849, cleaned the trail dust off her children and set up a kitchen in the brush while her husband headed down to the nearest stream to look for gold. It was Luzena who made the family rich. "Many a night I shut my oven door on two milk pans piled high with bags of gold dust," Luzena recalled. She made and lost a fortune in eighteen months at the hotel she built. In the same town, tiny Nellie Pooler Chapman became the first registered dentist in the far west.LOVE UNTAMED, ROMANCES OF THE OLD WEST reveals the amazing, tender and tragic stories of famous and infamous characters of the western territories, like Doc Holliday and Big Nose Kate, who set the west ablaze with their fiery love affair, or British traveler Isabella Bird and the one-eyed outlaw who laid a claim on her heart in the Rockies, and the enduring commitment of Annie Oakley and Frank Butler, brought together by two dogs. GILDED GIRLS, WOMEN ENTERTAINERS OF THE OLD WEST profiles fourteen of the liveliest, wildest and most talented female entertainers ever to light up the boards of the western frontier. From Catherine Hayes, the "Irish prima donna" and Maude Adams, "the most popular actress in America," to Jersey Lily, who counted men as diverse as Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Diamond Jim Brady and Judge Roy Bean among her admirers, the book provides a peek into the fascinating lives of these daring, colorful and independent women.SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, WOMEN SOLDIERS AND PATRIOTS OF THE WESTERN FRONTIER uncovers the hidden past of twelve brave and dedicated women who served with courage and determination. Francita Alavez risked death to save soldiers and became the Angel of Goliad, while Cathy Williams masqueraded as a man to become a Buffalo Soldier. Sarah Winnemucca, a Paiute princess, galloped hundreds of miles to save an army troop, and Elizabeth Custer followed her husband to the Little Bighorn and burnished his memory despite his flaws.These books reveal largely untold stories of the real lives of women who worked to build their dreams, support their families and secure the future for all of us. "With Gilded Girls, Chartier and Enss have again shown us an overlooked facet of the women of the Old West...A must read for anyone who wants a well-rounded knowledge of the 1800s in western America." Chronicle of the Old West newspaper
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Located in Cannon Beach along Oregon's northern coast, DragonFire Studio Gallery offers an eclectic blend of contemporary art in a community that has long been identified as an artist colony. My first international sale was made here. Gallery founders Mari Rockett and Eeva Lantella set out to create a gallery that showcases artists in diverse media while fostering a congenial atmosphere for artists as well as visitors. Annual spring and summer festivals involve a dozen or so galleries in Cannon Beach, with the added attraction of stunning coastline, excellent food and music and easy access from Washington, Portland and coastal highway 101.
Janet Smith at Sterling Editions in Springfield does all my Giclee prints with tremendous attention to getting the color exactly right. Using a professional photo of a painting of mine that was damaged during moving, she made a high resolution digital reproduction on canvas that lacks only the actual texture of the paint, which I can add if I want to, and all that at a reasonable price. www.sterling-editions.com
The Art Wizard of Eugene is Online Bigtime:
Eugene is a city of approximately 140,000 people, famous for its outstanding writers and artists (author Kate Wilhelm and painter James Lavadour are at the top of my list) as well as it's athlectic fighting Ducks, it's miles of bike and walking trails along the river, the Saturday Market, and, my personal favorite -- the quirky downtown festival with a parade led by the Slug Queen, honoring the state's ideal habitat for those ubiquitous terrestrial gastropod mollusks that no one, as far as I know, has ever turned into haute cuisine. Jerry Williams, professor emeritus of theater arts, decided Oregon needed a magazine to showcase its visual arts, so, despite lack of experience in publishing, he founded Jerry Williams quARTerly -- learning computer graphics, layout and design from scratch in order to feature artists from all over Oregon. Five years of quARTerly editions are now online, and you can sample back issues as well as the latest from selected Oregon artists.
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.Painting as Dialogue with a Wild Thing
A blank canvas. A white enamel tray. A can stuffed with worn brushes. A spray bottle and a rag. Pots and tubes of paint. Music. Or silence. The scene is set, and a single figure waits for a glimpse of the future. That's me, in my studio, and after decades of experience, I wait for the opening of an unseen door in my mind.
What happens next is difficult to describe, because it is a wordless dialogue that requires release of the wild thing that lives to create. Every artist, I believe, in fact, every person, has a wild thing. Giving it freedom, trusting it to know things you don't, is too important to ignore because an art school or a critic or someone you love told you wild things are dangerous or deluded and must be controlled. Not!
Ancient Dreamers is an example of a partnership led by my own Wild Thing. Let me explain how it came to be what it is.
I started by building a wooden frame measuring 48X51 and stretching heavy cotton canvas over it, covering that with two coats of gesso and, using a 2 1/2 inch house painting brush, I undercoated the entire canvas in watery acrylic reds, pinks and violets. I sat back and observed the canvas for a while; I don't remember how long because there is no clock and no deadline in the studio.
I decided to play some green against the reds, and dumped some Hooker's Green and some Cerulean Blue on my palette, picked up a big bristle brush and started laying on paint in the middle upper third of the canvas. I didn't mix up piles of color but dipped back and forth and brushed vigorously over the underpainting, which was a formless mass of varying intensity of pink to peach to violet.. I had nothing specific in mind. I had no thumbnail sketch, no photo, maybe a vague idea of landscape. Maybe. I can't remember because I was in that wordless space that I expect my paintings to come from.
So, I looked at all that green and didn't like it. Too much. Too heavy. A whole plate of spinach. I took my spray bottle of water and started washing off the green, and it flowed and ran and sheeted away and amazing things happened and Wild Thing took control and recognized a hint of a shape that became a bull's profile, and, while defining it with a transparent black (made from Thalo Green and Alizarin Crimson and Ultramarine Blue) a random brush stroke created a sharp beaked bird's head. Though I didn't really see it then, Wild Thing had presented me with a creation myth as old as time. I didn't recognize it because I was in the painting process and, like birth, or surfing or breathing, once you make the first commitment you have to see it through.
At some point I know I stepped back and my rational mind inserted some comments like: what the heck is THAT? Where are you GOING with this? COMPOSITION, anyone?
Valid comments to a point, but Wild Thing requires trust to do its best work. I remind my inner critic that a lifetime of painting supports this creative effort, and I keep a corner of my mind ready to call up my own Compendium of Principles of Painting that I began compiling at the age of 12 during my first lessons in oil painting.
Ideas presented by the bird and bull imagery dance around in my head: the bull, personifying earth and all its messy and tender and gorgeously physical attributes; the bird, representing air, and spirit and ideas in flight. Are they at war? Is it a partnership? Why is the bird bigger than the bull? That's weird. But that's what the wild thing created, and I trust that energy. So, how to balance this? I diddle around the edges, trying to build up momentum and courage to risk destroying something I like in the hope of creating something better. I decide I want greater communication between the bull and the bird, and it happens in a complex series of brush strokes and runny dark lines over turquoise blue that ends up (I recognize much later) as a kind of sign language linking the two figures.
In my Compendium is a section on symbolic interpretations of color, and I recall that turquoise or blue green in some cultures is a communication color, and that red is a life-force color and black is a color representing the Void, where everything is rich with potential. Even science is now trying to explore the space between things which some say is filled with Dark Matter. So, my rational mind finds a way to accept and name what Wild Thing put in my hands. We humans are always trying to find meaning in our universe.
It is not until years later, while explaining the painting to friends, that I see the Inca or Aztec face hanging like a medallion in the center of the web of lines linking earth and air, body and spirit, bird and bull. It seems to appear and disappear, camouflaged by inscrutability. My friends surprise me with visions of the pregnant bellies of two figures emerging from the body of the bull. I knew the figures were there, I deliberately emphasized thier silhouettes, and left the underpainting showing because the wild thing that started this process nudged me away from covering those red spots, and I accepted that hint by deciding it worked compositionally. That a pregnancy could be interpreted from those warm places never occured to me.
Other people have found other pictures within the picture and pointed them out to me. I give credit to Wild Thing, because if I had listened to the critic in my head I might have a large, possibly excellent landscape, but I would have missed the exhilaration of revealing my own version of a creation myth that became Ancient Dreamers.
Alternate Reality Series
This is the first painting in a series that began in 1978, with an invitation to show with a disparate group of artists in California's gold country. The awkward size and shape of the canvas, 44 by 60, was a challenge. I don't know why, exactly, I painted random vertical lines, but I had been reading some accounts of new ideas in physics. I can't do the math, even algebra takes me off in strange directions, but I felt a certain harmony in ideas about perception and "reality." I started wondering if we all really see the same thing -- I mean, how could you tell when words are so limited and changeable, and, despite what people believe, numbers are too? Heresy, I know, but scientific theory based on numbers is as much a belief system as religious theory based on words. So, why not a painted version of landscape incorporating ideas about energy and perception that no one but an artist could present, just as no one but a physicist talking to a physicist can draw equations on a blackboard that each can read? Math illiterates like me can only admire those equations as pattern and the people that write them as wizards describing unseen mysteries.
So, I picked up my primitive tool, a big stick with stiff bristles attached to one end and dug into the color.
A few Words on Women and History:
Books by JoAnn Chartier and Chris Enss
In California's gold country, where I lived for many years, one is always conscious that what looks like solid rock may be laced with gold, silver and other precious metals. Miles and miles of tunnels and caverns as big as amphitheaters exist just a few feet beneath paved streets, houses and shops. A century or so ago, Cornish miners sang Christmas carols for local citizens in the caverns they'd excavated while searching for gold. Who, today, can imagine what it was like to be almost a mile underground in absolute blackness but for candles, lanterns and a thin wire stringing electric lights toward the surface while a choir of immigrants created a harmony of heavenly sound?
In that same Northern California landscape, thouands of years ago, unbelievably huge rivers cut massive paths through prehistoric landscapes, leaving behind deep, wide beds of gravel that were later buried under layers of seasons of change. Geologists can read those layers like an exciting novel -- pillow lava that issued from underwater volcanoes millions of years ago lie exposed alongside a freeway driving ever higher through the granite peaks of the Sierra Nevada, a mountain range that is also still rising. Amazing to think the lava discharged into the ocean millions of years ago is now hiding in plain site alongside Interstate 80 almost 2000 feet above sea level. Landscape is mutable and history may be forgotten or rewritten, but my brush, using pigment derived from pieces of earth, slashes paint on canvas that results in Scape -- not exactly recorded history, not exactly landscape, not exactly abstract pattern, not exactly string theory, not exactly anything but what it is -- paint applied to a flat surface.
Feel free to explore my universe.
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Chris and JoAnn (r) at a booksigning
