on Still Life with Scraps and Discards
A special field trip to Sacramento and The Artist's Way Weeks 3-4 Recap
vanitas by Jen Hyde, digital photograph 2018
I’m combining weeks 3-4 of The Artist’s Way (TAW) because we just reached the end of the school year here and there is always a mad rush to the last day, and because for the past two weeks I was solo parenting while my husband did a hike through The Grand Canyon with his brother. We are really good about giving each other time, but sometimes this means something’s got to slide. In this case, it was last week’s recap, which I’m okay with since chapter three of TAW is about anger and chapter four is about boredom, and I actually think it’s more interesting and productive to look at the emotional current between these two weeks than to write about rage or boredom alone. TAW is, after all, about an ongoing nurturing and evolution of a self.
These two weeks have historically also been where I’ve given up on TAW because Cameron is right: the morning pages don’t lie, and the truth is raw and only useful if you’re brave. If you’re doing the course right now, I hope you’re being gentle with yourself and giving yourself space to play and dream so that any hard emotions that comes up can guide you toward what you want. I know this time around—my third time!—it did for me.
A while back I wrote about ending up somewhere I never expected to be and how I was finally getting intentional about blooming where I was planted. These past two weeks I’ve channeled that intention further through my artist’s date. The choice I made didn’t dramatically change how I lived, but it did help me live more fully in the moment and with the other people around me.
Planning a Parent-Friendly Artist Date
While my husband was en route to The Grand Canyon, I planned a solo-parenting artist date to The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento to see a painting titled Roses and Butterfly by the Dutch painter Maria van Oosterwyck. I discovered her work a few weeks ago while putting together a piece on the anniversary of my menopause diagnosis: a vanitas in which she features a book titled Reckoning. The painting caught my attention the way a still life by Jan Davidsz de Heem caught the attention of poet Mark Doty, causing him to write a whole book that shares the same title: Still Life with Oysters and Lemon.
I have read and taught excerpts from Still Life many times, but I had never truly felt for myself the stirring feelings Doty describes, where a painting unexpectedly moves you to understand the temporality life so deeply you are moved to tears. My moment came unglamorously, while poking around an open access database for fine art images for Postcards from Hyde Street.
I had made the decision to select and share images from open access art databases for Postcards because I like the idea of offering my readers many ways to access human connections across space and time. I also just love archives the way I love a good estate sale—you never know what you’re going to find, what synapses in your brain will fire that launch you toward a creative idea, what synchronicity—to use a TAW key term—awaits in a pile.
When, pulling up a larger image of van Oosterwyck’s painting my eyes and heart and body stopped. Everything from the well-read manuscript marked Reckoning to the butterfly resting on the page to the hourglass that has run out of time brought tears to my eyes, and made me think long and hard about how beautiful it is that the world keeps moving, and how I am moving along, even when I don’t feel like I am. In that moment, across a time-space continuum, I felt an intimate connection to Maria van Oosterwyck. I wanted to know more about her and, if I could, see a painting of hers in real life. But of course, as is the way things go, I had to put a pin in my research—and my feelings—and pick up my child from school.
The morning my husband descended The Grand Canyon, I returned to my Google research on van Oosterwyck and learned that The Crocker Museum in Sacramento held a painting called Roses and Butterfly in their collection, and that it was currently on display. More excitingly, that very weekend the museum was hosting a drop off art class for kids! I quickly signed up my child. To round out the adventure, I phoned my husband’s aunt who lives in Sacramento, and asked if we could take her to dim sum (an idea she’d floated to me two years ago, that we go together so that I could help her pick a few things to try off the menu). And with that I had an artist date that fit perfectly into a full day of family activities. Talk about synchronicity!
Folding The Artist’s Date into Everyday Life
The next morning, my son and I got an early start to Sacramento. We listened to Daft Punk’s 2007 album Alive on the way (we are trying to listen to whole albums in the car) and discussed the pros and cons of the arrangement of songs as mashups. We arrived at The Crocker a half hour early, and got to wander the museum together which was very fun. The museum is located in downtown Sacramento, near the capitol building. Architecturally, it is an interesting combination of the original gallery space which is a victorian museum and a large, all-white contemporary wing. The two buildings are connected by an interior courtyard which I later learned was a highlight of the art class (the teacher let the children run in the courtyard for 30 seconds before taking them on a brief tour of the galleries before studio art time.
The drop-off art class was two hours long, leaving me with plenty of time for my artist date with Maria van Oosterwyck. When I was finally alone, I started to feel first date jitters. Would I really be moved by her work in person as I was by the images online? Of course the answer is resoundingly yes.
Roses and Butterfly is a small painting, measuring just 14 x 11 inches. It is displayed on a wall of several vanitas, and could be easily missed which was perhaps van Oosterwyck’s point. The image features a nosegay cast aside on a mantle, which is an uncommon arrangement for this type of painting. Normally these still lives featured large bouquets of flowers. A bug is eating its way up toward the flower which, according to the wall text, suggests it is destroying its own delight. Meanwhile a butterfly rests on the petals. The painting seems to be a meditation on forgotten beauty, and how the magnificence within the things people casts aside are still worthy to nature. Womanhood and motherhood in a nutshell.
Even more significant is the curator’s placement of the painting in the gallery. Roses and Butterfly is displayed immediately next to a painting by Jan Davidz de Heem whom van Oosterwyck trained with. de Heem’s painting is of a large bouquet of flowers, and on the wall text I learned that such bouquets weren’t actually painted from still life but were composites the artists created using reference materials. Seeing them together felt like witnessing the moment the student finds their own voice.
The autobiographical note on the wall text of van Oosterwyck’s painting revealed that although she was a master student of de Heem, she was never formally allowed into the painter’s guild because of her gender. This limited her ability to to support herself through the sales of her work. Instead she relied on agents to sell her paintings. Through this path (which felt similar in many ways to the path Mary Cassatt forged for her business), van Oosterwyck found success in the German markets.
I took all of this in in front of the painting for a while, feeling grateful for being able to live a relatively short drive from the museum. To see Roses and Butterfly with my own eyes was to feel the dignity in my own experience as a mother and a woman and to know that my power will never be truly diminished because it resides in my worthiness as a nourisher and nurturer to my family, friends, colleagues and you, my reader.
Later that day, I shared my experience with my husband’s aunt who herself was, for a long time, the main caregiver to her mother. Between bites of a juicy pork bun, she gave van Oosterwyck a thumb’s up and a raised glass. It was then that I realized that although Cameron insists that the artist’s date is just for you, its purpose has a broader reach.
Sure, the goal was to do something just for myself, to feed my soul and tend to my inner child. To have done that on a weekend of solo parenting, I am quite proud of myself. But I am also enamored with the ways that my encounter with Roses and Butterfly can live on through this space-time continuum, through conversations I want to have about Maria van Oosterwyck, about what a vanitas can be, and what stories and commentary the genre can hold and the ways that we can defy genre over and over again. Thinking about that took me back to another point in time, and into my own archives.
Where Does the Artist’s Date Take Me Now?
The second time I did TAW, my son was just a few months old and I decided to play around with photography on my artist’s date. We had just gotten a lovely mirrorless camera, we were staying for a few weeks with my parents, and I had become interested in documenting my mother’s way of life as fine art.
As someone raised in Indonesia in the early 1960s, my mother is keen on the idea of saving and reusing what more people would discard. She takes items like yogurt containers and plastic bags in unexpected ways: as a dust collector for her instant pot, as a terrarium for Rocher chocolates that she and my dad eat so slowly they expire. (Her battles are truly with the sun and with dust).
During my son’s naps, I started photographing my mother’s belongings in vanitas-like arrangements to show the significance I see in my mother and her way of life. The project allowed me to exercise analytical thinking and creativity in manageable spurts and brought me back to myself in the way an artist date is supposed to. Unlike writing something long form, making photographic still lives also allowed me to complete a project in the small windows of time that I had which itself felt so satisfying I wanted to keep doing it. But like the main commentary of the genre itself, the project was short lived and ended at the end of our stay when we flew back to New York City where we lived at the time. As time went on I forgot that I’d made this work, and that I loved this genre of still life.
So when I encountered Roses and Butterfly, a part of myself that I love so dearly woke up and said hey, I may have been just a little nosegay that appeared in your life, but don’t forget about me, okay?
Inspired by van Oosterwyck, I’ve pulled my vanitas project out of the archives to share here. I’m working intensively on a different project right now, but if we’re to look for synchronicity, I wonder if I should continue the project this summer. Let me know what you think! Should I keep going?
