I thought I would write another post about Jack Kerouac, and I will before too long, but as I was thinking about art and the creation of art, I found myself thinking about Helen Hardin.
About 20 years ago, I one day visited the local county library in Bremerton, Washington, where I then lived. I spent an entire afternoon looking at every single book in the art section. Why? Maybe because I write -- words tend to be my medium in this life, and not images. Back when there were still bookstores (Amazon doesn't count), I would spend time thumbing through art magazines, searching for images that moved me or called to me in some way. A visual image does something to me that I can't quite articulate, stirs something visceral, internal, but something which I can't easily put into words. And I find that valuable. It puts me in touch with a feeling-center in myself that isn't verbal or intellectual. The verbal side of life was too easy for me, for a long time. It's less so now, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. I have less access to the subconscious mind, less easy access anyway, but there's no doubt that with age, if you're lucky, you also deepen and you have a kind of emotional gravitas that wasn't there or was out of your reach when you were younger. It is time's gift to you as the lyricism of youth wanes.
I found a book about Helen Hardin called "Changing Woman," which opened up an entire world to me. Helen was a Tewa, or at least partly. Her mother, Pablita Velarde, was a full-blooded Tewa of the Santa Clara pueblo, situated between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Pablita was a strong woman. Born in 1918, she became a painter, which was discouraged by the more traditional members of her pueblo. She also crossed paths with her pueblo by choosing to paint some of their sacred images. And lastly, she married a white man. Pablita chose a difficult path in life and suffered thereby, but she was true to her path and carried on nonetheless.
Pablita and her husband had Helen. Helen's fate was to not be accepted by either world; neither her pueblo, which would not allow her to participate in their sacred ceremonies, nor by the white world, which excluded her with its own bigotry and prejudice. But Helen inherited her mother's determination and indomitable spirit, as well as her mother's artistic talent. What I find particularly interesting about Helen's own artistic path is that she took many of the images that were important to her mother and carried them further. Helen painted small, stylized and geometric kachinas, as well as other images that held a very concentrated and symbolic spiritual power. It wouldn't be inaccurate to state that Helen's paintings were vivid and concrete expressions of her own spiritual struggles to internalize a world which she'd not been allowed to experience fully in a more human manner.
Back in the fall of 2016, I accompanied a friend on a trip to Albuquerque. My friend's father had passed away and she needed to go back and close out bank accounts, clear out a storage locker, and tie up loose ends. She simply didn't want to make the drive alone and asked me to join her as co-driver on the trip.
I love road trips and hadn't been in the Southwest for several years, though I was married there and lived in northern Arizona for a time. My friend and I had some time on our hands while there so we took one day and went an hour north to Santa Fe.
I had discovered that there was an art gallery in Santa Fe dedicated to Pablita Velarde and Helen Hardin, called "The Golden Dawn." It had been started by Helen's daughter, Margarete Bagshaw. I had an intense desire to visit this gallery, and happily, was able to do so.
As I walked into the gallery itself, I realized that Margarete was also an artist, and she had taken some of the imagery that her grandmother Pablita and her own mother Helen had developed in the course of their own careers, and Margarete had taken it even farther. Whereas Pablita's work was visually simpler and on canvases of a conventional size, and Helen's were concentrated, sometimes geometric, and often on very small canvases, Margarete's work was abstracted, modern, and on very large canvases, often several feet wide and high. But she had taken the same images that her grandmother and mother had worked with, those same sacred Tewa themes, and had extended them into the world of modern art, awash with vibrant colors. I loved it all.
In fact, I stood in the middle of that gallery, extended my arms, slowly turned 360 degrees around and said out loud, "I can't believe I'm finally here!" I felt I was in a sacred space. The caretaker of the gallery came up and took my hand and led me to a table where she started handing me all sorts of materials for free -- posters of exhibitions, tee shirts with images, biographical videos, even books. I honestly felt a kind of awe at the work these three women, all from one family, had accomplished over the course of their respective lives and careers. My hat's off to all three of them.
Helen died of cancer in 1984. Pablita passed in 2006, and Margarete had died the year before my visit, I think. I was so grateful for the chance to visit that gallery. I had been living with Helen's artwork and images for many years. I'd attended a symposium on her life and work at Sonoma State University. To finally see the work itself, and to discover her mother's and daughter's work at the same time, was just such an incredible experience. I'm really speechless to describe it.
So I did the next best thing I could do. The following summer I returned the favor of this trip by taking an artist friend of mine who lived on Camano Island in Washington state, and driving her to Santa Fe so she could stand in this gallery as well. The curator of the gallery had begun to change the emphasis of the art therein to reflect other artists' work, which is understandable -- otherwise the gallery would become merely a mausoleum. But most of the work I had seen was still on the wall, and we had a chance to look at canvases that weren't currently being displayed.
I would encourage anyone to explore the work of these three women and their amazing legacy as a family, as artists, and arguably, as representatives of their pueblo and their people.
There is an aspect of Helen that is important to me as a writer. She is in a sense a muse, an anima figure. Her imagery and style evoke that nascent whorl of creative energy for me. The process of creativity often has a kind of gestation period, of which I have to be mindful and to which I need to be sensitive. It has to be the right moment to write, and that's both a felt-sense and a kind of close observation of one's internal life, images, thoughts, and those fleeting feelings that pass through one almost unnoticed. There is a kind of feminine sense of containment until the moment to write arrives. Somehow these anima figures help both to inspire the genesis of this creativity, and to form a subtle shell in which that energy nests until it is ready for expression.
I find the visual work of these three committed women to be a fruitful source of, and access point into, the fecundity one discovers within oneself. This is one of the ways we touch and influence one another in life.
No comments:
Post a Comment