I have always been drawn to strong women, perhaps because my mother was a strong woman who was not strong enough to live the life she wanted and deserved. She felt undercut at every important turn in her life by men, mostly my remote and self-absorbed father.
My mother fought hard all of her life for her creativity and her self-respect and independence, she lost every battle she ever fought and was turned bitter and defeated. She knew what she wanted but could never quite muster the strength to go get it. She surrendered at every turn.
Kelly is, I think, a very strong woman, and she just returned from a vacation with her friends to New Hampshire and the ocean. They rented an apartment with a kitchen, shopped for groceries and holed up by the ocean. She came back tanned and relaxed, and we missed her.
I brought my new Achromat lens to try out on Kelley, one of my favorite portrait subjects, and it didn’t fail me, although we had to get under the pool table light to make it work.
I like this shot very much. Kelly has a lot of attitude, it shows up in this photo, in all of her photos. She has many of the things my mother wanted but never had – a job she likes, a child she adores, a husband she loves, deep friendships she trusts. I do not know four people on the earth that I could share an apartment at the shore with for a week.
Kelly projects comfort with who she is, and warmth.
That smile is very real. She knows who she is, she knows where she is. That’s what the Kelly photos say to me: “This is me, I’m find with that.”
Bill, a former actor, is a charming and interesting man, he is a difficult man to help.
He suffered a stroke last year that prevents him from living his life as he has for 82 years. He has a quick and lively mind, and when I get him to smile, his elfin charm comes to the surface. Bill and I have been talking on and off for a few months, he is struggling to come to terms with the limitations of his stroke, although he is sharp and clear in his talks with me.
He is getting surgery for his eye issues but struggles to write, and has resisted activities that involve those things. He is isolated at the Mansion, he says, he is the only gay resident and he yearns for his community. When I ask him if he would like to receive letters and messages from gay or transgender people, he says he can’t answer them, he can’t write and has trouble reading. We went round and round about this today, but I broke through, with the help of Katie Perez of the Mansion staff.
Bill looks great and moves well, he talks fluently, and often asks people to guess his age, and they are always surprised. He is fun to talk with engaging and quick.
Bill conceded that he would love to hear from gay people, he yearns for his community. A Mansion staffer is taking him to a gay pride day parade in Albany on Saturday, but he spends most of time alone in his room. He sometimes feels as if he has little to live for. He says since his stroke, his life has gone downhill, mostly because he must relearn so many things he once did automatically and took for granted.
This kind of depression is a common experience among stroke victims, but Bill has a lot of life and spark to him as you can see in the photo. It is not hard to get him to laugh. To me, a sense of humor is a path in. And his orientation is very important to him, he says the only therapist he would ever see is a gay therapist.
How about creeping uphill a bit, I asked? He laughed, and said okay. After much back and forth, he agreed to let me buy him a boom box and audio mysteries – he loved reading mysteries. He said he was opposed to doing things differently than he once did them. We argued about this for a bit, and he changed his mind.
We have purchased an air conditioner for Bill because his room gets warm sometimes, he says he will wait until next Spring to use it.
The first few times I asked him if I could write about him and ask members of his community to write to him, or even visit him if they live nearby, he balked, and said it seemed hopeless. Today, he relented on this also. He said he would love to regain some contact with his community, he is comfortable at the Mansion and well cared for, but I could see he feels isolated and cut off from many of the things he loves, as sometimes happens in assisted care.
Katie and I promised Bill that someone – members of the staff or volunteers or me – would be available to read the letters to him, and hopefully, after his eye surgery, he will be able to read them himself. I said I would make it clear that at this point in his recovery, he cannot respond to the letters. Perhaps one day he can.
I think it would transform Bill to regain contact with the community he loved and which was so large a part of his life. If anyone out there in the Army Of Good can help with that, it would be much appreciated. Please understand that you will probably not get a written response from Bill, or even any response. But you will do much good. If there are gay people in the Albany or Washington County, N.Y. area (we are on the Vermont border) who might like to visit Bill, you can call the Mansion at 518 677 3711 and arrange a visit.
It seems clear to me that the gay community sustained him for much of his life, and he understandably is mourning the loss of it. I pointed out that new technologies can bring it closer again.
So, with his permission, I am reaching out on his behalf, especially to people who are gay or transgender, Bill would love to hear from you, or even one day, visit with you. You can write him c/o Bill, The Mansion, 11 S. Union Avenue, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.
Maria and i both live creative lives, mostly in different ways, sometimes in the same way. We work well together, give each other room, respect each other’s impulses and boundaries. There are some areas where our creative spaces overlap, and that can sometimes be sparky, like yesterday.
(Warning, there is an occasional attempt at humor in this piece.)
When we first got together, Maria did fiber art and I did photos and words, period. She didn’t really love to write on her blog, and she never took many photos and no videos.
I urged her to get an Iphone 7 plus, the camera was good and the video was easy to shoot and post. Then things changed, the boundaries sometimes got fuzzy, especially out in the pasture in the mornings when we were out together in the pasture taking our photos and videos for our morning postings on our respective blogs.
Now, Maria takes a ton of photos, and they are good. She is always whipping out her Iphone to take a video and put it up on YouTube or Instagram or Facebook, three places she never ever went when we met or started blogging together. I expected this, even pushed for it. She is a visual artist, and these are visual tools.
Her blog is sensible, thoughtful, creative. Mine…well, you know. She used to say she wasn’t a writer, but look at her now, she can write (almost) anybody under the table any day. And every day.
At the Open Houses, people used to come and see me. Now, they ask me to point them to Maria’s studio and the dogs. I am happy for her, of course, but every now and then my teeth gnash a bit for no reason at all, a dental problem, perhaps.
Maria loves to take her pictures and post her videos. This has made me squeamish at times because she can be a touch competitive (not me) and she is not averse to bumping me out-of-the-way or stepping in front of a camera or Iphone to grab a neat shot. We saw Minnie lounging with a hen and Gus on the back porch the other morning, and before I could open the door, she was out ahead of and clicking away.
When this happens, she laughs as if this were a joke, but she can’t fool me.
She denies that she is competitive, but she is half Sicilian, half German and loves a good photo. She is competitive. Like me, she has come to appreciate the power of images online. And we both to create things. But I am older and slower, she cut right in front of me a few days ago as Gus climbed onto Fate’s back while Fate was watching the sheep. She stood right in front of my camera with her wretched Iphone 7 plus.
She hates to lose and rarely does.
It came to a head yesterday,and while I enjoy writing mushy stuff about how much I love Maria, I have to be honest and share her dark side once in a while. We are married, after all.
Yesterday, I spent ten minutes setting up the above photo, both a training and creative mission. I wanted a photo of all three dogs working together to herd the sheep, which is happening more frequently. It is an appealing photo to see little Gus hang in there with the two obsessive border collies, Fate and Red.
It took about a half-dozen tries to get all three sitting where I wanted them and still having sheep in the photo. That is not as easy as it looks.
Red sits back aways, as trained border collies usually do, he controls the sheep with his eyes. Fate loves to be with the sheep and race around them, Gus likes to stand close to the baffled sheep, bark and hold his ground when they try to move. So I had Red go into a lie-down, told Fate and Gus to lie down where they stood, which they both did, and I stood behind the sheep to keep them from moving farther back and so I could also get the right camera angle on the photo.
I combined training with photo taking, Gus now sits down right near the sheep with the border collies, I am eager to see if he grows as a mighty little working dog. Those photos are already an Internet sensation, and I am a big fan of going viral when I can. Gus is very popular on the Internet, he routinely snares 1,000 shares on Facebook. My own brilliant stand-alone writing draws about 200 on a good day. But who cares right? Not me. I am as pure as the morning snow.
As I looked into the camera viewfinder, I saw Maria come sailing right into the photo with her Iphone up and recording. I am not tiny like Gus, could she possibly not see me standing 30 feet away with a camera pointed at the sheep?
Without hesitating, I yelled “Hey, Get Out of My Picture!” and not too gently. The photographers out there know what it feels like when someone walks right into a photo you are setting up, no matter how much you love them. I was annoyed, and Maria was annoyed by my annoyance, but not so much that she stopped taking a video of the whole scene, including me yelling, which she promptly put up on her blog before I even got into the house.
We both cracked up as soon as we realized what had happened – a creative collision by two sometimes intensive and competitive people (not me, of course), and inevitable collision of creative interests in the middle of a sheep pasture. We both made the best of it, I got my photo, she got her video.
I was, of course, blameless, just doing my work. She was being competitive, you know those artists. There is one great thing about the occasional creative competition here: everybody wins.
In the morning, a small patch of sunlight beams in through the back door. Gus always finds it and sits in it. He is like a cat in that way, he always manages to find the sun.
Maria and I are both astonished at the depth and beauty and rich colors of the big box of potholders and color and sturdy canvas tote-bags that just arrived from India. Most of you will remember that Maria went to India in February to reach young women in some rural villages how to make her potholders so they could make a living.
She saw that there is no real market in India for potholders, so she is selling them here in the United States. The first batch of 100 potholders came a couple of months ago and sold out right away. This new batch of 100, made from Indian fabrics, is enchanting.
The tote bags are a surprise, they are so well made and have rich and distinctive colors. The potholders are $15 plus shipping, the tote-bags are $25 plus shipping. You can watch the video and see for yourself but I would wager neither will be around for too long.
This is exciting for Maria, and for me. This is what we are about. She really stuck her neck out to get to India (not to mention leaving her husband behind in February on a farm on upstate New York during two blizzards), and seeing these beautiful pieces makes it all worth while. Come and see. Gus makes two cameo appearances.
Behind Maria is her new quilt inspired in part by Tantric symbols, I call it the Tantric Song. If you are interested in any of these things, you can e-mail [email protected]. You can also see them on her website, fullmoonfiberart.com. They will be offered for sale at our October Open House in several weeks if they are not already gone.
