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.”