Self Portrait At GRAM

Grand Rapids Art Museum

Ellsworth Kelly and a Calder Symposium at the Grand Rapids Art Museum… perfect Sunday afternoon. It’s Father’s Day, it’s the Solstice….one could say today is a Bit Overdetermined. Good day to hang out with art.

The Kelly show is his color abstractions and plant lithographs. I do not know how he captures the essence of a thing, finding the subtle quirks that make each thing just itself.  Shape is his subject. It’s all done with close looking and simplification (and this is what we’re trying to do as writers, what I’m trying to teach my students. Look, look closer, hush, tell the truth, simplify.) 

There were the plants, and then a few of his early color lithographs, which represent his alphabet of later shapes — those simple, wonderful squares and oblongs in relationships with each other. There’s something here to learn for writers: the early work creates (our lists of words on cards) our own alphabet of shapes, the emotional/physical “stuff” we’re going to turn and turn over, again and again. A personal code, exploration for a decade.  He calls them “Suites”. I’m thinking a lot about working in a series, how to structure the classes this way, and putting the essays I am working on into “Suites.” I had an absolutely thrilling hour sitting in the museum, with these pieces, and seeing how my book of essays could be done as four suites.

But the best part was seeing in person these Ellsworth Kelly prints of leaves and buds–camellia, mulberry, dracena–what a great noticer. You can’t tell at all how amazing they are in a book, they have to be seen in person. They’re huge, first of all. And I do not how he makes four oranges into a sensual poem about sexual passion and true love itself, but he does this. I had the dark-lit rooms to myself, the idea of moving to Grand Rapids seeming really good. Visiting art and the library and the Cathedral, all in one Sunday sweet swoop……….good.

If I move to Grand Rapids, I will have to really really fall in with Alexander the great Calder. (His La Grand Vitesse is the giant orange metal jewel in the city’s assertively unfunky crown.) So I am stepping in.  His grandson spoke today, and it was said  over and over, in all kinds of ways: this man was a  ”Prodigious noticer.”  I learned about the circus he made, wire figures, and all the jewelry…he eschewed precious metals and mass production. He made things for his friends, for his wife. The French pretend he is French. I think I thought that too, as a child. He wanted to install stabiles you could drive a car through. And he did. This Florida girl’s in like.