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Letter from the art world
art
in the
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Imagining Alaska, 2014 margins
MMY PATH TO DRAWING AND WATERcolor fl ows om an unusual source: my business notebooks. ree years ago when I retired, I decided it might be a good idea to throw out 20 years’ worth of notebooks. e old ones were stacked up in a couple of large moving boxes, and the new ones were piled up in my home o ce. Not unlike many other professionals, I’d drawn doodles during meetings. If the meeting was long enough, the doodles became quite intricate (In Exile, 1999). On the o -chance that my notebooks had some value, I decided to show them to Kathryn Olive, a good iend and artist. I fi gured I wouldn’t be embarrassed if she told me that my doodles weren’t worth saving. Within 30 minutes, notebook pages were scattered across her o ce and she was proposing that I do an art show at St. Philips Episcopal Church in Durham. However, she warned
me that there’d be a lot of hard work in selecting the images and figuring out what they were about. I’d never thought about the doodles as anything more than a way to reduce stress and remain focused in meetings. The last feedback on my artistic skills hadn’t been positive. My elementary school art teacher had encouraged me to take shop.
With Kathryn’s encouragement, I decided to take the risk of exhibiting some images from my notebooks. I didn’t see it as an art exhibit, but rather as an opportunity to begin talking about and critiquing my former profession, money management. After months of culling through hundreds of doodles, we selected 12 pages for the exhibit, which I called Meditations on Money Management. As the project was being finalized, Kathryn asked me if I drew outside of meetings. My quick answer was no. She encouraged me to go to an art store and buy colored pens and paper (most of my doodles were in black or blue ink).
In Exile, 1999 Dubrovnik, 2014
Humble beginnings
I wasn’t comfortable going into an art store, so I went to Staples and purchased a couple of packages of pens and a pad of drawing paper. Then I sat on the couch and stared at a blank piece of paper. Without a meeting or a business issue as a motivation, lined paper and margins to guide my drawings, and notes and numbers to serve as borders, I didn’t know what to draw. I turned on the radio to create some background noise and after a while, I applied ink to paper. Then I began in the center of the page and just started making shapes, which turned into a building, animal, human image, or geometric pattern. This first phase of my work was a colorful extension of my doodling – without the need to take notes or interject comments.
I quickly discovered two things. First, I became completely lost in my work. During my business career, I’d been highly aware of my surroundings as I drew. But I found that when I drew while sitting on my couch with NPR in the background, I could focus solely on the world I was creating on paper.
Second, I discovered that drawing in ink was very stressful, especially after I’d invested several days in a particular drawing. Because my drawings are very detailed and use fine lines either as positive or negative space, there’s no room for error. Any loss of concentration or slip of the pen, and the drawing is ruined. However, I’d just retired from the business of money management, so I’d been well trained in coping with stress. Moreover, this felt like a good kind of stress.
Encouraged by friends, I started venturing into art stores to find a wider variety of colored pens. I even decided to buy a set of watercolors. I figured the kitchen table was a safe place to try what I’d failed at in fifth grade art class. Applying ink with 0.7 mm and 0.5 mm pens is a slow endeavor. I thought watercolor might allow me to cover more territory, allowing me to graduate from my 9-inch
Icy Straight, 2014
by 11-inch drawing pad to larger surfaces.
New direction
Two events took my drawing in a new direction. Last February, I decided to do a drawing of Dubrovnik, Croatia – my father’s boyhood home – for his 90th birthday (Dubrovnik, 2014). It was the first time I’d thought about a specific topic in advance and decided to capture the essence of a specific place. Up to this point, all my drawings had been drawn from my imagination, which had been a basic principle of my doodles in business meetings. For those, I’d intentionally avoided drawing anything resembling the actual people or setting of the meeting.
Several months later, encouraged by
The Oval, 2014
my Dubrovnik drawing, I picked up a large le over poster board and started my largest work so far, 22 inches by 28 inches. e picture became a series of scenes om coastal Alaska and was
drawn in anticipation of a trip to Glacier Bay (Imagining Al ka, 2014). A er the trip, I combined photographs om my trip to Alaska to inspire my own Alaskan landscapes in ink and watercolor (Icy Straight, 2014). e process of combining images was a satis ing way of creating my own realities. Now, instead of staring at a blank piece of paper, I collect multiple photographs and assemble them into a completed scene, like the one I created of the view om the second fl oor of my home ( e Oval, 2014). ere is, however, one big problem with the materials I’ve chosen for my art. It turns out that the ink in o ce pens fades with time. My bright color schemes will turn to pastel as the years go by. Rather than upgrade my paper or pens, I’ve turned to giclée – fi ne art digital prints on archival paper – in order
to produce lasting images. And thanks to the patience and expertise of Wojtek Wojdynski, a fi ne photographer in Chapel Hill, I have learned a great deal about light, color, and paper. Learning as I go is familiar territory. While I spent most of my career in money management, I stumbled into it through a series of accidents and was never trained in the subject. My second career as an artist appears to be following the same accidental path, although my current career is far more satis ing than my previous one.
Andrew Silton an art t in Chapel Hill who writ a bi-weekly inv tment column for e News & Observer and a blog critiquing the money management ind try (meditationonmoneymanagement.blogspot.com).
Reflections
READINGPROUST
II’ve long been fixated on the history of Europe and America between 1870 and the First World War, an extraordinary time for exploring the clash and coexistence of the old and the new. I’ve read loads of books on French and American society – and a bit on the British, too – about politics here and there, and most fascinating of all, about the world of the arts and artists in the Belle Époque. Think Impressionism and the emergence of the Modern – Matisse, Picasso, and Braque. Invariably in the reading adventure, there would be references to Marcel Proust, who wrote Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu (translated as In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past), a massive personal chronicle of society and manners in fin de siècle France. by LARRY WHEELER director, North Carolina Museum of Art
So why had I never read Proust beyond the required reading of Swann’s Way in French class? I am a French historian, after all. At least I have degrees in it. So I ordered the boxed set in paperback from Amazon about a year ago and set to it. The mythology of reading Proust is no myth.
Twelve million words spread over nearly 4,500 pages in seven volumes can seem a bit daunting at the outset. In How Proust Can Change Your Life, a small book of insights into such an experience, Alain de Botton points out that a single sentence – and the longest – measures 160 inches and can wrap around the base of a bottle of wine 17 times. Such facts as these are meant to impress friends – like you – of the readers of Proust – like me.
Yes, of course, I read the translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, which in itself is an amazing work of literature. Moncrieff died in 1930 before he got to the final volume. You can feel his absence in Time Regained. It was he who named the translated work Remembrance of Things Past, by which most folks refer to it. A new biography of Moncrieff, Chasing Lost Time, has just been published.
As I set out on my Proustian journey, my sensory overstimulation apparently radiated to all around me. The first instance was at a meeting of a committee to discuss the future of the Ackland Art Museum. I seated myself at lunch next to John Townsend of New York, North Carolina, and other places, a respected collector of modern and contemporary art. I had been dying to meet him for obvious reasons. As he was chatting with J. K. Brown about recent art fairs, he turned and asked what I did beyond art stuff. “I am reading Proust,” I remarked casually. “Wow. So am I,” he said. “I got the whole set on tape, the longest work on tape ever recorded.” (See how we are.) “Odette was by my side from Lumberton to Palm Beach.” We needed no further introduction.
One volume or the other ever in hand as I traveled, I could feel the bemusement of my seatmates or the curiosity of checkin clerks. This winter while registering at a professional meeting in Mexico City, a colleague behind me could not help noticing Proust printed in big letters on my portable book. “You’re reading that,” she exclaimed, noting she had never gotten around to it. I affirmed meekly that I was nearly finished with the final volume. I stood there, happily absorbing her respect.
Philippe Ardanaz, the consul general of France (up from the consulate in Atlanta) joined me for lunch recently with his cultural attaché, Alexandre Durand. As we discussed cooperation on cultural projects, the subject of Proust somehow arose (beats me). I noted that I heard the cultural services arm of the French
Embassy had opened the Albertine, a French bookstore, in their quarters on Fifth Avenue in New York. (Albertine is the unsuitable lover of Proust, over whom he obsesses for at least 2,000 pages.) I remarked about how cool that was. Our conversation and relationship moved to a new level. A few weeks ago I was in Wichita Falls, Texas, consulting with a small art museum on national accreditation. At dinner with the vice chancellor for finance of Midwestern State University, under which the museum operates, Dr. Marilyn Fowle asked what books I was reading that might be of interest to her book club. Yes, I did. You know I did. So what is Remembrance of Things Past about anyhow? Well, it is about French society at the end of the 19th century, which means that it is about, among other colorful things, loose women – and men – in an era of great moral breadth. Homosexuality and lesbianism are analyzed deeply, especially in Sodom and Gomorrah, Vol. IV. Courtesans of the salons are among the work’s great characters, Mme. Swann (Odette), par exemple. There is Count Charlus, a high noble who thrives on the low life and who moves from elevator boys to gifted musicians to eventually an S&M brothel he establishes As I set out on my Proustian journey, for his own debasement. There my sensory overstimulation apparently radiated to all around me. are great female characters – Albertine, of course; Odette; the Duchesse de Guermantes; and countless lesser noblesse and bourgeois divas of the salon world. Wild and compelling? Yes. One moves among conversations about anticlericalism and republicanism; the Dreyfus Affair, which outed the anti-Semitic bias of upper French society; and the political divisions and vicissitudes of governing in the Third Republic. Such were the times. And Proust’s observations on the habits of Parisian society and his recounting the gossip of the time are riveting. But most of all one swims in the head of Proust as he brings obsession to the level of fine art. Albertine, Gilberte, Count Charlus, Robert de St. Loup, Odette, his grandmother, mother, and madeleines – all merit multi-page paragraphs. His deep analysis of the nature of art – its true measures, its relationship to science – is as profound as his examination of the roles of memory, reflection, and spirit in art-making. But most of all, his language is art: art so beautiful and poetic that even in its protraction, one is left breathless and longing for more. Marcel Proust possessed a huge intelligence combined with an unrivalled patience in unpeeling the layers of life as he and those around him lived it. After nearly a year, I finished Remembrance of Things Past, longing for more but remembering, like Proust, how lovely was the dance. AUGUST 2015 | 105
