A Day at the Museum: Matisse Nearby, and Letting Inspiration Find Me

Henri Matisse "Yellow Odalisque"

I value inspiration, but I don't often go in search of it. Inspiration usually finds me via something else I’m doing—research for an already-begun writing project, a planned personal or business outing.

Like what happened during a trip to see the "Matisse and American Art" exhibit at the Montclair (NJ) Art Museum. Though this museum is a well-respected gem only a few miles from my house, I don't get there often enough. But my 2017 resolution is to support (not just talk about) organizations that matter—ranging from social justice to the arts. So I made a plan to attend the much-celebrated new exhibit, and pony up annual membership (so I'll be financially inspired to return). The timing meant my sister Cathy and I would have something to do together (other than haunt our favorite diners and bakeries) when she visited.

Cathy's the real art lover in the family; she knows the difference between Monet and Manet, and whether something is impressionist or impressive (or both). I enjoy looking at art, but for me it's always been an enjoyable sometime thing, not a passion.

Henri Matisse—and the American artists influenced by him—may have converted me. But the real bonus: new observations and thoughts about why I'm write  about some of the things I write about, my relationship to the prose, and even a few essay ideas. I'll keep the essay ideas to myself (half-baked as they are still), but as a writer, here's what I came away with:

+ Color! Rich, vivid, bold, drenched colors.(Yep, I used four adjectives in a row.) Colors saturated with ideas and emotion, suggestive and nuanced! Colors were speaking to me. Hard to believe some of Matisse's early critics called his use of color ugly and his first paintings something to laugh at. The world caught on, of course. A magazine feature on Matisse displayed notes, "All the colors sing together…like a musical chord." Like the words and sentences in a piece of writing.

Matisse, "Woman in Blue"

+ Matisse influenced so many artists. I was struck by John Baldessari's "Eight Soups" and Roy Lichtenstein's bronze "Goldfish Bowl II", which build on details in Matisse's works, combined with Warhol's soup cans. I'm reminded of how writers create new prose that couldn't exist if not for the foundations, references, styles of writers who came before. When writes quote Proust, build on a Shakespearian pun, obliquely reference Didion, they are both acknowledging those who paved new literary paths, and paying tribute, and if very lucky (and very good), perhaps making something that extends and expands instead of imitating.

+ Matisse believed in using "all the colors," and this spurs me to think more widely about all the literary tools at my disposal. It nudges me to remember about all the forms I don't regularly try, structures and organizational methods I want to experiment with but often pass over for the safer, more reliable methods.

+ Standing too close to visual art warps perspective. Stepping back brings the visuals into focus. Like creating distance from a manuscript draft is vital. Too close to the same material—page or canvas—and you no longer really see it.

Matisse, "Pianist and Checker Players"

+ My two favorite Matisse works were "Interior at Nice" and "Pianist and Checker Player"—the former because it brings me back to the feeling of being cosseted at a seaside inn (beautiful hotels being one of my favorite places), and the latter recalls my many childhood evenings when my sister was playing piano (beautifully), and I was playing checkers (poorly) with my mother. For writers, memory triggers—that can turn into stories and pages—are waiting everywhere!

+ Cathy and I were captivated by the bold, exquisite works of contemporary mixed media artist Janet Taylor Pickett and her "Matisse Series," which includes many pieces that play with the shape and colors of Matisse's "Woman in Blue" and his later-career cutout works, and the form and symbolism of women's dresses.

Janet Taylor Pickett, "Wrapped Up in Blue"

+ Like all great acts of inspiration, the visit tipped me into exploration—finding more Matisse works to look at online and reliving Pickett's exhibit via this compelling video, which she narrates and appears in, tracing her own inspirational journey to and from Matisse.

+ You can't visit the Montclair Art Museum without stopping at the George Inness permanent collection, and there on a placard was this, describing the 19th century American landscape artist:

"He refined an approach of conveying the greatest amount of information by means of the fewest marks of the brush."

A reminder about doing more with less, about, essentially, editing. How appropriate to end my excursion to the visual art world with this gentle reminder about the art of brevity in all art forms.

Images courtesy Montclair Art Museum

Guest Blogger Mary Rice on Finding Virtue in Women's Narratives

This is the second in a series of guest posts from writers who, like me, are contributors to Women Writing on Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing. You can read the first in the series here.  
Please welcome Mary Rice.

"And what do I say to my children?  Honesty has always been the bottom line between us, but did I really want them going through this with me during their final difficult years in college? On the other hand, how could I shut them out of this most important decision of my life?"  - Audre Lorde, from A Burst of Light: Essays on Living with Cancer
I admire women who, as storytellers, explore virtues in subtle, non-self-conscious ways. In the memoir excerpt above, Audre Lorde outlines the conflict in negotiating a personal plotline of living with breast cancer. As Lorde faces the decision of undergoing invasive and expensive treatment or letting nature take its course, readers begin to see the complexity of her circumstances. 

On the surface, her dilemma is whether to be honest with her children about her disease and the reality that she will die.  A deeper problem is whether treatment and fighting for her life demonstrates greater integrity than surrendering early to her mortal ailment.  For Lorde, the question of what is virtuous sustains the tension of the narrative. Whichever decision Lorde makes will carry consequences not only for herself, but for her family. Bravery is not demonstrated merely in the choice, but in the acceptance of whatever happens afterward. That acceptance, grounded in honesty, gives her narrative power. 

Let's look at the virtuous explorations of two other women authors—Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and Barbara Kingsolver -- who both negotiate questions of virtue in interesting and admirable ways that are also literary.  

"Suffice to say, I was the first member of our family to finish college and the first to marry out of my race.  As my husband and I began to raise our family, and as I sought for ways to live agreeably in Anglo-American society, my memories of Manzanar stayed far below the surface."  - Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, from Farewell to Manzanar.

Houston’s memoir of her experiences at Manzanar, an American camp of concentrated Japanese citizens during World War II, was assuredly about herself. Even so, Houston spends much of her narrative about Manzanar discussing her family she arrived with, as well as the family she came to know through friendship and trust.  She worked to harmonize family life and personal satisfaction.  Houston mentioned that she married “out of her race” as a confession to Japanese readers and as a way to assert honesty with herself.  Describing the ways in which she sought to live “agreeably in Anglo-American society” as a Japanese woman married to an Anglo man, simultaneously suggests acquiescence to a system while interrogating it. 

"I thank Virginia and Wendell Kingsolver, especially for being different in every way from the parents I created for the narrators for this tale.  I was the fortunate child of medical and public-health workers, whose compassion and curiosity led them to the Congo.  They brought me to a place of wonders, taught me to pay attention, and set me on an early path of exploring the great shifting tension between righteousness and what’s right."  - Barbara Kingsolver, Author’s note, The Poisonwood Bible.

Kingsolver reasons in her author’s note that even though her parents are not literally in the text, they make it into the book because they were the ones who took her to the Congo, taught her the observational skills necessary to be a gifted writer, and started her on a long journey of trying to figure out the balance between “the righteous and what’s right.”  Kingsolver’s statement suggests, just as Lorde’s and Houston’s did, that the virtuous action does not necessarily fit tidily in one recognizable place. The “shifting tension” Kingsolver delineates in her author’s note is precisely the mechanism by which narrators are bound together in story and authors are bound to the narratives they have designed. 

Lorde's, Houston's, and Kingsolver's writing explores the claim that truth is important to most people, but how truth interacts and entangles in life, is relative.  It is that kind of realization that I admire when I read and I hope makes it into my work when I write. 

Mary Rice writes frequently about the methodology of narrative in the context of folklore, geography, women’s studies, literacy, linguistics, and teacher education. Her work has appeared in many journals and collections. Her book Adolescent Boys’ Literate Identity was named Outstanding Publication of the Year by the Narrative SIG of the American Educational Research Association. 

Writing Time-Out: Movies, Milk-Duds, and MJ

"I don't care what they say. Ain't nobody's business..."

In some shots it's a body double. The production company is milking a dead man's profit-generating popularity. Parts of some songs are dubbed with old tracks. Too much movie-making craft obscuring the real story. It's all a hoax, he's living in an Eastern European castle, pulling everyone's strings. All hype, no history.

Say what you like (and the Internet is saying everything possible), I'm still going to see This it It, the Michael Jackson documentary film made from concert rehearsal footage. I'm fascinated by creativity, by the energy and process behind a multi-talented artist, by what occurs behind the scenes of any major event, and by film-making in general.

I don't think, as the conspiracy-theorists do, that it's a convenient coincidence there was so much high-quality rehearsal footage available, for the same reason I'm no longer shocked to discover that an author's 350-page award-winning novel has a backstory involving an unused 100,000 words, 4,000 pages, and 18 drafts.

To my mind, it's not so much about the "real story" of the run-up to Jackson's cancelled London concerts, but an opportunity to glimpse how the work of so many artists -- including musicians, choreographers, lighting technicians, dancers, etc. -- comes together to transform the original creative impulses of the singer/songwriter into a carefully intended experience for a particular audience.

Because isn't that what writers try to do every day (okay, maybe without pyrotechnics) -- to leave an audience (of readers) feeling differently than before?