Museo Rufino Tamayo

Museo Rufino Tamayo is another one of Oaxaca's lovely small museums. It's a museum not of Tamayo's own art work, but of his personal collection of pre-Hispanic and colonial art. What I like about this museum is that the artifacts are grouped and arranged according to his personal preferences and artistic style, rather than chronologically.

The background of the displays in each room is painted one solid color, a color he used in his paintings. In this way the museum feels like a painting itself, made from a palette of antiquity and modernity. It was here that I came to draw.

Biblioteca

Oaxaca has beautiful libraries and this one is my favorite. I can't remember the name but it's not too far from the Hotel Azucenas. The last two photos are of the first and second floor views from inside the library. In the middle, a ceramic Virgen de la Soledad looks out onto the courtyard from above, and a collection of black clay pots is found nearby. I loved the night my after school wanderings brought me to this library where I did my homework in a room filled with art books open to the courtyard, the rain falling just a few feet from my desk.

Back here, in the US, I've been falling in love with libraries again. Through graduate school the library was a place I went to get other things done, with books as a background. A recent long walk brought me back to the UNM Fine Arts Library, with its view of the Sandia mountains and amazing collection of art books. I felt giddy, sitting cross legged on the floor, reaching up with both hands to pull out books according to whatever title or color caught my eye. Titles like "Baroque Art in Bohemia," "The Artist Who Swallowed the World," "Courtyard Gardens of Kyoto's Merchant Houses," and "Lament of the Images."

Alone in the stacks, discovering artists I'd never heard of, like Edward Bawden, Koloman Moser, Lasar Segall, and Henri Riviere. Students with laptops filled the periphery of the room while the books, like radiant tombs, held their center.

El Duende

Remembering Nick Bantock reminded me of what he told us about el Duende. Unlike the Muse who flits about, alighting on us from above and inspiring at her whim, el Duende is a deep creative force, a fire that burns up from the ground.

A fire to be stepped into. It comes up through the souls of our feet and burns within us as a creative passion. We are not merely touched by an angel, we become the channel and the chimney through which the fire rages.    -Nick Bantock

I feel them both, absolutely. Sometimes it's the Muse, who loves to show up while I'm trying to get other things done, like taking a shower or putting away the dishes. Sometimes it's el Duende who rises up, forcing me to create fearlessly while shaking from inside. Often though, it's plain old me, who, while wondering where everyone else went and if they're coming back, has to just keep going.

Cartas de Artistas

The museum has an impressive collection of letters and stamps, meticulously cataloged and arranged in pull out displays. I was thrilled to find letters written by Frida Kahlo. I love that the one shown above is sealed with a kiss from her famously lipsticked lips. I'm fascinated by the part of the letter I can read, which says something like, "If Diego asks you why I didn't go tell him it was because..."

So much of what we know about artists, their inner worlds and inspiration, comes from the letters they wrote. The letters written between Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Steiglitz, or Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo, are beautiful and revealing. I wonder how the loss of letters will affect our understanding of an artist's history and inner world. How will an artist's biography look different due to passwords and delete?

Estampillas

Original paintings used for Mexican stamps on exhibit at the Museo de Filatelia. My favorite memory of stamps took place eight years ago during a workshop with Nick Bantock, author of Griffin and Sabine. The workshop was called "The Alchemical Wedding," and explored the marriage of visual art and writing. We wrote in the mornings and did paintings and collage in the afternoon. I hold this as a template for the way my life will one day be.

I signed up for the workshop because I loved Nick Bantock's collages and couldn't resist the rare opportunity to study with him. Writing was a complete mystery to me then and I was in awe of those that could do it. I discovered there how writing too is a collage; of people you've known, places you've been, things you want and don't want to be.

One evening, while working in the studio, Nick brought in a bag of stamps and poured them out into a pile on the floor. On hands and knees we pored over the stamps. While we investigated each little detail, conversation flowed about fears and insights, far away places and every day things. I love conversations that emerge from being lost in the flow of doing something else, like painting, folding laundry, or shelling peas.

Fireflies darted outside in the darkness as mid-summer heat swirled with the cool evening breeze. Nick told me he'd observed that I had a lot of knowledge and insight but seemed hesitant when I went to speak. I told him that was how I felt, that often I sensed things but would get tongue-tied and hesitant, because I didn't know if I really knew what I was talking about.

"It reminds me of that famous speech," he said. "The one that says it's our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us."

He pointed out that the fear of doing the wrong thing makes it so we can't do anything at all, and really, the secret was going for it whether we know what we're doing or not, and to accept that mistakes are just part of it. "I f*ck up all the time," he said, while sorting stamps, "What can you do?" He then sat up, looked me straight in the eye, and declared, "I hereby give you permission to f*ck up!"

I felt something lift on that late summer evening while looking at stamps with Nick Bantock.

Museo de la Filatelia

I loved the Museo de la Filatelia, it's a beautiful museum of stamps, letters, and other things postal. Just as I wrote that sentence I heard that critical, nagging, voice within say "You sure do use the word 'love' a lot. It sounds too simple, there must be more to it. Do you really love so many things? You need to be more discerning, censorious, analytical, and professional."

I do? What is with that critical, nagging voice? Curious about how many times I've used the word "love" on my blog, I did a search and came up with 161 posts. I love that. And the way the things I love contradict and overlap.

I also loved the night, three years ago, when I was snowed in in Boulder, Colorado and the only place open was the Boulder Book Store. It was there that I discovered Brenda Euland's book, "If You Want To Write," and in it, this:

If you read the letters of the painter van Gogh you will see what his creative impulse was. It was just this: he loved something -the sky, say. He loved human beings. He wanted to show human beings how beautiful the sky was. So he painted it for them. And that's all there was to it.

When van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. He sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lamppost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: "It is so beautiful I must show you how it looks." And then on his cheap ruled notepaper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.

When I read this letter of van Gogh's it comforted me very much and seemed to throw clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I had thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about design and balance and getting interesting planes into your painting, and avoided, with the most stringent severity, showing the faintest academical tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.

But the moment I read van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

The difference between van Gogh and you and me is, that while we may look at the sky and think it is beautiful, we don't go as far as to show someone else how it looks. One reason may be that we do not care enough about the sky or for other people. But most often I think it is because we have been discouraged into thinking what we feel about the sky is not important.

Escritor Público

Street scenes, an embroidered eagle from one of my favorite museums, the Museo Textil de Oaxaca, and customers gathered around an escritor público, a public writer.

As a public writer of sorts, I find that one of the hardest things is that writing doesn't just happen. When it does just happen, I find myself becoming superstitious, or just hopeful, that what worked once will work again. I will remember that one time where I was at the 4th street Annapurna and the clouds shifted in the sky in a certain way and I wrote, I really wrote. Then I'll drive all the way out to the 4th street Annapurna and I will not be able to write.

I can write really well with White Monkey or Anxi oolong or Long Jing tea, but I need time to be crabby and uncomfortable until the flowering of the tea happens, and I don't always have that time. I don't drink wine and write, simply because I'm afraid it will go too well.

I just keep showing up, noticing what works, noticing what doesn't, and knowing it all may shift again. In her book, "If You Want to Write," Brenda Euland says,

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountaintop, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten -happy, absorbed, and quietly putting one bead after another...


...If you skip for a day or two, it is hard to get started again. In a queer way you are afraid of it.

I once had a patient who, I'll say, had a brain situation. She couldn't remember where she was or what we did day to day, but when I came to see her in the afternoon, she was always willing to set forth. She would give a deep sigh, say "Lordy, lordy, lordy," and we would set off to see what would and wouldn't work, to see what might happen.

I think of her these days when I sit down to write. I open a blank page with a deep sigh...lordy, lordy, lordy...and set forth to see what will happen.