Dream House Part III: Cliff-Dwellings

"The moon was up, though the sun hadn't set, and it had that glittering silveriness the early stars have in high altitudes.  The heavenly bodies look so much more remote from the bottom of a deep canyon than they do from the level.  The climb of the walls helps out the eye, somehow.  I lay down on a solitary rock that was like an island in the bottom of the valley, and looked up.  The grey sage-brush and the blue-grey rock around me were already in shadow, but high above me the canyon walls were dyed flame-colour with the sunset, and the Cliff City lay in a gold haze against its dark cavern.  In a few minutes it, too, was grey, and only the rim rock at the top held the red light.  When that was gone, I could still see the copper glow in the pinons along the edge of the top ledges.  The arc of sky over the canyon was silvery blue, with its pale yellow moon, and presently stars shivered into it, like crystals dropped into perfectly clear water."

---Willa Cather, The Professor's House (1925)

In this scene from Cather's novel of modern life, The Professor's House (1925), the orphaned cowhand, Tom, describes the enchanting cliff-dwellings of the Mesa Verde.  Once inhabited by the Anasazi Indians, these dwellings have remained untouched for centuries, preserved as if in "amber" by the sun and the dry climate.   In Tom's account, he narrates his discovery of the dwellings and the amateurish archaeological project that he, his friend Roddy, and their housekeeper, Henry, pursue in the hope that the Smithsonian will take an interest in their findings.   When Tom returns to the Mesa following an unsuccessful trip to Washington, he discovers that Roddy has sold the artifacts to a German trader. After a bitter feud, Tom evicts Roddy and remains on the mesa for a solitary summer.  

This particular scene follows the loss of the men's friendship, their idealized family housekeeping-museum project, and the loss of the relics.  Tom's description of these homes from a position below  is one of the most vivid passages within the novel, and its detail and splendor suggests an oneiric home.  The dismantling of the idealized or utopian home is a modern conceit for Cather, and this story is set within a longer story about (in the simplest sense) the loss of cultural meaning in the 1920s.  Yet the intensity and purity of Tom's final experience on the mesa resonates with our very contemporary longing for wholeness and well-being.  As Tom discerns, the unadulterated happiness he experiences in these final months will only be temporary.  In a similar way, while we strive for happiness (almost as if it were a state that could be attained or sustained for any length of time) such moments are likely to be unpredictable and fleeting--something we grasp from a distance, in a flash of quickly changing color and light.

A Play of Light: The Still Life Paintings of Janet Fish

"When people look at realist paintings, they focus on the objects, which I don't think are the subject at all.  I think the object is one of the tools, like the paint and the brush.  The real subject is the light, movement, and color, and echoes of the objects in one's mind.  All those things are part of what I use to make the painting."

    --Janet Fish, qtd. in the exhibition pamphlet for "The Art of Janet Fish" (October 2, 2009-January 17, 2009, Naples Museum of Art).

Janet Fish is known for her vibrant and colorful paintings which play with light, shape, and texture. Like still-life, many of her works feature glassworks, foodstuffs, cut flowers, and domestic objects--all rendered in jewel-like colors that she suggests are inspired by her island upbringing.  Yet as the curators of this exhibit suggest, Fish is not a "realist" proper, but an artist whose work intersects abstract expressionism with realism to create expansive, bright and "juicy surfaces."   

  As is well-known, the sensory perception of fragrance is closely linked to memory. A familiar fragrance can prompt a mental journey into one's past.  Yet the sensory perception of subtle differences in light similarly draws the mind away from the mundanities of the present and into an alternative dimension.  On my first pass through this exhibition--which was sort of like a domestic coral reef---nothing much caught my eye.  But on my third pass, as I began to linger over certain paintings, I moved into a more meditative state---developing a keener awareness of the possibilities of the present and a heightened interest in the everyday.  The domestic scenery--while exotic--is not unfamiliar.  

 I was most drawn to one painting, "Cracked Eggs and Milk" (2005) featuring some particularly poignantly rendered cantaloupe-orange glass bowls and raw golden yolks set off in morning light.  The preparations of breakfast or brunch (I'm not attuned enough to the subtleties of light to discern the precise hour of the morning that Fish captures but in my mind's eye it is 8 am) appear in freeze-frame---we have no desire to see the ingredients to come together or to watch the meal being consumed.  There is an intense feeling of pleasure in the moment-- taking note of it, being in it. It is a very rare experience to linger over anything, to reflect on anything, to be rather than to do--to experience the luxury of time. Fish's art thwarts our desires to get to the end of things. She captures a familiar reality and yet makes it startlingly unfamiliar in its delicate allusion to what we fail to notice and what we take for granted.