Art is Life is Art: Susan Reep Photo Art

My dad loaned me a book called The Art Spirit by Robert Henri.  It was copyrighted in 1923 and Henri died in 1929.  Henri was an American artist whose paintings are in museums all around the country, including the Met.  And my dad, who loaned me the book, is Edward Reep, an artist whose paintings are in museums all around the country, including the Smithsonian.  So – I’m flattered that Dad wanted me to read it, thought it might apply to me.  It’s about art – teaching, beliefs, philosophies – and it’s incredibly engaging, especially having been written in the more formal prose of that day. 

That’s the best I could do for an image of the book – without leaving the chair in my bedroom.  Thank you photo booth (love the macbook)!  If the book weren’t held up in front of my head, and if I ducked my head, this is what you’d see.My lamp in front of a still life of a lamp.  And it’s the artist who painted this still life that continually comes to mind as I read this book.  He’s William Jordan, a sophomore at King’s College in London and he painted this still life when he was around 15.  If you read the London travel journal, you’ll see that I went to London specifically to visit this former student of mine, who is going to be a brilliant artist someday.  I didn’t like this still life at first.  Not only didn’t I like it, I really disliked it!  But the more I looked at it over a period of time – several years, really, I began to love it.  It’s not a wonderful painting – it’s done by a young man before  the beginning of his career – but the quality doesn’t really matter.  Because I can see into the picture.  I’m not sure what I see yet, but I know something is there waiting to speak to me.

So why do thoughts of William keep running through my head as I read? Here’s a passage from the book: “The work of the art student is not light matter.  Few have the courage and stamina to see it through.  You have to make up your mind to be alone in many ways.  We like sympathy and we like to be in company.  It is easier than going it alone.  But alone one gets acquainted with himself, grows up and on, not stopping with the crowd.  It costs to do this.  If you succeed somewhat, you may have to pay for it as well as enjoy it all your life.”

It’s a brilliant passage.  It’s true.  The artist, more than most, has to know who he or she is, and he finds that out (we’ll use “he” for simplicity) through deep, lonely journeys through the soul, through total immersion in work, through mingling with and alienating himself from others.  It can indeed be a lonely journey, and it’s not easy to mix being an artist with a normal, regulated life.

Henri goes on to say that for an artist to be interesting to us, he has to have been interesting to himself.  He must be capable of intense feeling and profound contemplation.  It’s not an easy life.

In all of William’s 19 years, he has already fit this description over and over.  It’s not been easy for him – especially the intense feeling and profound contemplation.  It’s made his life tumultuous – the highs soar, but the lows reach great depths.  William has The Art Spirit, of that I am quite sure.  And I think I have a little bit of it too.

William and me in London - the Art Spirit is high.

Above:  a twitterpix from Levar Burton, Row 19, Center at Staples Center.

The King of Pop will receive the kind of tribute this morning that would have buoyed him in real life.  But nothing about his life was real.  From childhood star with an abusive father, to early pop sensation who never could come to terms with who he was, to the troubled adult who craved normalcy, acceptance, and a childhood, Jackson only knew how he idealized the world he never had.  He tried to create it, but of course the conscious creation of that world rendered it unreal from the beginning.  None of us live in happy-time forever, and some of us never live in happy-time at all.  Most of us come to understand that happy-time actually exists only fleetingly, which makes it all the more precious.

A new star is rising – American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert.  Lambert is already attracting a large, devoted, rapturous following.  I’m one of them.  Yes, I painted my toenails black, and I’m a 62-year-old Glambert.  I crave everything Adam.  I can’t get enough of Adam.  I’m not suggesting that Adam is replacing Michael Jackson, however, in juxtaposing them in this blog.  Jackson changed the face of music and dance in such a large way that he could only have done it from a level of genius that almost guaranteed a troubled life.

Lambert may not bring such seminal changes to the music industry but he is giving us something equally as satisfying.  His voice is not of this world.  His range, his tenor, his pitch – he never strikes a wrong note.  In fact, when Adam is onstage, it is pure enjoyment – during Idol we never thought for a moment that he would give a bad performance, miss a note, forget a lyric, or mess up a song.  We relaxed and marveled.

Watching Lambert perform found us – and by us I mean girls, young women, older women, men, everyone – transported by his image, his sexiness, his ability to put himself into the song and become the song, his looks, his hints of erotica; yet we didn’t go all swoony-crazy like we did for the Beatles.  I think a less discussed (has anyone discussed it?) reason for Glambertmania was that Adam Lambert is a happy person, thrilled at what he is doing onstage, humble, yes, but just out-of-his-mind excited to be doing what he’s doing, and we’re thrilling with him.  He isn’t afraid to be honest about his sheer amazement at where he finds himself now.  And, most importantly, he is happy with himself.

His demons, such as they were, have been fought in coming to terms with who he is sexually, and he’s accepted himself as who he is – a human being as worthy as any other human being.  Will he have more demons along the way?  Sure.  Who doesn’t.  But Adam is going to enjoy his journey and give himself pleasure along with us Glamberts.  He doesn’t have anything to prove, a childhood to overcome, and a reality he has to create.  He is real and he grew up in the real world.  He has the opportunity now that has eluded him so far, and he is ready.

So I say, RIP Michael Jackson, with the peace you never found in life; and Adam Lambert, bring it and let us revel in an out-of-this-world performer who has his feet firmly on the ground.

July 4th and the corpse plant are NOT related – it just happens to be the 4th when I am writing this long-promised blog entry!

So here it is: Amorphophallus Titanum, otherwise known as the stinky plant since when it blossoms, it smells like rotting flesh.

This is the plant.

This plant last bloomed at the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena in 2002!  I was so sorry I missed it, so upon my return from Colorado and reading in the paper that it was blooming again, seven years later, I jumped in the car and drove the 100+- miles to Pasadena.

I was one day late – it had bloomed the previous day, and it didn’t smell like rotting flesh anymore, but like old stinky socks.

Look at the size of this plant!

You can judge the size by the people behind the plant.  It’s almost 7 feet tall!  When it bloomed the day before, it looked like the plant on the poster above – and the bloom had a four to five foot diameter!  Just incredible.

Growth Chart

This chart shows that when the blossom began to grow on May 28th, it was about 2 feet five inches.  By June 17th, when bloom began in the late afternoon, it measured almost seven feet!  When I was there on June 18, the bloom had already begun to shrink.

Detail

Look at the beautiful detail on this plant.  It was really remarkable and well worth the drive.  Who knows when it will bloom again?  As you can tell, it’s rare.

I was able to use photos of this plant on my collage Blue Moon.

Blue Moon

To see other photo collages, you can visit the gallery.

Back from the cabin a day early to avoid the 4th of July noise-fest.  Not that Bakersfield will be any quieter, really, since we still sell and set off fireworks. The non-profits complain that if we stopped fireworks stands, they would lose big chunks of income.  But we live in a desert in a drought, in a high fire-danger area. All of California is a high-fire danger area nowadays.  What if the non-profits sold asbestos products?  Would they have wanted to continue just because they’d always done it?  The fireworks are a noisy, air-polluting mess, not to mention all the injuries caused by using them the wrong way.  Someone was killed here a few years ago because someone put the powder from the fireworks in a bottle or something, and put it all in a watermelon.  How sad to be killed by an exploding watermelon!  I’m not making this up.

BUT – Art!  I completed three collages that I previewed on the blog, but here they are in cleaner form.

Blue Moon

I love this.  I think I explained it in a previous post.  Tomorrow, though, I promise to write about the stinky corpse plant, from which these capes were made.

Generations

The background photo is from Piazza San Marco in Venice.  The people?  Four generations of my family – not all of us, but my mom, dad, mom’s brother and mother, one of my daughters, and me.  And the wind-up monkey from my father’s toy collection.

Spirits of the Desert

Gotta love that stinky corpse plant.  I have a feeling I’m not finished with it yet.

You can see more art in the art gallery, to which these will be added.

What a day!  I finally got the web page done.  I’ve been working on it since March.  I say “I,” but the chief architect is my son-in-law Steve Davies.  Since I’m his MIL, I got a discount – but anyone who needs a web page, I recommend Steve.  I was very picky to the littlest details, and I don’t know what he’s saying at home, but he was patient all the way through with me.  SO – I let people know through facebook, twitter, email – and I’ve had such wonderful response that it feels like Christmas!  I’ve even sold two collages!  Thank you everyone!

Now that I have a blog and a website, it’s shameless self-promotion time, so please subscribe and pass it on to others.  Steve put those little boxes on the pages where you are supposed to say you like something, or post links or comments.  I don’t really understand that part.

Me up at the cabin working on Blue Moon

I continued work today on the collage I was wrestling with yesterday and it continued to give me trouble.  I have to do a little, look, think, do some more, and there have been times that after a couple of days I’ve just trashed what wouldn’t work out.  This time, though, I realized I was using the wrong background photo.  So I switched and after hours more I had it.  Here’s a really bad photo – I’ll scan it when I get home.

A very bad photo of Desert Spirits

The background photo is the stinky corpse plant – I’ll blog about that soon.  The “blue moons” again are part of my friend Jeff’s old victrola.   The spirits – yes, there are four girls dancing in there, were practicing at a school in Monteverde, Costa Rica, and the flowers are from the Utah Visitor Center near the San Rafael Swell on I-70.  And the little yellow bud on the top?  From a dahlia at Butchart Gardens, Victoria.

And – to tell you the truth, I just might turn this one upside down!  To see rightside up collages, click here

I’m at our cabin and was up far too early today.  I awoke at 5:45 and made the mistake of looking out the window.  The special early-morning silence of the forest captured me and there was no turning back.  So I came downstairs and sat by the window hoping to see a deer walk by.  How many hundreds of deer have I seen in my lifetime?  No matter.  There is still something entrancing about a deer’s silent, graceful passage through the trees.  I didn’t see one but I fed the blue jays (they love peanuts and are very raucous sorting out who goes first).

New collage - untitled

So here’s a bad photo of my new collage.  The background photo i a rock formation at Arches National Park.  The formation reminded me of the three wise men (it may even be named that for all I know) so I treated it as such.  The hats are part of a Venus Flytrap, the caps are part of the stinky corpse plant that bloomed recently at Huntington Gardens, the frontman is carrying a Chinese lantern, and the blue moon is an old victrola speaker thing.  The little goat, since mountain goats do belong at Arches, is one of my brother’s baby goats.  He’s standing on part of the stinky plant.  I like this, although I may take the goat out.

Today continuing word on a collage that is vexing me – can’t get it right but it’s somewhere in there.  I have more collage images in my art gallery.