January 11, 2012

By Claire Sykes

The first piano in my life was a huge, old, olive-green-painted upright that ruled the living room in my childhood home in Columbus, Ohio. I remember the way my mother played it: a two-beat bass (single low tone and upper third) from any keys that her left hand happened to land on; and her right hand stretched thumb to pinky in octaves belting out songs like “Oh! Susanna” and “The Erie Canal.”

Every so often, she’d roll the piano away from the wall and ask me to clear out whatever had fallen off the top or gotten shoved underneath. There, like treasure-hunt fortunes, I’d discover crayons and coloring books, the doll I thought was gone forever, stuffed animals and socks, my brother’s toy cap pistol, all smothered in balls of dust. Behind this booming, resonant beast that played some of my mother’s happiest moments lay a whole world in itself, as rich as the one I’d create when I sat by myself at the piano.

Before I knew how to read or write, I’d gather up storm clouds in the low notes and rumble them into thunder, lightning slashing and rains pelting at the other end of the keyboard. Or, sometimes, a little four-year-old girl just like me skipped up the black keys through the forest, birds trilling from my hands as I narrated. It was talent enough for my mother to send me to Miss Volp down the street, who showed me Middle C and slapped my knuckles when I forgot to curve my fingers. I told fewer and fewer stories the more I practiced my scales and “Cubby Goes to Town.”

Who knows whatever happened to that green piano. But the stories remained. I’d hear them in my parents’ Peter, Paul and Mary albums; in the Bach organ preludes from my teenage headphones; at high school dances and college rock concerts; in symphony halls and smoky bars; and in the free-form piano improvisations I’ve scribbled out, in between my Mozart sonatas and Chopin nocturnes.

Then there’s the jazz of pianist/composer/arranger Gordon Lee—the haunting melody that rides the rocking chords of his original “Loss is Freedom,” the impressionist accents in his arrangement of Chinese folk songs, and his unexpected take on “Someone to Watch Over Me.” As he says of his newest jazz-piano compositions, in the liner notes of This Path (OA2 Records, 2010), the latest of his seven CDs and among 15 on which he appears, “The melodies are personalities, characters in a story, the harmony is the plot and the groove is the setting or time line.”

Whether solo or with an ensemble, from my stereo or live, Gordon easily pulls me into a storied universe of the visual and the emotional. When I listen to his music, I can’t help but see pictures—abstract and illustrative, symbolic and epic—as films and sketches and photo-album snapshots. I sigh, call out, feel so happy and sometimes even cry. When I listen to his music, I want to play the piano even more.

I try to imagine the first time Gordon ever put his hands on a keyboard. What melodies and rhythms? By then, at age 14, he’d been playing rock ‘n’ roll drums in a garage band for a couple of years and, soon, double bass in high school. A more serious look at music had him eyeing the piano.

Gordon Lee, circa 1987

Born in 1953 in New York City and raised just north of it, in Westchester County, he’s lived in Portland, Oregon since 1977, except for a five-year return in 1980 to his hometown. As a 24-year-old newcomer to Portland, Gordon began performing around North America and Europe with Native American saxophonist, songwriter and jazz-rock fusion innovator Jim Pepper. Over the years, he’s played with famous jazz artists such as cornetist Don Cherry, vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Leroy Vinnegar; plus major pop groups Gladys Knight and the Pips and The Temptations.

Bassist Leroy Vinnegar, Gordon Lee, drummer Dick Berk and saxophonist Warren Rand, 1992 (Photo and copyright by Hiroshi Iwaya)

In 1986, he joined the band of Portland jazz drummer Mel Brown, also a veteran of the Motown sound, and a few years later The Mel Brown Sextet was performing Gordon’s pieces and arrangements, which won the group the prestigious Hennessy Cognac International Jazz Search award in 1989, beating 700 other bands from around the world. Since then, Gordon has been playing with The Mel Brown Septet every week at Jimmy Mak’s here in town.

The Mel Brown Septet at Jimmy Mak's (Photo courtesy of www.jazzpdx.com)

If a weekly dose of Gordon isn’t enough for you, every month here in Portland his Gordon Lee Trio, with Phil Baker on bass and Ron Steen on drums, sounds it out at Arrivederci; and his trio with drummer Dick Berk and bassist Dan Schulte heats it up at Wilf’s.

Gordon puts his talent on the page with his compositions and arranged works for symphonies and string quartets, choruses and other vocalists, piano solos and duos, small jazz ensembles and big-band groups. He teaches jazz studies at Western Oregon University (“a funny dude who really knows his stuff,” posts one student) and since 1989 has participated in the state’s Art-in-the-Schools program. From clubs and concert halls all over the world to living rooms and classrooms here in Portland and the region, Gordon has made his musical mark as one of the most well-known and respected jazz artists in the Pacific Northwest. In a part of the country that for decades has been celebrated as home to a host of jazz greats, clearly Gordon is one of them.

Claire Sykes: How does the piano best speak the language of jazz for you?

Gordon Lee: It’s a percussion instrument, so it’s rhythmic, of course. But more than any other instrument, the piano is melodic and can play extremely complex harmonies. There’s no other instrument that you can get so many different notes from.

CS: I’ve read that your father was a musician, and that as a child you suffered from insomnia and spent nights listening to New York City AM radio, and that’s what got you into music. How did you come to the piano, and to jazz?

GL: I started with drums, playing in a garage rock ‘n’ roll band at 12. Then, everyone told me if you really want to know music, you have to learn the piano. By age 14, I took that up, and six months later had my first professional performance at a high school dance, playing The Rolling Stones, The Animals and three-chord blues. That’s pretty late if you’re wanting to be a professional pianist, but I didn’t think I would be, even at age 21. At that time, I was into conducting. But I also started hanging out and playing with jazz musicians, and fairly quickly was playing gigs.

Portrait of the artist as a young man

CS: What jazz artists and other musicians have influenced your original compositions and improvisations over the years?

GL: McCoy Tyner is a pretty obvious influence on my playing. People have hired me because of my ability to pick up some of his sounds. I was listening to Thelonius Monk and Art Tatum years before I was a jazz piano player. Eventually, I discovered Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans. Those are some of the main jazz pianists you can hear in my music.

CS: You’ve played with many jazz greats. Who would you say have influenced you the most?

GL: From 1977 to 1992, when he died, I traveled around North America and Europe with Jim Pepper, who introduced me to some of the big musicians in New York and LA. Jim was a huge influence for me. He brought the American Indian sound into jazz music, and that’s where I first got the idea to incorporate an ethnic component in with my jazz. Pepper is a bizarre combination of traditional Indian; and rhythm and blues, avant-garde jazz, and even country western. He wasn’t at all self-conscious in combining all those things together. It wasn’t out of character for him to play a simple pentatonic melody one second and a screech and roar from his sax the next, in a natural transition. And I liked that. It was pretty inspiring to me.

(Photo and copyright by Ron Schwerin, courtesy of www.jimpepperlives.wordpress.com)

Mel Brown was another. He has kept me consistently working for over 26 years, playing every week. We have a huge repertoire, over 200 pieces, of bop and post-bop-period songs. I have most of them memorized. Mel wants them played in the style in which they were created, so we “speak” bebop. We also play quite a few of my own compositions.

Mel Brown (Photo courtesy of www.saphurecords.com)

CS: I hear so many styles in your playing, as you draw from your many influences. Tell me about that.

GL: I’ve played a lot of different ways with different people, and everybody has a different style. I think it’s important for jazz musicians to change the way they play, depending on who they’re playing with. If it’s just me and a singer or a sax, I’m going to be doing different things with my hands than when I play with a drummer and bass player. I accommodate and change in relation to who’s there with me.

CS: Would you say you have a signature style?

GL: I hope so. It’s impossible for anyone to hear themselves completely objectively. I think I’m getting there, or I have a certain sound, whatever that is, that’s my voice. I’ve been working at that for a long time.

CS: I hear a European classical sensibility in your compositions, improvisations and arrangements; and some sound impressionistic, like Debussy. You tend toward complex and unexpected melodies, harmonies and rhythms—many of them carrying that ethnic flavor you were talking about earlier. There’s both a congruence and contradiction in what you do; you don’t go off the edge exploding into some kind of Cecil Tayloresque rant, but you don’t stay in any safe, predictable zone either.

GL: Certainly Debussy is a huge influence for me. I’ve always loved his music. Sometimes I’m playing my own music and it sounds impressionistic, particularly in some of the solo-piano pieces I do. I’m aware of that. I might even be consciously going for it sometimes. But how can you improvise on the whole-tone scale and not sound like Debussy? You can also sound like Monk. I’m somewhere in between.

For many years, I focused more on classical piano than jazz. I’ve spent thousands of hours on Chopin and Bach, and keep coming back to them and other classical composers, because I love that music. Practicing it teaches my hands to do what the music tells them to do. The notes are very specific, and that’s the challenge. At the same time, I can better hear and understand the music of Bach, Debussy, Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Scriabin, Chopin, [György] Ligeti and others, having listened to, studied and played jazz. Because I know Hoagie Carmichael’s “Stardust Melodies,” I can understand a Bach fugue even better: Functional harmony is a system of predictable chords that has been developed for centuries, going back long before Bach and continuing with jazz compositions.

CS: Along with these classical influences, you mentioned Jim Pepper and the Native American tonalities and rhythms in some of your compositions. What other ethnicities find their way into your hands?

GL: I recorded a couple of Chinese folk songs that I reharmonized, after my 2007 trip to China. I was invited there as a performer and lecturer by Anshan Normal University. I performed in Anshan and Beijing. The original Chinese folk songs have only one to two chords, and I added chords, which is a modern-jazz thing to do. No one from China has complained to me yet!

I’ve played quite a few Brazilian songs, and incorporated some of the Brazilian grooves into my own compositions. In 2005, I orchestrated Ghanain drummer Obo Addy’s symphonic concerto, “Cry of Our Mothers” for singer, Shanaian drummers, orchestra and chorus. It’s been performed numerous times around the country. And recently, I reharmonized a Siberian waltz—same melody, but the chords of the harmony are different—that was played by [Portland State University music professor] Darrel Grant in Khabarovsk, Siberia in December 2011.

Obo Addy (Photo courtesy of www.newworlddrumming.com)

CS: What does it feel like to be able to play as creatively, as remarkably, as you do?

GL: When I feel I’m playing really well—and this is a common response that a lot of artists give, but I actually feel this—I feel that I’m a vessel for ideas that I don’t know where they’re coming from, in my mind or outside of me. But there are these ideas and they’re passing through me, and I’m the translator of them. When this happens, I feel I’m really inspired. But inspiration for me isn’t something I can summon up whenever I want it. That’s why I think about the actual songs I play, the repertoire, are very important. Each song brings out a certain mood that helps me get into a certain frame of mind, a space, and all of a sudden, I’ll have a bunch of ideas of what to play and just how to direct the energy.

CS: It must be a blast.

GL: It’s also very nerve-racking. There are times I’m hitting so many bad notes. I don’t know why that is, but I’m trying to curve it around and get it under control. It’s worse some times more than others. Of course, the worst is to lose concentration during a performance for a measure or two, knowing some guys in the band heard that, or even worse, that the audience did.

CS: Why would that lack of concentration happen?

GL: Probably lack of self-discipline or getting nervous, stage fright, or a bad sound system can cause it. As jazz musicians, we’re not reading everything on the page; we’re usually playing off the groove, so it takes really listening and trying to get back to it. It happens to everybody who improvises; they have to hear their way back. It happens to me a lot less than it used to. But there’s nothing like those embarrassing moments in show business. These moments are educational, but they may not sound very good!

CS: Would we even notice?

GL: I don’t know. Hopefully not. I teach this to my improv students, the reason why you never hear great jazz musicians make a mistake is because they don’t let the mistake stop their flow of ideas, their concentration. And the first thing they don’t do is curse themselves, because it puts negative energy in, condemning their stupidity, which only interferes further with concentration.

CS: While you’re playing a gig, how much of your music is your own compositions and how much is it you improvising?

GL: In jazz, there’s always a bit of both. I’m really trying to mix it up, improvisation and original composition within each piece, unless I’m commissioned to write or arrange something for someone. So it’s maybe hard for the listener to tell. I’ve been working on this combination, though, in different ways for a long time. I’ve written a jazz sonata for clarinet and piano, and it’s got a lot of written parts to it. You could remove all the improvisations and still have a complete sonata, but if you call it a jazz piece, you’d have to have the improvisation.

CS: How is your music changing?

GL: I want to find a new sound and style that pay homage to the past, but don’t imitate the past. I think my influences are obvious, but I hope I don’t sound like one person, specifically. For instance, you may say I remind you of Debussy or McCoy Tyner, yet I don’t sound exactly like them.

One thing I’ve been focusing on in the last year or so is pianistic, more of a two-handed style. There’s a lot of jazz where the right hand is improvising the melody and the left hand plays predictable chord progression, which is a typical one in jazz and blues piano style. But usually in that style, you’re not mixing the two hands together. It’s usually right hand melody, left hand chords, like most classical piano music. And I do a lot of that, but I don’t want that to be a habit for me. I’m trying to integrate it so the left hand is improvising as much as the right. Sometimes that means doubling the melody, in octaves, but also it could be rhythmic, mixing up the two hands. But either way, you’ve got to have a strong left hand.

CS: As your own music progresses, where do you see jazz, in general, headed? What’s going to happen with it?

GL: It’s hard for me to say; it’s a constantly evolving art. But hopefully, it will get more popular.

CS: There’s so much jazz to choose from out there. For anyone who listens to your music, how would you suggest they receive it?

GL: I’m not hung up on trying to challenge the listener. I’m trying to come up with new musical ideas, so that could be challenging to them, but that’s not my primary goal. And they don’t have to know a lot about different styles of jazz, or about music in general. What I hope is to communicate emotionally to people, and it can be very complex—happy and sad at the same time. They should be listening for that emotional content, that expressivity. I really want people to feel that.

CS: I think it’s this emotionality in music that explains, in part, why “music is the healing force of the universe,” as you quote on your website.

GL: I don’t know who originally said that, but I’ve heard it many times from lots of different jazz musicians. Music also certainly helps bring people together, from different cultures and backgrounds. It heals by not emphasizing our differences from one another, and letting people realize their similarities, no matter where they’re from or what they do. Human beings have a lot of things in common with each other—and music is one of them.

For more about Gordon Lee, his upcoming performances and to order his CDs, go to his website, at www.gleefulmusic.com.

Words © 2012 Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.
Photos © 2012 Gordon Lee. All rights reserved.

"Wonders of Water" detail (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

November 23, 2011

In the caves of Southern France, beasts gallop across the limestone, finally arriving 30,000 years later.

The tenderness of lovers lingers in the ancient Roman frescos of Pompeii.

Propaganda shouts from multi-story images of Chairman Mao and Calvin Klein ads, while Diego Rivera leads us through the history of Mexico and portrays its struggles with class inequity.

"Man, Controller of the Universe" (By Diego Rivera)

For millennia, people have scratched, drawn and painted on walls, making their mark on the world. George Chacón is one of them. On public buildings and in private homes, his colorful murals in Taos, New Mexico take us up to the mountains and under the sea, back to the past and here to what is right before us.

"Ama Dablan Khumbu Range, Nepal Himalaya" San Cristóbal, New Mexico (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

George has been making art all his life. And he was doing just that when I met him 30 years ago in a summer oil-painting class at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Here I was, my first crack at this, awkwardly dabbing muddy mauves into starfish shapes, while a few easels down, this guy’s swift, confident brushstrokes made those boulders of his punch right through the canvas. One afternoon, we played around with my oil pastels. I don’t know whatever became of the drawing I did, but I still have George’s.

(Detail of untitled drawing and copyright by George Chacón)

“What an old piece . . . and one of those drawn from the wellspring of my subconscious,” he says of this picture that he hadn’t seen since that day, until I emailed it to him three decades later. We never stayed in touch once we both left town at summer’s end, then a few months ago I Googled him. I was so happy to see he was still doing his art.

Born in Saguache, Colorado, George inherited his father’s and grandfather’s “good hands,” as he says in a YouTube interview. Since childhood, those hands have gripped crayons, held paintbrushes, and cut through stone and wood. He studied art at Colorado State University and Western Washington University, but is basically self-taught.

Over 70 of George’s murals grace vertical surfaces in Taos. His “El Santero,” in the heart of town, is a 22-year-old landmark, and has appeared in Skiing magazine and Collier’s Encyclopedia Yearbook (1991), among other publications.

"El Santero" 1989 (Photo by Jill Caven and copyright by George Chacón)

Walls at Taos Ski Valley, Taos Middle School and the Taos Public Library also have welcomed his brushes. In 1998, he was commissioned by the Town of Taos to paint the Taos Timeline Murals on a wall adjacent to the Town Hall complex.

George painting the Taos Timeline murals (Photo and copyright by Jeff Caven)

Along with his mural art, George does oils, acrylics, etchings, drawings, monotypes, mixed media, pastels, and woodcarvings; and as a fine woodworker, also builds custom furniture. He even plays congas, bongos and timbales, having studied Afro-Cuban music for over 30 years.

George playing with Los Lobos, 2002 (Photo courtesy of Taos Solar Music Festival)

For just as long, George’s art has been enjoyed by studio/home visitors and private collectors, and has received several awards. His website shows portraits and nudes, landscapes and architecture, and Hispanic and native scenes.

Nude Study, ink and brush (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

"Marisol of Equador" pastel on paper, 18.5x26.5 (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

"Valley Near Tequila, Jalisco, Mexico" oil, 16x20 (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

"La Casa de Mi Vecinos" pastel on sanded paper (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

"Mayan Woman with Calla Lillies" monotype and acrylics (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

"Canoe Races, Nooksack Tribe, 1980" acrylics (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

"Summit of Mt. Elbert" acrylics (Photo and copyright by George Chacóon)

Shortly after George left Bellingham for Colorado, he met his wife Beverly; and their three daughters now are about as old as we were then.

The Chacón family (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

Since 1983 he’s lived in Taos, where he talked with me by phone last summer, after all this time. We’d finish the 30-year catch-up later, but right now it was about his art.

Claire Sykes: You live in such a beautiful place, and many of your murals offer up these sweeping vistas of Taos. What’s your favorite view?

George Chacón: The one right out my front window every morning. When we built this house 24 years ago, we placed the large living room window to look out at the Taos Mountains, located on the Taos Pueblo Reservation. The mountains completely dominate in Taos. And at sunset, shadows cast against them and it breaks the mountain in a prism of shades of light and dark. It’s pretty amazing.

I’ve painted that view on canvas many times over different seasons, and it’s changed over the years—different skies and light. The Taos light is why painters come here. We’re witness to it every day, all year round. And at sunset, it moves from tangerine to orange to crimson. The air seems to fill with this iridescence.

CS: Light is an object itself in your work, isn’t it?

GC: I’m glad you see that. Culturally, my mestizo heritage, both Spanish and native, dwells in the mysteries of light and dark. And we have a strong mestizo element here in Taos with the essence of the land, and light as a dominating factor. Through the ages, various human conditions have brought humankind to be observant of the light within us, all seated in a dark universe. Out of darkness comes light. The famous Spanish poet, [Federico Garcia] Lorca wrote about this. He also often wrote of the duende, the wellspring of the creative spirit that an artist seeks.

As painters, one of our challenges is to capture light. I’ve been chasing it all my life. I like to go out and paint plein aire. That’s when I do smaller paintings. They help by serving as studies of landscape and light when I’m working on murals or creating out of my head. You have only an hour and a half to capture the light, because it shifts. The challenge is to try to paint it in that time, but it often takes longer, so you rely on memory if you’re finishing in the studio.

CS: How else do you keep your paintbrush nimble?

GC: I do figure studies and portraits, weekly. I attend two groups of artists that pitch in for models, and this allows us to afford them, and be disciplined. The portraits are three-hour studies, and the figures here are 20-minute studies.

"Dine Woman" oils (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

"Model with Duster and Hat" oils (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

Figure study, conte pencil (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

Figure study, conte pencil (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

CS: You work from studies, and I know you map out your murals. Have you created any on the spot?

GC: The owner of a house here in Taos Ski Valley gave me carte blanche to paint whatever murals I wanted inside all three levels of this family home. It’s rare for an artist, especially a muralist, to get a commission from a patron saying just do what you want. It’s the best commission an artist could ask for.

Instead of having to give sketches and stick to a plan, the chains were released and I was free. I didn’t have any idea of what I was going to paint until I started painting. I prefer not to have any plan and just start painting with no preconceptions, letting it evolve and that way grow on its own, out of my own jurisdiction, and let the creative juices come out. When the creative spirit comes through, that’s when duende appears, hopefully. I’m the vehicle for it. And that’s really important for me.

But then there’s the challenge of this blank wall. I knew I wanted the murals in this home to be pleasant for those who live there, but still exciting for me to paint. I thought of landscape and wildlife from all over, and breaking these walls open because it’s very claustrophobic in these canyons of Taos Ski Valley. The house is right up against those trees and mountains, and I wanted to give people in the home visual relief. That was the challenge. So I started with the architecture. I wanted to open it up, and at the same time give credence to the natural, physical place.

The mural in the stairwell is high and narrow. I painted it in earth tones, with a rainbow near the top to brighten up a dark spot. It’s all out of my head, without the help of studies.

"Stairway to Heaven" (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

The murals in the dining and living rooms, in the middle level of the home, are also created from my own inventiveness. Here, I wanted to capture the alpenglow. Up high in the living room side, I have two eagles in a free fall, with talons interlocked preparing for a last-minute mating ritual before releasing. At the front door, a cougar greets guests who may be arriving for dinner. The house is built on an extremely sloping hillside. I wanted to give the viewer the sensation that if you stepped through the wall, you’d tumble down into the valley below and into the soft snow.

(Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

On the lowest level, I painted the desert, as it is the coldest part of the home and I wanted the terrain to warm it up, visually. Here, I portrayed a wolf and her pup, an owl in a saguaro cactus, and eagles and canyons. On the third level, in the master bedroom, I painted the Serendipity Range near Banff, Canada. The fiords of the South Island of New Zealand and its glorious range with birds of many different feathers, and waterfalls from New Zealand’s Alps seen in The Lord of the Rings are in one of the children’s rooms. In this same room, in a quiet ladder area to access a loft, I have a mermaid and a flying swan in the fiords of Scandinavia.

CS: So much of your art celebrates the natural world, but also you’ve done murals that are very Hispanic. How does your art speak of your ethnic heritage?

GC: One thing I purposefully do is not duplicate what many Chicano or Mexican artists have done. They’ll try to put a thousand pages of history on the wall, and it’s been done over and over and over. But I don’t like being pigeon-holed. I’m a contemporary Chicano who paints, an artist who happens to be Chicano and who paints. I’m not caught up in trying to paint my people, but I do.

"Mexican Folkloric Dancers" detail (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

“El Santero,” done in 1989, reflects my historical culture, and is dedicated to the santeros of the past and present. It’s also dedicated to the craft of iconic art here in New Mexico for centuries, done for churches by the Hispanic craftsmen here. The artisans of the past did mostly religious artwork because the churches needed the iconography in the moradas, the little chapels where people worshiped. The artwork there is called bultos, which are sculptures of the saints; or paintings on flat pieces of wood, called retablos. These were done entirely of raw materials made by the craftsmen of the past, as there was no access to materials from Europe or Mexico in Northern New Mexico or Southern Colorado, which is the range that makes up my cultural heritage here.

George and Beverly with "El Santero" (Photo and copyright by Larry Chávez)

In this mural I didn’t include any religious imagery relating to traditional Catholicism, so as not to offend non-Catholics. But there’s symbolism—of family, a single parent (with the architecture leaning on her) and a positive individual who doesn’t have a family. I’m assigning sainthood to these people in our contemporary society, but in nontraditional forms and shapes symbolically representing an age-old tradition.

CS: What else do you consider when creating your murals?

GC: The materials. I’ve studied a lot about mural-making and materials used. Primers for early murals, done with oils, were made with gypsum and painted al seco (on dry plaster); frescoes are painted on wet plaster. They had to be done inside under protection from the elements or they would become damaged.

Doing interior and external murals, different concerns come into play. Now we know much more about walls and what materials are most compatible for murals. Today’s acid rains are destroying many ancient and not-so-ancient murals, and this is one reason acrylics were invented, to find a modern solution for modern times in regards to exterior art. Time will tell whether it is successful or not. But also, the salt from the ocean will affect the plaster, so you need a different primer up in the Pacific Northwest than down here in the Southwest, where walls are sandblasted by the wind or face the harsh, cold environment of the mountains.

CS: What about other muralists, or artists, in general? Who has especially influenced you?

GC: One of my favorite painters was José María Velasco, a professor at the Academy of San Carlos, in Valencia, Mexico. One of his students was Diego Rivera, whose landscapes were influenced by Velasco. Many of Velasco’s landscape paintings are very large, and when you stand before them, you enter into the realm of his vision. In Mexico, you’ll see all these beautiful murals with his influence.

CS: History figures strongly in your work, whether it’s your own culture’s or someone else’s. I’m thinking of your murals at Taos Ski Valley. Tell me about them.

GC: Ernie Blake, the founder of Taos Ski Valley, was German-Swiss. Before he passed away [in 2008], he wanted images on a new day-skiers facility, similar to the ones on the old facility. Ernie owned a book of 11th-century poetry, with imagery from the 13th century. On the tower and around the exterior of the new facility I painted Minnesingers, German poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries. These small images were from the Byzantine Era of religious art, when Christianity was spreading to the north in Europe. They were in the collective memories of pre-Renaissance art there, and were similar throughout Europe. Then they were brought by the Spanish when they came here to the Southwest, in the 1400-1500s. I took elements of these line images from his little book and rearranged, reproduced and enlarged them to mural scale.

On another tower of Taos Ski Valley, located on the children’s daycare facility, I painted Ernie Blake’s family from his childhood in Switzerland as a ski jumper, with his grandmother on the Swiss Alps. The front wall on a 40-foot tower has a 20-plus-foot painting of his children and wife, during their founding years in the 1950s Taos Ski Valley, welcoming children to their ski school and daycare.

At the Hotel St. Bernard, for Jean Mayer, the founder and owner, whose passion is the mountains and skiing, I painted a pictorial history of skiing in 30 different murals. A few were painted panels attached to wood-plank walls often done above snow lines. I went back to early Scandinavian cave art that showed skiing as transportation for warriors and hunters all the way up to skiing today as a sport.

(Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

Detail (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

CS: I can see how meaning and memory are preserved and conveyed in your murals, which serve as tributes to a person, place or time. How else do your murals contribute to the community?

GC: There are the ones I did on the interior walls at the Taos Youth and Family Center’s swimming pool. On one, I painted tiger sharks, a dedication to the Taos High School swimming team’s mascot. Another portrays Williams Lake, up in the high range near Taos at the base of Wheeler Peak, the highest peak in New Mexico. This mural is 50 feet wide by ten feet high, and portrays all the different wildlife you might see on any given day up there—eagles, bears, elk. And a third mural has divers at the cliffs of Acapulco against an orange sunset. When people are doing laps or especially when the therapeutic swimmers are in the water, they have a diversion, a calming visual to enjoy, and they get to see all these things they otherwise might never see.

CS: Like the underwater ocean scene on the exterior of the building. There’s a picture of someone helping you paint that. What’s the story there?

"Wonders of Water" (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

GC: I wanted the youth of Taos to have an appreciation of our fragile oceans. So with the town’s approval and a local bank sponsor, in the summer of 2008, I had kids drop in after their swimming sessions to help me do this mural. Working with only two to three kids at a time, I gave them individual lessons on how to paint fish, outlining some for the younger kids. The older ones could see how they were participating in a community event, contributing to their community in a civil way. This mural was a sort of repeat; in 1994 I did another with kids in the original pool that was abandoned for the current, newer facility. Some of those kids are now the parents of these other kids, almost a generation later.

"Wonders of Water" (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

"Wonders of Water" detail (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

I’ve worked with two generations of students in Taos doing many murals with them. It gives kids an outlet for their creativity and a sense of civic pride. The parents get something out of it, too, and so does the city. The rewards are prismatic.

CS: What do you enjoy most about painting murals?

CG: I just love working on a large scale. I have always been inspired and awed by works of art larger than life, maybe because I grew up in a landscape so vast and endless that human efforts are minimized. Also, people have access to public murals, without stepping into a gallery. Murals reach a lot of people at one time. And that’s a good feeling, knowing that they go by my work every day, and I get a new audience with tourists when they come through. On a grand scale, artists are storytellers, visually sharing something that we’ve discovered, that excites us and that we want others to see. Artists are also risk-takers, and a muralist or public artist puts it all out there. In this sense, murals are almost invasive; whether you like it or not, they’re there, to be enjoyed or not.

CS: Maybe one day hundreds or thousands of years from now, someone will come upon your mural of the undersea creatures or the ancient skier, just like the people who discovered the prehistoric cave drawings or frescos of Pompeii. And they’ll wonder, Who was this George Chacón who painted these, and what other murals did he do that no longer exist?

GC: Already I’ve had several painted over or the buildings knocked down. But like my mother used to sing, “Que sera sera. Whatever will be with will be.” I don’t have any control over the life of my murals. I don’t know what kind of longevity my art will have. That’s the risk we muralists take.

George Chacón (Photo and copyright by Beverly Chacón)

Words © 2011 by Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.

Images © 2011 by George Chacón. All rights reserved.

Back to Velvet Sofa Salon welcome page.

"Forest Dream, Study 1" (Photo and copyright by Edgar Angelone)

November 9, 2011

By Claire Sykes

We emerge from darkness into darkness, and for nine months float blindly in the pitch. Then we hurl ourselves out into the only world we think we know, until darkness hauls us back. Between two slabs of infinity our lives are mere sparks, as night turns to day turns to night. For millennia, we’ve taken what we’ve made of all that darkness and light, and shaped it into myth and meaning—and art.

"Oceana, Study 14" (Photo and copyright by Edgar Angelone)

We now know that light lives a spectrum of electromagnetic radiation perceived by the retina, telling us what is possible for us to see, from sheen to shadow. Darkness is the absence of light. Yet, they are no more separate from each other than silence and sound, or the colors of the rainbow bleeding one into the next. Only our minds make a distinction between darkness and light, enough to come up with two different words for them. But both are constantly moving toward or away from each other, like river water following the ocean tides or breathing in the wind. Meanwhile, light lets us see into the darkness, and darkness lets in the light.

It’s the same, often, with the darkness and light of our own lives. When we allow ourselves to feel so deeply that we suffer, we also open ourselves to great joy: Afternoon storm clouds pull a curtain on the day, but after the rains the wet streets shimmer. We hang onto hope through despair: Why else does a tree with a shadow stand in the sun? We accept our weaknesses and in so doing find inner strength: Lightning flashes more brightly at midnight than at noon. Only when we unearth our dark sides can we know ourselves more fully: It’s why it takes a night sky to see the stars.

The darkness and light in Edgar Angelone’s book of platinum-print photographs, Beyond Darkness and Light, begin with his medium-format view camera, its interior a cave of night with no fire. Then, that split-second shutter release strikes the film with light, igniting the visual possibilities. The darkroom, a sort of camera itself, takes a picture of the picture, as the enlarger exposes the negative onto light-sensitive paper.

"Iron Horse" (Photo and copyright by Edgar Angelone)

As much as the making of Angelone’s images require just the right interplay of darkness and light, these two sides of his own life come through in his work. How can they not? Sure, in his photographs I see narrow cobblestone lanes, concentric archways, rocky seascapes and tree limbs weighed down by snow. But it’s in the shades of gray and shadowed corners, gleaming sweeps and winks of glint, hovering luster and crepuscular shifts that his work ushers me beyond a sense of place.

"Infantry Terrace Pass, Presidio of San Francisco" (Photo and copyright by Ed Angelone)

"Oceana, Study 47" (Photo and copyright by Ed Angelone)

"Winterscapes, Study 3" (Photo and copyright by Ed Angelone)

I love Angelone’s picture of two oak trees. The inky branches of one, thick with moss, stretch across the frame as if reaching toward some unseen calling, while the other, veiled in fog, spreads open in its entirety like a white, lacy fan. What struggles have those dark branches known, answered now by the promise of wholeness?

"Oak Trees, Study 1" (Photo and copyright by Ed Angelone)

Blacks and whites and nuances of each define an object’s contour and depth. But Angelone takes the tonalities a step further when he slams a stone stairway with tenebrous heft, shocked by an angled radiance that intimates a nearby window’s band of brilliant sunlight. Here, the light mystifies as much as the darkness envelops.

"Fort Point, Study 6 Presidio of San Francisco" (Photo and copyright by Edgar Angelone)

Both also sharpen the geometry and patterns of place, from the rectangularity of that window and those illuminated steps to the curved lines of a Frank Lloyd Wright and the stripes of the Golden Gate Bridge.

"Marin Civic Center, Study 18" (Photo and copyright by Edgar Angelone)

"Iron Horse" (Photo and copyright by Ed Angelone)

In this photograph of the bridge, the span swings trapezesque through a blackness with the gravity of emptiness, the bridge’s steel cables on either side like the strings of a harp.

We define what we see not only by what’s revealed in the light, but also by what we create from that, if only in our minds. Darkness makes that happen. Darkness also leads us out of the light, and can send us from presence to transcendence.

In his photographs, whether it’s the glow of mist drifting gossamer through the evergreens,

"Fog and Trees, Study 1" (Photo and copyright by Ed Angelone)

a blustery dusk rippling the water

"Oceana, Study 35" (Photo and copyright by Edgar Angelone)

or ocean and sky dissolving the horizon in a thousand faces of gray,

"Oceana, Study 31" (Photo and copyright by Edgar Angelone)

Angelone’s darkness and light take us right to the place where he pointed his lens. And we find ourselves somewhere else.

(Copyright by Edgar Angelone)

Words © 2011 by Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.
Images © 2011 by Edgar Angelone. All rights reserved.

This essay of mine appears in Angelone’s new book, Beyond Darkness and Light (Aperture F64 Editions, 2011). The 74-page hardcover edition, due out December 2011, features 54 duotone images on European silk matte paper. Luscious! For more about Angelone and his book, please visit www.edgarangelone.com and www.darknessandlightbook.com.

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Born and raised in Argentina, fine-art photographer Edgar Angelone works as a private-practice neuropsychologist by day and dips his hands in darkroom chemicals by night, taking photographs whenever he can. He has won numerous prestigious international black-and-white photography competitions for his work that has been published in several photography magazines; and shown in galleries throughout the United States, Southeast Asia, South Africa and Europe. His photographs also enjoy collections at the Marin County Civic Center, The Nature Conservancy, The Wilderness Society and Santa Clara Medical Center. He lives in San Rafael, California with his wife and three children.

(Photo and copyright by Laurent Reiz)

Paris of the nocturnal pull
the current of sweat and illumination
stone walls and a thousand steps
of longing following
the Seine in your tears.

Of chance and calculation
the broken mirror
and shuttered windows
Paris of darkened kisses clutched
in a constellation of night.

Waiting and taking
Paris of the unraveled you
leave behind where you have thrown
only yourself
wandering your revel
asking for everything.

~ Claire Sykes

Welcome home, Gerard.

© 2011 by Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.

(Thanks to Alex in Milano for the postcard.)

August 12, 2011

July 18, 2011

By Claire Sykes

What divides and what joins? One single line can link two together. That same line can separate. Connect. Bisect. So much depends on what we make of it.

All photos were taken around or inside Mt. Tabor Park. This is a work-in-progress.

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Thank you to photographer Jim Vecchi for inspiration. My in-depth profile on him will appear in the September 2011 issue of Photographer’s Forum magazine and on my website then.

Photos © Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.

(Courtesy of The Hermiston Herald)

May 14, 2011

By Claire Sykes

I was 16 the first time I stepped inside a prison. The way I remember it, metal doors clanged one after the other behind me, each one locking me deeper into the ominous, gray stone building. While fluorescent lights glared at their reflection in the bulletproof glass and uniformed guards peered at me, their pistols and billy clubs hugging their hips, I was told to sign my name, and was questioned and patted down. Then they took my purse, and motioned me to go stand over there. A few minutes later, another metal door banged open and I was led into a large room with rows of folding chairs. I took a seat and waited. Any minute now it was going to start—the Ohio Penitentiary 511 Jazz Ensemble.

The idea of prison performances has fascinated me ever since. But nearly 30 years would pass before I saw one again, in the late 90s, when the male inmates at William Head Institution, just north of Victoria, British Columbia, put on “Our Country’s Good,” by Timberlake Wertenbaker, about Australia’s first British settlers, many of them convicts. What a choice.

So when I heard recently about Johnny Stallings’ Open Hearts Open Minds project that brings Shakespeare into the Two Rivers Correctional Institution, a state prison near Umatilla, Oregon, I had to know more.

It started in 2005 for Johnny, a Portland actor, playwright and director, when he twice performed his solo “King Lear” for the inmates. After each show, he talked with the prisoner audience. Later in the fall, he gave two performances of “Silence,” a spiritual monologue he wrote. His one-man “Hamlet” came next, the following spring. After that, his post-play discussions with the inmates had grown into weekly dialogues, which he titled, “The Stories We Tell Ourselves: How Our Thinking Shapes Our Lives.”

Johnny founded Open Hearts Open Minds in 2007, a 501.c.3 with the mission to “nurture inner transformation through dialogue, silence, education and the arts, in order to promote peace, love and understanding.” Since then—every week—he has driven the three hours out to Two Rivers to talk with the men.

Then, in 2008, he helped the prisoners form their own theater group, starting with “Hamlet,” with four performances for their fellow inmates and two for the general public. It was the first Shakespeare play ever staged by inmates in an Oregon prison. But it wouldn’t be the last. Two years later, they did “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” wearing costumes lent to them by Portland Opera.

There’s also a documentary in the works (directed by Bushra Azzouz), called “Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison,” featuring interviews with the inmate-actors and scenes from their rehearsals and performances.

A couple of months ago, I invited Johnny and Bushra, and as many people as I could fit into my living room for a Velvet Sofa Salon “Evening with Inmates” (followed by quite the party!). While Bushra exudes this quiet warmth edged with intensity, “frisky” is a good word for Johnny I think. He thrums with a childlike glee that bursts through his easy smile, but there’s depth there, too, and heart. And you can’t help but feel all snug and cozy around him. We watched clips from their in-progress documentary, the inmates looking squarely at us while they talked about their fears, their hopes, their regrets. I believed their sincerity, as well as the severity of their crimes (whatever they were) that deserve their incarceration. Yes, they had knowingly done bad things in life. But could acting in a Shakespeare play help rehabilitate them?

Johnny thinks so. Here on the Velvet Sofa, he talks with me about open hearts and how they really can open people’s minds—especially his own.

Johnny Stallings

Claire Sykes: How did this all start for you, doing theater in a prison?

Johnny Stallings: About eight years ago, I was living in Central Oregon, in the small town of Ashwood, with a population of about 15. I lived there for three years. The closest town for groceries is Madras, 30 miles away. They were about to build a prison there, so the county commissioner set up a tour of an existing, nearby prison for anyone who wanted to see it. That was Two Rivers.

I didn’t like the fact that they were building a prison. It’s one of the main, new industries and a source of jobs, but couldn’t they think of anything else? But taking the tour surprised me. It wasn’t what I expected. It didn’t look like a scary prison; it seemed more like a social service agency, which is one of the things that it is. And I was impressed by the administrators. As a gesture, I offered to do a performance there, and they said OK.

CS: You started the discussion group with the inmates right away. Why?

JS: I wanted to meet the audience members. I became very engaged and interested in these people who were in prison. Meeting the inmates face to face, I saw their humanity; they’re just people. Before you go inside a prison, it’s just an abstraction; the inmates don’t have a face. Then once you meet them, they remind you of yourself. They’ve done bad things that hurt people, but their humanity comes across very strong, in spite of the things they’ve done.

CS: What does their humanity look like to you?

JS: Often when we think of criminals, we think only of their crimes. They might’ve taken five minutes to commit that crime, but they’ve lived their whole lives. There’s more to them than their crime; there’s a whole human being in there, just like with all of us. They’re not so different from those on the outside. In our minds, we’ve reduced them to this one thing, their crimes, but meeting them, you get to see all the rest, very quickly.

CS: You engaged the inmates in post-performance discussion beginning with your very first production at Two Rivers, the one-man “King Lear.” How did they respond?

JS: Afterwards, one guy said to me, “You don’t know how much this means to us. Thank you.” He appreciated it. He loved the Shakespeare. He cared about it. It blew him away. It had an impact that, as an actor, you’d always wish for an audience. This was a person who loved the language, he loved the performance. It was extraordinary—for both of us.

CS: And your next play? What was it, and what did you talk about with the men?

JS: The second was “Silence.” That discussion, with about 15 inmates, was about spiritual search and the search for meaning in life. I’d been on my own spiritual/intellectual search all my life. But so what? Most people aren’t interested in that. But eventually, every once in a while, you might stumble upon someone who is interested in what you’ve been doing with your life. So when I did “Silence” there at the prison, we started talking about how to live a meaningful life in prison, and what their spiritual practices were. What have you understood about your life, so far? Where are you at? Some of the men are very mature, some are just taking baby steps. But all of a sudden, we were in some really fertile territory.

At one point, one of the men expressed how much he was enjoying the discussion. I suggested they get together themselves, but they’re not allowed to congregate; someone from outside would have to come in and make it happen. I thought, I’d like to come back here on a regular basis and do this. I was invited back to perform, and eventually, I proposed to the prison administration that I do a dialogue group, and they said yes.

CS: You no longer live in Central Oregon, and you still go out there?

JS: Since I left Ashwood, almost five years ago, I’ve gone out to the prison every Wednesday, driving three hours each way to get there. The group meets for three hours.

Mt. Hood on the way

CS: It’s a beautiful drive. But that’s true dedication! And you don’t have a background or degree in counseling or psychology, so how does the prison let you run this group?

JS: You’re right. The only experience I have is my own life. It’s because the prison isn’t paying me—this is all volunteer—that I can do this, without the credentials.

CS: You call the group, “The Stories We Tell Ourselves: How Our Thinking Shapes Our Lives.” Why?

JS: I picked that topic because it’s of interest to me. I noticed, through meditation, that whether a person has a good life and is happy, or is suffering and depressed, depends on what is going on between their ears. It’s a narrative they tell themselves; and it becomes very important if you’re in prison, because you could go mad. But this applies equally to people outside of prison.

CS: What are some of the topics that come up for the inmates?

JS: We discuss big topics—freedom, love, happiness. That sort of thing. One time, we discussed a phrase from “King Lear,” when he’s running around with flowers in his hair and he says, “None does offend. None, I say. None.” So I asked, What does that mean? We got into the subject of the innocent person we all were when we were two years old. And really, we are still that person; we just got bigger. Is it possible for a two-year-old to do something wrong? To offend? And one of the guys said, “Absolutely not.”

CS: Other than having these discussions, how else does the group benefit the inmates?

JS: Just my showing up is a tremendous help. Prison is lonely, and people there feel like they’re being warehoused. They also feel forgotten and abandoned by friends and family and lovers. So the fact that I would bother to visit them means a lot to them. Many of the men have said that the group is like a little oasis for them, and that for those three hours a week it’s like not being in prison.

CS: What do the inmates learn from being in this dialogue group?

JS: It’s very helpful to them, and to me, to learn how to listen to other people whose views are different than our own, and to respect them, nonetheless. And not feel that you have to argue with them or change their mind. Not everybody thinks like you do. Not everybody agrees with you. But it doesn’t follow that they’re wrong. They have different perspectives based on their own life experiences. So that art of listening to other people’s viewpoints and honoring them is one of the things we all get from the dialogues.

CS: In what ways have listening and talking changed their experiences of living in prison?

JS: In prison, you’re thrown in with a lot of people who don’t have—to put it mildly—good social skills. They might be belligerent and unpleasant. A lot of them might be immature and aggressive. But you have to live in this environment with them. So it would be helpful to have a little empathy and understanding for these people. There are reasons why they’re so unpleasant; they have some issues. I’m pretty confident that just knowing that makes it easier to live with them.

CS: How soon after running the weekly group did you start Open Hearts Open Minds?

JS: About six months. Jerry Smith [with the Jerry and Donna Smith Family Foundation] helped me out from the very beginning of the dialogues. I don’t know how I would’ve done it without his help. After six months, he suggested that I start a nonprofit organization to garner more support. His foundation has continued to be our biggest supporter.

CS: How did the inmates start acting and performing?

JS: During one of the weekly dialogue groups, one of the guys asked me if I’d ever thought about doing a play with them. This guy is serving a life sentence for murder, and he looks the part of a stereotypical prisoner. If you were making a prison movie, he’d make a good extra. Anyway, he asked me if I’d ever thought about that, and I said, Well, do you want to do a play? He said, I’ve never read Shakespeare and have never been in a play, but I would consider it a challenge. Everyone in the group nodded. They had a lot of respect for him.

CS: What was the play?

JS: I chose “Hamlet.” I cast four guys as Hamlet, instead of one, so in each performance, there were four of them. It’s a very big role, and to ask someone who’s never been in a play before to take it on himself can be overwhelming. And also, I wanted four guys to share the juiciest role. One of them was the guy serving the life sentence.

(Courtesy Michael Rollins, The Oregonian)

CS: How did rehearsals go?

JS: We rehearsed for six months. Usually, plays aren’t rehearsed for more than two months, but I could only go out there once a week. In addition, we had one all-day rehearsal, one Saturday a month. The inmates said, uniformly, that rehearsals were a challenge; they were difficult. Typically, I’d give someone a speech to learn, and a week or two later they would know the speech, and get up and recite it. Then I’d ask them what it meant, and most of them said, I have no idea. They spoke of it as being like a foreign language. But they persevered. And by the time of the performance, all the inmates knew exactly what they were saying. As they spoke, they understood it. As director, I made sure they understood. The play meant a lot to them. They cared, and they worked hard.

(Courtesy Michael Rollins, The Oregonian)

When we rehearsed “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” we had a lot more fun than with “Hamlet.”

(Poster by Rick Bartow)

It was really wonderful. The spirit of the play lifted everyone up, all throughout the rehearsals. It was very pleasing to hear people laughing, and laughing hard. When we performed the play for just the inmates, one of them said, “I’ve been in prison since the age of nine”—he’s about 50—“and I’ve been on the street for only three years, and this is the most I’ve ever laughed.”

(Courtesy of The Hermiston Herald)

(Courtesy of The Hermiston Herald)

When we did a public performance of the play, inmates could invite family and friends. The guy playing the part of Bottom didn’t know anyone in the audience, but he had a friend in the play whose mom came. Afterwards, she gave Bottom a big hug. It was the first hug he’d had in 12 years.

(Courtesy of The Hermiston HeraldO

CS: That’s way too long. No one deserves such lack of affection. You know, I can’t help but feel that anyone who’s imprisoned has goodness in them. At the same time, one has to be careful not to idealize prisoners, and assume more virtue or promise than they warrant. How does the film about the inmates, directed by Bushra Azzouz, avoid romanticizing them?

(Copyright Bushra Azzouz)

JS: Well, it’s a documentary, not a drama. I don’t think the film will either glorify or romanticize these guys, or life in prison. Viewers will be struck by the fact that people who are stripped of everything will still retain their humanity. That’s not romantic, exaggerated or hyperbolic. It’s just important. People will see the inmates and hear their stories, and come to their own conclusions.

CS: What kind of conclusions have you come to, in working with the men?

JS: Running the dialogue group really opens my heart and challenges my mind. When I’m sitting in the prison and we’re looking at each other, I’m awake, alert, and I love everybody I see. The lighting is bright and we’re in a circle, and we’re listening to each other very intently. Sitting in a circle like that, it’s sort of the experience Whitman said in “Song of Myself,” seeing God in every face.

CS: What is it that allows you to have that experience?

JS: Something about prison, perhaps, strips people of their facades. Outside of prison, we wear different clothes, drive different cars, and we make all these assessments of people in terms of status, wealth and desirability. But here, everything’s been taken away from everybody, similar to what monasteries do. There, when everybody shaves their heads and wears robes, you can really see their uniqueness. It might be something like that. The prisoners seem innocent to me.

CS: What has been most rewarding for you about running the dialogue group at Two Rivers and directing Shakespeare plays there?

JS: It’s been very satisfying to have found something that I do well, and that’s so helpful to others.

CS: How do you feel that your work at the prison has made a difference in people’s lives behind and beyond its bars?

JS: There’s a possibility that it’s having a big impact on a few of the prisoners’ lives. They may be better people, more patient, more empathetic, kinder. As mentors, slowly, they’re touching other prisoners’ lives and those people touch a lot of other lives, then there’s a ripple effect going out from the dialogue group and performances. It could, slowly, change the culture of this particular prison.

CS: In what ways do you think you’ve changed after nearly eight years of working with the inmates?

JS: One of my aspirations is to be a more open-hearted person. I can see that that’s happened. I cry more easily. When I see somebody, a child or grown person, who has been deprived and then they get a blessing, it makes me cry. I like to think that no one is outside my sympathy, that I have no enemies. Actually, I wish everyone well. But that’s an intellectual stance. How do you actually become a kinder, more loving and open-hearted person? Maybe by practicing it. You start out performing a kind act, and if you keep doing it, you might get there.

Go here to learn more about Open Hearts Open Minds, and volunteer and/or donate.

Read more about Johnny’s theater work here; and about filmmaker Bushra Azzouz here.

© 2011 by Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.

April 1, 2011

Gerard Wozek’s Postcards from Heartthrob Town: A Gay Man’s Travel Tales (Haworth Press, 2006) makes me want to grab my passport and head for the nearest boarding gate.

I confess, however, that my relationship with Wozek’s book is a somewhat secret affair. You won’t see me sipping coffee at my favorite café with that cover (not Wozek’s doing). What makes me cringe is not the blatant sexuality of naked sweaty pecs, an effortless six-pack and an unseen hand no place our imagination can’t go. It’s that whoever this guy is (headless yet), the color photograph of him on a book of erotica reeks of cliché and condescension. OK, so it gets your attention. But Wozek’s stories deserve better.

Even before I hit the book’s table of contents, the Joni Mitchell epigraph tells me I’m in for a literary journey that’s honest and heart-felt, personal and poignant. Wozek convinces me this trip is worth my treasured tub-reading time, just from his titles alone: “Tenderness Among Wolves.” “Paris Angels.” “Kissing the Buddha.” “Pulse Points.” Already I can’t help but see the poet in him, and by the first paragraph, he’s got me.

From one story to the next, Postcards sends me on an itinerary of mostly foreign places traveled in wanderlust and wonder, musings and melancholy. His protagonists seem always longing for somewhere they almost are able to reach, as they drive past Midwest highway billboards and cross Paris bridges, linger in Moroccan cafés and stroll through Japanese gardens. Among all the Frenching and thrusting, Wozek detours into dreams and diary entries, fantasies and flashbacks, The Carpenters lyrics and Charlie Chan movies, ancient-cathedral histories and tourist routes (without sounding like a travel agent brochure), seamlessly weaving between the sensual and the erotic, the intimate conversation and the illicit tryst.

He first takes us back to childhood (his?), in “Tenderness Among Wolves.” There’s the protagonist with his G.I. Joes, not combating in camouflage fatigues but kissing each other in their wheat-stalk and grass skirts. He covers up the secret of his backyard hideaway with a “boyish swagger,” barely concealing his infatuation and lust for his older cousin Leigh, who ends up spending the night with him in the playhouse: “I’m thinking all the while of Leigh’s hands, of the way my breathing changes when he stands next to me, of the gentle way he charms and makes me forget myself.” Even Wozek’s night gives in to desire: “I look up at the sky swollen with dead stars. The stars succumb to the mercy of thin air and vanish.” And the story’s ending? The first time I read it, it made me gasp.

Some of Wozek’s first lines have a similar effect. Take “Paris Angel” that begins: “Angel of the veil. Angel of whirlwind and smoke. Angel of the unknowable rune.” His artful eye for detail delivers opening sentences like the ones in “Reuben Ran:” “Reuben liked to run with the wolf boys. He liked to walk in thick packs that inspired fear from his classmates and feel his square shoulders rub up against his two best partners Mario and Deek. He liked to slick his black hair back with wet-look gel and wear orange leather cock rings around his wrists. He liked to sneak out of his bedroom window at night to smoke Camels in the park after curfew.”

Like walking onto a plane in New York and waking up eight hours later in Rome, Wozek’s stories, just pages or even paragraphs apart, transport us less from the familiar to the foreign than they do from one end of the sensual/erotic spectrum to the other. We bask in “Brujo,” set in Oaxaca, Mexico: “I nestled into a corner of the botanicals where I was surrounded by all kinds of roses: black roses, tea roses on thornless stems, seashell roses. The most exquisite orange roses were nodding in the late morning sun and something compelled me to reach over and inhale the aroma of an open bud.” From this story’s tender embraces, we’re jolted by the one that immediately follows, bluntly titled “Francois at the Toilette,” and I’m amused by Wozek’s brazen transition while admiring his flexibility.

So much libido in Wozek’s stories—even when he writes about death. In “Arcana,” he eulogizes a lost love in Tarot card images, beginning with the Prince of Cups: “I remember your eyelashes. The way snowflakes would crust over them when we were standing outside in a Chicago winter waiting for the bus. The way they would brush against my cheek when you would kiss me hello on the cheek. How they framed your hazel-brown eyes, making your limpid gaze even more hypnotic, even more compelling when you fixed your stare onto some handsome stranger at a cruise bar.”

And later, in the Temperance card, “All my stagnant, buried emotion won’t raise you from the dead, all my forced macho bravado, stifled tears, the turning away from your bird-frail frame.” In the final card, The Magician, the protagonist recounts, “Last night I dreamt of you again. You were waving hoops of burning fire over my naked body as I levitated in the air. Then you placed me in a narrow box and drove steel spikes through it. Of course, in that dream I felt nothing. And when you opened the paneled coffin, I stepped out, still alive, still intact, and I walked over to you and there were fluttering doves pouring out of your Dr. Seuss hat. You wrapped a long rope of knotted rainbow scarves around us and we kissed to thunderous applause.”

Whether they throb with true love or the truly lurid, the travel tales in Postcards from Heartthrob Town ultimately arrive at the place where they all started—the heart.

Text © 2011 by Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.
All photos, except book cover, are of Gerard Wozek, © Gerard Wozek. All rights reserved.

Gerard Wozek is the author of Dervish (Gival Press) which won the Gival Press Poetry Award. His book, Postcards From Heartthrob Town was selected for the Haworth Press “Out in the World” Travel Literature Series. Wozek’s award-winning poetry videos have been featured at festivals and conferences around the world. He teaches writing and literature at Robert Morris University Illinois.

"Sunset Burning Cane" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)

March 1, 2011

By Claire Sykes

Flames shoot up from the sugarcane fields, burning off the crop’s leaves and punching the sky with thunderclouds of smoke. Only the useful part of the plant, the stalk, remains. The fiery light glints off the lens of Debbie Fleming Caffery’s camera as it seizes the fall-harvest scene.

For over three decades, she has been taking pictures of these southern Louisiana acres—with their blazing fields, hunched-over workers singing hymns, mill machinery grinding the night and sugar-loaded barges floating down the bayou. It’s a place I’ve never been to. But when I look at her silver gelatin print of that field on fire, I can almost smell the sweet burning.

In all of Debbie’s photos—from those of the sugarcane fields to Katrina-ravaged churches to prostitutes in Mexico—there’s more feeling than fact, more mystery than materiality. It’s why, for years, I’ve been drawn to her work, following her photographs mainly through her books. The emotional aesthetic that she articulates in her images is driven not only by her interest in and empathy for her subjects, but also the personal connections and relationships she’s built with them over long periods of time.

Last winter from Santa Fe, New Mexico, her home for many years before returning to Breaux Bridge, Louisiana in late 2010, Debbie talked to me about her life and her art—and what matters most to her.

"Fabiola" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)

Claire Sykes: What was it like growing up in New Iberia, Louisiana in the 50s?

Debbie Fleming Caffery: I had a really interesting family. They were all French-Cajuns, with a little Spanish blood. The Acadians have such a rich heritage, coming from France then to Canada and finally Louisiana. My great-grandmother, who lived with my grandmother, spoke primarily French. Every day after school, I walked to my grandmother’s house. I was always around a lot of really strong women, a lot of great storytellers.

CS: Your photos of sugarcane workers—found in your books, Carry Me Home [Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990] and The Shadows [Twin Palms, 2002] (which also includes those of Mexico and of your children)—show the sweat and toil of the hardscrabble life of people just trying to get by. What’s the draw for you?

DFC: I’m interested in people’s stories, and their lives, particularly from people who’ve had difficult lives and how they’ve managed to make it through such hard times. I grew up across the bayou from a sugar mill. During the harvest, my brothers and I would watch the sugar being loaded onto barges in the bayou, and I’d worry that the men would fall into the water. The bayou to me then was this menacing, dark place full of snakes’ nests along the banks. And the smells from the sugar mill were so intense, the noise so haunting.

My grandfather would take me to the mills and fields when I was child. We’d drive through the fields of burning cane with people working extremely hard. Growing up, I saw the struggles of African Americans, especially during the harvest, which often was the only time they worked in the sugar industry, facing hard times surviving the rest of the year. I witnessed a lot of heartache and poverty, and heard unbelievable stories of injustices, struggles and survival in the African American community.

"Praying" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)

As soon as I took a photography class, at the Rice University Media Center around 1972, I set out to document the workers during harvesting. One day, I walked into a field, introduced myself and asked the workers for permission to photograph them working. I would return to Houston and print the photographs and give the workers copies. As a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, in 1974 I received a work-study grant to return home and photograph the sugar can harvesting.

CS: After getting your BFA from there, I know you returned to Louisiana and, while raising three children, continued to photograph in the fields and mills. You also met someone named Polly Joseph. Tell me about her.

DFC: For a few months in 1984, I’d drive a couple of hours from my home along the Mississippi River by New Rhodes, and I passed a cabin that seemed to have someone living in it, but I wasn’t sure. I was attracted to the neat arrangement on the front porch—a sofa made of branches, a rocking chair with no rockers and a mailbox. Then I noticed an elderly woman crossing the front yard. She was so beautiful and majestic that she took my breath away. I stopped to talk to her and she invited me into her home.

"Polly's Baby Shoes" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)

CS: And you’ve told me that that was the start of a deep friendship that lasted until her death, in 1996. What was it about Polly for you?

DFC: Polly was an intense person who grew up in intense times. Her whole life was difficult, but she was full of love and affection. Because I had so much experience growing up with people like Polly, I felt this natural attraction to her, this affinity. I visited her often, and we’d talk about the weather, flowers, her chickens, love. And sometimes we wouldn’t talk at all. But she rarely mentioned her husband who abandoned her or her son who drowned in the Mississippi. She lived without running water because it reminded her of the river that took her son. She was extremely afraid of running water.

CS: In one of your photos of Polly in your book of photos of her, Polly [Twin Palms, 2004], called “Polly Snapping Fingers,” her face is blurred in movement, with the cabin’s dark interior stabbed by a blade of sunlight—aimed right to her heart. I find this image sort of premonitory, given how she died.

DFC: Polly was superstitious. She lived on a curve in the road, and whenever she heard cars driving by she’d help them get around the corner by snapping her fingers.

"Polly Snapping Fingers" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)

CS: When did you stop taking pictures of Polly?

DFC: I stopped photographing Polly when she was put in a nursing home. She was very confused. She called me Eloise. She died when she slipped in a whirlpool bath. Since then, I’m always drawn to go back to where her house was. It had been torn down and all that’s left is an empty lot that is sometimes a soybean field. I feel peace when I go there because is was so wonderful to visit her. And I always find something of hers—a piece of material from a dress that I’d photographed her in. I visited there recently and the dirt had just been plowed up and it had rained and I found 11 buttons, a spool, bent spoons and forks.

"Polly's Hand" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)

CS: The rural South’s strong ties to the earth for sustenance and to religious tradition for the spiritual are what initially attracted you to Mexico, in 1990. I’ve read that you were always searching “for the darkest, most mysterious places I could find.” Some of those were brothels in Mexico. How did you start photographing them?

DFC: The second or third time I was there, a friend and I were walking in a village and we found a church beside a cemetery, with a golden crucifix near the entrance. I said I wanted to come back and photograph it at night, something my friend wasn’t too keen on. But we came back that night, and while I was photographing, a jeep full of men suddenly came barreling down the path in the graveyard. My friend wanted to get out of there, but I told her to just ignore them and sing. And out of the jeep jumps the most handsome guy I had ever seen in my life. He turned out to be the village priest. We quickly became friends, and he renovated an outbuilding on church grounds for me to rent during my visits. Down the street was a cantina, and upstairs in it was a room for women and their clients.

"Nexicolis" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)

"Cocodrilo Bar" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)

CS: I find these photos of Mexican brothels, in your book The Spirit & The Flesh [Radius Books, 2009], disturbing and depressing, but also beautiful. They push me past the obvious subject matter of the women’s occupation and toward their utter strength, faith and grace in the face of economic hardship and raw human desire.

DFC: There is an air of secrecy, sadness and loneliness in the brothel.

"Smoking Torso" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)

"Prostitute Shoulders Face" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)

"Lucy" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)

CS: Your People magazine assignment to photograph survivors of Hurricane Katrina and the possessions they rescued took you to another very dark place.

DFC: Katrina happened when I was finishing up the brothel work. I’d never photographed any kind of weather disaster before, and here it was happening in my own state. When I began assignment, I was sent to the River Center Shelter where the evacuees were being brought to from the Superdome or highways of New Orleans. I was paralyzed photographically by the traumatized people and the terror they had gone through. I wanted to comfort them and help them, instead of photograph. After a few days I began to photograph, as the evacuees became anxious to tell of their terrifying experiences.

CS: I know that over the next two years, thanks to a fellowship from the Soros Foundation, you continued to photograph the people that once lived in the Seventh and Lower Ninth Wards, as well as what was left of the churches in the these neighborhoods, and the landscape of devastation.

DFC: Now I’m photographing the old churches along the Bayou Teche, here in Louisiana. They’re starting to disappear because so few people are going to church—you may see ten people, at the most. Some of these are family churches, and the communities are trying to save them as historical buildings.

CS: And you’re still taking pictures of sugarcane country, too.

DFC: You could say it’s an obsession. I have been photographing the mills and the few burning fields. I am interested in the changing (industrial) landscape of the mills and am starting to edit the work for a book project. For the past 33 years, I’ve missed only a few harvestings. I understand the weather better every year, so my images, especially of the skies, just seem to get more dramatic. The whole environment is always changing. There’s something new every year.

CS: How so?

DFC: Now, modernization of cane cutters has replaced most field workers. There are fewer fires in the fields because of environmental reasons. The new expensive cane cutters cut so well, burning cane is not necessary.

CS: There also aren’t people singing hymns in the fields anymore, you’ve told me, because the mills’ sophisticated machinery means there are fewer people out there working. Those who are, are mainly Mexican migrants.

DFC: My images now are mostly landscapes. And because I understand the weather better every year, the ones especially of the skies just seem to get more dramatic. I am recording oral histories of the elderly former sugarcane workers, as this generation is dying out.

CS: What fuels your devotion to your work?

DFC: I keep finding more stories to tell, and more interesting people. It never ends.

"Primping" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)

Debbie Fleming Caffery (Photo copyright by Debbie Fleming Caffery)

Text © Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.

My profile on Debbie appears in the May 2010 issue of Photographer’s Forum magazine.

January 4, 2011

By Claire Sykes

You take the same route to the grocery store, pass by that park or art gallery you keep meaning to go into, and don’t even think about entire parts of your own city because there’s “no reason” to go there. Well, all that’s about to change—thanks to Kathy across the street from me.

She recently got back from three weeks in Ireland, Scotland, Kosovo and Turkey, most of that for her job at Mercy Corps. Tonight she stopped by with an article for me that she tore out of the latest issue of Lufthansa’s in-flight magazine. In it, Strasbourg-born journalist Jöel Henry suggests these ways to explore your own city with a fresh perspective. I add a few of my own.

Henry says:

On your city map, make a mark on a street that starts with the letter A, and another with the letter Z. Draw a straight line between the two and follow it.

Locate on a street map the neighborhood inside the K2 coordinates. Visit the bars, restaurants and clubs there, as though you were writing a guidebook.

Buy your city’s edition of Monopoly, throw the die and visit those places.

Spend 24 or 48 hours at the nearest airport, and watch people come and go. Visit the shops and restaurants there.

Get on the very next city bus, or subway train, and ride to the end of the line. Once there, book a hotel for the night and explore the area.

Leave your house and walk down the street, taking the first right, then the first left, then the first right, and so on.

And here are ones from me:

Choose one chapter from your city’s best guidebook, close your eyes and point, then go do that.

Have someone blindfold you and lead you around the city. Take in all the sounds and smells, without being concerned about where you are at any given moment. Notice what happens.

Time yourself walking anywhere for 15 minutes before sitting down on the nearest bench or brick wall, and really listen. Write down what you hear. Get up and do it again, somewhere else.

Leave your house and walk around the block ten times in a row without stopping. Each time, look at and listen for something different—just trees, then just cars, then just fences, then just birds, etc.

Choose several buildings downtown that you especially like. Close your eyes and put your hand to them, and feel the textures of all their surfaces.

Find out all the places you can have access to at the tops of buildings—from restaurants to corporate offices—and make an excursion to take in the views.

Visit a part of town populated with an ethnicity that is not yours. Try the strangely named foods and go up and talk to people, as if you were traveling in a foreign country.

Map out a dozen independent bookstores all over town and visit them, stopping for coffee at nearby cafes.

On 12 separate index cards, write down 12 places in the city you’ve never visited, but have always wanted to go. Every month, close your eyes and pick a card, then go there.

If your city is blessed with bridges (like Portland), vow to cross them all this year–but not by car, truck, motorcycle or public transportation.

Every week or two, go to a different city park, big or small.

Venture into some kind of peopled environment where you might not feel all that comfortable. A country western tavern? A swanky nightclub? A karaoke bar? A hospital? A church? A big-box store? The mall? Spend at least an hour there interacting with others.

Attend a public courtroom session or a rural auction, as if they were performances. Enjoy the show.

Instead of ignoring those outdoor, downtown chess players, challenge one of them to a duel.

Shoot baskets with total strangers in a park not in your neighborhood.

Give the next homeless person you see on the street a 10-dollar bill—no explanation, no strings attached.

With no destination or route in mind, and no map in your hands, just wander. Follow your gut with each turn you make and place you go into.

What about you? What do you suggest?

© 2011 by Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.

By Claire Sykes

In the privacy of my own home, I’ve been known to spontaneously sing, dance and lip-sync for select others (and you know who you are!). But I haven’t taken to the boards or a podium much beyond the poetry readings I used to do. Other than those, I’ve been onstage only as an alto in my high school chorus singing things like “Hey, Look Me Over” and Handel’s “Messiah;” and once 17 years ago playing piano in an improv out-there jazz trio.

When I was in the 11th grade, I thought maybe, just maybe, I could act, so I tried out for the school play that year.

Standing in the wings waiting my turn, it was exciting to look onto rows and rows of empty seats and imagine that I could be someone else, someone not me, in front of all those people. It was also utterly terrifying. But not as much as the impromptu scene three of us were asked to do, as friends out at a restaurant for lunch. Somehow, that afternoon, the two other girls cleverly managed to act their way offstage, leaving me all alone—with nothing to say. I blew it. I was really bad. I didn’t even nab a bit part. And I never auditioned for anything again.

Who would guess then that 40 years later I’d find myself back up onstage, footlights beaming into my face—in front of 2,000 people.

What. A. Thrill.

I was happy enough on New Year’s Day this year, sitting in Row N, Seat 1 in Portland’s Keller Auditorium with my friend Ed, watching the touring Broadway musical, Hair.

I used to own the album, part of my coming-of-age soundtrack, and after all these years I still knew most of the songs. This time, they brought tears to my eyes, not so much for their words and music (though that, too) and not for any nostalgia (that I generally don’t do, but how could I not just a little?, given the fringed vests and bell-bottom jeans, long hair and 60s lingo), but because all this singing and dancing were going on live, right in front of me. Up there, onstage with the colored lights and hippie costumes, trippy backdrop and live band, these people were doing something a part of me always wanted to do, but knew I never would.

So at the end, when the cast invited the audience to come up onstage and dance with them—are you kidding?—I didn’t hesitate for one second. This was my big chance.

I danced down the aisle and up the steps right to the front of the stage and shook and shimmied, cutting completely loose and letting it all hang out, man, swinging and flipping my hair around just like they did in that one scene. I danced like I always do, now (at parties or on dance floors)—and like I never did in my shy, uptight youth.

I danced for the music and era of Hair, even if some of the show now was sort of corny. I danced for my quasi-hippie teen years. I danced for the verve and nerve of my middle age. I danced for everyone from the audience dancing. I danced for that hot actor dancing next to me who sang my favorite Hair song.

And I danced for the 2,000 people in their seats watching us dance.

I did it. It was a once-in-a-lifetime (maybe) thing, kind of like skydiving or winning the lottery. I got up there in front of a whole lot of people and did something totally uninhibited, even hamming it up. What the hell, it was all in fun.

Together we danced with Love and Peace—I was sure of it, if only for one song—all of us Dancing As One. And I felt as far away from terrified as that high school day when I trembled struggling for words. I was free. Just like Hair wanted me to be.

© 2011 by Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.