Art Access - Articles

Write of Way: The Process by Mary Lou Sanelli

Monday, March 15, 2010 7:34 PM | Anonymous

Calvin Calls Me Sunshine

Hey, Sunshine, how ya doin’ this morning?” asks Calvin, his smile radiating like a child’s, a stack of Real Change newspapers in the crook of his arm, “Do ya want to help me out today?”

I say yes I do.

I like Calvin. I get his need to smile even when the weather scowls. He gets mine. Today we smile together, a duet. We nod. We joke. For a man living on the street, Calvin has a remarkable ability to give us a positive sense of our neighborhood, of us living in it. Of our belonging here.

And, sure, he likely calls every woman on the block the same sunny nickname. Still, I blush, a sucker for compliments.

I’ve bought Calvin’s Real Change newspaper for months now, ever since the first time he called me Sunshine. Even as a hard wind blew grit into his eyes and a Whole Foods bag blew past his feet, he smiled. A smile that split his face in two. From that point on, we began to cross a familiarity line, shifting from an awkward exchange of a dollar to matters of the heart.

That’s the thing about the homeless: they are there. On any given day, if you walk from the Space Needle to Pioneer Square (or the same distance in the core of your city, large or small), you will see how homelessness has spread alarmingly in all directions. It is a living thing, begging and competing, involving not only joblessness, but mental illness and all matters of despair in between.

These days, I’ve come to view these folks as less of an “other” than as acquaintances. There really is no other choice, other than completely ignoring them, which, I admit I do sometimes, not because I’m a cruel, cold person, but there are days when I’m just trying to hold it together myself, unraveling like a ball of yarn, and I can’t cross the distance, emotionally. So I go about my day, letting in only my life, the one in front of me, the one I need to keep afloat. I admit, on these more-fragile days, I fall back on passivity. I insulate, seal off, so I can move about without caving. Because it’s not only likely that I am going to get hit up for spare change, for receptivity that will break my conscience wide open, it can be depended upon. Until, by the time I reach my destination I’m thinking I need this like a hole in the head.

To me, though, the Real Change vendors offer a fair exchange — a buck for a well-written paper and the seller’s time to pitch it. Still, as I’m discovering a little more clearly every day, I can’t give money to all the needy vendors I pass in a Seattle downtown day, surely. So I picked Calvin.

Calvin stands out: his genuine smile, certainly, but it’s more than that. It’s his careful attention paid to his neighbors, his quality of good nature, his intelligent eyes and narrow — but not hauntingly-thin — body. The word that comes to mind about his personality is an old-fashioned one: winning. Even when he asks “How ya doin’?” the question isn’t momentary and without care, disconnected from any real interest. He looks you straight in the eyes and listens to your reply. Ladies! How many men do you know who do the same? Once his kindness caused me to forget my troubles completely and utter what I knew to be a stinking lie: “I’m great!” A better man in need — where is he?

I assume some of you already know the history of the Real Change News. If not, I’ll give you a short summary: www.realchangenews.org says: Real Change is a hand up, not a handout.

And it can work wonders.

One day back in October, Calvin was on Fourth & Virginia dressed in what appeared to be a brand new suit jacket. “Calvin, you look dashing,” I said. “You’ve found your style.”

About a month later Calvin told me he had a full-time job at the Goodwill Store in Ballard, “but I gotta keep selling my papers, comin’ back to my roots in Belltown.”

Now? Calvin works in sales at Macy’s. “They seem to like me just fine,” he said recently. “I just hope I can keep at it, keep myself up.”

I hope you can too Calvin. I can’t write any more just now. You inspire me beyond words.

Mary Lou Sanelli

Mary Lou Sanelli’s latest book is Among Friends. Does your organization need a wonderful new fundraiser? Check out The Immigrant’s Table at www.marylousanelli.com

Speak for the Trees by Kathleen Cain

Monday, March 01, 2010 2:00 AM | Anonymous

We human beings have a complicated relationship with trees. We get food from them, we once lived in them and occasionally still do, we admire their beauty, and some of us have even been known to hug them. We also cut them down, burn them, poison them, and use them to build houses, toilet paper, sawdust, and toothpicks.

All of these ideas are explored in words and images in “Speak for the Trees,” an exhibition and its companion book, both of which are showcased at Freisen Gallery from now until May 29. The book contains images of all 76 works that were submitted by painters, sculptors, photographers, glass artists, and conceptual artists from all over the world; many of them were created exclusively for this project. More than 50 of these are in the exhibition and that selection includes pieces created David Hockney, Yoko Ono, Mark Ryden, and the Starn brothers. The Northwest artists featured in this show are Julie Speidel, Spike Mafford, Michael Brophy, Martin Blank, Catherine Eaton Skinner, Laura Sharp Wilson, Steve Jensen, Janis Miltenberger, and 2009 Neddy Award Nominee Lynda Lowe.

It’s pretty easy to

get a little sentimental when it comes to trees, and some of these artists do. But that’s understandable. Trees are, after all, are the original performance artists. They live with their feet in the ground and their heads in the sky. They drop their clothes and go naked in the winter, then put them back on in the summer. Trees neither spin nor toil, unless you count that essential little product called oxygen. And they are such flagrant poets, flapping their leaves in collaboration with the wind in a million different ways to expand its vocabulary from gentle gossip to howling complaint. Think back to your earliest memories and see if they don’t include the shifting colors and mysterious sounds made by the wind playing in the trees.

But all of their art-for-its-own-sake tendencies tend to divert us from the fact that trees are much more than vegetable poets or hapless victims of our neglect and stupidity. They’re our caretakers. We don’t own them; they own us. Sit up and take notice because without them, we die.

The more you look at this book and exhibition the more you understand that we’re the ones who are going to be destroyed if we don’t stop destroying trees. The trees portrayed, observed, and sometimes flagrantly worshipped in this book and exhibition, possess dignity, power, wisdom, mystery, and most especially, a fine disregard for human presence. Some of the them are a bit sinister, it’s true, but even the most benign and whimsical ones don’t seem as if they will miss us when we’re gone. These trees may be temporarily vulnerable to our stupidity but if we don’t start paying attention to their survival, we will simply disappear. They will go on ruling the earth just as they have been doing since long before we showed up. And they will be here long after our dust has settled. After all, it wasn’t the missing people who miraculously rose up out of the ashes of Mt. Saint Helens. It was the plants and trees.

There are plenty of pieces I like in this show but I have room to mention just a few. Lin Rabin’s “Minuum #8,” a simultaneously nano and macro point of view, leaves you wondering whether you’re looking at trees from far, far away, or deep inside a chlorophyll molecule. Tom Zetterstrom’s romantic yet respectful portrait of an American Elm makes it clear that this is a tree you would never presume to hug without a formal introduction. Jennifer Bolandis spookily manipulates images from old postcards to remind you that it’s probably not wise to venture into an Irish forest at the close of the day. Catherine Eaton Skinner’s elegant encaustic panels of trees flanking one of her signature 108 grids won’t be in the show, but the piece that replaces them is every bit as fascinating and intricate. And Louis Reiner’s painting, “On Via Fagina #4,” reminded me of how a tree looks to a child: lofty, mysterious and grand but also nurturing and very much alive.

The trees that inspired these artists are neither fragile nor helpless. They don’t need us in order to survive; in fact they don’t need anything from us. It’s the other way around. Whatever we do to trees, we do to ourselves, only faster and more efficiently. So when we speak for trees, we’re really speaking for ourselves.

The message of this exhibit is that the seed has always been mightier than the sword. So go take a look. And even if you’re not a tree-hugger, you will probably start thinking about what trees have to do with our own survival.

Kathleen Cain

Kathleen Cain is a Seattle-based free-lance writer and bibliophile who follows art, admires trees, and refuses to sleep in the woods at night.

“Speak for the Trees” exhibit is on view from April 1 through May 29 at Friesen Gallery which is located at 1210 Second Avenue in Seattle, Washington. The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 10 A.M. to 6 P.M., Saturday from 11 A.M. to 5 P.M. The reception with many showcased artists in attendance is to be held on Thursday, April 1, from 6 to 8 P.M. For more information, please call (206) 628-9501, email friesen@friesengallery.com, or visit the website www.friesengallery.com.

Decent for a Change by Paul Hunter

Monday, March 01, 2010 2:00 AM | Anonymous

Even buying a loaf of bread
you don’t know where you stand
till you get the wrapper off
and sniff and taste it with
some of the expensive spread

you got in the habit
of smearing on cardboard
to kill the taste of it
once you lost your innocence
and started to wolf everything.

Of course you assume
you’re squeezing the genuine article
and you kind of see through the wrapper
but not down between all the slices
or past the curve of each heel

though on the outside as required
by law it says in tiny letters
everything that went in
the dough including preservatives
as well as what to watch out for

but then you bite on it anyhow,
laying it out like a broken paperback
you glue and slap together
to make a quick sandwich
without your reading glasses.

We all know good bread doesn’t last
and the bad you stuff yourself with
in a fit of depression
hangs around forever in the way
when you’re in your right mind

musty green under plastic
blooming with envy
as you keep reaching around it
to get at a little something
decent for a change.

Paul Hunter
Seattle, Washington

Featured on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Paul Hunter has published fine letterpress poetry under the imprint of Wood Works for the past 15 years. His farming collection, Breaking Ground, reviewed in the New York Times, won the 2004 Washington State Book Award. Companion volumes include Ripening, 2007, and Come the Harvest, 2008. His new book of prose, One Seed to Another: The New Small Farming, just appeared from The Small Farmer’s Journal. He is reading at the University Book Store on April 13, 7 P.M., and at Elliott Bay Books in its new store on May 2, 2 P.M. Visit the website www.woodworkspress.com for more information.