Memento mori

My mind and hands have been overflowing with new art ideas, techniques, materials and styles this year; it’s been an exciting and productive, if often challenging, year. I’ve engaged in some old artistic pleasures, such as making miniature pencil and pen drawings based on historical portraits and fashioning a few delicate pieces of jewelry, but I’ve also pushed myself in entirely new directions. I’ve done a lot of work with metal mesh and wire constructions; they run the gamut from looking like identifiable sea creatures to being completely conceptual abstract pieces based on the study of physics. (You can click through to a gallery of my recent pieces above.) I’ve done pieces that look like billowing curtains and shimmering bubbles, and brought my love of jewels and detail out of the world of jewelry by wiring gems and metal findings around, over and through canvas. I’ve built up assemblages of bits of twig, watch parts, pressed flowers, layers of wasp nests and phrases from encyclopedia pages, some showing a sort of strutting, geometric confidence and others twinkling shyly.

My work has become much more tactile and textural, sometimes invitingly and sometimes in a more prickly way. My calligraphy series of metal mesh and wire on canvas pieces includes shapes that to me evoke a meeting between the landscapes of Tim Burton and Dr. Seuss, while my wasp (vespa) series is softer, mostly featuring the undulating lines created by a colony of wasps as they built an extraordinary striped paper nest. The gift of the nest was a surprise from a friend, and its texture, unevenness and the perfection of its imperfections have been wonderfully inspiring.

I’ve found another favorite source of inspiration this year in old pocket watch innards, small cogs and wheels, and delicate old watch faces. I’ve been gathering them for some time, and I find them physically pleasing for their meticulous and intricate construction and tininess. But I love them just as much because, cold little mechanical devices that they once were, they were also the intimate possessions of real, warm, living people, most now cold and dead, who relied on them to order their time and make sense of their days. Tiny, clicking, jeweled machines rested in their hands, around their wrists next to to their beating pulses, in their breast pockets, against their hips.

Now their watches are in pieces, showing parts of themselves that their long-dead, long-term owners never saw. They remind me of Dutch memento mori paintings, still lifes that included exquisite renditions of flowers covered in reflective droplets of dew, insects, hour glasses, skulls and ripe fruit and watches. Each lovely item, carefully collected and displayed, acted as a reminder that life is fleeting, that all is vanity, that even the most luscious peach or the most perfect tulip will someday wither, and that we must appreciate them today, but also keep in mind what is really lasting and what really matters. They tell us that the fragility of beauty makes it more precious, and that this is a good thing.

Memento mori pieces are sometimes seen with a Calvinist eye as dark reminders to repent and put away the things of this world. I think this view is mistaken, that they are actually delicate reminders to treasure each day and savor each blessing. The loveliest way I can think of to describe this view is to quote Swinburne’s poem “The Garden of Proserpine”:

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no man lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

These lines also happen to have been quoted and set to music by my mother’s friend of many years, Owen Goldsmith, a composer and arranger of great subtlety whose choral works are so painfully beautiful they invariably make me cry. Owen was a music director at Livermore High School when I was a tiny child, and he went on to a very successful career as a composer of choral works. Thousands of students have sung his works in concerts and competitions over the past forty years.

When I was little, my mother, who was a remarkable pianist, was often the first person to play Owen’s compositions after Owen himself; he would ask her over to play them for him so that he could hear them fresh from another pair of hands, and I was usually there, too, sitting on the floor reading his books of Charles Addams or Pogo comics in the room as his pieces hit the air. My mother also had a powerful and lyrical soprano voice, and she was often the first to sing his songs as well. Now I wish that I had recordings of those magical times; I remember hearing her play and sing them many times at home when I was a child, and I still play the pieces myself from old photostatic copies of the manuscripts, though not with her fluency at the piano.

I do have a recording of my mother and me singing his piece, Cleavings, which was comprised of three short songs, including the one above, about 25 years ago. I listened to my recording again last month, and immediately burst into tears for its beauty, for the pleasure of sharing it with my mother, for the way her voice and mine blended so sweetly, for the loss of her, her talents and her own passion for music and art. That bittersweetness is why we remember that death comes for us all: “memento mori” means “remember death” but implies “treasure life.”

Planned Obsolescence

Sometimes beauty is purposely ephemeral, created solely for a brief span of time, meant to dissolve or decay, disappear or be devoured. Its very impermanence is meant to underscore the special quality of the time for which it is created. One sees this in window displays, holiday tables, elaborate birthday cakes and in wedding celebrations. A fantasy world is created, impossibly perfect dishes are served, clouds of billowing organza and thousands of fragrant flowers are whisked into a single day's worth of heady scent and glorious excess to be enjoyed ever after only in memory. This temporal quality emphasizes the rarity and the uniqueness of the moment. Temporary excess heightens our emotional responses to an event.

Sometimes the excess seems truly wretched or obscenely wasteful, such as when a perfect wedding dress is purposely destroyed and photographed at the moment of its destruction, as has become more popular in recent years. To me this feels like a huge waste of beauty, and I abhor the willful destruction of something that could bring pleasure to others if sold or donated to someone without the resources to buy or make it. Others see it as an artistic act and a whimsical way to celebrate something usually seen as very serious.

I have trouble with the concept of destruction as artistic action; I think of art as the result of creation, of building, of bringing together. Celebrating the act of destroying something of beauty so that it can never again be enjoyed often seems meanspirited to me. However, I must also admit that there can be delight in creating something special that is meant to be impermanent so that it exists primarily in memory.

Some artworks are made out of ephemeral materials on purpose so that they decay or degrade on cue. This can be quite disturbing or even funny: the perfect ice sculpture that devolves into a drippy puddle; the elegant Thanksgiving dinner that gives way to a table featuring a dissected and desiccated carcass; the sparkling pile of Christmas gifts that so quickly becomes a trash-strewn testament to excess and waste.

Part of me aches when I see something lovely and intricate created out of ephemeral materials treated as so much random material to be devoured and displaced. But I've made so many ephemeral artworks over the years and put so much work into things that were supposed to be eaten, discarded or enjoyed for a brief moment that I understand the other side, too.

There's pleasure in making something special and evanescent to celebrate the special quality of a particular moment in time. However, I usually keep mine to things I can do in a few hours, and I do generally hope that my works are enjoyed enough to make the recipient think them worth keeping. I've made so many intricate cards in carefully designed envelopes, decorated thousands of elaborately illustrated cookies, sewn so many excruciatingly detailed costumes for my daughter for special events and made some birthday cakes that took half a day just to decorate. These might seem frivolous, time-wasting activities, but they heightened the importance of something usually considered of little value, and that showed evidence of my regard for others and of my desire to please them. Such carefully planned gestures are rare enough that they make a strong and positive impression on others. Having the power to please others with my talents gives me joy.

I do love wowing people with grand gestures, especially when they show inordinate and unexpected care and effort on their behalf. Such creative work is a form of devotion, like a scribe copying a Bible or a Tibetan monk making intricate mandalas out of sand which will be blown away within days. Partly it seems a waste, I know. But it's meant to celebrate and appreciate the transitory nature of pleasure and of life itself. It's a form of memento mori art, something that moves me and which I've spent a lot of time thinking about and studying. It shows up in my work rather often, actually, as I've written about previously here in my blog.

I don't want to make a grand gesture just to impress the public; that wouldn't be nearly as much fun as doing it for a friend, and would be done simply to show off, which can feel rather embarrassing. Certainly part of the fun comes from making the grand gesture as a way to show off my skills and determination; I'd be lying if I said it wasn't. But another part, the greatest part for me, is the joy I get from anticipating the pleasure I can bring to another from my painstaking care. Spending time focusing on an item specifically meant to bring pleasure to another is something I do to show respect and admiration. I see it as a way to show obeisance to the sacred and beautiful elements within the person to whom I make my gift.

I enjoy spectacle on a small scale, and lavishing great detail on a work made in an intimate format, so that the object of my attention feels personally drawn in and celebrated. It is a way to pay homage to the precious nature of the fleeting moments shared with someone worthy of care. Grand ice buildings are remarkable and entertaining works of art to share with the world at large, but I'd rather put my care into making something that matters to a specific someone.