IONA ART SANCTUARY

When I exited a Sunday afternoon reading at a unique art gallery on The Mountain, and a man with deep blue eyes, wearing a baseball cap, bowed gallantly, kissed my hand, and invited me to read at a literary event in the Fall of 2014, my response to the invitation was a resounding “yes.”

Yesterday, I attended a reading by local authors of the Autumn Assembly of Authors at IONA Art Sanctuary.  I had been invited by my friend, the Rev. Francis Walter, who read from his novel, Goldilocks and the Three Bears at Mobile Bay. Following this amusing reading, I was re-introduced to Edward Carlos, a sculptor and artist I met the first year I moved to Sewanee, Tennessee, shortly after he opened his Art Sanctuary. I had been deeply impressed by his religious and spiritual art, some of which reflected visionary events that he experienced during four visits to Iona, a small island off the western coast of Scotland.

On this particular Sunday afternoon, three writers performed at the reading: my friend Francis who read from his unpublished manuscript, David Bowman who read from his book, Sewanee in Stone, and Lynn Cimino Hurt who read from her unpublished manuscript of poetry. The reading was one among a slate of Fall readings and art exhibits sponsored by Carlos, who was called to “offer a place for writers and artists to share their creative work with each other and the community, and the emphasis is to source creativity and spirituality,” Carlos says. I might add that many Sewanee writers and artists produce rich creative work that isn't read at the annual Sewanee Writers Conference, which features mostly national luminaries, so Carlos provides an outstanding service for less-recognized literary and artistic figures.

The IONA Art Sanctuary sits atop a hill off Garnertown Road and overlooks a field of dried sedge grass and seven acres of lake and woods. The building is situated on a N-S, E-W axis and offers art lovers a view of colorful sunsets as they exit the 70’x64’ building. The interior of the sanctuary follows the design of a nave with a Celtic cross shape. A 20' high gate stands in the center of the field of sedge grass and symbolizes an entrance between the physical world and the spiritual world. It reminded me of a similar gate at Rip Winkle Gardens on Jefferson Island near my home of New Iberia, Louisiana. Above the entrance on the IONA veranda the sculpt of an angel hovers, part of a scene about the Nativity, which is further carried out inside with a life-sized “Creation Nativity.”

At the reading, before Carlos introduced the first writer, he pointed out a vertical 19 l/2' x 10’ piece of art behind the improvised stage, a complex photographic work by Carlos’s son, Adam Carlos, that depicts an earth mother figure superimposed over images of a forest and a lake. Entitled “Lost Love," it contains 260 separate but overlapping 16”x20” black and white photos..  It is a stunning backdrop to reading performances, and Carlos explained that the building ceiling was constructed to accommodate this piece of art.

When I’m in New Iberia part of the year, I often read some of my poetry at Paul Schexnayder’s Art Gallery and am scheduled to read at this gallery with the new Louisiana poet laureate in November. I know that combining art exhibits and literary performances in one event results in an afternoon or evening of interesting entertainment, so I understand the efficacy of holding the Autumn Assembly of Authors at IONA, a highly creative venue.

Carlos has also sponsored the exhibits of many talented art students and area artists at IONA Art Sanctuary. The year that he retired from his position as chair of the Fine Arts Department and director of the university gallery at the University of the South, staff, community members, retired faculty members, and students helped install his two-month long exhibit, “Creation: Aurora Borealis” at the university gallery. My architect friend, Sarah Boykin, a graduate of Sewanee who now teaches at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, spearheaded a drive to raise funds to provide for a new gallery in the Nabit Art Building, which was named the Edward Carlos Gallery of Art.  Although Carlos lives on campus with his wife, Sarah, and a flock of dogs, he spends his meditative moments at the IONA Art Sanctuary. 

I look forward to seeing my blue-eyed host and to reading my poetry next Fall during the Autumn Assembly of Authors at IONA Art Sanctuary, another "thin" place of inspiration and beauty on The Mountain.  

ILLUMINATE

Margaret Simon, one of my New Iberia, Louisiana friends, has chosen an apt title for a slender book of finely-crafted poems published by Border Press. The poems accompany the drawings of John Gibson, her father, who used a technical pen to execute arresting pictures in the tradition of pen and ink pointillism art.

Following a church service at the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in New Iberia, Louisiana last year, Margaret told me that she had reviewed a collection of her father’s Christmas cards she had received through the years and conceived the idea of deepening her connection with her father by writing poems to express the religious verses he used to accompany the Christmas card drawings. The result is Illuminate, a book in which each poem is a “harmony creating a vision of love,” as Margaret writes in the first poem she conceived about her father’s art. The poem was an exercise she completed during a writing project retreat with former Louisiana poet laureate Darrell Bourque.

The cover of Illuminate by John Gibson features a drawing derived from a photograph he took of a small church in Salzburg following an all-night snowfall. The drawing became the basis for the first Christmas card he “illuminated.” Eleven drawings in Illuminate reflect Gibson’s passion to capture spiritual mysteries in art using the technique of pen and ink pointillism. He does not use lines, and most of the picture elements are created with small dots made by a technical pen with a 0.05-mm point – images of angels, wise men, Mary, and a manger scene that inspired Margaret to write a poem entitled “The Pointillist.”

Margaret’s poems show her command of the writing craft in the range of poetry forms she uses to deliver the message derived from her father’s ink drawings, about which he says: “it is the darkest dark that reveals the brightest light. So it seems also in life.” I was drawn to a sonnet about trees entitled “Dance of the Trees” that is a tribute to Margaret’s father and resonates with rich sound and rhythm:

Dance of the Trees

Look at trees, think of God who came to bring us love.

I watch you watching trees,

I watch you watching those trees

outside your window in the loft.

If you could walk on the roof,

if you could walk out on that roof and touch them—

you could feel their hearts beating,

their hearts beating out the rhythm of the wind.

I watch you drawing the trees.

I watch you drawing those trees

in perfect chiaroscuro, shading just so,

just so they come alive and dance.

The trees dance in the moonlight

when you draw them.

When you draw them, God’s hand moves.

God’s hand is moving.

Illuminate is a small volume, but it radiates with light and inspiration, with religious and nature themes. It’s a unique Christmas gift that celebrates the passion and faith of two family members who teamed up to create an artistic gem.

Margaret Gibson Simon teaches gifted students in Iberia Parish, has published poems in the journal, The Aurorean, and wrote a chapter about teaching poetry to young children for Women on Poetry published by McFarland and Co., Inc. She’s also the author of a young readers’ novel, Blessen, published in April, 2012 by Border Press. Margaret has a Masters degree in Gifted Education and certification by the National Boards for Professional Teaching Standards. She lives on the Bayou Teche with her husband Jeff in New Iberia, Louisiana.

John Gibson retired from medicine in 1997 and has been doing pen and ink pointillism for many years. He has displayed his work in galleries in the Jackson, Mississippi metropolitan area since 2001 and received second place in the 2012 Annual Cedars Juried Art Exhibition. He credits the “environment within which he lives for providing him with creations of nature such as trees and foliage and the magical effects of light and shadow as subject for his ink drawings.” He lives with his wife Dot on a lake in Madison County, Mississippi.

Order Illuminate online or from Border Press, PO Box 3124, Sewanee TN 37375.

WILLAMEENA MOONBEAM…

"I was the night sky."

I once had a friend from Yugoslavia who had been through the strife of WWII and who often talked about the poverty she endured during her childhood. “I never had beautiful children’s books like the ones your mother bought you,” she said. “We were glad to get good bread and soup and have a warm stone at our feet when we went to bed.” At the time, I felt dismayed when she talked about her impoverished childhood, and I appreciated even more the books that my mother bought for us at Claitor’s Bookstore in Baton Rouge, Louisiana back in the 40’s. A passage in the introduction to my book entitled Their Adventurous Will: Profiles of Memorable Louisiana Women refers to Mother’s love of books and the trips to Claitor’s: “Every month for years, Mother would take one of the three children in our family to Claitor’s Bookstore to choose two books for our nightly reading session. She was the first family member to open the books, touching the pictures with credulous delight. My mother began to fly in the heavens long before Mary Poppins opened her first umbrella to make her wonderful flights…” I was privileged to grow up with beautiful books, and my appreciation for children’s books probably equals my mother’s enthusiasm for them. I’m sorry that every child doesn’t have the opportunity to grow up with access to good books.

Yesterday, I received two copies of a children’s book entitled Willameena Moonbeam, written and illustrated by Ben Blanchard, a young friend of mine who has done paintings for two of my books and who illustrated a long poem that became a small book for my grandson Joel. When I opened Willameena Moonbeam, I thought immediately of the words that I penned about my mother touching books “with credulous delight.” That’s how I felt when I touched the illustrations in Ben’s book.

Ben illustrated Willameena Moonbeam using collage and watercolor techniques and printed, by hand, the text of his long poem. The theme of the poem concerns Willameena and her young friends wishing for and actually lengthening a day to one of constant sunlight, a day when the sun “grew weary …weary of waiting for moon…” Children playing in the fields longed for more sun, danced and pretended that the day would lengthen…The day did lengthen, but the youngsters became hungry, and one of them cried out, “Surely we’ll grow thinner/if we keep on playing/without any dinner.” Unfortunately, the parents of Willameena and her friends decided they couldn’t call their offspring indoors while it was still light, and the children became aware that they had achieved more than they had bargained for.

One of the beautifully-illustrated scenes in Willameena Moonbeam shows the children trying to capture darkness by getting under umbrellas, but even then, the sun doesn’t vanish, and they’re forced to solicit the help of their grandparents to bring on the night. According to “The Elders,” the solution involves the use of a patchwork quilt dress that Willameena must wear and dance in so that she becomes part of the night sky. “I was twirled by my music and from afar/my long dress made a canopy of quilted stars,” Willameena explains. “Like a thousand pearls…all strewn/were actual stars in procession with moon…” Willameena dances the day into night, the moon finally rises, and all is well in the skies above. Ben brings his poem to a close as Willameena bows her head and finally accepts the fact that “it’s time for bed.”

Ben Blanchard is originally from Lafayette, Louisiana and currently lives in Austin, Texas. His multimedia projects include works in music, film, and collage. Willameena Moonbeam is the first book he has written and illustrated. Ben graduated from the Raw Food Preparation and Organic Gardening School sponsored by the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center in Arizona and practiced as a raw foodist for a few years in Sedona, Arizona and Lafayette, Louisiana. One of his delicious raw food specialties that I’ve sampled is “Third Eyes Cream,” a dessert made with frozen bananas, raw chocolate, and Goji berries. Ben’s original drawings also appear in a book we published together entitled The Beast Beelzebufo. We share a mutual interest in the comic strip “Peanuts,” and have shared ideas in artistic sessions held at tables in Starbucks.

Willameena Moonbeam is an artistic achievement that will engage the interest of any child…as well as grown children like me and my fantasy-loving mother (deceased).

You can order Willameena Moonbeam from Ben Blanchard, 1200 Elm Street, #114, Austin, Texas 78703.

MAKING THE MOST OF BLANK SPACES…

Many people who’re classified as “hobbyists” are authentic artists and artisans who care more about their art or craft than they do about high-powered marketing. Marilyn (“Toni”) Blackwell is one of those gifted artists. While in Florida last week, I visited with her several times and toured what she calls her “comfort zone” in Babson Park, Florida. Toni was featured on one of my blogs a few years ago, but after touring her home the other day, I decided that her skills weren’t confined to decorating the note cards, glassware, vases, candles, and terra cotta pots that I had written about -- she even has a penchant for organizing personal objects, like jewelry, clothing, and scarves, in an artistic way.

Some of the photographs here show how she uses her organizational talents to arrange closets, shelves, and racks that reflect her appreciation for beautiful objects.

Toni also uses her decorative art skills by dressing in unique clothing and wearing bright jewelry that she has inherited, collected, or designed. She creates many of her earrings and bracelets, sometimes decorating dress sandals, and wears all of them with more flair than less artistic people would exhibit.


Toni is a native “Yankee” from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and a transplanted Floridian who graduated from Webber International University in Babson Park and worked as an administrative assistant to executives at Florida Power Corporation (now Progress Energy) for thirty five years before retiring in 2002.

After taking an art course that taught her “one stroke painting,” Toni began working on terra cotta pottery; however, she now uses her technique on most any blank surfaces she finds while scouring for objects at flea markets and crafts stores – glasses, pitchers, trays...she even eyes blank walls that might be made brighter with murals and has painted several in Florida homes. Her primary subjects are flowers and plants, which she paints using acrylics, but she has become interested in a technique similar to watercolor technique that utilizes acrylics on larger canvasses than her glassware and pottery.


We enjoyed the tour that shows Toni’s decorative talents and brought home a pitcher to add to our collection of a flower pot, a breakfast tray, and a Florida palm painted on a wood surface that we have in our Sewanee home. We’ve used the breakfast tray to transfer food from the kitchen down to the dining area for several years, and the colors haven’t diminished from cleaning. The vivid red, yellow, and purple flowers are a better wake-up call than a cup of Louisiana coffee!


This blog’s photographs are included because they may be helpful as a “how-to” visual for people who have trouble making the most of space in their closets and on shelves. One of the closets occupies the space that was a former bedroom, but I didn’t photograph the closet, so readers can’t see how many changes of clothing Toni owns!


Toni attributes her love of beautiful things and her sense of color to her paternal grandmother, “Gacky” Thomas, who nurtured Toni’s (her first grandchild) interest in aesthetics, flamboyant clothing and jewelry.

TOTEM POLES

I’ve placed photographs of my brother Paul’s yard on my blogs in the past – scenes of his beautiful garden, benches, and lattices he has built to create a lush California scene that deserves to decorate a postcard. Yesterday, his wife, Lori, sent me a photograph of the latest addition to his yard that she and Paul saw and bought on a walk through the neighborhood in northern California – a totem pole. I’ve included the photograph of it but have no idea what this particular totem symbolizes. I do know that totem poles are often representative of kinship groups and aren’t objects of worship.

In the particular coastal area where Paul lives, totem poles are more common than in southern California and are the products of local descendants of aborigines. The carving culture has actually moved down from British Columbia and Washington to this area along the northern coast. Although the totem poles once represented clan lineage and legends, today, they are mostly artistic representations.

Some of them have been used in aboriginal cultures to represent shamanic powers, but I don’t think Paul’s carving belongs in that category. During the 18th century, Christian missionaries denounced totem poles as objects of heathen worship and tried to destroy them. In some places, notably in Canada and the Southwest, totem poles have been labeled as “junk art,” a naming that demeans native cultures and the skillful carvers within those cultures.

Totem carvers often use animals to denote special powers of the individual owning them. In my young adult book, Martin Finds His Totem, Martin, the hero, who has Cajun and Chitimacha lineage, sets out to find his totem and discovers that a hawk is the bird that will represent his special healing powers. The passage in which he discovers his totem:

“Through the drizzle, I glimpsed a long-winged hawk, with an equally long tail and gray back and head, soaring just above the ground around the lake, its wings held back in a V. Then I heard a squealing noise and knew that the hawk had flown close to the ground to overtake a field mouse by surprise. The hawk dropped out of my vision, but when it soared above a tree, I heard it make a sharp whistling sound like “kee-kee.” I was fascinated at the sight of him and decided not to leave my tent or to give up my search for a totem. Could the hawk be the animal I looked for? My dad called this bird, with its disk-shaped face like an owl, a harrier, and I knew the hawk had keener hearing than other hawks. What a powerful totem he would make if he was mine. But how would I know?…”

Martin makes this choice of a hawk for his totem because he’s told by a shaman that every young man needs a dream animal to protect him.  In actuality, many carvers of animal totems that decorate poles feel that the bears, birds, and other animals represent protection for the carvers.

I’ve written Paul's wife, asking her to identify the carvings on the new totem pole and to tell me what they symbolize.  I hope that his new object of yard art isn't one of the totems that shows symbols of quarrels and murders about which Native Americans prefer to keep silent --the topmost figure is rather ominous-looking!

THE FRAGILITY OF ART

The art of Karen Bourque

Last month, Drs. Mary Ann Wilson and Vickie Sullivan, accompanied me to lunch with former poet laureate Darrell Bourque and his wife Karen, a glass artist, in their home near Churchpoint, Louisiana. At a feast featuring pork roast, a la Darrell, and flour-less chocolate cake a la Karen, we talked about Karen’s latest glass art, the depiction of the four seasons for glass panes in the windows fronting their home. After we had decided on the season we liked best (and which was not for sale), we discussed the glass piece Karen had created for the opening of the Ernest Gaines Center at University of Louisiana at Lafayette (ULL) last year.  She related how the first rendering of the piece had been a “casualty.” When I returned home that evening of the visit, I wrote this prose piece to illustrate her story:

“THE FRAGILITY OF ART
She and her poet husband were moving the center panel of “Just Like A tree,” a beautiful glass piece, 23”x72,” depicting an oak tree and the river, two motifs often appearing in the work of Ernest Gaines. She had made the piece to define the entrance way of a writing center named after her husband’s mentor and friend. The glass piece was something that reflected the mentor “leading us to the in-habitation of our better selves,” she had written to describe his influence on her art.

But as they carried the glass together, the “center would not hold.” The panel broke into pieces and separated the tree from the river. It was one of those things she’d rather not have experienced but knew she would accept, although the palms of her hands felt as if they had been pierced, although her heart bled into the pool beside the cottage. She bent double to stay the flow, finally raising her head to look into the shocked eyes of her husband.

“Glass breaks,” she said simply. It was her summary of suffering that she voiced for her Buddhist husband. But he fled as if pursued by djinns to make his three-mile walk – to ponder the fracture of this creation.

She picked up the pieces – the stones, agates, and gems that represented “insight and strength,” pausing before a Buddha who smiled as if urging her to dignify the break. “There’s more than one way. The memory is whole. Nothing is that sacred,” she heard the Buddha say, his smile widening.

So she saved the glass. That much she knew to do from watching her husband, who never discarded any of the drafts of his poetry, never wadded and tossed the first expression of special words into a wastebasket.

Later, when the poet had summoned enough courage to return to the scene of broken art and what he perceived would be her broken spirit, he found her putting the tree beside the river again. In her mind, she had returned the panel to its dimensionality. “I told you that glass breaks,” she said. “A fragile and beautiful thing is worth recreating.”

A most extravagant hope, the poet thought. But she is like me and my poems, making many drafts, trying to bring something into eternity. “My beloved,” he said, embracing her. “You are a better Buddhist than I.”"

A PAINTING SENT BY BROTHER…

With a little frame showing. Whoops!

Nothing brightens my day more than the arrival of a photograph of one of my brother’s paintings. The most recent painting is one of the northern California coast–the magnificent rocks and water executed in varying shades of blue. Something about the one blue color gives me a feeling of peace, and I hope to put it on the cover of a new book of poetry I’m writing this year, which, at this date, only has seven poems in the collection.

Another of Paul’s recent paintings features more rocks and sea and a small coast town on an island in the forefront of the painting. Although Paul’s eyes are failing, he seems to be able to render tiny houses and trees well, and I think he must strain mightily to execute his art at the age of almost-eighty. Many of his paintings are abstract ones I’ve used for my chapbooks, and his art often appears on the covers of novels I’ve published.

Paul began painting and drawing when he created his first story about a bear that my father introduced at bedtime called “Jimmy Bear,” and he was encouraged by my mother who painted pictures of gnomes, fairyland creatures, forest scenes featuring huge frogs and dwarfs holding paintbrushes. When Paul moved to northern California nearly twenty years ago, he began painting again in earnest–no lessons, no art school–just the paintings that reflect memories of Louisiana, gardens and flowers, seascapes, landscapes, and brilliant abstract renderings. His garden and yard also reflect his artistry and are paradisiacal scenes.

I am withholding most of the pictures because they may appear on chapbooks of poetry, but will include the blue one that lifted my mood when I received it. Also, the scene inspired a poem:

A PAINTING SENT BY BROTHER

Is it barometric pressure
or days catching up

with the oppressive rain
simmering on heavy leaves,

when the last drop of ego
has evaporated into a scentless past,

and the oak makes deep shade
outside my window and within me.

I’m given a memory of elegance
piercing sea fog,

and in the blues of his art,
ghost ships sail away

on a tempestuous day,
a tempestuous sea.

Atop cradling waves of silver-tipped blue
my brother captures me with his visions,

a child once, and returned,
painting a long transport…

this ocean voyage
on which our history ripples.