La Silva, 90x75, encaustic on panel, 2010

Frances Lansing exhibits at Nathalia Laue Galerie in Frankfurt, Germany

Walking with a dog in Tuscany inspires thoughts on the Sienese landscape. Some of these reflections have to do with the agricultural past of this zone and its inhabitants from the Etrusca period to our times. The resulting work – pastels, wax paintings and sculpture in bronze – are very personal responses to an intimately known territory, the Crete Senese.

Invitation Caccia all'uovo

The Galleria dell’Incisione proposes, once again, a theme show taking its inspiration from the practice in northern countries of an Easter Egg Hunt. This will involve both children and adults in looking for dyed eggs hidden in the garden. Among the artists participating are: Berenyi, Bueno, Carroll, Von Den Steinen, Faravelli, Gallizioli, Griffa, Kapor, Lansing, Matticchio, Micheli, Pajevic, Pigni, Saiani, Scarpella, and others.

Giving a patina to the Easter Tree, 2010

Burn field, 45x30 cm., ink wash, 1976

Recently I have been sorting out my notebooks. The earliest of these date to childhood when my mother gave us empty notebooks – actually the agendas given at Christmas by Insurance companies and banks – to draw in and, every now and then, an enormous book of expired wall paper samples donated to her by a local home decorator’s shop.

Arno Fall, 45x35cm., pastel, 1990

These latter volumes were at least 50 cm. wide and you had the choice of the cream colored back side of each page where only a serial number disturbed the space or the pattered front side. Here, you could use larger crayons, pastels or tempera while we usually used pencils or pens in the smaller books.

Tommaso, 13x20 cm, ink, 2005

The only order to our work was chronological, a date on the page at the lower right hand corner. Everything else about the drawings was anarchic. There was no real subject or clear theme. Or, if there were, it had to do with the mysterious relationship that objects and places have to you before functional values become part of the equation, the way you renew your existence.

Yates Violin, 13x20 cm., ink, 1982

There was a child went forth every day;

And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;

And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain

part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

(Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass)

White Street, 45x32cm., pastel, 2002

An artist’s sketchbook has a more immediate connection to his life than is true of work prepared for exhibition.  In its purest state its contents are like children’s drawings, tied to existential factors that have little to do with style, and even less with intention or communication directed to the outside world.

Monica, 24x16cm., ink, 1996

There is a kind of paradox here because the value of drawings like this lies in their very lack of material worth or importance. Even a discussion of quality is irrelevant here. A sketchbook may be – ought to be – chaotic in theme and style because whatever else it may seem to be about, the main subject is the going forth every day of its author.

Dolci di Erice, 25x16cm., water color, 1996

My-studio

I am going to clear out my studio today. I promise. It has just started raining, a gentle spring shower that will keep me in and undistracted by what is going on in the garden. I have just finished a painting or think I have finished it…but the total disorder that only now disturbs me – as if I were a different person than the one who left the floor strewn with rags, dripped wax all over the place, scattered capless tubes of pigment, and left books open face down – is a distraction that won’t let me see what my efforts look like. I move back, the same way I did while I was working a few minutes ago, but now it is even harder to see.

Studio door

Part of the problem is the process I use. Wax is melted in a double boiler used by restaurants for preparing pasta and contained in stainless steel pots that I alternate while painting. Everything takes place very quickly before the wax hardens. I use wooden panels and a good part of my painting takes place on the floor. When I see an image appear, I prop the painting on an easel. That way I can move freely away to see if it looks right from a distance or move very close to see if it has a the surface qualities I like. Very often, while I am waiting for the wax to heat, I pick up a something to read or start modeling a figure or working on a drawing, but everything is dropped once the wax is ready.

Sun on my desk in the studio

This makes me think. The process an artist uses is by no means a matter of efficiency or technical ability alone. Not even both factors together would explain what goes on in the studio, which always remains somewhat unpenetrable, and at the same time uniquely itself. For example, there are the movements required for stepping over instead of into the painting, the music that supports this dance, the wax harvested from the bees in the garden, the rare pigment found in a restorer’s shop in Rome. The friends you were thinking of while you were working.

And this last thought. In the real world you live in a specific place. But in your studio you can inhabit – you must inhabit – many different worlds, invoke a variety of companions without regard for time or distance. While this might not be the point in painting, it must be at least one of the reasons people make art. Not long ago I stood in front of a work of mine I hadn’t seen for twenty years and there they were: some fragments of Scarlatti played by Glen Gould, a meeting with a son’s teacher, an abandoned kitten, and some lines by Wallace Stevens:

Soldier, there is a war between the mind

And sky, between thought and day and night. It is

For that the poet is always in the sun,

Patches the moon together in his room

to his Virgilian cadences, up down,

Up down. It is a war that never ends.

(Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction; Cummington Press, 1942).

Now while I try to create order in the disparate objects distributed over every horizontal plane, a new source of confusion invades the space. Outside, the sun has just emerged through a hole in the dark grey sky.  Inside, rays of light penetrate the darkness making a golden mosaic of everything and, into this new opus, my painting has completely disappeared.

Frankie in studio

Margaret Garden

Not long ago, I stole a big slice of time from my painting to work on a garden. This happened just after my mother’s death. She had involved me in her love for outdoor work from earliest childhood – helping me made a vegetable plot, letting me pick out my own flowers for a tiny bed edged with a border of oyster shells. But, as an adult, a need to jealously guard my painting time made each spring blossom as seductive and threatening as a Siren’s song. When I finally gave in to my desire to construct a garden it became a refuge from sadness, a protection, and the best means for me to invoke my mother, Margaret.

What I began to understand was that gardens, like any art form, exist in a in a realm of their own, somehow estranged from everyday life. They may imitate or represent natural phenomenon but they are anything but natural.This is dramatically true of the gardens that inspired me, the hortus conclusus, the enclosed garden you see in miniatures painted by monks in monasteries, friars who also tended the plants of the cloister. One idealized tree becomes the symbol for all trees; several blades of grass, three strokes of a fine brush, alternate with single flowers, delicately rendered, to represent all flowers, every detail intensified in luminous tempera and gold. At last a sort of frame is invented, a shape suggesting mass, meaning protection, a wall high enough to exclude the landscape and horizon…the materialization of an escape from the real world.

The hortus conclusus is an introspective garden, a metaphysical room with a sky for a ceiling. Because of its scale, the room shows each treasure – even the smallest detail – to great advantage. Fruits and vegetables seem more colorful, brighter and larger than they do outside. Fleeting sounds and fragrances get captured within: bees humming around the pear blossoms, the first drops of a spring shower in the fountain, the peppery scent of the marigold. The room itself remains constant, a foil for continuous changes in color and form as fruits and vegetables mature.

Puttering is a good word for describing what you do in this kind of garden.  A good deal of time is spent wandering, hovering, and performing chores in a movement that looks random.  A little pruning here, some tying back there, strawberries to pick, a bit of weeding, a new bug to identify – then back to pruning.  And even when you aren’t at work, your mind is puttering, moving from one thought to another and back again.

This way of thinking, this mind – puttering, is good for a painter…and different in kind than the intellectual exercise required by the classical Italian garden. In this space there are no meanings to be revealed, no narrative to accompany your path, no prospective views; everything is visible at once. Here time is not linear; it is cyclical having no beginning and no end. The hour of the day, the season, the weather – what you observe today are only temporary installations.

I pass by my studio, a hay barn, trying not to look in the door at the half finished painting on my easel, waiting for a rainy day.  Right now, except for winter salads and some black cabbage, the orto seems to be resting…but already the earth is beginning to stir and life goes on. We have to sort out our seeds and organize the beds. There are certain rules. For example the tomatoes like being near the onions and the marigolds. It’s time to plan a nice new structure for the beans to climb and another one for the tomatoes. The squash will enjoy clinging to a south wall and the beans will like the plot where the tomatoes grew last summer.

Nextam Partners; Via Bigli 11, Milano

Open until 28 February, 2010 9a.m. – 5 :00 p.m.

Recent work by this group of friends includes sculpture, paintings, and drawings. This is their first exhibition of the original group in 20 years! The show is presented by Philippe Daverio, its founder. All the artists continue to live in Etruria!

Porch, 9ox72cm., etching, 1978

First you have to imagine a young girl in an upstairs bedroom where there is a window facing a narrow road with an unpaved sidewalk backed by a rustic wooden fence. From the window she can make out the shingled roof of a rundown shack recently occupied by a hobo; just beyond it, invisible in the mist, begin the juniper growth and muddy terrain of Dismal Swamp and the tide waters of Virginia.

This girl will become my mother about fifteen years later but right now she has just lost her own mother and this is the first time she will sleep alone in a room she had always shared with her favorite sister who has just left home to live with relatives in New York City. Now she is afraid because across the street she can see a dark shadow lurking in the gap where a board is missing in the wooden fence.

This is the territory of Billy Bo Possum, a terrible creature who lived in the swamp, crawled out of the quicksand and captured children, dragging them under the earth with him. The hobo said that he saw the monster slip through the fence at night … Sometimes even in the day. The girl, her name is Margaret, pulls the sheets over her head and lies very still. Her father, at the far end of the house is pacing in his room.

At a certain point a door opens softly and she is overjoyed to hear her older brother’s gentle voice. He is home from the army, on special leave. His name is Buddy – this was the traditional nickname for an older brother in the south. I know he was tall and lanky and had red hair because my mother described him to me. I used to think of him as Uncle Buddy but I never met him.

However at this moment, in my mother’s story, he is her big brother sitting on the bed while she is crying. She is sure that Billy Bo Possum will come to get her.

Buddy looks out the window and stares at the fence lit by the street lamp. It is a damp night and the mist clings knee high to the ground. He tells Margaret not to worry, that he is going out for a short walk. She hears a screen door shut, then footsteps down the stairs of the front porch and looks out the window towards the swamp in time to see Buddy with his old hunting rifle squeeze between the wooden slats. He disappears into the mist. A billow of fog rolls from the direction of the Chesapeake. The only sound is a distant foghorn. Suddenly a shot rings out! She waits, motionless, at the window.

Trees night, 100x70cm, pastel, 1996

Finally she sees a shape move near the fence. Buddy emerges from the fog, his rifle over his shoulder. He looks up at her window. In a short while he is tiptoeing into her room to tell her not to worry, to settle down. He strokes her forehead; everything is going to be all right now. No one is going to harm her.

My sister and I were snooping through my mother’s keepsakes one day – we especially liked to rifle though her button box – when we came across a small silver box. In it were an eagle scout pin, medals, ribbons, a photograph of a field in France with rows upon rows of white crosses and the snapshot of a lanky red headed boy in a uniform. This man (who never became our uncle) was the hero who shot Billy Bo Possum.

Lulu's milk; 15x10 cm., ink, 1999

When I was a child my father liked to tell us stories of the different cats who had inhabited the farm he lived on during the summers upstate New York, Little Falls. Very often these stories – while not being exactly moralistic – did nevertheless illustrate a point. For example there was a blind cat that lived in the barn, a good friend to the cows, and caught mice despite her handicap. She also managed to raise a litter of four kittens and when she died of old age the cows stopped giving milk for almost a week. He liked to joke about cats being much more reliable than people since they let you know where you stood in their materialism and wisdom. Moreover their demonstrative warmth showed the absolute confidence, of someone who knows affection to be a birthright.

• Gatto (Lulu) arrabbiata, 27x12x6, bronze, 2009

Daddy liked to joke about death and reincarnation – I am sure that, although he was officially Episcopalian, his religion must have been a hodge-podge of spiritual beliefs mixed with ideas about nature from Emerson. But he liked to joke that in ancient Egypt they had a more accurate concept of god – at least as far as the cat images were concerned. He warned us repeatedly that he would be reincarnated as a big black cat.

I returned to the US from Italy with my new born son and five year-old only days before my father’s death after a long illness. We traveled upstate, my mother, brother, sister, husband and children to the old Iroquois burial site used by generations of my father’s family: the funeral was small and quiet with an unmarked grave under an ancient oak.  We visited my father’s childhood home, a rambling wooden farmhouse on the edge of an overgrown forest, and then headed back to the house my mother and father had lived in during his illness. This was a small cottage on the outer banks of New Jersey, about 200 meters from the surf of the Atlantic Ocean. It was late August and the island was almost deserted; summer vacationers had headed back to their homes in the city.

When we entered the house there was that familiar beach house smell that you only notice after an absence. Everything was as it had been the day we left except there was an oversize black cat sitting upright on my father’s chair. We looked at each other calmly, petted the cat, put out some chopped meat for him while my husband walked around the neighborhood to see if anyone was missing a large black cat. No one came forward so the animal casually continued on at the house for several days, showing us affection the way cats do until one day he disappeared. We never talked about this but I think my brother, sister and mother took it as one of those special gifts that chance often gives.

My father's house (scrapbook)

This event came to mind a few years later during advent when the parent-teachers’’ association at my son’s grammar school in Florence were discussing what to do about Christmas. Florence is politically to the left and so a holiday like Christmas, most of the parents felt, should be celebrated without much emphasis on religion. But my son’s teacher pointed out – rightly I thought – that the risk was a celebration that had more to do with consumerism than the traditional-cultural significance of the day. I was, though not religious, sympathetic to her view and started to say so when she said that the children in her class were so ignorant in their religious culture that one of them (and my face burned) actually believed that when you die you come back to the world for awhile as a large black cat to comfort the family you leave behind….

My father's cats (scrapbook)

Years later I was going through a box of books my sister sent me that had been in the family library when my mother left our big old house on Staten Island. Some of these were like old friends, the Ernest Thompson Seton books on wildlife, the James Fennimore Cooper books that took place along the Mohawk River valley of my father’s childhood, the Washington Irvings.  But one I had never seen. A black photo album with small snapshots, several for each page, neatly mounted, labeled in a child’s hand. Nearly all were photographs of cats…Folded notes tucked into the binding included comments or short accounts of each. In the unfocused background a farmscape – barns, pastures, a kitchen. The book ends with the boy – now twelve years old – on the top of a building in New York city.

My father in N.Y.C. (scrapbook)

Frankie; 10x20x10 cm., bronze, 2009

There are any numbers of ways of acquiring a dog today. The first is going to a pet shop, after due research on pedigree and characteristics, and purchasing one.  An alternative to the pet store – and more adventurous – is the adoption of a dog from the local dog pound or acquiring one after a search on the Internet.  Another way – and this one seems to be the most favored in this area (where most of our dogs work for a living either hunting, guarding vineyards from deer or finding truffle) – is waiting for a puppy from the new litter of a friend’s dog’s.

A more worrisome way of acquiring a dog – especially when you have never been a dog owner – is finding one in front of your studio door. Frankie was still a puppy of undetermined race and future size but easy to determine sweet character. Unlike all the cats I have known, Frankie’s chief goal in life seemed to be, from the very beginning of our acquaintance, to please me. “Unconditional love” is what they call it but as I observed him at work and play, I wondered if the situation wasn’t more complex; after all; didn’t I also enjoy pleasing him?

As far as his education, he seemed to intuit that I had little experience in dog training so he’d invent some of his own tricks until I picked up on them. Some, like his pointing at a bush where a pheasant was hiding, seemed to have been part of his black and white package.

Frankie (peeing)

Lately I look at dogs when they pass me on the sidewalk…I guess the same way mothers look at babies, by way of comparison. Of the animals I see, Frankie looks most like what I think of as a real “dog”…Maybe because he contains so many different combinations, he is able to speak not only for himself, but for all dogs. The other day, a hunter looked Frankie over and said he didn’t know what in the world he was. But, if he had seen him a few moments later, taking off, sprinting through a field, reappearing in leaps through the blowing grass he would have known: he is pure joy.

Frankie in the wind

International Photography Center

Scavi Scaligeri

Open until 22 November, 2009-10-14 10a.m. – 7 :00 p.m.

“This exhibition was designed to create the occasion to publicly announce the new course that Alinari 24 ORE is about to undertake in the field of contemporary photography and its art. The only restriction to which the various projects presented by the various artists were subject was that they had to be inspired by an image of the past, the concept of Memory, the Relationship space/time, the representation of a world whose images could be drawn from the immense « Fratelli Alinari » archive.”  Fabio Castelli

“These miniature subjects on an invented stage seem to have been caught by the camera as they pass through everyday life. While they are small and inconsequential, they are as large as life because photography always has to do with reality in the world at large.”  Frances Lansing