The Isolation of Artists and Scientists

Rushdie's talk and the rambling conversations and laughs circling through the night until 4:00 am with Brian and Chris have stirred me up so much that I have to process it all first.  And right now for me the easiest way is through art.
So I started a new piece, "Isolation" due to the fact my self-imposed isolation was broken by this trip. Along with most artists and writers I deal with the necessity and the dangers of isolation constantly.  To produce, we need to isolate ourselves, have time to think, process, create and connect references, memories, concepts. Yet experiences are the only way to bring the endless stream of material, ideologies and emotionally-charged moments which an artist or writer needs to make those pivotal resonances in their art.
This piece is still a work in progress but it's one of those serendipitous pieces where things fall together because of my subconscious.  I started by using Golden's Gel Medium to lay down a photograph taken  from a time frame anywhere between 1950-1970.  It came in a wonderful packet form a dealer on Etsy who offers various historical paper ephemera.  It's a photo of an old man walking on a New York street perhaps - at least in my imagination, he is, yet he's totally in his own world, slightly out of place, like I imagine Tesla and Howard Hughes were at the close of their lives.  He was the perfect subject for "the scientist" in my piece on isolation.  Also in the packet were unused vintage liquor and drug store labels  I chose ones with the words "poison" and "spiriteaux" since I feel both words apply to the paradox of isolation.
But for a whole day, I couldn't find the image that would work for the art or artist.  I tried many - none of them worked.  And then I thought of the first piece of art which ever inspired me to study art history.  It was "The School of Athens" by Raphael.  All through school and even art lessons my mother sent me to for a brief time, I was told I had no artistic ability at all, while my sister had a good bit.  After that I was no longer exposed to art, in fact denied even cursory art classes through high school.  Yet, as a young mother in a bad marriage, I ran away one day and just picked up a book on Raphael and was stopped dead at the image of Raphael's famous fresco which featured all the philosophers of Athens.
I paid $60.00 for a book when we didn't have enough money for rent.
It was my first act of rebellion, urged on by the image of one of the two figures who looked directly at the viewer among many philosophers. It was the first piece of art which captivated me, and for 35 years, I've had a fascination with the figure in the white robe. Yet only today discovered who Raphael meant her to be.... Hypatia of Alexandria, the only female philosopher in the entire School of Athens. She represented learning and science to Raphael, thanks to her contributions to astronomy, mathematics and philosophy.
Wow, that discovery blew me away.  Because of her direct gaze, I spent years trying to figure out what she was trying to say. She was the first person to encourage me to stand up for myself . She was murdered for political reasons in 416 B.C. then painted in Raphael's vision in 1510 and 1511.  A major resonance here to Rushdie's admonition that writers and artists may be isolated, tortured and even killed because of their books and paintings, yet their work outlives the assassins. Yet ten years later I finally had the guts to get divorced and 25 years later started to paint.  It may have taken a long time, but her questioning gaze inspired me on a long and transformational journey. In many ways, she represented the spirit of women who would stand up for change.  Even Raphael, had to cater to his society by using the son of his patron as the model of Hypatia.
AS a student of Carl; Jung, I am pleasantly surprised at these developments.  The subconscious does work in mysterious ways, indeed, but always towards the holistic awareness, the "authenticity" of the individual. I was often called a late bloomer as a child - and this seems to emphasize that. While I'm not the most daring and outspoken person on this planet, I have tried to rattle some aspects of the status quo with my art, fiction and poetry. But now looking at things in this late, not enough.
It was only later today, that I noticed the label with the word, Spiriteaux, was from the brand of St. Jerome's. So I decided to look him up.  Wow- another synchronicity since he's the patron saint of librarians and translators and is the second most voluminous writer after  St. Augustine in ancient Latin Christianity.
I tried a number of new techniques in this piece. I added a Doric column to the androgynous clothing of Hypatia with the transfer technique using packing tape which I found in Claudine Helmuth's book, Collage Discovery Workshop. I used a number of acrylic and metallic paints, some gold leaf, and the Periodic Table of Elements to represent science.

Salman Rusdhie's Call to Writers

On April 12th, I had the rare opportunity to see Salman Rusdhie speak at Duke University this past week, thanks to free tickets form my friends Brian and Megan. As a writer, he admits he's not comfortable with public speaking, but as he got rolling, he was amazing, personable and down to earth, passionate and thoughtful, sarcastic and caustic at times, but mostly he called out to writers worldwide to take their stand, tell their story and claim a spot on the steps of history. He believes the role of the writer or artist is to shape our understanding of the world.
Like so many others who believe news is no longer the news, he states how the ever evolving novel must now be not just the story of a family of characters, but also the story of the world. Where will our archives be once newspapers are defunct? How will future generations find all the details of our histories?  Because of the radical changes in human society thanks to the Internet, few societies are not aware of what is happening globally minute to minute. As Salman reiterated, man is a creature enthralled with story. So in the future, novels will relate not only the intimate stories, but also how world events affect each individual's life. Multiculturalism and a shrinking global awareness will require it.
While less vitriolic and more reserved as a speaker than writer, Salman did not hold back on his opinions or requests.  When he recounted stories from his past, running the gamut from the years of the threats, exiles and deaths surrounding the Satanic Verses, to the tales of India's history, we saw a wide-angled view of the world, yet it was shared in a way so personal with the audience, we felt involved as part of the human race and not as voyeurs.  Perhaps this is the future path of the novel, hopefully to remain both in print and on the likes of Kindles and E-books.  He believes the cross-section of tales from every perspective, are how we must share our stories for future generations. We must remain steadfast to protect the voices of the individuals and the necessity of free speech.  Even as Salman stated, despite the risk of authors being isolated, persecuted, or even murdered; despite the rapidly changing media, the writer must write, the novel must be shared, the stories must be told. 
Brian, Chris and I left inspired and invigorated, also a little guilty and certainly humbled. Rushdie's speech was targeted to writers and he left no wiggle room for those who even thought about writing. He repeatedly called upon their single voices to offer an overall perspective to crush tyranny. It certainly made each of us more aware of  the importance of the novel and it's multiple effects: from entertainment and storytelling. Rushdie views the recounting of world events in an intimate manner as tales of flawed but constantly struggling humanity, the global politics hared alongside loves, passions and our fascination with life. The ultimate cross-section of these tales, told in one perspective from one corner of this complex rapidly changing world become a mosaic which illuminates and relates the truest history of our times.

What is Magical Realism?

What is Magical Realism - part I

Over the next few blog entries, I'm going to discuss the style of magical realism.  It's an illusive term, often confused and misinterpreted and I have my own interpretation to add.  It's not necessarily a scholarly one, but a personal approach, launched by all the books I've read since the mid 1970's that seem to fit the term.

As an intersting sidenote, Jennifer Mattison, a literary agent with the Andrea Brown Literary Agency,has written an entry on her website predicitng magical realism may be a field mined for the next big thing in YA books.While I don't write YA books, I find this interesting since the YA and adult markets often cross-reference. So you might want to check out her opinion.

so off we go on this magical mystery ride...
What is Magical Realism?

a very brief overview...

Readers may ask what is magical realism. This literary style conjures authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, thanks to Venezuelan, Arturo Uslar-Pietri who adopted the term. He used it to describe the work of  particular Latin American writers who wrote in a vivid style laced with folklore and the acceptance of magic in the everyday world.

.However, the term – magic realism - was coined many decades earlier in the writings of a German art historian. At the same time, in a Jungian synchronistic way, separately and without communication, an Italian magazine editor mentioned the term.

“Franz Roh in the 1920’s presented magic realism as a reaction to expressionism, and independently in the Italian journal Novecento, edited by writer and critic Massimo Bontempelli. It was adopted during the 1940's by Latin American authors who combined the theories of Roh and Bontempelli with French surrealist concepts of the marvelous, and incorporated indigenous mythologies within traditional mimetic conventions in their quest for the original Latin American novel. From the 1960's to the present, there has been a strong current of magic realism within the general movement of post-modernism, especially in British and North American literature.” -- the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

And while magical realism started out to first describe paintings following the expressionist period, when it turned to fiction, the shift was dramatic and took on more momentum in literature than it had in art. Franz Kafka, one of the first authors to be labeled with the term, was followed in later decades by English authors, W.H. Hudson and John Fowles in the humanist-realist 50’s movement, also called 'historiographic metafiction. This was also linked to late modernism's experimentalism, and then later with the 'fabulation' of authors such as Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie.

Granted, many changes and terms were thrown around in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s following the period of the deconstruction of the novel and dramatic new swings in all of the arts.  Latin American novels, along with the works of the likes of Rushdie brought magical realism to the bestseller racks and a renewed curiousity from the general reading public.

to be continued....

In the next section I'll discuss the various elements often found in magical realism which sets it apart form straight literay or genre fiction.