‘Where I Want to Be’
Two new works underscore how a sense of place defines the artist
‘A PLACE TO LAND’
Threadleaf Press (2022, 79 pp.)
Where do we come from, where do we end up? And why do we choose to inhabit the place we do?
In a delicate balance between memory and loss, prose and poetry, author Philippou arranges the layers of place in her own personal
story — so essential to her growth as an artist. Born in Cyprus, an immigrant to England as a child, she writes of her ambivalence in the prose poem “Tug o’ War,” “The moment our
ship docks in Southampton…. Mom grabs one of my hands, Grandma the other; they pull in opposite directions.” And in a five-line stream-of-consciousness aside that reveals her predicament and forms the hallmark of the tanka hybrid form, she inserts:
“Horns drown out
the screeching of wind-battered gulls
the shouts of immigrants clinging together.” Memories of her motherland mingle with that of her adopted homeland in
the book’s first two parts, Goddesses and Gods. At age 3, the narrator is
scampering along dirt roads after cattle in her Cyprus village (“Neither Seen Nor Heard”) until the wail of a
siren shatters the edenic serenity and reminds the family of relentless GreekTurkish animus: “A curfew siren/louder
than cowbells.” She recalls with reverence the expanse of sea and sky, the
tales of her grandparents, the myths of her ancestors “in sepia tones,” and watching the village knife grinder pedaling “holy fire” on his grindstone.
Transported to England, there is learning English, wearing uniforms for
school and making aprons (“Imago”): “As we work, our teacher tells stories
of ancestors binding skin with bone, wood and ivory; of Mary Queen of
Scots in the Tower, whiling away her time with needlework. The Scotch thistle, Tudor rose and French lily were
some of her motifs” — so different from her grandma’s patterns of butterflies and wild plum.
In the third part, Communion, Philippou relishes where she has “landed”— Northern New Mexico. Here
is a place as ancient as the one(s) she came from. She imagines in “Sloughing Off” scampering up Cerro Pedernal to “plunge headlong into the blue, slough off my skin among pink hollyhocks, return home as a stranger.” In this arid moonscape, long before the stagecoach travelers stopped to rest at the hot
spring along the Río Grande pocked with petroglyphs, and long before the
Spanish arrived, she writes in “Passing By,” “Native Americans called these springs Wa-pu-mee, waters of long life.”
And she ponders:
“In a hundred years who will see my imprint who will know
I knelt at the edge
of the river.”
‘NEW BEGINNINGS: AN AMERICAN STORY OF ROMANTICS AND MODERNISTS IN THE WEST’ By MaLin Wilson-Powell
Tia Collection (2022, 311 pp.)
What strikes the viewer about the works of the artists transplanted from
the eastern cities to Taos in the early decades of the 20th century are three qualities: space, freedom and awe.
Space was conveyed on the canvas as unimpeded vistas and immensely dazzling skies. Freedom meant jettisoning the conventional rules about what was suitable to paint — starchy
subjects planted in middle-class sitting rooms became Indigenous figures
gracing firelit adobe domiciles. And awe is evident everywhere in these
painters’ reverence for the holy light, friendships they forged with locals and sense of ceremony they witnessed.
An impressive companion volume to the ongoing exhibit “New Beginnings” at the Harwood Museum, this
tome is narrated by independent curator Wilson-Powell (“Mabel Dodge Luhan and Company”) to showcase the Tia Collection of Southwestern work covering 1888-1983 — the collector is anonymous, though acknowledges
they are South Asian. The exhibit has been making the rounds from Scottsdale to Dayton.
Artists technically trained in New York, Paris and Munich, like Ernest L. Blumenschein, Bert Phillips, Joseph
Sharp, Oscar Berninghaus, W. Herbert Dunton, Walter Ufer and E. Irving Couse, were drawn to Taos by mesmerizing stories of Western mythology — “I’m going to hand down to posterity a bit of the unadulterated real thing, if it’s
the last thing I do,” Dunton is quoted as saying. However, the artists were confronted by stark living conditions,
no heating or modern conveniences, and compelled to paint in the wilds of a nature they had never encountered back home, not even by the plein air
painters of the earlier Hudson River School. Despite the tribulations —
such as the famous axle-smashing roads leading to Taos encountered by Phillips and Blumenshein in 1898 — they still came, wearing their neckties,
pipes between gritted teeth, to seek an authentic American subject — the great Southwest and its First Peoples.
What the book underscores that the exhibit does not is the import of the words that make up the title — “new,”
meaning art unlike anything the Anglos had fabricated back home — while “beginnings” connotes a rupture with the past, an old world tainted by
stultifying mores, war, class inequality and pandemic.
Why did they come West? In the end, concludes Wilson-Powell, “it was
friendship that led most of the artists to embark on long and arduous journeys.”