“How does it feel… how does it feel… to be without a home… like a complete unknown… like a rolling stone?” This signature Dylan song has been in my head for weeks…home can mean many things. A year ago I began my June 13th entry, art then art now:
I need to reorganize the house I’ve been living in for the past four years! In 2008, we moved from a beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright house to a small, unassuming, 1960s tri-level with joyous expectations of becoming part of a particular church community in the neighborhood. Shortly after moving the housing market fell, leaving our FLW house without a great many qualified buyers.
Rolling on: Membership in the neighborhood church community did not come to pass and that tri-level never got organized. Shortly after writing the entry, we received an offer on our beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright house that took us down the real estate garden path by the throat! Weary of tumbling along over the cobblestoned highways and byways of the past several years, we did an about-face—put the tri-level on the market and moved back to the FLW house. We were glad to be home at last!
This spring, we invited people from all walks of our life to celebrate our home coming in a music fest. In addition to old friends, the guest list included people who had made music or art with us, people who had helped us in various ways through the past several years, and people who had helped us in the actual moving process. Everyone brought something to share…food was abundant and the music flowed from gospel to rock ‘n roll. We had a great time and hope this will be the first of many music fests to come.
Jim Croegaert on keyboard, Mark Vanderhoff and Callie Surber on guitar belting out Bob Dylan’s classic, 1965 tune, Like a Rolling Stone. Go ahead and sing along, shake it all out…you won’t be able to help yourself!
After that We Went Down to the River to Pray. The movie, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou has nothing on us! We were rockin’!
Nancy Miner Guenther and Judy Studenski leading out with Joni Mitchell’s 1970 hit, Big Yellow Taxi.
Mark Vanderhoff playing Neil Young’s Heart of Gold from the album Harvest; applause by Ardean Goertzen
Jaime Cortez’ Rain Down, with rolling arpeggios—catching them single-handedly.
Even after everyone had left, there was still more music…
Links in text:
Jim Croegaert, Singer-Songwriter • Rough Stones Music
Nancy Miner Guenther • Roses and Teacups
art then / art now
Tags: Art, arts, Belonging, Cancer, frank lloyd wright, Friendship, Joy, Life, Membership, Personal Growth, Transitions
I need to reorganize the house I’ve been living in for the past four years!
We lived here in this little house for four years with shattered dreams and could not make it a home. Now we are on the brink of finally selling our FLW house, albeit at an enormously reduced price. It is time to move into this unassuming tri-level and make room for the next chapter of our lives. Making room means re-organizing and that requires cleaning out and thinning down my files…all those things I’ve carried around thinking that they will be needed at some future time. As I am in my seventh decade and climbing, I think the future is now.
The process of reducing files requires opening and looking through them. I could only manage four drawers without mental/emotional exhaustion overtaking me as I walked back into my life, folder after folder, making decisions that sometimes brought unwanted memories to the surface. In one of those folders I found correspondence with a friend from the past—an artist from Armenia whom I’d met a decade earlier when Judy and I were visiting friends on the east coast. It was a period of my life when I was doing a lot of genealogy in an effort to understand my heritage as a building block for knowing myself. This period culminated in an exhibition I produced involving nine Armenian/American artists.
Inheritance: art and images beyond a silenced genocide. (The electronic version is hosted by the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota.)
Curious about this old friend and somewhat lonely for people of my own ethnic temperament, I looked him up online and found he was here in this country, with a partner of six years and still a practicing artist. I sent out a Facebook friend request, Twittered and emailed him at the art center address where he teaches ceramics. About a week later I received an email from him that made me happy; he is a person like myself in so many ways, and one of the few remaining links to my own heritage. When he asked so plaintively why I got out of the art world, I had to give a brief history of the past decade since I’d last spoken with him. Haven’t had a response to this yet…must be busy…
His question brings me front and center, having been asked by others from time to time: Why did you get out of the art world…why would you? Revulsion is one answer. Cancer’s clearer vision is another. I am a professional artist gone AWOL. There is an article in the New York Times—How the Art Market Thrives on Inequality—that simply renews my sense of revulsion. I recommend reading this for all art lovers. It’s educational.
I will always be an artist. That is my temperament and training and it filters into everything I do. Some have questioned why I pour so much of that artfulness into the church I attend when they see so little reason for doing so. My answer is: Why not? The Church having separated itself—to its own detriment—from visual art at the time of the Reformation, is in desperate need of beauty for soul’s nourishment. I can do it and it gives me pleasure rather than pain. When I hear that someone’s experience of the sacred has been enhanced by a bit of beauty I’ve had a hand in providing, I am blessed, because I’m acting in accordance with having been Called by Name back in those gloomy days of cancer treatment and recovery. Clearer vision, that’s the reason.
Art created for one’s own pleasure is personal and edifying, but in a broader, societal sense, it is one hand clapping. Art created out of one’s own spirit and shared freely with others is two hands clapping—communication, pleasure and edification all around. As many of my friends and acquaintances know, I’m big on movement, hands, feet, whatever. Clapping counts.
Now I go to my weekly dance class where I can be art
as well as make it…where I can be beauty as well as behold it.
This is the street where I live now…