Allin and I met in 1992 when he was leading a bus load of persons with psychiatric disorders to a social protest and I, having a sibling with such a disorder, went along for the event. Turned out it was kismet. Since our very first meeting, Allin and I have forged a partnership that has enriched us both beyond measure and created the strong and mutual bond that life-long partnerships are built upon.

The Door County part of our story began when we bought and opened the first Woodwalk Gallery in the Juddville schoolhouse in 1994. The name “Woodwalk” comes from the merging of our last names – LockWOOD and WALKer and as is the case with that name, for the past 25 years we have in all ways been a partnership – in love, friendship, art, business, in life. We first worked together to rehab the old schoolhouse, then an old dairy barn, and most recently, an old printing office turned cleaners.

These are some things you might or might not know about Allin:

He graduated from Brown University and Harvard Divinity (so I knew he was smart) and what I’ve learned to appreciate since I married him in 1992 are his community organizing skills, his passion for politics and social justice, his ability to inspire others through his leadership methods and his gift for oratory. In addition to all that, Allin performs beautiful, personal wedding ceremonies and has been a very effective fundraiser for causes such as Peninsula School of Art, Help of Door County, the Community Clinic. Of course, I also appreciate his enjoyment of good food and the love of our dogs!

Finally, Allin has also dabbled with his own creative side. He has written six audience sing-a-long plays and one puppet show, with another in the works. He encourages the use of our lower level (called Inside/Out) for theatrical productions, poetry readings, movies or whatever else comes along that he fancies, has an interest in or needs an artistic outlet.

I think Allin is a visionary. You can see I certainly get the best of our partnership. I get to paint and Allin does all the advertising, financials, frame making and most deliveries and installations of large-scale canvases, still finding the time to encourage his artistic side as well as his passion for what is right.

As we age together, the bond deepens. We still look forward to the challenges the future holds for us!

I saw Caio Fonseca’s work in Boston and was intrigued by his layering, leaving intentional shapes of the first layer exposed. Fonseca is an American painter best known for his use of tonal harmonies and balanced compositions. Since I paint by building up layers with some areas leaving the first layer exposed, but not in defined shapes, I decided to paint the birds on branches in two paintings of a series as a departure from my usual layering process. Looking into his background after seeing Caio Fonseca’s work, I was drawn to the development of his painting style. 

Caio Fonseca was born in 1959 in New York City, the son of two artists, Gonzalo Fonseca one of Latin America’s leading modernist sculptors and Elizabeth Fonseca, also an accomplished artist. Growing up in the West Village of Manhattan where father Gonzalo created his sculptures created a rich and vibrant childhood for them and Caio and his family would spend long summers in Italy. 

As a young man, he attended Brown University and then joined his older brother in Barcelona where he lived for five years, studying under the artist Augusto Torres, whose father had taught Gonzalo Fonseca in Uruguay in the 1940s. When Caio turned 26, he bought an old marble workshop in northwestern Italy to convert to a studio and divided his time between New York and the marble quarries. It was in this studio, he painted and sketched hundreds of still life, figures and landscapes, learning from reality and classic education and grasping the concept of abstract forms.

For the next six years (1985 – 1991) Caio spent in Europe developing a style far from those of mainstream America in the 1980s (Neo Expressionism – a style of late modernist or early-postmodern painting and “Identity Art”) whereas at this point American art was transitioning from minimalism, language-based conceptual art to a broader field, including women, minorities and overall more diversity.

In 1983, Frank Stella, an American painter, sculptor and printmaker, well known for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction said “the demise of abstract art was a result of the bankruptcy of pictorial space”. He began to turn his work into Baroque-inspired reliefs and others began to make their own spatial adjustments and by the early 1990’s abstraction was enjoying a resurgence in America. In the 1990’s Caio Fonseca returned to New York City, turning to abstraction as well. He had his first solo show at the Charles Cowles Gallery in Manhattan in 1993. Soon after the Metropolitan Museum bought two of his paintings. He was quoted as saying “The essence of painting for me is the secret nature of forms.”

The musicality of Fonseca’s work stems from the fact he is a musician and pianist. In composition, he is aware of the similarities between the two, saying tonality is essential to painting and “The most mysterious thing in painting is that mysterious order that exists in the values of the painting – that all the pieces respect the harmony of the surface, just like different notes in music”.

A fascinating aspect of his work is that it is both planned AND improvised. He begins by covering the gessoed surface with water-based pigments and the quick drying polymer paint allows him to accumulate multiple layers without bleeding. He does charcoal markings in these layers and when he starts to make charcoal marks, indicators, divisions of space, he gets a chair and sits 10 feet away, looking at the space suggested by the proportions marked in charcoal. A form suggests itself and he begins. The colors underneath minimized by the over painting, adding lines and marks using such diverse implements as tools or kitchen gadgets. These marks reinforce the relationships of forms and colors. “At some point, says Fonseca, I realize I can neither add or subtract a single form without disrupting the rhythmic balance – that’s when I’ve learned to stop.”

Frank Stella’s said of Caio’s work “there has to be a convincing exchange of vitality between the viewer and the painting if both are to live” and I think Caio Fonseca’s work IS indeed convincing. His work is new yet feels familiar, reductive but rich, spiritual and irresistible. He says his greatest teachers are his other paintings and visual phenomena around him; the sense of scale, values, rhythms. “I am responsible for every inch. I have to keep a double mentality – big picture, small picture. I have to react to the unplanned relationships. I eliminate as much as possible, then I turn to the wet surface by incising it there is a fuller unity.”

For those of you who’ve been to my gallery, you may have seen some of the “Birds on Branches” that became a series for me. I was in a stuck place after knee surgery and recovering by watching too many hallmark Christmas movies, needing rules. 

Turning to my Caio Fonseca book once again, I found these two: (1) Not to allow myself to turn the new paintings into skies, water or trees and (2) Not to fix the quickly drawn birds even if they came out somewhat misshapen. My technique was to first paint an allover background, then quickly draw birds on branches, then paint all around them, leaving the birds the first layer of paint. Working within this framework gave me a much needed structure and ultimately aided me in recovering from my knee-induced delirium.

Visit Caio Fonseca’s website at http://www.caiofonseca.com

How is Fall different from the other seasons? Except for the first few busy weekends of fall, for one thing, our entry bell rings less often. That is, unless Fall breezes blow and catch it, announcing the coming of no one, except perhaps a ghost (who might know now we have a bit of more time to engage in such hijinx).

For me, Fall is a season of unwinding. From Summer season’s demands, from the daily schedule, from being tied so tightly to the Gallery. While Summer is about the sun’s warmth, its energy, the flurry and of meeting new visitors and how many invitations to summer art events we can accept, it’s also about getting up the next day and doing it again and again. Fall, on the other hand, is more cool yet warmer, more vibrant yet slower and much more relaxed.

Fall is a season where as an artist, I have more freedom to recharge, contemplate, building creative energy to put onto each canvas. It’s a season in which my color palette might change (consciously or unconsciously) to the shades that are all around me. The trees and aura of the woods of Door County, the moodiness of its skies and water, the natural changes that occur as one season slides into the next season.

Fall is different in other ways. Weekdays in mid to late October might be spent sans a bit of makeup, in baggy pants for the whole day, which delights me. In late October, I might make a date with a friend or friends, go have lunch or meet for coffee, or take a jaunt around the block with Walter and Mona. I might even (gasp) wake late and not begin to paint until mid-day.

On November 1 our Gallery hours change to Friday and Saturday from 10:00 to 4:00, but we are almost always here. Living in the same building as the gallery actually increases our off-season freedom, to pop “home”, prep for dinner, write a quick response to a note from a grandchild. So if you’re planning a trip this Fall (or winter) any time Sunday through Thursday and would like to visit, give us a call. If we can’t, we’ll tell you, but chances are, we’ll be here and you’ll be welcome.

“Celebrate Water” is the theme of galleries, theaters, schools, and music all over Door County this year. The idea came to my friend Anne Egan when her son, Dan Egan, wrote his acclaimed book “The Life and Death of the Great Lakes”. She has spearheaded this idea, and through the Community Foundation of Door County, brought it to fruition.

Like many artists in Door County, I spent last winter painting all about water. Like water itself, the paintings are full of a myriad of colors, patterns, flecks of light, and movement. Sometimes there are horizon lines where water meets sky, other times there are no horizons, only the implied waves and currents with spots of color forming patterns of light touching the water’s surface.

The Boys and Girls Club under Nicole Chapeny’s direction, created an underwater installation in a 10’X10’ canopy which I was pleased to display here on our own patio at the gallery.

Past Door County poet laureate, Estella Lauder, shared her exquisite poem “The Color of Water” with me. In words she expresses what I try to express with paint, the mercurial nature of water.

THE COLOR OF WATER

White, when it caps
the waves
and when it falls as snow
or stays
as frost,
so how does it turn
so many shades
aquamarine
lapis, turquoise, sea green
along the margins of lakes
or oceans
and then become
slate blue away from shore?
Does it have no color
of its own
apart from what it borrows
from earth or sky?
How else could we see
straight through it
when it rains?
Ah, but when it pours
it is opaque
and slightly
silver.

– Estella Lauter

“I want my paintings to haunt you, so that you carry them away with you.”

Any internet search of May Stevens will inevitably turn up these words: activist, feminist, political. And, while it is true that these words describe important personal and artistic focal points that exist across her body of work, what May Stevens really was, was a painter of narratives, of intensely human stories. Political activist and feminist are then terms that could be viewed as facets in a long career, areas of interest that she delved deeply into, each a lens through which to view and explore her own narrative, and the narratives of those around her.

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May Stevens was born in 1924 just outside of Boston, Massachusetts and grew up in the nearby suburb of Quincy. Her father Ralph Stevens was a pipe fitter and all around blue-collar American. Her mother Alice took care of May and her younger brother Stacy. Part of May’s outlook on life and society initially stemmed from her interactions with her father and her mother. Her father, while supportive of her interest in the arts was also outwardly racist. Her mother, a quiet woman, became increasingly reclusive following the death of May’s brother at the age of 15.

Following high school, May began studying at the Massachusetts College of Art in 1942. While there, she primarily studied the post-impressionists, and began to develop the narrative approach to painting that would connect all of her later styles. “I remember going to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,” May would recount later in life, “to look at Postman Joseph Roulin by Van Gogh and being deeply influenced on a primal level—also by Gauguin’s painting Where Do We Come From? Where Are We? Where Are We Going? This kind of narrative painting that intends to speak philosophically about life itself was very important to my thinking, to the techniques that I used, and the way I put paint on a canvas.”

In 1948, May Stevens married fellow artist Rudolf Baranik, and the following year the two painters welcomed their first and only child, Steven, into the world. Throughout the late 1940s and 50s, May and Rudolf continued to develop as artists, and increasingly began to view art not just as a vehicle for personal expression, but also as a medium through which to comment on the political and social movements of the day. By the early 1960s, May was completely involved in the Civil Rights Movement, and in 1963 her painting Freedom Riders, for which Martin Luther King Jr. wrote the catalogue preface, was exhibited at the Roko Gallery in New York.

For May specifically, much of her artwork was influenced by the poverty of, and lack of, opportunities for the women that she grew up around. “My favorite teacher, my painting teacher, was Otis Philbrick, the acting president of [Mass Art]. He liked my painting a lot, and he said he wanted me to promise him that I would never give up painting. I thought that was wonderful. It indicated that he understood how hard it was for a woman to go on, because they usually got married and had children. They don’t become painters.”

As her artistic career became increasingly political, May began to return to her “narrative” roots, she began to create in series—painting, and exploring, the same narrative different ways, approaching an idea from numerous viewpoints and perspectives, saying in an interview, “I start with an idea and look at it in different ways. There’s more to say—contriving to see it—think about it—go all around it and discover more. I want to really plumb the depths.” It was with this approach—an approach that necessitated multitudes—that May Stevens began to make a larger impact.

Big Daddy: political narratives of the father

Perhaps one of May’s first series to gain widespread recognition was the Big Daddy series, painted between 1967 and 1976. Initially based on a photo she took of her aging father, the Big Daddy series came to represent dueling aspects of her life: the personal and the political. Remember that May Stevens’ father was unapologetically racist and came to represent, in the artist’s mind, the white, male-dominated and unabashedly patriotic world of late 1960s America—a world and culture, whose viewpoint would eventually lead to the Vietnam War. So, the image of May’s father, and all of the memories and emotions that she associated with the man, became Big Daddy. She painted him as a “fat, white, self-satisfied, smug man who is totally naked, and with a big bald head.” He was gross, fat and self-involved—a bland authoritarian—he represented, both physically and conceptually, the politics of the moment that she so detested.

Even May Stevens acknowledged that Big Daddy Paper Doll was her most effective and well known of the Big Daddy series. Painted primarily in red, white and blue, the painting (above) shows Big Daddy naked. He has been stripped of clothing and the power that uniforms convey. Transformed of into a child’s toy, Big Daddy is no longer deadly. On either side of him are different costumes, each costume representing an aspect of patriarchal authority. However, for May, the imagery went beyond the representational and into reality—into the riots and into the war those riots were protesting. “On one side of him is a soldier; on the other a policeman in a dark, blue uniform with a big, blue, shiny helmet for riot gear. Then there is a black-clothed, hooded hangman. At the end is the butcher. Both the butcher and his bulldog wear white aprons stained with blood. The butcher and the hangman are allegorical, but the policeman and the military are real.”

Ordinary/Extraordinary: feminist narratives of the mother

Based on nursing home photos of her mother Alice, Ordinary/Extraordinary explored the lives of women through the lens of her mother’s final years. And, again, just as there was duality in the Big Daddy series—a conflict of personal and political narratives—there was duality in the paintings that comprised this series. In discussing the painting Forming the Fifth International, May addressed these dueling narratives—that of the iconic, historical figure versus that of the commonplace woman—which comprised its subject matter.

“In [Forming the Fifth International, from] Ordinary/Extraordinary, it isn’t just a clash of cultures that I’m dealing with. I’m dealing with the lives of Rosa Luxemburg and Alice Stevens. Alice Stevens was born in Canada in 1895. Rosa Luxemburg was born in Poland in 1871. These two women, who are important to me, were juxtaposed by me because of the differences in their lives and because, as a part of the women’s movement, I was very interested in the range, the span, the diversity, the problems, and the possibilities of women’s lives. So here I placed a woman who was a Polish Jew and became an international theoretician, organizer, and actual world-changer, and juxtaposed her with my own mother, who was a housewife, had two children, and ended up in nursing homes.”

We see in this painting, divergent paths, partly chosen based on expectation—societal and cultural—partly chosen based on character.  These divergent paths, placed side by side, create a narrative that beautifully conveys the lack of opportunity for women that so disheartened May Stevens; on one side sits her mother, a woman given no choice in life other than to raise a family, opposite her mother sits a woman who chose the path normally reserved for a man, and a woman who eventually paid for that choice with her life.

Water: narratives of love and loss

May Stevens most recent series came into the being as a response to the loss of those closest to her: the loss of her son Steven, who committed suicide in 1981 by jumping off the George Washington Bridge, which spans the Hudson river in New York; the loss of her mother Alice, who died in 1986; and her husband Rudolph, who passed in 1998 from heart failure. While she continued to work on the Ordinary/Extraordinary series for several years following the deaths of Steven and Alice, it seems that her water series really came into being following the death of Rudolph, her partner of 41 years.

The water series began with May scattering Rudolph’s ashes in different bodies of water that were important to May and Rudolph—in the Charles River in Massachusetts; in the Santa Fe River and in Galisteo Creek, both in New Mexico. As she put it, “My new paintings tell the story of Rudolph, our life, and of our love together.” Perhaps what sets these paintings apart from any previous water painting is her use of words within the painting. She paints tens of thousands of words across the water. They represent the ashes of her loved ones, but appropriately take on the quality of light dancing on the waves. The words serve a spatial purpose too: floating on top of the water, they add a luminescence and depth that I find remarkable. And of course the words add another layer of meaning to her work. Initially, she picked up the technique from Rudolph, who began adding words to his work as a way to deal with the loss of Steven. For May, she initially added the words “Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto”—thanks to life, which has given me so much—the lyrics to a song Rudolph asked to have sung after his death. Eventually, words came to encompass so much more—eventually, she saw the combination of water and words as a means to connect the many aspects and narratives that had combined, like the confluence of many rivers, into her own life.

“It all ties in. It begins with the canal. Rosa [Luxemburg] was thrown into a canal, so I began working with the canal. I have my mother in one painting sitting on two sides of a canal, which started out as Rosa’s canal, but then I name it Fore River, which is my river where I swam as a child. So I do all these canal paintings, and eventually Steven dies close to the water. They all connect. It’s all one body of water that connects my childhood, my love of water, my swimming…and then it goes to Rosa, her being thrown into the water, the canal, her death, and then it goes into the Hudson river, yes. So there’s this kind of circularity, continuity, and it’s the way I feel about life and death, about circularity, continuity. There’s nothing strange or weird about it. It’s extremely natural. So, [the paintings] Galisteo, Connemara, and Atlantic, which refer to the scattering of Rudolph’s ashes, are part of the continuity.”

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There is a world of techniques and ideas in the paintings of May Stevens that I find compelling. She paints large. Her paintings cover walls. They feel like a place, not a picture. And, her paintings, regardless of the often very dark subject matter, are always beautifully painted in rich and vivid colors—colors that feel like bruises. With May Stevens, it seems painting is a sensual act, but an act in which Apollonian control vies for dominance against Dionysian abandon. Textures move from the clear to the opaque, and the surface of a painting can feel meticulously executed while also being covered in the incidental drips of too much oil.

In particular, I love that she works in series, that she will explore the same idea for years. I am a serial painter as well, so I feel a connection to her philosophical drive, a drive that seeks to explore a limited number of ideas from an unlimited number of perspectives.  Additionally, as she discussed in the quote above, a single idea in one series of paintings (in this case the canal Rosa Luxemburg was thrown into) can morph into a new series of paintings years later. I find a personal connection to this idea as well. In fact, my tree series—my exploration of the visual rhythms and plays of light that exist in a dense and wooded landscape—began as a study of table legs! Like the metamorphosis of certain insects, the central idea can, over time, undergo an essential change in its nature, and the original idea can become both unrecognizable and, in its transformed state, incredibly beautiful!

Perhaps what I take, more than anything else, from May Stevens is the fact that at 93, she is still painting—in other words, she has kept her promise to her painting teacher. And, as I am getting older, I find her ethic inspiring. To me it says, “Never give up!” and “Be who you are!” for as long as possible, regardless of what society, or any single person, tells you to do or be. Always keep painting. Art, or the act of creation, can become a lifelong friend, a friend that will be there for the good times, and will help you through the bad, a friend that will help you explore the world outside, as well as the universe within.