In line at the grocery store the other day, I unloaded the cart while Ella did her best to charm the elderly woman behind us. She succeeded. The woman descended from her baby-talking raptures long enough to assure me my daughter is positively artistic. Or else mathematical. "Look at how she fingers the cart handle!" I don't know where that inclination figures into things, but I won't be surprised if the overall assessment is dead on. This girl is sensory enough to notice all fine detail in a two-foot radius. But she's also got door pulls, box clasps, block stacking, and puzzle fittings figured out pretty good. I'd say she's a right combination of her dad and mom.
Engineering and creativity. Math and art.
Our Vermont Christmas trip is still on my mind, and while we were there, I paid two visits to an art gallery in Hanover, New Hampshire. Down on an up-and-coming corner of the growing college town, there is the League of N.H. Craftsmen Gallery. You can enter at the front from Lebanon street, and find yourself in an open, sunny space with gorgeous local art on careful display. Or you can come in at the back, as I always have, climbing steps from the parking deck past the downstairs studio where some bearded man cradles fast-spinning clay in his spackled grey hands. Art in motion.
The back door opens onto display cases filled with jewelry, shelves of blown glass and finished pottery, walls of framed art, and - the jackpot for me, this trip - stacks of matted prints and originals, waiting to be flipped through and fallen in love with. Because that's what it's about, isn't it? We can talk local and we can talk art and quality craftsmanship and we can talk about the grand meeting of the two, but in the end, the value is in the personal connection. The value, really, is in the individual.
On an earlier December trip that involved a flight to Houston, I pulled the copy of GO: Airtran Inflight Magazine from the seat back and read an article on art collecting, "The Artistic Process." The writer, on her own venture to identify quality art and, ultimately, choose a piece of her own, realizes the best choice and the highest value comes down to the painting - or sculpture or carving - that speaks to you personally. We're all different, you know. Our perceptions and pasts and particular "isness" (as Madeline L'Engle would say) converge to make meaning out of surprisingly different items (pictures, songs, books, experiences, memories) from person to person.
The piece that connected with me in this particular gallery was - is - a whimsical serigraph. Entering the back door, I flipped through a stack topped by a stylized depiction of a creek bed, right up Kenton's alley, I thought, though somehow not to my taste. I wondered if there would be a piece to satisfy us both. There was: a small, 3 x 7 inch view through a birch forest to a hilltop cluster of pines, with a winding moonbeam - or is it a whitened snow path? - lighting the way. I loved the spareness of the rendering. It felt faintly magical. And I was immediately reminded of a scene from L.M. Montgomery's lesser-known Emily of New Moon, wherein the title character, Montgomery-ish heroine as she is (I can stomach only so much of her heroines naming every nature item in sight), names her front yard trees and makes friends of them. Appropriately, the painting was titled "Meeting Old Friends." I carried it around the gallery with me. I brought Kenton back for a second opinion. I deemed it well worth the price. I walked out the door, art in-hand.
Like the Airtran article said, it's about the personal connection with the crafted item. But doesn't that leave things a little fuzzy and grey? How, then, can value be determined? And not just regarding art, but in the matter of people, too. If everyone is so different - artist here, engineer there - how can we be figured out, known, understood? How can we know ourselves when isness is so variable?
Before our flurry of holiday travels, Kenton and I went on a birthday date to see Hugo at the movies. He was excited about the 3D; I anticipated the glimpses of beauty hinted at in the online trailer. (Those impossible, gorgeous stacks of books!) Our expectations did not go unmet. From the winding of the gears to the unfolding of the plot, from the artful acting to the 3D visual direction, we were both entirely satisfied. And we were most struck by the larger theme: everyone is unique, and everyone has a purpose. In fact, the best team in the movie is the boy who repairs clocks and the girl he befriends who writes stories. It felt familiar.
There is a telling scene toward the climax, a key moment in the life of young protagonist Hugo Cabret, orphan, secret train-station resident, silent clock-winder. He looks down from his perch in one of the impossibly high and lovely clocks it is his self-appointed business to keep running. He sees Monsieur Labisse, the station's bookstore owner, hand a book to a customer. Watching, Hugo realizes something about the bookseller, and about the workings of society, and about himself. He ruminates (I paraphrase here), "We are all made to do something, aren't we? Monsieur Labisse's job is to connect people with the right books." To his young friend Isabelle, he declares with confidence, "Your job is to write. What is my purpose?" He knows he must have one. He suspects something about that. "Maybe my purpose is to fix things."
The two friends are a team, and their individual purposes, their individual selves, work together for the good of many - and for the endurance of art, at that. She writes; he fixes. She descends from artists, he from engineers of the clock making sort. Engineering and art. Quite the pair.
Admittedly, real life and real people are more complex. Kenton's got an eye for design and I can add numbers in my head at a frighteningly quick rate for someone who can't do much else with them. And, of course, we go much deeper and broader still.
Still. Engineering and art. If it were possible to Googlemap the two, you'd be directed to a small, grey 1940's Cape Cod, five driveways up from a quiet dead-end. Inside, there would be us: me with a book, or laptop, or vague gaze out the window; Kenton with book, or budget, or project that involves measuring and cutting; Ella serving make-believe food to her stuffed bear, and then turning on a dime to stack blocks with impressive thirteen-month-old precision.
Madeline L'Engle talks about individual identity, implying there's a certain glory in being precisely who we are, each person as unique as the piece of art I brought home with me. She calls it "isness." And when that individuality is paired? She says of her relationship with her husband: "we are willing to let each other be; as we are; two diametrically opposite human beings in many ways, which has often led to storminess. But I think we are both learning not to chafe at the other's particular isness."*
Perhaps I am a fool, but I am hopeful. I look forward and suspect our little family will be quite the team. In the end, at the New Hampshire gallery, Kenton approved my art choice; I know him, and he knows me. In the end, Hugo Cabret and his friend Isabelle were each stronger and safer for their friendship. In the end, the mysteries of individuality and of relationship - the intersection of our isnesses - remain a surpassing beauty. It's been said "a threefold cord is not quickly broken." That's generally interpreted to include God as one strand amongst the three. But I also think that, here at the intersection of many things, we three individuals do and will augment each other. . . . Yes, quite the team.
* L'Engle, Madeline. A Circle of Quiet. HarperCollins: New York, 1972. p. 110
** Ecclesiastes 4:12, English Standard Version
1 comments:
ovincelBecca,
Your ability to write and create pictures/stories in one's mind is most impressive. Keep up the good work.
Carl
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