Twenty Seven Years of Excellence: Day Two
2.10.2008
27 Years of Excellence: Days 6-10
It's five degrees & the temperature is dropping as we trot into Judith's gallery on the west side of St Paul, Minnesota Saturday afternoon. Familiar independent shops, grocery stores, street names, accelerator memories, & St Paul-isms have gently reminded me where I have been and where I would like to be on our drive out here. The sun- which hasn't been out for days- blinds Judith and I and illuminates my dirty windshield making my view clear as stained glass. Once we are inside the heavy doors of the gallery, I see my name printed under the "and I would like to thank" category of Judith's life.
It is hard to explain Judith's lithographs & I don't have the art terminology that will do them justice. What I can explain is that these pieces are not superficial. It takes minutes if not days to see her images- usually of a female form- in a complex position. One time Judith challenged me to identify "my position"- outstretched arms in a crucifixion form, knee elaborately across the body. For me, knees against chest. Always knees pulled tightly against chest with my body taking up the least amount of space.
"I call it a quiver of recognition," she tells me as we stand in the gallery Saturday afternoon, all my emotion wrapped up in the figure above. "Quiver of recognition being when you identify yourself in a piece of art. There is an immediate connection, an emotional draw, an underlying thread to the form and you recognize it as yourself." I am thinking about this hours later in my lifelong observation of any piece of art- painting, song, pottery. The need to bring it back to myself, to recognize myself in a lyric or the rough edge of a piece of pottery. Judith made no hypothesis on my recognition in this particular form but stood silently with me for several minutes as I connected to it. Wild lines connecting the feet like a marionette, her one knee pulled up such as the position I love to sleep, and a sense of either absolute rest or crawling with the effort extending all the way to her fingertips into the next chapter.