Home Sweet Home

Re-entry

photo collage

So here I am facing a usual problem. It’s morning. I’ve been up since 6 am but I had dogs to care for, e-mail and social media messages to respond to, a lesson to plan and of course, I had to get ready. Now I have maybe two hours ahead before I have to head off to work at noon to run an art technique practice session for a group of ten participants, for which I continue planning as I write. My studio is downstairs, waiting for me to start working on a new series of clay sculptures. Trouble is, when I start making even the most simple, I’ll need more than two hours.

I suppose there are artists who can deal with four or five different responsibilities without losing the rhythm and energy needed for their art-making work. They can return to their studios after teaching or doing office or lab work and just pick up where they last left off, no re-entry, no decompressing or debriefing necessary. I just don’t know any. I have to re-connect with myself as an artist after I’ve been a teacher, a curator, or anything else requiring my non-artist attention. Just about all the artists I know have to as well.

The re-entry methods are varied among artists, but they are usually ritualistic. Head full of images and energy fired up to deal with the demands of life outside the studio, artists need a way back into their ideas. In my case, I have to find ways to calm my over-other-stuff-stimulated brain, to re-direct my nervous energy, to quiet the movie-worthy special effects of immediate memory and to refocus on being an image-maker. Quiet is essential for this.

When I’m finally in my studio, a Zen-style meditative period involves not stillness but movement: I have to re-connect with my studio. For me, it is a place, but it is also a kind of entity, a presence much like water is when one is swims in the ocean or a mountain is when one climbs up to sit atop it, or like music is when one dances. I enter my studio and my first act is a kind of Walkabout, simply appreciating the fact of the space. My next turn is to make sure it is clean, aired out, well lit and that materials and equipment are where they need to be.

Invariably, my next contact is with my tools. Taking them up is like returning to old friends. I touch them one by one - how I especially love the feel of wood on my fingers! - even as I call to mind the gestures they allow me to make by extending my reach or by enhancing the sensitivity, dexterity or strength of my fingers. It’s reassuring to know they are ready to get to work.

Maybe next I’ll go through my sketches and plans. In between series of images there is always a choice to be made. Despite being engaged in other activities. I will often be moved by an idea I have to record or lose. Over time, a collection of these amasses, each waiting for its turn at life. If I’ve not come into the studio with a specific one in mind, a review of my sketches allows me to remember what inspired them and what I intended for them. Choosing one idea to follow is both difficult and exciting because even the best planned has a way of mutating as it evolves.

Next I touch the clay. Having moved into this new studio not so long ago, I’m not equipped anymore to mix my own recipe, so I purchase it in boxes containing two twenty-five pound blocks of it kept moist in plastic. It needs care. The kneading process, called wedging, is both physical warm-up for me and a way to strengthen the clay. There is sensual pleasure in the feel of it, an excitement at the possibilities its malleability suggests. This is true despite the fact that it is extremely difficult to wedge since I broke my wrist and it didn’t get reset properly (the dangers of stepping out of the studio onto the ice coating my world). Oh well. Pain is now just another intimate part of the creation process.

As I prepare the clay, my focus is on visualizing how I will transform this amorphous mass into a variation of the image I’ve imagined or sketched. There is a plot to that story, a setting, a variety of characters in minor roles, transformation, conflict and climax of the action and finally either a heroic or tragic ending. I will successfully support the clay through its many stages from dough to rock-hard sculpture, from a shapeless mass to a work of art, or it will collapse halfway or blow up when i put it in the kiln for its first firing.  Call me a romantic, but luckily, I’m not very good at creating tragedies.

The trick to all this is to have the time to go from re-connecting with the idea, the material the gestures and the tools to finishing the work. That takes a lot longer than two hours.

Two on a Tightrope

They

photo colage

On a recent occasion, I met a friend, a successful business owner, for coffee. His wife is a painter, but she hasn’t painted recently, and this is making them both very uneasy.  True, he said, her art making has been disrupted these past few years by obligations to family and by the demands of both their jobs. She makes good money teaching art but of course, his business must be the priority and he depends on her helping him at need.

However, she’s had an extensive art education, she’s an expert in her technique and imagery, she has produced works of great mastery and beauty in the past, AND she often has plenty of time in the evenings. Yet she doesn’t paint, after supper she sits in her studio by the kitchen, staring at blank canvases but not producing. This makes her both frustrated and depressed, affecting even their otherwise solid relationship.

“What,” he asked,  “can I do to help her?”

Well, back we go to the question of the artistic process. I said:

“You don’t forget how to run a business if you stop doing it for a long period of time. However, getting back to it after a hiatus doesn’t mean that you are the person you were. What makes you successful at it is CONTINUIITY.  You’ve been focused on it for five, six, seven years, you make it your priority and your family’s, you’re on top of developments in your field, you’re right there when an opportunity presents itself or a promising contact is made, you are eager to create new outlets for your business and spend considerable time with your wife’s help creating them, you are ‘in it to win it’ as they say. You don’t just do your work in your’ free’ time in the evenings; chances are you continue it.

“Yet, you expect ‘your wife’ to sustain a serious, professional practice on a part-time, when-I-can-spare-you time. How is that even logical? You are a businessman, you know what it takes to succeed at an endeavour, how can you be surprised that she doesn’t? I suspect you are aware but in denial of the reasons.

“There are only two possible answers to your question.

“One: while you say you value your wife’s talent, while you assert that you support her in her work, while you pressure her to ‘be productive’, you actually believe and communicate that her art is a quaint pastime, something she can easily shelf for awhile and be none the worse for it. That has to change. It will perhaps fly against all your social conditioning to put your wife’s profession on a par with your own, especially given that you believe yours is more profitable, but that is what you must do. You must respect and support her professional needs as she does yours.

“Two: you are unconsciously and inadvertently manipulating her sense of loyalty/responsibility and her insecurity as a businessperson to sabotage her independence. You know her, you know her ability to focus, you are aware that once engaged, her attention to her work is totally dedicated - indeed, her practice demands that level of commitment. The only way you can be sure she is at your side is to be constantly in need of her and to keep her looking to the future by promising she will get to her business ‘soon’ but postponing when that ‘soon’ will become ‘now’. I

“f you don’t want her to reach her limit, and from your question I sense that she is very close to it, that ‘soon’ has to be ‘now’, no more delaying tactics.

“The fact is that without painting, she is at most 50% of who she really is. Deprived of her art, she deprives you of that essential part of herself, the creative and imaginative self, the engaged and optimistic self. The longer she is without it, the more she will lose energy, interest in and enthusiasm for her life. Love will be subsumed by her frustration, anger, resentment, and if she loves you too much to make demands of you, if she’s too empathetic to your needs, if she doesn’t leave you, she will nevertheless withdraw the rest of her from you and your love for her will wither. She will not remain the person you knew. Your husband/wife relationship will go the way of so many others and neither of you will thrive.

"How can you help her? The same way she helps you. You can help her by listening to what she needs and standing with her as she strives and achieves it."

More than the Sum of its Parts

Waiting

colour pencils

Over the holidays, I visited the home of two graphic artists. In their spare time, they share a studio where they paint. One uses acrylic colours to render representational but imaginary landscapes; another uses acrylic pastes to get textures and overlays ‘skins’ made with acrylic gels, the imagery derived from photographs. They have quite a stack of paintings but as they pulled one after the other out to show me, they said apologetically, “It’s not finished.” It turns out that neither is ever satisfied with his or her work. He never finishes his; the she repeatedly paints over hers.

While both have taken many art technique courses, they work on their art when they have time, sometimes weeks apart. To them, it’s a leisure activity that they nevertheless approach with high expectations: their imagery should work; everything is in place for it to work, and yet they are frustrated and discouraged because it doesn’t. “What can we do to fix this painting?” they asked, showing me one with a background sky in a painterly, abstract style and a foreground tree in a graphic, narrative style. “You need not just to know the words, you need to understand the language.” I said, “And then you need to become fluent in it.”

It is pretty huge. It’s also daunting. People expect art to be easy, accessible, enjoyable, an instantaneous result of ‘inspiration’. It is that, at first, for the child artist encouraged to discover expression, or for the amateur finding the courage and the leisure to ‘just do it’; it is almost that as well for the professional after many years of painstaking work. The hard part is for the people in the middle, those with enough training and knowledge to have expectations but without the work ethic or the dedication to process to find a way to fulfil them.

To the two painters looking at the landscape, I pointed out the disconnection between the elements in the painting, between the subject – the tree - and the background – the sky. Two different ‘styles’ were being represented in the work and they were in conflict: the sky was painted with a flat brush and fluid gestures, the stormy sunset colours blending and separating without hard edges or still spaces. The tree, on the other hand, centred on the canvas, had a fixed trunk and a leaf mass created by the tip of a round brush dabbed onto the surface, each dab a bright, defined, static shape, one colour on or beside another. There was no storm and no sunset anywhere in the tree.

It looked like the artist couldn’t decide whether to ‘express’ the image or ‘describe’ it, two different aims of which the artists were totally unaware (I blame their education).

When questioned, the artist finally decided that the more painterly approach, the one that referred more to abstraction than representation, was the ‘right’ one. The task now was to help the artist re-think the tree, re-visualize it as an expression of a tree rather than its description. “How?” was the perplexed question.

We all ‘know’ a sky is ‘already expressive’, it moves and changes as we watch, it suggests movement and fluidity, and even when captured in a photograph it has no hard edges. How indeed does one express a solid object made up of fixed forms  - trunk, branches, leaves -  as having form but not fixed in place? How even to override the typical or familiar definitions of objects, in this case of ‘tree’, especially when one works from a photograph (usually a badly taken one, or an appropriated one), that denies actual experience, time and movement, to be able to perceive the tree’s growing energy, its dance with the light and the winds?

There is the crux of these artists’ problem. Art is as much about ‘gesture’ as it is about subject. By ‘gesture’ I mean a number of things: the lines of movement and energy in the subject; the physical way the subject inhabits its space, how it is affected by the energies around it, both physically and as ideas (a building, for instance, is a more complex reality than a box sitting in perspective on the ground). As important is the artist’s ‘gesture’: how the paintbrush (or pencil, or sculpting tool, or…) is held, how heavy or light it is, with what movement and force does it touch the canvas, how tight/loose, small/large, focused/sweeping are the artist’s movements as paint is delivered to the canvas; what level of stamina must the artist have to sustain these gestures and for how long; how to maintain focus during the most difficult or challenging moments…

In this ‘gestural’ way, art making is as much a sport as, say, javelin throwing or tennis or hockey, it requires a similar type of training, the re-calibration of body and mind in relation to tools, space and timing to achieve the best result. This takes time, what’s called ‘practice’. Why would a painter sit down at a canvas ‘cold’, expecting to create a perfect image out of thin air? Yet this is what many do; this is what these two painters do.

I gave the artist an assignment to answer the “how?” practically. First, since the tree image was derived from a photograph, I advised her to sit with the photograph but to look at it through a film, perhaps a sheet of Mylar or some wax paper from the kitchen. Then to draw it in graphite maybe ten or fifteen different times with loose gestures, trying to ‘see’ light and shadow through variations of speed and pressure as she worked quickly. Having done this, I advised her to stop, to go do laundry or have supper, but to do these things visualizing what she had seen happening on her paper. (this helps develop a deliberate visual/physical memory of the exercise). After awhile, or the next day, I told her to go do the same but looking at a tree in her yard, now trying to ‘see’ the relationship between the solid parts (trunk, branches, leaves) and the movement (clouds, wind, changes in the light and in the directions of elements). Lastly, she was to do the same two exercises, again with visualizing breaks, with coloured pencils or with pastels (though pastels generate toxic dust and must be used safely). The colours chosen eventually should be matched to the colours she wanted to retain in her painting of the sky/tree.

Having done all this, the artist had to decide to re-paint the tree in the painting with the same gestures used in the practices but from the memory of the results obtained, or to start the painting fresh thinking of sky and tree not as two separate objects in the same place but as related elements of the same experience. That second choice meant the artist had to understand what the experience was (A storm-resistant tree? The beauty and power of nature? A heroic stand against opposing forces? All of the above?) and what aspects of it the painting would express.

The more engaged people become with materials and subjects to make art images, the more they, and those who watch them create, expect from their work. However, without a sustained practice, without research and experimentations, without knowledge that increases with each failure or success, the more difficult it is for the work to live up to expectations. Process in art isn’t just about making a bit of time, clearing a little space, setting up a few materials, choosing a subject and beginning and ending an image. There is much more to it than that.

I saw some dismay in the artists’ faces because I’d not given them a quick fix for the image. I just hope they commit to the process. I look forward to seeing what comes of it. Maybe as a result, he will get to finish his images and she will resolve rather than erase her paintings.

A Chip on Her Shoulder

Chip on Her Shoulder

(see description below)

            My artistic choices are these: I have long mined my own life experience to extract the thematic raw material that defines it.  I use this self-referential method because I explore ‘the human condition’ as a kind of visual storyteller. I work figuratively and representationally, and I use symbol and metaphor in a literary sense.

My work is born of my strong sense irony; it grows out of my observation of the conflicts, contradictions and absurdities that complicate even the most ordinary lives. Yet, I hope through my technique and my commitment to my media and to my subjects to reflect my deep respect for the fact that despite our limitations of body and mind, we keep working at trying to figure it all out.

Because I think and remember best in images, and because I have a vivid and associative visual imagination, I wish simply to engage in the practice of image making and the conversation about it that began with the first mark made by the first human hand to wield a tool expressively. My brain is large enough to accommodate a huge variety of imagery and ideas at once, albeit sometimes chaotically, which for an artist is a good thing, I’ve discovered. I suspect this is because the inner vision on which I as an artist focus is perhaps more perceptive than the outer. What my mind’s eye (or my third eye) ‘sees’ is not just what my physical eyes see, but is the result of all my senses, plus memory, the intellect and the imagination ‘seeing’ in concert.

Using imaging and creation techniques I learned during my dance, creative writing and theater studies and practices, which subsequently merged in my visual arts practice, I create imagery that blurs the boundary between inner, or subconscious, and outer, or conscious realities. It is also influenced by the many cultures of which I am a product, and the experience of being an immigrant or an outsider many times over. My work has at different times been called ‘magic realism’, ‘psychological narrative’ or ‘conceptual representation’. Whatever else it is, it is clay, pencil, paint and a lot of time in the studio.

Chip on Her Shoulder

1987

Talc body clay, underglazes, glazes

12”x17.5”x11”

Self portrait with ‘the’ Winged Venus (Winged Victory of Samothrace) from the Louvre collection.

It is my observation that art history is the ever-present companion to a serious, if at times harassed, artistic practice.

As Canadians Gear Up for Elections in 2015

Gardening

photo collage

Elections have become stressful times to which I do not look forward. 2015 approaches, however, and I’m afraid it will be yet another campaign with a ‘lesser of evils’ outcome, especially for those of us in the Arts.

I had a thought as Canadian politicians begin their pre-federal-election campaigns. Maybe there could be a requirement that people wishing to put their names forward as candidates first complete a rigorous degree on Leadership, regardless of their political parties.

Oh, I know many people disdain education, and higher education especially.. They’ve made it without Masters or PhDs to influential positions by sheer will, arrogance, and canniness. I think that’s not because education is over-valued, but because of individual personalities. We all admire people with drive, ambition and self-confidence, and they, whether they have degrees or not, rise to the top.

Problem is,I think that a community, no matter its scope, is not really defined by its elite, its business, its military or its competitiveness. These things are the direct result of its Culture: they are a result of the Values that define it and the way it applies these as it relates to other communities. A community, especially when it is ‘A Nation”, is an extremely complex and nuanced entity, even in dictatorships, even when they grow out of terrorism or colonialism. This is true especially in a country that functions democratically, especially in a country like Canada that prides itself on its multiculturalism, its social safety network and its sober, fair approach to international relations. Any Canadian leadership candidate should have to prove she or he is up to leading the community from these core Values.

In Canada, the Leadership degree could be offered by existing universities but evaluated by an independent body. Representatives would come from all regions of the country. For regional-level leaders, for instance, each region would select its best thinkers in public, private, military and corporate sectors, male and female, to create the curriculum, including rigorous Human Rights and Heritage sections. For national level contenders, top thinkers the world over would design and add courses to cover World Cultures, Global Environment and International Human Rights, for instance. The course creators would determine the grading, standing structure and examinations, select the educators (for limited, rotating contracts) and award the Leadership degrees. For these degrees, a balanced number of men and women would have to enrol.

Courses would cover the major areas of public concern: men’s, women’s, children’s, seniors’ and family rights (regardless of religion or orientation), Aboriginal rights, military rights, animal rights and health, human health, environmental health, education, culture, multiculturalism, visual and performing arts, sports, competition, infrastructure, economy, budget, international affairs, technical and scientific research and development, banks, etc. A scoring system could be determined, and a minimum total score required for the person to earn the right to be a ‘Leadership Candidate’.

Once so prepared, and only then, the graduates would be eligible to run for office. They would each be expected to conduct themselves like leaders: no more talking down to or disdaining voters, no more gratuitous attacks on their opponents, no more focus simply on charisma or personality. And no more promises without a clear, concrete explanation of how they would honour these promises: perhaps their platforms could be drafted as legal contracts?

Why a degree? Why not just business acumen or a camera-friendly face or a strong lobby group and an ‘après moi le deluge’ attitude (Oh, Steven!)? Because somewhere somehow, prospective politicians need to understand that leadership is not the same as ownership. They need to be more than the sum of their own interests. Making them become learners might help to broaden their thinking, un-blinker their eyes, re-direct their attention and make their candidacy about broad-based ideas and achievement, not power grabbing or partisanship.

Maybe really good people are hesitant to run for office because they don’t feel qualified, leaving it to ‘career politicians’ to focus on keeping their jobs rather than on leading. Maybe they’ve lost faith in the electoral system, which seems to have been tampered with to serve… whom? Too many candidates grasp for power by any means during elections and then forget they are elected and not divinely appointed, protected by their term of office and rewarded for their ‘service’ no matter what its quality with a nice, for-life pension at the end.

Perhaps what I propose would be complicated. Perhaps it would take a huge amount of effort, cooperation and be costly. Perhaps it would affect everyone’s behaviour. Perhaps it would require the involvement of more citizens than currently turn out to vote. Perhaps it wouldn’t solve all leadership problems in the world, for, as far as I can see, they are huge.

Maybe it would be worth the trouble.

All About Perspective

Mind's Eye

photo collage

The first time someone saw me the way I saw myself was when, I think it was a fellow grade six student said, “Hey, you’re AN ARTIST!” with that emphasis that communicates both delighted surprise and respect. It was wonderful to hear it like that, as something good, and as something real to someone else, not just to me. I heard that voice in my head for many years subsequently, and it made me smile every time.

It wasn’t until I was a young adult and traveling in Italy that I heard that particular statement said with that particular emphasis again. Between that day in elementary class and my trip to see all the art I’d only ever seen reproduced in books during my studies were many comments more in the style of “You on welfare?” or “So what’s your real job?”

I was staying in a pensione with people who apparently spoke very little English and no French. I’d gotten the room through the service at the train station when I arrived in Florence, and had managed so far to communicate only with smiles and nods until one morning at breakfast. I was sitting quietly, waiting to be served by the mother of the house, when a child of about eight came up to me holding a binder in his hands. My binder, which I’d left on my bed in my supposedly private room.

At that moment, the boy’s father walked in from one side of the apartment, and the older sister came storming in from another. Over the cowering boy’s head there ensued such a loud exchange accompanied by so many hand gestures that I feared for the boy’s head. I said, “It’s ok!” and had to repeat it loudly to cool the room down. I understood that the older sister had gone to my room to change the sheets on my bed and that the brother had illegally followed her. It was a punishable offence.

As a distraction, I invited the boy to sit beside me and encouraged him to look through the binder. His family came to stand behind us to see. My binder contained my portfolio. Along with paperwork there were four slide sheets, each with twenty slides (remember those?). Before I could take a sheet out of the binder, the boy started pulling individual slides out of the sheets to hold them to the light and then pass them around. I watched. One after the other examined the images carefully. Faces grew focused, serious. The silence unnerved me.

My work was … unusual, at least as far as the ‘average person’ was usually concerned. It was not what people expected when they heard “I am an artist”. In the early eighties, being ‘an artist’ mostly meant being a painter, and failing that, a sculptor of big things in metals, found objects or involving technology and elaborate architectural installations.

Clay sculpture, I’d say when people asked me what I do, and people expected to see not art but ‘ceramics’, that is, clay made into objects and glazed for use, usually involving liquids or food. Or yet people expected to see clay used purely expressively, for the focus to be on the clay’s plastic (meaning malleable) properties rather than on classical-style control. My work did not (and still does not) fit neatly into those expectations. My sculptures were ironic; they referenced Surrealism and represented people caught in moments of inner conflict or confusion or daily objects animated theatrically and symbolically.

But I was in Italy, and this was Florence. Nearby was Fiesole, a hill where once the Etruscans lived. As in other European countries, the Czech Republic, for instance, clay was still a respected old-world material.

When all the slides had been examined, the father of my pensione family turned to me. In English, he said, “You are an artist,” with the same mixture of surprise, delight and respect I had heard so long ago. It’s all he said then, but after that it was as if I’d been adopted into the family. No longer just a foreign roomer to be kept at a distance, I became a kind of celebrity aunt. It turned out they all spoke English, so over meals we talked art: what a delight I had to discover that all the family members could discuss the art I saw in the various museums in the city with proprietary pride and surprising knowledge

That memory sustained me through another bunch of years, until I had enough of a body of work for it to help me “suffer … the heart-ache and the thousand natural (and unnatural) shocks that…” being an artist is heir to (to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Hamlet).

In Another Place, At Another Time

In Another Place, At Another Time

The story begins on a family visit. Father, mother, five-year old son and one-and-half year old daughter are visiting the father’s brother’s family. The uncle has two twin teenaged sons who are forced to be home for the gathering.

When the cousins are gathered, the twins are assigned the entertainment of the children. Off the four go to the boys’ room in the back of the house, out of earshot of the adults gathered in the living room. The plan is this: the twins will give their cousins toys to play with and sneak out the kitchen door to join their friends.

The five-year old boy is easy enough to occupy. He sits happily in a corner pretending to fly the planes and race the cars he is given. The chubby baby girl is another matter. She not only walks, she runs, and the second her hand is free of a cousin’s hold, she is off, laughing happily. The twins have to chase her all over the room. Her laughter, however, is contagious and soon the teenagers forget their plan and are playing like five-year olds with their cousins.

When the two sets of parents come to gather their children, they are astonished to find the cousins all laughing uproariously. The merriment is caused by the baby’s delight at being swung by the arms between the twins as her brother lies under her swinging feet, either tickling them as they fly by or pretending they are trampling him. The play is interrupted, the five-year old and his sister are gathered up and amid more laughter and farewells, no one pays attention as the baby cries when her coat is put on.

By the time they get home, everyone’s nerves are frayed. The baby has cried the entire way. Nothing calms her; everything the mother tries makes her cry the more, distracting the father as he drives. Once home, the girl refuses warm milk, she pushes the father’s stroking hand away, she cries though her bath and cries until the parents fight. The father leaves the house to go smoke in peace and the brother is sent to his bed without supper for being uncooperative.

For the entire next day, the baby, exhausted, slips in and out of a fretful sleep and whimpering wakefulness. The father is relieved to spend the day at work, the brother happy for once to be in pre-school; the mother feels increasingly helpless and afraid. When the father comes home, they agree they must take the child to the doctor, cost what it may. Something must be wrong beyond teething or gas. The baby won’t eat, but worse she doesn’t tolerate to be touched. Another sleepless night follows.

The doctor examines the child but finds nothing to explain her reactions. “Spoiled!” he announces finally. The treatment? “Let her cry!” The father pays. They go home. They try ignoring her but neither parent can stand leaving the baby alone. Anyway, she doesn’t stop. They sit with her all that third night, taking turns singing softly to her and feeding her formula by the drop as she lies on her back in her bed. By now she barely moves though she keeps up a soft mewling unrelieved by sleep.

Now it’s the weekend. The beach is nearby. The parents agree that they all need fresh air. Perhaps the baby will be happier on the beach. Preparations are made, the mother carefully gathers the half unconscious child in her arms, provoking loud cries that gradually become softer, weaker. As the family walks to the beach, father and son slightly ahead, they try to ignore the looks people give them. The baby continues to cry softly as her mother holds her protectively.

Now they have passed a row of vendors who have set up shop along a stone retaining wall on the beach when the mother feels a tug on her skirt. “Mom,” someone says. She keeps walking. “Mom,” someone says again and she stops and turns, annoyed.

“I won’t buy anything, go away,” the mother says to the girl standing beside her. The child is maybe seven years old, not very clean in her unkempt clothes. Her teeth are brown and her fingernails are broken.

The father has returned with his son to stand with the mother, he says angrily, “What do you want?”

The girl doesn’t flinch, “My granma, she wants to talk to you, mom. There.” and the girl points back along the row of vendors. The father, mother and son turn to look. There, sitting cross-legged on a blanket on the sand is an old woman. She doesn’t look much better than the girl; in fact, she is very old, very bent, and obviously very poor, obviously a widow for she is dressed all in black. She is staring at the family, a vacant look in her eyes.

“We don’t want anything,” the father says but the mother is looking intently at the old woman. She is blind.

“Please, mom,” says the girl, “It’s about your baby.”

To the father’s surprise, the mother is walking to the old woman. He follows with the son to join his wife by the old woman’s blanket.

“Your baby,” says the old woman “she’s crying.” The father snorts. He’s seen this kind of thing before: she’ll offer to sell them some potion or some spell.

But the mother, near tears, says, “I don’t know why.”

“Shh,” The old woman listens, tilting her head. “That baby is hurt.” She shifts, stretches her legs with great difficulty before her on the blanket in a ‘v’. Then says to the mother, “will you trust me?”

The father stands surprised as the mother does not hesitate. She bends and gently hands the baby to the old woman who takes her as if she is made of glass and lays her on the blanket between her legs, feet toward her. Her hands are arthritic but to the mother watching her every gesture, she moves her fingers like they are butterfly wings caressing the child’s body, gently exploring until they hover over the baby’s shoulders. “Ah!” it’s a breath sound, but it could be a shout.

Moving quickly, the blind old woman grasps the baby’s right shoulder with her right hand and putting her left hand on the baby’s chest, snaps her wrist. There is a barely audible pop and then silence. Silence. The baby stops crying. Just like that, after days of it, she stops crying. With the old woman’s hand on her chest, the baby takes a deep breath, sighs and falls deep, deep asleep.

The mother kneels and kisses the old woman’s arthritic hands. The father is reaching into his pocket, shamed, he is peeling bills out of his wallet but the old woman shakes her head. “No money,” she says. “Love your baby.”

            That baby grows up with a desire to embrace space, a longing for unfettered movement, and a passion for malleable form. And she comes to love stories, the kinds in which change defeats stasis and where obstacles are nothing to potential.