Yes, these are the dog-days, Fortunatus:
The heather lies limp and dead
On the mountain, the baltering torrent
Shrunk to a soodling thread.
-from “Under Sirius” by W.H. Auden
A few years ago, I interviewed Alex Katz at his summer place in Lincolnville, Maine. He had bought the small farmhouse there in 1954. At the time, it had no plumbing or electricity, and the trek from New York City took far longer than it does today in this age of interstate highways.
I asked Alex why he had chosen Lincolnville, when most of the painters, poets, and critics we now lump together as the New York School were spending their summers in the Hamptons. “Well,” he told me, “Larry Rivers said, ‘Come on out and enjoy the party.’ But I liked the look of it here better, you know? And at the end of the summer, I’d come back refreshed, and they’d all be beat up by parties.”
At the risk of sounding like a geezer, I wonder how many young artists today could bear to be shut off from their I-Phones and laptops, their e-mail and social media for a summer. (Actually, I wonder the same about middle-aged or white-haired artists as well.) To withdraw into solitude for a month or two and just work at what you love, to do labor, physical or mental, that replenishes as much as it exhausts – it’s a strategy that more of us should consider. The Hampton crowd came back with sunburns and hangovers; Alex came back with a car trunk full of paintings and drawings.
Whether you’re an artist or not, I encourage you to lay aside the distractions of social media and get away to nature as much as you can this summer. So I’ll keep this month’s post short and go out to weed the garden and check on my bee hives.
Oh, and one last thing. When the summer’s heat drives you indoors to air-conditioning, there’s something you should try this summer – rehang your collection. Ideally, you should rehang everything, but if you can’t, then take three or four works of art and swap their positions. In museums, works are usually hung to have unvarying illumination. One of the joys of owning a work of art is the chance to see it change throughout the day as the light changes. Even so, there’s always a tendency for a work of art to become part of the furniture. By rehanging a work of art, you will literally see things in a different light. You’ll see undertones or details that you never noticed before, and you’ll appreciate that work of art even more. If you don’t find yourself appreciating the work of art anew, then perhaps it’s time to let someone else enjoy it. Give me a call, and I’ll help with that.
