Still Life at SAM

Banquet Piece c. 1675 Abraham Hendricksz van Beyeren (Seattle Art Museum)

    Still in the afterglow of reading Mark Doty's Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, I visited the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) last week to enjoy the experience of standing in front of the museum's one still-life painting. Days beforehand, I imagined myself there at the museum, overwhelmed by light and color and richness and intimacy and meaning just like Doty was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Did I forget somehow that I was not a prize-winning American poet--or any kind of poet at all?
  I arrived at the museum knowing that the painting was European, but not knowing which floor or gallery held this painting. I wanted to wander the three floors of art and walk myself back in time from contemporary and post-Modern to the 17th century; I wanted to travel from Seattle to Africa to France to Italy and to Holland.
Ah, there it was, in a beautiful gilt frame. I stood before it looking looking looking.
   It was a busy painting, a bit too busy for my taste, so it took quite a while to explore the canvas, to identify all the components, to begin to figure out how one thing related to another. I looked and stared and gazed. And I waited for something to happen. Niets. I was not having the Doty experience. I was disappointed. I paid $15 admission plus parking to have an experience. I had sent copies of Doty's book to a family and friends. I just stood there wishing someone would come in and clean up this mess of  a feast. What a rube. What a fool. I knew better.
   So I planted my feet and kept looking. I pulled out my camera, disabled the flash, and took many close-up photographs. I needed to look for myself to see what I saw not what Doty had prepared me to see.
   Here, then,  is the gold watch and pomegranate:

And here is the figure of the artist reflected in the curved shape of the silver pitcher:

 And here is the lemon and its tendril of peel somehow "talking" with the folds of the burgundy and white table cloths to its right and the cluster of red grapes to its left:

And here is a goblet of white wine catching the light from the window:

 And here is Beyeren's oysters and lemon (left)--for certain an acknowledgement of Jan Davidsz de Heem's Still Life with A Glass and Oysters of 1640 (right).

  And then...I could hardly believe my eyes. There were the clouds! There! Look! Out the window behind the thick green drape: 

  Clouds never appear in still lifes! Neither do windows! There's always some invisible source of light illuminating the objects arranged on the tables. Look at this "classic" still life. See what I mean?

Still Life with Gilt Cup by Willem Claesz.

  The window is never in the painting. But here was a window showing actual clouds, not just a wash of blue sky or butterscotch-colored sunlight. Still Life with Clouds! 

   And then I starting seeing how the light from this window was reflected in all the shiny objects on the table. Look!

 Now the painting was alive and my eyes were dancing all over its surface looking for the reflection of the window. And, strangely, it was an asymmetrical light--three panes of a four-paned, two-over-two window. And, even stranger, this could not be the reflection of the window with the green curtain and clouds. That reflection would take a different shape and would, based on the location of the window, be reflected on the backsides of the objects on the table. There was another window somewhere "off stage" being captured, curved, elongated, truncated, and bent by the artist in every vessel in the painting.

   What does it all mean? Why did Beyeren include the window here? The curatorial notes next to this work offer no clues, but I can think of three reasons: 1) it balances the very dark space behind the arched doorway next to it, 2) it provides a visual "breath of fresh air" to a claustrophobic table setting--an escape of sorts for the viewer, 3) he wanted me to be happy.

Archaic and Passe? Dang.

   Well, Cloud of the Week fans, I've suffered a major set back. Shortly after visiting the University of Washington library to see the 1939 edition of the Atlas International des Nuages (International Cloud Atlas, I wrote to my favorite cloudman to tell him I was planning a trip to see the 1896 edition of this atlas at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. He was, he wrote back, envious. And he admired my persistence in tracking down these early editions.
   He himself had written a piece on cloud classification years ago but, he admitted, he didn't consult this atlas--the "bible" of cloud classification published by the World Meteorological Organization. "Frankly, he wrote, "the ID-ing for clouds has become a bit passe." Ouch! "I think it's seen as archaic now." Double ouch.
   Just as I was feeling comfortable pointing to the sky and saying "Look! A cumulus congestus capillatus!" Just as I was ready to post another Cloud of the Week (after a weeks off) here. Just after I had laminated a two-page cloud key for my personal enrichment in the great outs of door.
   Tossing aside cloud identification, he suggested beginning students of meteorology focus on learning just a few things: 1) Being able to tell ice clouds from droplet clouds, 2) recognizing the signs of an advancing storm, and, 3)  because we are in Puget Sound, recognizing the Convergence Zone. This can be accomplished without books, laminated keys, or blogs--just "by eyeballing and nothing more."

Ice clouds.

This is a way more practical approach to the clouds. It is, however, an approach from a Real Scientist interested in weather and not an Accidental Naturalist with quirky passion for archaic Latin nomenclature, the poetry of clouds, and old atlases published in French.

"Nuages isoles, delicats, a texture fibreuse, sans ombres propres, generalment de couleur blanche, souvent d'un eclat soyeux."

  Fortunately, there is room for both on my blog and in my book. So, I will post more Clouds of the Week and will begin to tackle the three essentials listed above. I would hate you to feel outmoded by what you learn here.
   

Be a Lorax! Please Write Today!

Due to format incompatability, this image cannot be expanded. I have summarized it below.

   Once again, the marbled murrelet and our old-growth forests are on the chopping block. Tomorrow (May 3) two nearly-hundred-acre parcels of old-growth Douglas-fir in Wahkiakum and Pacific Counties are being considered by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources for clearcutting.

Despite the fact that this is marbled murrelet nesting habitat.

Despite the fact that the murrelet population in Washington State is just 5,600 and is declining at 7.4% per year.

Despite the fact that the murrelet has been listed as a threatened species under both federal and state endangered species legislation.

Despite the fact that the 1997 Recovery Plan for the Marbled Murrelet mandates conservation measures to stabilize and recovery the marbled murrelet populations.

Despite the fact that a team of murrelet scientists recommended in 2008 that the state should specially manage or set aside 100,000 acres of older forests on the Olympic Peninsula and in Southwest Washington for this bird.

Public Lands Commissioner Goldmark and the Board of Natural Resources are essentially ignoring this advice and are postponing the adoption of long-term conservation plan until 2013, continuing to clear-cut marbled murrelet habitat until that time.

Clearcutting is a short sighted, unsustainable way to cut timber.Not only does this practice completely remove all trees, but it creates open edges into remaining forest surrounding the cut; this provides easy access for marbled murrelet nest predators such as ravens and jays which do not traditionally hunt in old-growth forests. In addition, it destroys habitat for other species by the removal of the trees, destruction of the  understory vegetation, increased soil erosion, and increased sedimentation of streams (salmon habitat).

Clearcutting is not management. It is not stewardship. It is not wise. But you are. Please take a minute of your day to write Commissioner Goldmark: Peter.goldmark@dnr.wa.gov and the Board of Natural Resources  bnr@dnr.wa.gov. Ask them to defer clearcutting of all marbled murrelet management areas until the State adopts a long-term conservation strategy consistent with its 2008 science report.

Thank you thank you from me and the murrelet. To read more on this bird, go to www.mariaruthbooks.com

Still Life with Oysters and Lemon...and Clouds

   From the moment I started reading Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, I knew I was going to start re-reading this book the minute I finished it. Poetry is like that and, apparently, so is this lucid memoir and meditation by poet Mark Doty.

 I quoted from Doty’s book in an earlier blog about my unwieldy collection of cloud photographs and the strange new art of virtual collections.  Though Doty does not write about clouds per se, his thoughts on still life painting are of interest to me as the working title of my next book is Still Life with Clouds.

 I have never heard of Doty until I read a New York Times article by Rob Walker, which quoted him and mentioned his book. Though Doty's Still Life with Oysters and Lemon is ostensibly about a still life painting by 17^th-century Dutch painter Jan Davidsz de Heem, Doty moves gracefully from the canvas to explore the art of seeing, intimacy, beauty, and life.

 I  began reading this slim seventy-page essay on the runway before taking off from Seattle to Denver and finished its last sentence as my connecting flight touched down in Washington, DC.  Travel time was about eight hours, but I lost all awareness of time as I read sections of Doty’s beautiful book, contemplated his ideas, stared out the window, took notes, read several more pages, napped, read some more, thought of all the people to whom I would give copies of this book.

 And now my problem. Explaining, paraphrasing, summing up, describing Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. What I would really like to do is start with page one and retype the entire book here for you to savor. It’s that beautiful and irreducible. However, I will start with a quote.

 “…I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting’s will;  I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held with an intimacy with things of this world.”

Still Life with Clouds (photo by M. Ruth through a sailboat window)

 Strangely, this is what comes over me when I look at a cloud. Strangely, because a cloud is not still, not alive, and too distant really for intimacy.
  Yet, I find the clouds as compelling and inviting as the painting Doty has fallen in love with--a small canvas composed of shucked oysters, curling lemon peels, a cluster of grapes, and a shining goblet of wine—not water droplets and ice crystals constantly moving, constantly changing form. Jan Davidsz de Heem’s painting captures a table set 350 years ago, forever fixing the relationship between carefully arranged object. The curls of lemon peel will always curl just so, the lemon wedge will always rest on the grapes, the glistening oysters will never stray from the edge of the brown wooden table, everything will remain clustered around the sparkling goblet, the light will never change, and decay will never taint the soft, ripe air. 

 Yet still-life paintings are never still, even though the living things in them have been stilled—the lemon and grapes plucked, the oyster shucked, the greenery cut, and the wine long ago separated from the life-giving vine. Our restless imaginations go to work changing them—warming wine, shriveling the oysters, drying the lemon, browning the grapes. We hear the buzz of the fly, smell the fragrance of decay, see the hands of servant or artist himself clearing and resetting the table, shaking out the tablecloth.

 We keep the still life moving by adding the element of time to the painting. And though the stories of the artist and his feast are lost to us, we enliven the feast with our own stories. We reach for the goblet, taste the wine, recall our first oyster (maybe also our last), think about the oyster beds, the ocean bays and inlets, the vineyard, the window where the sun pours in from the left, what is outside the window. We break the serene silence of the still life with sounds of the market, the clopping horses on the cobblestones, the gulls, the fruit vendors, and (because we cannot help ourselves) fish mongers and huge wooden clogs. I am looking at Jan de Heem’s painting now, the one on the back cover of Mark Doty’s book, and this is exactly what happened.
  So what exactly happened? A kind of intimacy. With the painting, with the eye of the painter. And with the "I" of the painter. We inhabit for a brief time the soul of the painter. We see through him.
    From the experience of looking at this particular painting, Doty moves to wonderful stories of his grandmother's striped peppermint candies, of other still-life paintings, lost loves, yard sales, of chipped blue-and-white platter, and new loves. And they all express the highest value: intimacy.

“...what we want is to be brought into relation, to be inside, within...But then why resist intimacy, why seem to flee it?  A powerful countercurrent pulls against our drive toward connection: we also desire individuation, separateness, freedom. On one side of the balance is the need for home, for the deep solid roots of place and belonging; on the other is the desire for travel and motion, for the single separate spark of the self freely moving forward, out into time, into the great absorbing stream of the world.
A fierce internal debate, between staying moored and drifting away, between holding on and letting go. Perhaps wisdom lies in our ability to negotiate between these two poles. Necessary to us, both of them—but how to live in connection without feeling suffocated, compromised, erased? We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.”  

    This is the banquet Doty lays out for his readers--a feast for a cloud watcher studying themes of restlessness and sense of place.