Seeking the Sublime in the Everyday

  Today is good Friday and we're in the midst of Passover.  This will be our second Easter and Passover in quarantine, and even though there is reason for hope that the end is near I really miss gathering in church, and then having a big crowd for dinner.  Two years ago we had a Seder/Easter dinner. Here's what I wrote then. Today is good Friday and we're in the midst of Passover. When these two holy feasts come together I think back to my daughter, Jessie’s, first year.  I hadn’t given much thought to her religious education; I was just trying to sleep through the night.  But it was a big question. Jessie had a Jewish father, Arthur, and a Christian mother, me.  Arthur had very little religious upbringing and I had taken some time off from church to wrestle with some  issues in my evangelical background. Up ’til that point our biggest conflict had been what to say at our wedding; so—no Father, Son and Holy Ghost, but we did say the Lord’s Prayer....

Pink Balloons Today, March 13, would be my grandmother's birthday.  Last year I posted this story about the day she died and I'm reprising it now.   My grandmother, Louise Mayhew Russell Swanson, we called her MomMom, died at home early in the morning on my daughter Jessie’s 7th birthday.  We were there, and after several hours of phone calls and business, after the doctor and the undertaker had left, I looked at Jessie and thought, this little girl needs a celebration.  So I drove to town to buy a cake, then went to the party store and bought 7 pink balloons and one purple to grow on. I headed out the door. The spiky chandelier in the entryway caught a balloon and P OP!   I went back, they replaced it for free and I headed out again, this time holding my bouquet very low. On the street, I passed a woman with a lit cigarette and POP!    I went back to the store and this time I paid for the replacement. I headed out again, holding the...

Sometimes an image really grabs me.  Like this painting,  Tobias and the Angel.   by  Andrea del Verrocchio  1475 I just dug this out of my files. I found it years ago in one of my favorite places in New York--a treasure, really, the picture collection of the New York Public Library.  It's a magical place.  Say you want to look at pictures of mole rats, or shoe fashions in the fifteenth century, or Byzantine architecture. You just walk in with your library card, ask the librarian, who knows exactly where you should go and writes down the shelf and file numbers--you find a fat folder and sit down at a table to leaf through a pile of pictures, some of them decades old.  I  know you can do the same thing on the internet but there's something about holding those papers in your hand. You can take them home, too. I must have been looking for pictures of angels and came upon this painting.  I was knocked out by the energy of these t...

I made this etching after I gave up teaching to concentrate more fully on my art.  My children were in school full time and my days were now my own. I first spent hours and months just filling little blank books with images and quotes that caught my attention. I crammed into this piece everything I could think of to define a new phase of my life. As I think back, maybe I was defining myself as an artist. I put the seven continents across the top, each with an indigenous animal. On either side is a great ocean—on the left, the Atlantic, with  an allegorical figure of Europe from the plaza outside Musee D’Orsay in Paris. She’s sitting with a stag under a pine tree. On the right is the Pacific, with a palm tree, a parrot, and a pineapple. I'm not sure why I put a seal there. Two cows honor my years in Vermont. My family is represented by our signs of the Zodiac; an Aquarius Bear for Arthur, Taurus, the Bull for me, Cancer,...

I wonder if I knew how rich I was when I had three brothers.  Here we are; me, Robby, MomMom, Alan, and Larry, at Alan's wedding. Donna, the bride, thought Alan's hair was too short. How could we have lost Larry, in so many ways, and we all acknowledged, the best of us?   He was full of grace. Larry watched me and Alan and Rob, his big sister and brothers, and figured out that if he gave Mom and Dad what they wanted;  nice manners  and good grades, they’d leave him alone to do as he pleased.   Once when I was feeling overwhelmed with new motherhood and I wasn’t getting enough understanding from Arthur--he was all, “ Okay, so you just had a baby, but where’s my dinner?”   Larry listened to me sob out my story, patting my knee, and said, “From what I have observed, living with another human being has got to be the most difficult thing in the world to do.”   And that got me through the next few days. And when he and Arthur wen...

Merry Christmas, six months from now.  I thought I'd show you a page from my current project; I'm illustrating some of my favorite Christmas Carols and putting them in a book. I'm going to show you "Angels we Have Heard on High" because one, it's a beautiful song and I love it and two, Sam told me when he was little he thought "In Excelsis Deo" meant "Jesus lives in Chelsea." Well, Emannuel means "Lord with Us' and I kind of like the thought of Jesus living just a few blocks away. Here's is how this drawing has evolved. The first pencil marks.  I have a vague sense of what I want and I feel pretty tentative. I think about the composition for a long time before even making a pencil mark.  I look at my collection of pictures of angels and try   some really vague sketches on cheap paper that I throw away. Then I move onto my Arches watercolor block, 140 pound, cold press paper.  It ha...

   Here is a painting that has fascinated me for years. Young Virgin Spanking the Infant Jesus In Front of Three Witnesses  by Max Ernst, 1891-1976  I first saw this at the Museum of Modern Art—I think it was a show about surrealism but I can’t find it on MOMA’s website.  It’s a shocking painting, almost six feet tall as I remember it.  Mary is sitting in a shadowy corner of a de Chirico like space before a bright blue sky,  spanking the heck out of the toddler Jesus—so hard his little bottom is bright red and his halo has fallen to the ground.  It’s a violent image—all sharp angles and brilliant colors.  She wears a  red dress and her lap is covered with a blue robe. Her arm is high over her head—she’s really letting him have it. And she’s doing it in front of witnesses; there’s a window through which Ernst and his friends, Paul Elard and Andre Breton are watching. Why are they there? Their...