Posts from the ‘memory’ Category

Sep 4

Altering an Image

Many years ago in graduate school when Polaroids still existed and the magic of images appearing before your eyes was still new, I enjoyed taking small photos of the sculptures I’d made and altering them with thick, gooey oil pastels–the kind that were an inch wide and 4 inches long and smeared like lipstick.

I savored the challenge of wielding a big stick in a small space-it was a means of gaining control over the uncontrollable. Graduate school was a place where hardball was the rule. Working on these small and intimate scenes returned me to a more comfortable place.

Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to revisit photo altering in the Altered Image, one of the workshops in 6 Degrees of Creativity 2 taught by Fiona Fitzpatrick, an Australian art therapist. For my project, I chose a photograph my father had emailed to me several weeks ago. In the photo, my father, a young professor, crosses his arms with a roll of papers in his hand. His gaze is expectant, searching, as if looking into the future, wondering what it might bring–and a bit apprehensive at the thought.

As a child, I knew that my dad longed to write. He was an English professor at a Big 10 university, always busy with his classes and busy too, writing the texts from which he taught, but I knew that what he really wanted to do was to write essays. Essays were his favorite form of prose.

Of course, things got in his way as things always do. I remember wondering if he would achieve his dream and being ignorant of the pleasures of retirement, I feared he might not find the time.

As I held the photograph, I remembered all this–and the recognition of all that has taken place since his retirement. My dad, Carl Klaus, is 80. He has written 6 books since retirement, his Mac on fire with all that he stored up to say. It was this blossoming of words that I wanted to express as I altered the image of the writer as a younger man.

I wanted to take that figure and surround him with the fruits of his labor; fruits that he couldn’t possibly see from his perspective in time, but that certainly, in due time, were his to harvest.

I took postcards announcing the publication of two of his early books and cut them into slices, encircling him so that he appears to be at the center of an illuminated manuscript. I tucked a picture of Kate, his second wife, into the corner. Her death became the subject of another book: Letters to Kate.

As I glued, painted and pressed papers onto the surface, I was transported by the process of juxtaposing past with present in the same picture.

I took a break in the middle of the process and checked my e-mail. There was an e-mail from my dad. While I’d been working on his collage, he’d typed a message: “…the attachment is the manuscript for my new book, which I just finished yesterday afternoon…I thought you might be interested… on the chance that it might give you some ideas you can use in the writing you do for your blog, for your art, for your professional work, for your personal satisfaction.

Mysterious, isn’t it, how altering an image can affect your life in an unexpected way?

Aug 28

7 Comments

Take 2: Palliative Care and Paper Swaps (The Whole Story)

Paper Offering for Missouri Artist, Alies

Our pediatric department is beginning a pediatric palliative care team and as we lay the groundwork, we’re introducing the idea of integrative therapies to our pediatricians.

It’s not a new idea. My colleague Kathy Lorenzato, a music therapist, has been teaching and practicing Reiki, a hands-on healing technique, for over 10 years, and I have joined her for the last 4 years. As far as integrative therapies go inside the hospital, at the moment, we’re it.

With this in mind, the two of us were invited to speak to our pediatric physicians on staff about art therapy, music therapy and Reiki. I made a PowerPoint to explain the use of art in palliative care and put together a resource list on other integrative therapies.

It sounds simple on the surface, but as my husband noted, trying to explain the value of therapies whose effects cannot be quantified, to a group of science oriented folks, made me more than a bit nervous.

That’s where my own art therapy came into play. Over the last couple of weeks, I participated in a Paper Swap organized by Gretchen Miller of 6 Degrees 2. I mailed my offering to an artist living in Missouri and looked forward to receiving an envelope of my own in return.

Days passed while I worked on the PowerPoint and my anxiety rose accordingly. Raised in a family with a healthy number of doctors, I’ve had some run ins with scientific minds and I’ve always felt myself lacking. Although art therapy requires a certain amount of intellectual engagement, I depend more heavily on my intuition, letting passion do the heavy lifting.

One day last week at the peak of my fear, a large padded envelope arrived, postmarked Australia. I opened it carefully and sifted through the contents; feathery tissue, textured rice papers, leaves of patterned scrapbooking pages and a packet of gaily colored buttons.

A tantalizing package from Beth in Australia

I considered the colors and shapes sitting on my lap and something shifted internally. As I touched the papers, taking in the colors, patterns and textures, my fear eased. I realized that “right here, right now” on my couch I was experiencing the tangible results of art therapy.

I went into the presentation 2 days later with an insight. Rather than seeing the doctors as a group of individuals whose opinions I wanted to change, I saw an opportunity to heal the split between my own thinking and feeling, between the intellectual and the artistic.

I stood on the podium, praying the memory stick and my own memory would work. As I looked at the slide of a patient’s artwork projected behind me, I remembered the joy I felt working with him–but I also remembered the research, the effort that others had gone to, in order to document the effectiveness of art therapy. Research that is necessary for art therapy to be accepted into the treatment team’s fold.

The presentation went well. The physicians were attentive, and even better, I felt the old split inside me being carefully drawn back together. When our talk ended, we gave a Reiki demonstration. Up there on the dais, Kathy, one of the pediatric residents, our Child Psychiatrist and I offered Reiki treatments to four doctors who came forward. I felt the tide beginning to turn.

Jul 9

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Yunomi, or, “Fired Thing”

Ever since my recent trip to Iowa City, I’ve been thinking about collections and collecting. Over lunch at the Bread Garden, a haven for visiting writers, my writer friend Carol Spindel and I discussed collecting and collectors.

We had just visited Akar, a gallery which features Japanese tea bowls made by ceramic artists from all over the country. I’ve never seen anything like it in Northern California where I live, so each time I return to Iowa City to see my dad, I make sure to stop by Akar and pick one favorite bowl.

My habit began years ago. I’d taken a ceramics course from Bunny McBride, an artist with a love for Asian pottery, and discovered the Book of Tea, by Okakura Kakuzō. (Reading it was magical–like coming upon Grimm’s Fairy tales for the first time.)

Kakuzō describes the Japanese tea ceremony in a way that embodies the principles he seeks to teach: simplicity, harmony and, to use a nowish term, mindfulness.

I was smitten. The whole notion of simplicity achieved through mastery spoke to me deeply. (Where did that come from? Was it that my English professor mom nourished me on Taoist collections of poetry at a young age? Who knows?) During one trip back, some 20 years ago, I selected my first Japanese tea bowl, a wood fired thing with a lovely exterior of salmon smeared with blacks and browns. I hesitated, being on a slim budget, but it chose me and I plucked it off its stand.

I had purchased a yunomi, or, “wood fired thing” and I’ve been collecting them ever since. The whole idea of drinking from one of these bowls incorporates being present, acting with care, savoring one’s drink. You sure as heck can’t grab a yunomi like you would a Starbucks cup with it’s cardboard collar. You’ll burn yourself. You have to learn to wait.

And, in learning to wait, you watch the bowl change. Over years, not seconds, there is an alchemy that happens between the tea and tea bowl. The pattern of crackles in the glaze shifts, the colors deepen.

I now possess too many yunomi to store on the shelf in the cupboard where we keep tea and coffee mugs. My husband complains that he can’t empty the dishwasher without building tipsy teacup towers. I might have to build them their own shelf.

Cups on Parade

But I probably won’t, because that would remove them from the realm of common use and make them special in a way that would defy their meaning –”wood fired thing.” And because like The Troggs song, “Wild Thing,” they make my heart sing.

Apr 18

10 Comments

States of Mind

Iris 4/12/12, Hannah Hunter, 5″ x 7,” watercolor

Last week I pulled my car into a parking space at the gym. I stayed in the car a few minutes longer to listen to a report on the late journalist, Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes fame, who had died a few days before.

I was struck by his comment made in response to another journalist asking Mike about old age. He had replied that, of course, “it’s all down hill from (t)here.” I’m paraphrasing because I can’t find the original quote, but those words resounded in my mind over the next several days.

I challenged them– “that isn’t true!”–but I realized something had changed in the person who set off to Europe at 17 by herself and the young woman who created human size nests in her apartment in her twenties.

I tried to figure out what was different, particularly artistically. As a younger person, one confronts a series of firsts. Each new experience can be a source of peak emotion–residue passion that can be channeled zestfully into a new piece of work.

As Twyla Tharp notes in her excellent book, The Creative Habit, “As we age, it’s hard to recapture the recklessness of youth, when new ideas flew off us like light from a pinwheel sparkler. But we more than compensate for this with the ideas we do generate, and with our hard -earned wisdom about how to capture and, more importantly, connect those ideas.”

In my fifties, I don’t run into many firsts anymore, but there sure are a lot of second chances. And revisions.

I look out my studio window and I’m struck by the the beauty of tree branches with their tightly clustered knots of of budding leaves and their shadows cast upon the wall of the house. At twenty, I doubt that I would have gotten so much pleasure from such a simple sight, at least not for long. Tharp continues:

“If you find, in your own work, that ideas you didn’t have room for at a particular time nonetheless lingered and arose later, you are coming close to an idea creative state, one where creativity becomes a self-perpetuating habit. You are linking your art. Everything in your life feeds into your work, and the work feeds into more work.”

This is the beauty of hanging in there for the long run…I’m nearly two months to the day into my year of watercolor and I’m still painting. I’m stalking my studio with more ideas than I have time to chase. Irises are blossoming in the garden and outside my studio door, the creeping Hydrangea has reached the second floor after a 16 year climb; a green enclosure for me to contemplate when I step outside. A glorious first after all.

Dec 17

Clear Sight

Lemon Thoughts

I’ve been doing some thinking on my vacation; going away is often a way of coming closer to myself, of discovering what’s been stored up inside me for lo these many months.

Landing in Kauai, I assumed I would magically relax into a state of being where one activity flowed into another–not the hurried hula I find myself performing on most working days.

While there were indeed many delicious activities; ocean walks, tropical flowers and rainbows, I was surprised to meet up with some of my oldest and most familiar demons; the ones that incessantly wish to compare myself to others who seem to be more, do more, achieve more.

A hold-over from childhood, these thought pests seemed more intense than usual, even creeping into my dreams. My sister, who had joined us, noted that sometimes in Hawaii, it seems that one’s stored up issues just seep out like lava–a kind of “detoxifying” if you will.

While the gremlins nibbled and morning doves cooed, I tried to set up a studio practice–sparer than my normal routine, but something to do in order to counter my inner detractors. I decided to sit down for an hour a day with watercolors and just paint something. I picked the simplest forms I could find; lemons and limes picked from trees growing in the yard and tiny birds of paradise that grew by the outdoor shower.

As I painted, I observed my initial antipathy to mixing the color green. It brought up memories of phthalocyanine green oil and viridian oil in undergraduate school and my messy complicated affair with oils). I persevered and, finally, loosened my association of mixing colors which matched my mood and began instead to evoke a feeling of relationship with the fruits I studied.

Bird of Paradise

What I also observed, as the days peeled off, was that after painting I experienced a feeling of clairvoyance–clairvoyance in the French sense of the word, which literally means: “clear sight.” The fabulous leaf and flower forms that surrounded me seemed heightened, standing out as if I were staring at an intricate Indian miniature. I experienced an intensity of seeing similar to the high that practitioners of yoga describe. I felt loose and clear headed. I breathed effortlessly.

Lime and Lemon Studies

I’d like to claim, after this time away, that I’ve returned to normal life with no worries, sustained clear sight and a pack of good watercolors. But reality, like river water after a storm, is muddy. Spending time with transparent colors and resplendent foliage allowed me to see the landscape through the mist; there are always more layers–I understood again that we can never really remove ourselves from the complex relationships of people and situations, the endless rich entanglements of this world. However, like finding a blossom in the Hawaiian jungle, I can always locate something to focus on.

Dec 7

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My 7 Links

I recently accepted Donna Iona Drozda’s invitation to participate in a project: My 7 Links Project. For this project, each blogger chooses 7 different posts to fit seven unique categories and then invites up to 5 more bloggers to do the same, and so on, as a way of uniting “bloggers from all sectors in an endeavor to share lessons learned and…to… create a bank of long but not forgotten blog posts…”

A timely invitation and one that I thought about because it seemed to me a perfect chance to look over the year’s post, to form in my mind a gestalt of what I’d written, a means of seeing the road I’d traveled and perhaps the road I might choose to take in the year ahead.

Like the doors on an advent calendar, I invite you to open up one or more of these links and see what you discover.

Most helpful: Young Adult Bereavement Art Group/Art Therapy in Action: This post proved to be helpful in two ways; one for me, because the post reflects how much I learned about the grief process of young adults, but also because this information is useful to those people who wish to start an art therapy based bereavement support group in their own community.


Where I Live, ©2000, H. Hunter, 15″ x 18″, Acrylic &		Caran d’ache

Most popular: Finding Sanctuary: addresses our universal need to find a safe and sacred space. Nature + art = one of the most effective ways to find it.

Didn’t quite get the attention it deserved: Timing is Everything: There’s a lot packed into this little post with M.S. Merwin’s poem. Spring opens our eyes with its fleeting beauty and we’re reminded, once again, of the transience and beauty of life.

Most proud of: Art Therapy 101: No questions here. Art Therapy 101, about my daughter who was my first teacher in art therapy, wrote itself.

Peonies at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art

Most beautiful: Accidental Journey: Places of the soul–all of us have them and I accidentally traveled back to mine in this trip to Maine. Here I share images and thoughts of this magical journey, especially one gorgeous blush colored peony.

Surprising Success: A Different Kind of Summer: I had no idea when I wrote about spending the summer in the studio that it would elicit so many responses. At the hospital, when I’m asked what I did on the weekend, my answer is always the same: “I was in my studio.” (And it’s always a pleasure.)

Most controversial: New Beginnings: The controversy here is subjective within the quilting world–I suddenly felt confronted by an entirely different way of seeing the quilting process, one I hadn’t considered and which challenged me to re-examine my approach to the aesthestics of art quilts.

And now some nominations–4 blogs with entirely different focuses–something to satisfy different parts of my personality.

From the Scattergood Farm: written by two teachers at Scattergood Friends School (my daughter’s high school alma mater) where students both study and work a living farm. In this new blog, they present some radical new ideas for school lunch. Check this out!

Patricia Scarborough: I love Patty’s posts–witty and wry and half a continent away, I love to read her observations and see her plein air plainscapes.

Dwelling Here Now: One of the first blogs I discovered, Anthony Lawlor takes a spiritual approach to architecture and the architecture of thought.

Blue Sky Dreaming: Blue Sky’s open minded approach to her subject matter and materials intrigues and inspires lots of us in the mixed media world.

Jun 24

9 Comments

An Accidental Journey

Peonies at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art

When I was a small child of five, my family moved to Maine. My dad was finishing his PhD and got his first teaching assignment at Bowdoin College. I was just beginning kindergarten.

Is it possible to fall in love at the age of five? Because if it is, I did. I loved so much about Maine, beginning at the edge of our backyard. Behind our brown plank house, in a yard with clumps of birch trees whose bark made perfect “paper,” lay a bog. It was a magical place where I discovered peepers, tasted my first cranberries and stood peering into the depths of the murky pond. I marveled at the frogs’ eggs gathered in gelatinous blobs, the beginnings of my education in biology and reproduction.

We didn’t live in Maine for long; just three years, but enough for the landscape of the place to imprint itself on my consciousness; stretches of land with rocky outcroppings, white steepled churches, docks and piers heaped with lobster pots and fishing nets, the smell of ocean and the clack of clamshells.

Rocky Coastal Beach, Hampton, N

The car-sweep of these images wove itself into my consciousness, so that even now, fifty years later, I dream of traveling back to Maine. In my dreams, I swim up a river banded by ferns and rimmed with pine trees; there is the promise of blueberries hiding within the woods. The dream is so vivid that I believe I am there and awaken with the sensation of just having returned from this faraway place.

Dogwood in the yard of a older home in Kittery, ME

It didn’t seem so strange then, when I accidentally ended up in Maine last week. My family and I flew out to a wedding in Vermont and, wishing to make a small vacation out of it, I suggested we stop off at the coast for a day; in New Hampshire to be exact. Arriving at dinner time, we set off in search of sustenance other than McDonald’s. After getting turned around on a round about, we crossed a bridge and came upon what looked to be an excellent taqueria. A man whom I asked in the parking lot noted that it was the best Mexican food in Maine outside of Southern California. We were in Maine, not New Hampshire!

Boats like clamshells at Kittery Point, ME

The feeling of delight that rose up in me was exquisite. We all looked at each other and began to laugh. Imagine that!! We had arrived in Maine by accident. What followed was a day and a half of intense exploration; of inhaling smells and remembering once familiar sights. I could tell you that we lingered at a dock, wandered through an art museum and mixed with the locals in a general store, but that wouldn’t quite capture it. Throughout the hours we spent there, I felt that I had returned to something quite precious that I don’t want to lose again.

Weehawken Sequence, John Marin, circa 1916, 10″ x 12.5,” oil on canvas

Is there a place in your life that calls to your soul, appears in your dreams, a place to which you’ve made a secret promise to return?

May 28

15 Comments

Home: Our Foundation

Recently, I’ve pondered home as a symbol and a reality. In the wake of Japan’s earthquake/tsunami and the rash of virulent tornadoes over middle America, the fact that one’s hearth can be destroyed in seconds made me think about the various values held by the place where we reside.

Across our country, home prices have tumbled, particularly in areas deeply connected to me: California where I live, Florida where my son resides and Michigan, where half of my family originated. We’ve been lucky enough to maintain our home for many years but it has come home to me how quickly that privilege can be taken away.

As children, we moved frequently from state to state, house to house, apartment to apartment. While many kids dream about what they want to be when they grow up, I fantasized about having a home of my own (think:Virginia Woolf’s A Room of her Own.)

Even as that vision took shape, my desire must have remained sublimated, because I also ended up making art about homes. Recently, I saw a message on my facebook fanpage from a collector, who bought one of my paintings nearly 20 years ago. The woman was kind enough to take a picture of the work and when I saw it, I recognized an early “home” piece.

That made me curious. I pored over my i-photo files and pulled out the “homes” I’d made in recent years. I’ve selected a few to share with you here.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on home as you’ve watched the images of devastation flash across your television screen or heard the news about another small town leveled. Has your art been affected by these current and timeless events? Are images of home on alert in your imagination?

I’ll be posting intermittently this summer; I want to take advantage of long days and cool evenings in the studio and finish working on a chapter for Cathy Malchiodi’s upcoming book, “The Arts in Healthcare.”

I look forward to keeping up with you on your blogs and wish you a reflective Memorial Day weekend; visited by memories of the ones that have gone before you.

Mar 12

13 Comments

Thread Talk

How often, after all, do we take the time to look back, review and in this way, renew our relationship to our work? Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking to a local guild of embroiderers about my artwork. I decided that if I was going to share some history with them, I needed to do some digging.

After some searching, I came up with three separate images: a stack of books, a marsh and an Amish quilt. Pretty disparate images–but like reducing a fraction to the lowest common denominator, I had come up with the structural bones of my creative process, each one grounded in some vital part of my history.

The books: I often spent my summer days stretched out on a sofa or a hammock, after carefully arranging a pile of books beside me which I devoured one at a time.

Michigan Marshland

Marsh: a scene from early childhood in Maine where I spent time chasing peepers and later, growing up in Michigan, where instead of peepers, I gathered reeds for weaving.

“Amish Abstractions”

Amish quilts: when I saw my first one in the University of Iowa Art Museum, it struck me as a visual form of haiku. With only a few colors, a quilt conjured a landscape.

It tickles me that as I look at my present work, I find traces of the words, reeds and quilts which informed my early visual blueprint.

It makes me think that there is something something mysterious yet inevitable about the images which dwell within us and arise out of our experience, recombining in powerful ways that we cannot predict.

Succeeding experiences build upon each other and yet, as we work with them in our studios, they come into being, slowly but surely, like a photograph appearing for the first time in its alchemical bath.

Jul 9

8 Comments

Is the Past Younger than the Present?

Yesterday at the breakfast table, Monty, my husband, spoke about shooting a web video for a towing company which was his assignment that day as a videographer. An artistic soul, he was wondering how to coax inspiration out of this rather dense subject.

A picture arose in my mind’s eye of our son as a three year-old, beaming as we drove down the streets of Berkeley, pointing with enthusiasm as he declared “guck, guck!” I’d look to see what he was pointing at and invariably it was a large, liberally enhanced truck.

I shared my image with Monty and we talked about re-inhabiting the mind of a three year-old for the job.

Later that morning I sat drinking jasmine tea with a woman interested in buying my work. We drank our tea from flowered cups, a Villeroy and Boch pattern I remembered from long ago. She shared a small, leather bound photograph album of her recent trip to Chicago. I leafed through the pictures, imagining myself back in Chicago, walking along Lake Michigan, heading toward the Art Institute.

That imaginary walk on the pier came back to me during our art group that day, as a young boy worked on notching skill sticks together to create three interlocking towers. To him, they were an imaginary surf shop. To me, they were the buildings I passed as I strode toward Millennium Park.

There is tremendous power our imagination, that as artists, we are constantly drawing upon. I’m trying to put imagination and memory to work in this same way in my studio. My assignment: to create a series of paintings of “objects” for an upcoming exhibit entitled: “Lessons from Things.”

Not normally a painter of things, I’ve had to reach back in my memory to my student days when anything in my surroundings was grist for my mill. Whether it was kitchen tools on a pegboard, two fine russet pears, or an arrangement of bottles a la Morandi, painting my life onto canvas was as fresh as my son spotting a tow truck.

I’m reaching back into those days now and drawing out the enthusiasm, pulling it through a tunnel of years into my present. I absorb an elegant little still life I’ve set before me consisting of a white raku vase, jade-colored beaker and a palm-sized, brass Aladdin’s lamp. The magic begins.

Textile and Paper Collage

Posts from the ‘memory’ Category

Altering an Image

Take 2: Palliative Care and Paper Swaps (The Whole Story)

Yunomi, or, “Fired Thing”

States of Mind

Clear Sight

My 7 Links

An Accidental Journey

Home: Our Foundation

Thread Talk

Is the Past Younger than the Present?

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