Janet Geib Pretti, Sculptor

Back to the Basement (and Sculpture)

In 2015, I began to transition to a planned retirement in 2017. I had not started a new sculpture in over six years. My life had been overtaken by my day job after I was promoted to the Curry Campus Dean just as the dream of building a campus had a chance of becoming a reality. There was money to raise, a building to design and build, and programs to run. There was no time to think about, let alone make art. 

I am always plagued with worry when I dive back into sculpture after a life-imposed time away. Would my well have gone dry from neglect? Would I be able to pick back up where I left off?

First, I reclaimed my basement workroom, then I fussed and puttered over the words to avoid it. But eventually I went down the stairs, pulled out my wax bin and tentatively began to apply wax to wire armatures. Only five new pieces are in the show announced below. But it feels so good to be working again. When the time came for the show, three pieces were left behind unfinished, insuring that I have a place to begin when my official retirement begins.  

Russell Childers Show

 

Russell Childers: Oregon Outsider is currently on display at the Hallie Ford Museum in Salem, Oregon.  Jonathan Bucci will be giving a free lecture on Russell Childers September 25, 2016 at 3 p.m., at the Roger Hull Lecture Hall, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. The show will close October 23, it is worth making time to see. There is also and exhibition catalog of the show available for $17.95.  

I cannot express how much knowing Childers' story and his work has meant to me over the years. Childers died in 1998 and I have longed to know where life took him and see the work he created after the 1977 show. The current show is terrific.  But there are still missing pieces. Jonathan Bucci (and I) are excited that the show is bringing attention to this forgotten artist and more people are contacting him with information and recollections.  Go see the show and if you have a missing piece of Russell Childers' story, please share it so he will never forgotten again. 

The Power of a Book

This summer there was a local retrospective for Carol Vernon, a long time Southwestern Oregon Community College art teacher.  During the preparations, I was shown the picture they were planning to use for publicity - a young Carol was resolutely looking directly at the camera, clutching, embracing her copy of Georgia O’Keeffe, by Georgia O’Keeffe. Someone commented that it was odd she was photographed with a book, not one of her pieces.  But I knew why. One look at the picture and I was immediately transported back to 1976.

I was finishing my first year of graduate school. It had been a challenging year.  In the 30's, early in her career, Louise Nevelson was told she had “to have balls to be a sculptor.” That sentiment was alive and well in 1976. That spring, I impulsively cut a slab of walnut into the silhouette of a plump swimming suit and mounted it on mahogany legs fitted with maple high heels. I rubbed white paint into the grain of the mahogany. By the end of the week, the finished piece was squirreled away in the corner of my work area where it could not be readily seen from the common area of our shared grad studio. The next Monday, the head of the department visited. Clearly word was out. He circled my new piece, paused, and pronounced he had nothing to say, “There was no art history precedent for it.” And he left. I was stunned. Less blunt but the same message given to Nevelson - I was not making, nor was I equipped to make sculpture. A paper doll past was irrelevant, useless for a sculptor.

I sat staring at the piece for the longest time. As I gathered my things to leave, one of the other grad students poked his head around the corner and quietly said, “I don’t get it either.  But he is wrong.... it is art”. Jan Zach, the chair of my graduate committee, stopped by a couple of days later. In his usual effusive half-Czech, half-English way, he urged me to make more, bigger and bigger. He was convinced that the piece was the start of my thesis work. But nothing of substance grew from the tiny balsa wood studies that followed.

In desperation for a context from which to build my graduate thesis, I surveyed the University of Oregon Architecture and Allied Arts Library for information on women artists.  I found one picture and two magazine articles. But by the fall, some of the fruits of the feminist movement were reaching Oregon. Black and white paperbacks on Nevelson and Kathe Kollowitz had been published.  Judy Chicago spoke at the U. of O. and Miriam Shapiro lectured at O. S. U. 

The Georgia O’Keeffe book showed up in the college book store just before Thanksgiving.  It was a full colored, oversized monograph on a woman artist, with an unprecedented $75 price tag. For comparison, I had bought the Nevelson book, Dawns and Dusks, for $7.95 and Kathe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist for $5.50. I spent Christmas Day curled around my very own copy, reading it from cover to cover. The book sold out in record time, shocking the publishing world and providing impetus for rushing long-neglected manuscripts on other women artists to market.

For me, Carol Vernon and countless other women artists coming of age in those chauvinistic times, the book was instantly our most prized possession. Carol’s copy was at her retrospective, looking worn and well loved, just like my copy.  We all still had to struggle to find our own paths, but the O’Keefe book was proof we could hold in our hands that a woman artist had found her way, had found a place in the art world. 

I will forever be grateful to O’Keeffe for not allowing her work, her life be relegated to a black and white paperback.  Instead she continued to work and patiently waited for the publishing world to meet her terms.  She was 89 when the book was published, but when her story was told, it was with her own words, in a blaze of color, and bigger than life.  The size of the first edition was wonderful to look at, but difficult to shelve, later editions were downsized to a more conventional coffee table book size.

The Crying Tree, Naseem Rakha

The 2011 South Coast Writers Conference is over and done.  Naseem Rakha, author of The Crying Tree, was the keynote.  Before the conference, when I  recommended The Crying Tree, I found myself calling it a dense read, because you have to read every word, none are superfluous.  I also said it was about finding forgiveness - something everyone needed to learn more about. 

I know that I responded to The Crying Tree because it struck a chord with the day my family's world turned upside down and our journey back.  But as my 87 year old mother said when she looked up after reading the final words, carefully, tenderly closing the book, "this is a good book, the best book I have read since Cutting for Stone.  It is an important book, one that will change lives. . . but now I need a light read, something to make me laugh."   She made me stop at a bookstore for a copy for my sister before flying home.

My mom was right, as she usually is about books.  Read The Crying Tree and if Naseem Rakha comes to a town near yours - go see her.  She will not disappoint. Her web site is: http://naseemrakha.com/.

For Christmas I treated myself to two new books on the sculpture of Andy Goldsworthy.  Then I saw Manufactured Landscapes a  documentary on the photographs of Edward Burtynsky.  Much of Goldsworthy's sculpture is fleeting, made with natural materials which melt, decay or are washed away with the incoming tides.  But one of my new books, The Andy Goldsworthy Project, is on his permanent work.  Through out his career Goldsworthy has been a meticulous photographer, carefully documenting the purposeful interactions of one man (and his team of workers) with and on nature.  He records the evolution over time - the impact his pieces have on the land or the impact nature has on his pieces. Images of his work are in the Other Artist album.

Edward Burtynsky's  photographs record the collective impact of humankind on the environment as we extract and use natures resources to manufacture the consumer goods of a modern society.  Burtynsky's photographs reminds me that even degradation  and pollution seen through an artist's eye can be incredibly beautiful.  But his work also stuns me by revealing  the shear magnitude of the scale and change we are having on the world.  One of Burtnysky's pictorial studies is on the multi-decade, Three Gorges Dam project in China.  For some of the workers   it was simply a job, but others glowed with pride for being part of something so monumental, bringing  progress in the form of power generation, transportation and floodcontrol.  A good website to see Burtnysky's work is  http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/. But I have added a few pictures to whet your appetite.

As a community college dean,  I am privileged to be part of making a long dreamed for small  branch campus a reality.  I was there when local tribal members gathered Sitka Spruce roots for baskets, before the trees were felled and the land cleared.  I  watched as trucks haul away a ridge of rock slowly but surely, day after day.  The structural beams of the building are finally peeking over the hill.  Half of the ten acre site will be untouched but the other half will be forever altered, in spite of the solar panels on the roof and the carefully engineered system of bioswales and filtering ponds designed to manage runoff before returning it to the neighboring wetlands. 

Like the Chinese workers I swell with pride and excitement every time I am on site, because  I knows how needed the new facility is for our isolated, rural county.  Like Goldsworthy, I have enjoyed the design process and seeing the project evolve.   But Burtynsky reminds me that like most people, I have a hand in the steady transformation of our planet. 

Construction workers tease me about my "magic tree", the one remaining Sitka Spruce circled by barricade netting, to remind everyone to keep it safe.  When I look at it, I remember the beautiful spring day when we gathered roots for basket making, how the land looked and smelled before we began carving it up to build a college.  Sometimes I find myself making the Spruce a promise - that once we are done building we will re-plant with natives so it won't be solitary forever. I promise it that we will use the surrounding wetlands wisely to teach watershed management.  And I share my dream that by setting the college at the edge of town, in the midst of a forest with a distant view of the ocean, our students will reconnect to the land, learn, and be inspired.

Guardino Gallery Show

Just back from the opening.  Marcia Hindman's paintings and my sculptures are perfectly paired and gallery's owner, Donna Guardino's keen eye has hung the show beautifully.  I borrowed a few of the pictures of the show from the Guardino Gallery Website to start a photo album of the show in the right column.  Will add more as I get them.  The gallery is located at 2939 Alberta St., Portland, OR. The show will be up through November 21st.  

The Color of Sadness

I was recently asked what color sad was.  I floundered about, mentally picturing color after color trying to find a fit, finally deciding sad did not have a color.  Sad is emptiness, it is what is left after mad, after grief, after all the other emotions have flamed out.  It is a stuck place where there is no forward or backward movement.   It is texture-less, colorless.  It is a void. 

 

Then I realized, that I while I could not settle on a color for sad, but I did envision an image  - The Invisible Object, Hands Holding the Void, by Alberto Giacometti.  

 

His later pieces, the ones he is most known for, do resonate with isolation and sadness, but I was surprised when the word sad triggered Hands Holding the Void.  I have always loved this piece, because she appears to be just on the verge of being able to tell me something important, something life changing. She does have a certain helplessness, a quiet desperateness, but she also seems so earnest, engaged, even hopeful - in spite of the curious rectangular slab pressing against the front of her lower legs.

 

It is hard to find good pictures of this sculpture.  Most are full frontal images, where it is hard to grasp that she is actually represented sitting on a chair and in some versions there is even a bird sitting beside her.  Everything is skewed, but logical except for the slab pinning her legs together, preventing the independent movement necessary to stand and move on, trapping her in place. 

 

Giacometti wrote that he "could have destroyed it. But I made this statue for just the opposite reason - to renew myself. Perhaps this is what makes it worthwhile." It was one of his last surrealist pieces. He would later struggle to finish work.  His brother Diego sometimes arbitrarily emptied his studio to force him to begin new pieces. Was Hands Holding the Void his last heroic effort to get a grasp on the sadness and isolation that was about to descend, an attempt to capture and hold it so he could set it aside and move on?  Was in the end he left with emptiness, resigned to letting it settle into his life without further fight? 

 

Maybe Hands Holding the Void is my image of sadness because it was the last piece by Giacometti that engaged the viewer, that grappled with emptiness, that tried to communicate emptiness.  Every figure afterward stares back at the viewer dispassionately, in the world but not part of the world, seen but not heard.   

I have had two shows this year.  Each time pieces were finished just before packing the car.  Two will require some re-do.  The pre-show grind seemed especially brutal.  A recent day job promotion had added hours of commuting time and work time, leaving little time to get into the focused state needed to make the final  critical decisions to finish a sculpture.   But our college was closed for the Christmas holidays and I had enough vacation time saved to set budgets, long range planning, staff and student issues aside and slip back into the world of sculpture for a precious ten days before each show.

 

Sigmund Freud in his essay Civilization and Its Discontents wrote "beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it.  Yet civilization could not do without it."  I can't seem to do without it.  When a piece is finished and I finally see it for the first time after the long treasure hunt of discovery that slowly uncovers what it is to become, I always wonder if it is worth the months of neglecting  friends and family, leaving books unopened and movies unwatched to steal enough time to work in the basement.  After each show is delivered, comes a time of emptiness.  I am incapable of making simple decisions and I have to wrap my hands around my coffee cup each morning to uncurl them for the day ahead.  Yet glimpses of future pieces gradually began to surface and slowly my mind kicks back into gear.  

 

My mom gave me Joyce Carol Oates The Faith of a Writer for Christmas.  Oates believes that "we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called "culture" --- and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.    She  feels that " we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us.  In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born.    The individual voice is the communal voice." 

 

Making art, especially in these economic times  seems such a frivolous thing.   Building college programs for our isolated county seems so much more needed.  But I love to stand back watch people explore my pieces at shows.  I make sculpture because I need the dialog, the insights it  gives me that might never come without it.  But when I watch others interact with the finished pieces and begin their own journey of discovery, the making of them seems less frivolous, less self-indulgent.   

Fitting In (my latest piece)

For three months in third grade, I was the most popular girl in my class.  My dad had returned from a big city business trip with Barbie dolls, the first in our small town.  All the girls wanted to play with my doll.  It was thrilling to be in the in group, but after Christmas everyone had dolls of their own and I was relieved to disengage from the Barbie Fan Club.  I tried to see what they liked so much about her, but her caricature figure confined to a lifetime in high heels seemed silly to me.

 

The drive to fit in begins at birth.  In America it fuels our economy.  Parents strive to provide their children the latest clothes and toys, the right schools and neighborhoods.  Children quickly learn what is in and what is not.  They hang upside down on monkey bars trying to stretch, diet or spend hours perfecting their cosmetic masks.  Everyone is confused and hurt when parents scrimp and save for the latest fad only to be met with wails of anguish when it is the wrong brand; or a birthday party invitation is suddenly revoked or refused by parental directive because the invitation was from or to a child not in the acceptable social class.

But I was lucky, I was given a Barbie doll. After the initial infatuation dissipated I began to feel the exhaustion, the boredom of trying to fit in where there was no fit. Slowly I learned for myself who I was, my passions and dislikes. I learned to live within my own skin. I learned that life was never dull, never stagnate, if I was willing to share my life with people and ideas that I didn’t always agree with.

Daniel Minter

While I was in Seattle last month I went to the Northwest African American Museum to see the Jacob Lawrence and James W. Washington, Jr. exhibit.  It was a treat to finally see Jacob Lawrence's work in person and be introduced to the sculpture of James W. Washington, Jr. , but the biggest surprise of the day was to see the work of Daniel Minter. 

 

Minter had been an artist in residence at Washington's House and Studio and the paintings he had completed were hanging in the museum's hallway and cafeteria.  They were breathtaking and haunting.  Minter also sculpts and illustrates children's books.  His website is www.danielminter.com.  I am posting a few pictures from the website to help lure you into checking it out for yourselves.