State of the Heart

Shades and Tints

Valentine's Day approaches and I've found no better place to celebrate it than in the playroom of our hospital. It's a place where even the most jaded of hearts opens wide. For someone dedicated to the practice of maintaining an open heart, well, it's a gold mine.

To begin the festivities, I set out materials on the art table--scissors, glue and paper plus the exotics: papers printed with designs inspired by Kente cloth, Japanese silk fabric and Navajo rugs. For good measure, I added ribbons, sequins and pom poms.

Once we'd made our way through decorating some 50 or so empty glove boxes, we began to make Valentines and met up with the good old shape of the heart. It doesn't escape me as I'm writing, all the double entendres that pop up around hearts and hospitals: open heart surgery, infectious love, heart-felt emotions, heart palpitations...etc.

Fortunately, the kids put all that to the side when they come in, dragging their IV poles behind them. They just get to work like the serious artists they are. These last two weeks brought several Spanish speaking girls to the group together with their moms. At the beginning of our time together, they were all so shy, they would simply nod "yes" and "no" to my questions. Any attempts to start a conversation simply died away. I invited the mothers to join us and they also nodded "no" politely but firmly.

Glove boxes transformed

That lasted all of two days, when I decided to throw in a twist and add the concept of shading and tinting to the mix. Using oil pastels, I asked them to draw a heart and to color the inside of the heart one color and the outside of the heart another. The next step was to use a ruler and draw several lines that bisected the heart, going from one end of the paper to the other. This resulted in "a heart divided." Finally, I asked them to use a gray pastel to add shading to one half of each segment and a white pastel to add tinting to the remainder of that segment.

A great idea in theory, but I forgot to factor in manual strength. None of the kids present had enough physical strength to color in the outside. The moms took action. They couldn't let their children's hearts go empty. They each pulled up a small child size chair and began to color. It was only one more step to accepting papers for themselves and taking off on their individual heart.

By the end of this week, we'd made jewelry for the occasion and added several other young children to the mix. The girls were positively bubbly by now. Another Spanish speaking mother arrived with her able five year old boy and complemented me on my Spanish (which honestly is still limited to something like "quieres hacer un corazon?")  I was touched and even more so, because after spending this time together, we had created our own community and as far as "making hearts," they had certainly made mine and it was wide open.

Taking Hold of Uncertainty

"...vision is always ahead of execution, knowledge of materials is your contact with reality, and uncertainty is a virtue." Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland I've been following these words as I work on a challenge for an art quilt exhibit I'm participating in.

Our group of artists agreed to pick a photograph, which each of us would interpret in her own way.

It made me think of women quilters back in the 19th century, spurring each other on to greater heights of inventiveness, as they watched their neighbors take the same old shirt fabric and use it in entirely different ways.

We chose a photograph taken by Maura McEvoy, a stunningly simple shot of a mandarin orange and two dominos, sitting in a raku fired bowl on a deep teal colored linen background.

My first thought was to get as far away as  possible from the photograph and create a quilt that looked nothing like it. Then I careened back with an almost comical desire to imitate the photograph in a very literal way.

Frustrated by opposing impulses, I decided to channel my imaginary 19th century ladies.

It seems to me that these women were the early forerunners of color theorists like Josef Albers, employing an understanding that colors appear differently, according to the colors  around them. The use of color in a pattern created the spirit of the quilt.

Although I'm no slave to pattern (I usually want to break it as soon as I begin), I wanted the blues of my piece to pulsate around the squares, suggesting the delicate cracked bowl with the bright orange mandarin and the ochre colored dominos.

One week and many stitched together scraps later, I've begun to enjoy the process; stepping into the unknown, unsure of where the next stitch will take me and also not knowing exactly where the final stitch might reside.

Thinking of my ladies, both the real and the imaginary, I'm discovering the loveliness of uncertainty.

Color: STAT!

Thinking in Stripes (before quilting) ©2011, Hannah K. Hunter

About this time of year, I begin to get a bit squirrelly, especially with the tule fog of January (and February and March).

This dense fog, named for the tule grass wetlands of the California Central Valley, makes me feel cozy at the beginning of the season, all tucked into whatever world I happen to be occupying. But like snow in colder climes, the pleasure soon begins to gray.

I long for big splashes of color, wide skies of brilliant blue and the glowing yellow sunflowers of summer. Looking out the window this morning, I knew it would be awhile.

Of course, there is a cure for this: the studio. I go in and I want to inhale great gulps of color: carmine, fuchsia, tangerine, chartreuse, coral, jade and emerald green.

I've been working on a full size quilt for an upcoming exhibit. As I tried to work out the pattern for it, I began a smaller piece that could capture my color hunger and satiate it at the same time. I wanted the quilt to be irregular, with large "bites" of color, color that could explode inside me when I look at it; the same sensation that a child might have when she pops a Starbursts into her mouth and savors the eruption of harmonic sweetness that follows.

How are you coping with winter in your domain?

Allies in January

Let Us Eat Art, ©2010, Hannah Hunter

I am a worrier. It's true. And when I found out that my SoulCollage^®

workshop for the UC Davis Cancer Center had 35 people enrolled, I panicked. I thought that 15 people would be a great success. But then, I'm also a risk taker.

In offering the workshop, I was taking on a new population, cancer patients and their navigators (cancer survivors who have gone through treatment and volunteer to help patients with the same cancer navigate the labyrinth of treatment).

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll remember that I taught a similar class for the Cancer Center last spring, only that time, none of the cancer patients signed up. This time, it was different.

I had agreed to provide art supplies at no cost for participants and so, as I flew back from vacation, I tried to calculate what my out-of-pocket costs would be as the plane flew over the Pacific. Most of the turbulence of that flight was internal.

Amma Mama, © 2008, Hannah Hunter

Back on land again, I took matters in hand. I counted up my x-acto knives and cutting boards. I raided the supplies at UC Davis Hospice, and I still came up short. My friend Sara offered me her collection of boards and x-acto knives, I collected scrap matte board and in the end, spent nothing on supplies, a testament to the generosity of my community.

But what about the workshop? The women came in, one after another. The Cancer Center provided excellent spreads and my worries melted as the day unfolded. These women, and one man, were some of the most receptive people (in the adult population) with whom I've had the good fortune to work.

There is something about this illness, cancer, that makes one willing to dig deeper, a feeling that there is nothing to lose, and often pride over outer appearances takes a back seat to the need for authenticity. Our focus for the day was allies: those people or beings who act as guides, challengers, mentors and friends as we move through illness, or simply through life.

Whatever the case, this group of souls opened themselves to the process of searching through images, looking for the ones that conjured up the supporters, guides and all around lovers who are in their lives.

Group Member working on her card.

As they shared their cards, I felt I was seeing the nuggets of gold in each of their lives. I saw constellations of flowers, dogs, cats, children, mothers, fathers, husbands and even the Golden Gate Bridge.

At the end, my friend Terri, an oncology nurse, noted that programs like this one are as important to healing cancer as the the clinical interventions of medication, chemotherapy and radiation.

While she may have overstated the case a little, I do believe that this need to relate, to come together and to make something tangible and visible out of our challenges is what, in part, makes us human.

I met this morning with the director of the education and outreach program at the center and we are planing to offer 4 of these programs throughout the year. I'm looking forward to seeing how as a university community, we can create a climate of healing, nurturance and deep self-discovery in our lives.

New Year Unfolding--Straw into Gold

The other day my sister Amelia and I spent our last morning of vacation exploring a small store in Kauai, which sold beautifully crafted jewelry and sarongs. Brilliant colors and patterns wafted in the temperate air, rivaling the nearby hibiscus. The store was called "Live a Little," ever a good motto for me.

We spoke with the owner, an enthusiastic and friendly man slightly younger than I. We exchanged first impressions of our home states and he told us a story of his first trip to the mainland in 1992.

He'd landed in L.A. during the Rodney King riots of 1992 and he described for us the empty freeways, the closed shopping plazas and the unsettling quiet. I was both surprised by his candidness and embarrassed, hearing about this disturbing welcome to California.

Later on that day we were wandering through a small town when we suddenly heard a man's voice yodeling and looked up to see the same store owner waving to us with the shaka sign, a common greeting gesture in surfer culture. Surf boards were strapped to the top of his car, which was headed for the beach.

When I looked up this greeting, I learned that in Hawai'i, it expresses a spirit of friendship and understanding between the many cultures living in proximity there--in other words, the spirit of aloha.

I did some more looking and found that "aloha" not only means hello and goodbye--but also refers to a means of  solving a problem, accomplishing a goal, or finding a meeting between mind and heart.

This seems like a gentle and ease-filled way to go about meeting my goals; bringing together my mind and heart, finding my way to my Source.

That's what I'm striving for this year. All too often, 'Mind' heads off in the direction of her choosing and 'Heart' sticks around wondering "What just happened here?!?" Or, vice versa.

The collage at the top of this post was made during my time away. I was thinking of the coming year and wanted to express my deep wish to spend as many hours as I can in the studio; making. I chose the hands of this older woman to signify the power that aging brings, the skillfulness brought to bear on materials and the absorption that is possible when you've given yourself over to your heart and mind's desire.