Art reader's digest

From How to Disappear, by Akiko Busch:

"Soetsu Yanagi was a Japanese potter who advocated for anonymity in folk art. In his 1972 book, The Unknown Craftsman, he includes the absence of the artist's signature in his list of what confers beauty on an object.  Along with use, the imprint of the human hand, simplicity, low cost, and regional tradition, the anonymity that comes in deflecting attention from maker to user is part of what infuses physical artifacts with value and meaning.  Certainly those criteria apply to all those handcrafted household artifacts made of wood, clay, textiles, metal; all those utilitarian plates and spoons; all those touchstones of domestic life, tables, chairs, knives, tools, hinges, and quilts, all shaped, carved, molded, and sewn at a time when such things are largely forgotten, but this archive of objects carries its own collective effervescence over the centuries.  In an odd way, it might even be the very absence of the signature that confirms the humanity of the work."

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Thought-provoking, but I'm not sure I agree.

Perhaps it's true that functional objects are more about the user than the maker, but over the centuries the master makers have always commanded more value than the anonymous journeyman.  Think silver made by Paul Revere, fabrics by Jack Lenor Larsen.

I am one of many quilt lovers who are sorry that so many of the old quilts lack a signature.  When the owners of these quilts bring them in for appraisal or display, the ones with ID seem to be more prized; how many family quilts are tagged with a precious slip of paper, perhaps safety-pinned to the binding, noting that great-grandma started this quilt in 1917 and Aunt Minnie finished it in 1940.  Many of my own family "heirlooms" were lovingly wrapped and labeled by my mother.

I'll happily use an anonymous doily in my fabric collage, but I'd never cut into one made by my grandmother.  At some point I'll have to add a second label to this roll, explaining that it was my mother who wrote "my mother."  And just to make things clear, I'll add her name -- Ida Wilhelmina Fahselt Burtzlaff.  Because I think it's good to know who made something special.

What do you think?

Deja vu in Helsinki

In the early 1970s, when Marimekko was all the rage, I made myself a dress from a huge pink/red print.  It was a highly impractical dress, sleeveless and floor-length, and I recall wearing it only once, although maybe I have forgotten.  But the print was unforgettable, embodying the minimalist-yet-wow Scandinavian design esthetic.

We had the pleasure of spending the most of this month in the Baltic, and Helsinki was one of the stops on our cruise.  One of the other women in the group, a quilter, told the guide that her fondest wish was to visit a Marimekko shop, and the guide figured out a way to make that happen.  Since it was a big favor, I thought I should come along too -- a favor for two isn't quite as outrageous as a favor for one.

When we walked into the shop what did I see but my identical pattern from the 70s.

And then I saw that they now offer the same design in at least three different sizes:

And on coffee mugs, trays, cosmetic pouches, oven mitts, napkins, and who knows what else.



They also have "my" pattern in a black/gray colorway, but I like the original better.

It made me feel good to know that some things never change.

My favorite things 53

When my Dad was helping win WW2, his official MOS (military occupational specialty) was cartographer.  He never had a chance to find out what that meant in real service, because even before his division made it to Europe, he had been diverted to putting out a newspaper for the troops, but they did issue him a nifty little atlas, the 1943 edition, which he dutifully carried around for his entire length of service.

After the war the atlas soon became quaintly obsolete, all those dozens of newly independent nations still labeled with their colonial names (Belgian Congo, French West Africa, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Italian East Africa, Netherlands Indies, French Guiana, British Somaliland).  But the contours of the land were as they had always been.  I appropriated the atlas when I was maybe in fifth grade, when my fascination with maps became important.

I would put a sheet of carbon paper behind the page in the atlas, and trace it with a stylus to make maps for my term papers and book reports.  Raised to never, never, never, never put a mark into a book, I was meticulous about keeping the atlas pristine, although leafing through it today, I find black smudges on one page.

And apparently I decided to ink in the border between East and West Germany, which appears to stop in midstream, because by 1943 Czechoslovakia was just another part of Germany, no border indicated.

I've loved that book for many decades, often taking it down from the shelf just to recapture a bit of the world before I was born.  For instance, how intriguing to find the map of petroleum production with not a single green dot in Saudi Arabia, or the map of automobile production with the huge red circle in the US and the tiniest dot in Japan.  I can easily open any page at random and pfft, an hour has gone by.

Over the years I've probably spent more time with this book than with any other single book in the world.  I own other, more recent atlases, but none of them fill the room with magic when I open them the way this one does.

It's fitting that I'm ending my year of favorite things with a book of maps, because my daily art project for 2018 is going to be maps.  I'll talk more about that in the next week, but for now I'll just close out a very good year (personally, if not for the world at large) with this wonderful thing.  On this New Year's Eve, I know we all hope for wonderful things, at least a few of them, in the year ahead, and I wish many of them for us all.

My favorite things 52

Many years ago my sister bought a present for Dad -- a Christmas bear.  Turn him on, and he taps his toe, strums his guitar and plays Jingle Bells, in a syncopated rock-n-roll rhythm.  Clearly this was the perfect present for the man who had everything.

I don't recall whether there was negotiation, after our parents died, over who got the Christmas bear.  Maybe I pulled rank as the oldest survivor, or maybe nobody else wanted it (although how could that be possible??).  But the bear came home with me, and has been an integral part of our holiday celebrations ever since.  He needed a new battery a couple of years ago, but is otherwise good as new.

Most of the time he takes his position on the bar in the dining room, ready to perform for the assembled guests.

When we first met Isaac, age 3, at a Christmas dinner, the bear was on hand to make him feel welcome.  Isaac needed to be held up to reach the button, but now, of course, he's tall enough to do so without help.  This year it's new baby Vivian who will have to be held up to meet the bear. 

When we do Christmas away from home the bear comes along, so as you read this, our whole family will be listening to Jingle Bells at the beach in South Carolina. 

All of us wish all of you a very good Christmas!

My favorite things 51

Over the years we have become less and less inclined to do a lot of Christmas decorating, giving away huge boxes of ornaments to our kids and putting up fewer outdoor things that require climbing on ladders in the cold.  But there are a few doodads that are non-negotiably required.  Such as my angel choir.  (I know it's really an orchestra, not a choir, but for some reason that's what I have always called them and I'm not going to change now.)

When I was about 12 my godmother sent the angels to me.  She didn't ordinarily send gifts but maybe this was special because I was confirmed that year?  Anyway, it was the first Christmas doodad that was mine alone, rather than a family possession, and I always took great care with where and how the angels were set out. 

They never had a regular place, but would be arrayed wherever it seemed best.  Every year they tried out different formations: all in a row, or in a two-by-two procession, or arranged into percussion, brass and string sections.  Here they are performing from atop the Bose radio, so their songs can be broadcast throughout the house.

Over the years the angels have shown some signs of wear.  A few wings have broken off and had to be glued on.  The conductor has lost one arm (fortunately not the one with the baton).  There some paint chips.  But they continue to make beautiful angel music

My favorite things 50

I got interested in Zuñi fetishes, those tiny carved animals who represent the Prey Gods or guardian animals of the six regions of the earth, in the late 1980s when I took my sons to Los Angeles on a business trip.  My professional organization was holding its convention at Disneyland, in a resort hotel that was adjacent to the park, and it seemed that the boys, in their early teens, could occupy themselves safely while I attended the meetings. 

One day we drove into the city to ooh and aah at the weird people on Venice Beach, and to gape at the La Brea tar pits.  And we went into the next-door museum, where the gift shop was having a big sale on fetishes.  I fell in love, and bought several, and over the years I have gotten many more on visits to the Southwest.  Here are some of them:

Before fetishes became collectible art objects, they were used ceremonially and carried in small pouches by hunters for protection and good luck in hunting.  Thus they were small -- the littlest one in this photo, the donkey in the center front, is only about an inch long.

Each of the fetish animals has a little "prayer bundle" tied around its middle, which it carries for its own protection and good luck.  According to tradition, you're supposed to feed your fetish animals to keep them healthy and happy, by strewing some cornmeal in their case or pouch.  Mine have never been fed but I think they're still happy.  I know I am.

My favorite things 49

If you've ever been in a Lutheran church service you know that congregational singing is a really big deal.  When I still lived at home the major topic of conversation on the way home from church was occasionally the sermon or the Bible reading, but always the hymns -- I love that one, that one was way too slow, strange wording in the third verse, can't go wrong with a Bach cantata.  Of course I own modern hymnals, but wonderfully, I also own these four old ones.

The big black one was my grandfather's, and my mother appended sticky notes inside with historical commentary. 

The really beat-up green one belonged to my grandmother's sister, and I don't know how it got into my possession.  Both these really old ones had words and music, in German, of course.  The latest of my ancestors to arrive in the U.S. emigrated in the 1880s and I'm sure they spoke English in town, but German at home and in church at least until World War I.   

The two little ones -- with words only, no music -- belonged to my parents, with their respective names stamped in gold on the covers, issued upon their confirmations.  My father's book, given to him in 1927 when he was 14, was in German, his first language, from which I deduce that Holy Cross Church in Saginaw had not.  Or maybe they just had a box of books left over and weren't about to throw out a perfectly good book, even if it was in a language that the kids couldn't read any more; it would build their character.  Meanwhile, my mother's confirmation hymn book, given the following year, was in English. 

By the time I learned to sing hymns, of course, everything was in English, and I know only tiny bit in German.  Stille Nacht, of course, and a few lines of my favorite Advent hymn, Es ist ein Ros entsprungen.  Since today is the first Sunday in Advent, here's that hymn from the little green book, in case you want to sing along.

Es ist ein Ros entsprungen
aus einer Wurzel zart
Wie uns die Alten sungen,
von Jesse kam die Art,
Und had ein Blümlein bracht
mitten in kalten Winter
wohl zu der halben Nacht.

My favorite things 48

My mother owned a meat grinder that to my knowledge was never used to grind meat.  I'm not sure why she acquired it, but at some point in my adolescence it got to be used for cranberry-orange relish.  When my sister and I departed home for our own kitchens, we both noted that cranberry-orange relish made with other kitchen implements wasn't quite as good as the official home version.  We tried chopping up the fruit in Cuisinarts, or with knives on cutting boards -- close but no cigar.

I don't know what I did to deserve it, but my mother passed the meat grinder on to me, and for many years I have been able to make perfect cranberry-orange relish.  Obligatory for Thanksgiving and Christmas, welcome for many other festive menus. 

The original box is labeled "Meat grinder" in my mom's handwriting -- twice, because you never know which way you'll fit it in the cupboard.  A bit of research reveals that Rival Manufacturing, founded in 1932, made a whole line of kitchen appliances with similar names:  my Grind-O-Mat, a Juice-O-Mat, Can-O-Mat, Broil-O-Mat, Knife-O-Mat, Shred-O-Mat, Steam-O-Mat and Ice-O-Mat.  (But when they became famous for the Crock Pot, they abandoned this naming strategy -- I guess Pot-O-Mat didn't survive the focus group.)  The company history tells me the grinder was made sometime after the mid-1950s, and the fact that the address on the box has no zip code tells me it was made before 1963, which jibes with my memory of when we started making cranberry-orange relish.

You have to put it together, making sure that the sharp-edged cutting plate (the one with the big holes, not the small ones, because there are two) faces outward.  You have to put a drop of water on each of the suction cups to hold it firmly to the counter.  It's not as tight as it was in its youth (but then who is?) so it wobbles a bit when you get it working, and drips a bit of orange juice out the bottom.  Cranberries like to bounce out of the chute when you crank it, so you have to hold your hand over the top.

But it makes the perfect relish.   I couldn't do a holiday without it.

My favorite things 47

In the olden days, toys were from a different planet than they are now.  For one thing, there weren't so many of them, and for another, they weren't made of plastic.  I have only two really old toys, which I suppose belonged to my dad and his brother.  They're small, just two inches tall, and now they live on top of the type case in my living room in a prime display spot.

The three monkeys are made of ceramic, stamped "Made in Japan" on the bottom, which probably means they were produced between 1921 and 1941 -- I suspect closer to 1921 because the boys were little then.  Remarkably they are still bright and unchipped after decades of being played with.

The painted metal dog, made in Germany (appropriate, because he appears to be a German shepherd), has an extra attraction: his head bobs on a spring.

I don't have many things from my parents' childhoods -- a doll quilt from my mother, these two toys from my dad.  So these are special.

My favorite things 46

Four months after we got married we moved to Germany, and my parents seized upon the opportunity to come visit us the next summer.  It was Mom's first trip to Europe, and Dad's first since he was in the Army in WW2.  In subsequent years they traveled the world but for this first expedition were happy to have a home base, a chauffeured car and personal guides.

The chauffeured car was nothing to write home about: a VW hatchback, only slightly larger than the classic bug.  When all four of us, with our luggage, piled in there was barely room to breathe, but we were all much younger then and soldiered through.  We picked them up from the ship in Bremerhaven and then drove around for a couple of weeks through Northern Germany and Denmark.

In Copenhagen we split up, men adjourning for beer while women went shopping.  Mom and I were both enamored of Scandinavian design and we wandered around drooling over all manner of furniture, china, housewares, textiles and glass.  Mindful of the tiny car we had to return home in, we bought a couple of tiny dishes, small enough to fit in your pocket.  But then we came upon a small table, dark wood with an inlaid copper top.  The copper was incised in a shallow bas relief, with an abstract pattern that was at once organic and industrial in feeling.

I fell in love.  But how would I get it home?  We asked the clerk if the legs came off.  No.  We asked the clerk if they could ship it to Germany.  Yes, for three times the cost of the table, which was a non-starter.  We left.  We came back, so I could stroke the copper top again.  Do you suppose the legs really don't come off?  So we turned it over, and guess what?  The legs came off!

So we took the table home, in pieces, held on my lap in the backseat for 1000 kilometers.  It has sat next to my living room chair, whichever chair that might be, for 46 years.  It really could stand to be refinished, at least the wooden part; the copper looks as beautiful as the day it was born.

The moral of the story, of course, is persistence, and/or skepticism: even when the clerk says the legs don't come off, turn it over and look for yourself. 

My favorite things 45

Although I own plenty of things whose only function in life is to sit there and look beautiful, I love souvenirs that work.  And best of all are free souvenirs that work.

Consider the humble beer mat.  While the customary American beer mat is inscribed with the name of the restaurant or bar, the customary European beer mat, like the customary European beer glass, is inscribed with the name of the beer.  When we lived in Germany in the 1970s we started acquiring beer mats by accident, and some time later I started acquiring them on purpose.  I own several dozens, small piles of them conveniently situated around the house within reach of any place you might ever want to sit down and park your drink. 

Since I've been officially collecting (a much nicer word than stealing, don't you think?) beer mats I have gotten many that are in relatively virgin condition, but the most precious are the ones that have been with us since Germany.

 It's amazing how tough those old mats are -- some of them are kind of beat up, and some have faded a bit, but they keep on trucking.  Some day I may retire them to use as art materials, but for now I'm just as happy to use a vintage mat as a nice new one.  Although I don't remember exactly where and when I grabbed most of them, they bring back fond generalized memories of pleasant hours of leisure and cameraderie.

My favorite things 44

My mother acquired three old kitchen chairs that had belonged to her grandparents, but the caned seats were deteriorating.  Once my father's supremely handy aunt and uncle were visiting and the chairs came up in the conversation.  Well, heck, it's no big deal to recane a chair, they said, and took them home with them to Indiana.  Mom insisted on paying them, despite much argument.

In the fullness of time the chairs returned, beautifully recaned.  But Mom had a conniption when she realized that it was plastic "cane," not real.  That had not come up in the conversation.

Mom thought that plastic had defiled her grandparent's precious chairs, and indeed, their precious memories.  She berated herself for not having specified authentic cane for the job.  She couldn't stand to even look at the chairs and stashed them in the attic.  We talked about this one day and I said, I'm sorry you can't stand to even look at them; I think they're pretty nice.  If that's what you think, she said, you can have them.

So the chairs came home with me and have been making themselves beautifully useful for a long time.  One served as my sewing chair for many years.  After we bought elegant upholstered chairs for our dining room, and I realized the seat was too high for me to get my feet comfortably on the floor, I sat in a caned chair for a decade, even though it didn't match anything else in the room. 

Currently two of the chairs reside in our front hall, convenient for depositing the mail, the newspaper, a package on the way to the post office, or your hat and gloves. One lives in the dining room, ready to be slotted in when we need to squeeze three people along one side of the dining room table without putting in the extra leaf.  If we need one someplace else, they're light enough to be carried all over the house.

For a while I shared Mom's opinion of the plastic cane, even while welcoming the "ruined" chairs into my life.  Then I decided that plastic was probably an excellent choice for chairs that were going to be seriously used.  In 30-some years it hasn't faded, stretched or frayed.  It doesn't scratch your legs if you're wearing shorts.  It looks sharper than the rest of the chairs, whose carved ornamentation is starting to lose its veneer.

So Mom, you were wrong to disdain the fix-up job.  But you were right to let me have the chairs!

My favorite things 43

We visited Italy in the winter of 2003. With the exception of two taxi rides, we did a whole month depending entirely on public transportation and our own two feet.  We packed light, washed out our clothes in hotel bathtubs and wore the same sweater every day. 

But in Sorrento we strolled through a market street and saw a kitchenware store with a table of sale items on the sidewalk.  We spotted some nice pasta bowls for an amazing 1.25 euros apiece -- at the time, about $1.15 -- and couldn't resist.  We bought four and shlepped them back to the hotel, a long enough walk that we traded off carrying the bag once or twice along the way.

Before we made it home for good we had carried those bowls about four miles, making our way between hotels and railroad stations and through airports.  With every step they got a little bit heavier, and we had to remind ourselves that the bowls were beautiful, a steal, and our only souvenirs of the trip.  We had invested not just the five bucks but a heck of a lot of sweat equity to bring them home.

But it was worth it!  They have become our default bowl for pasta, not to mention the occasional soup or other juicy entree.  I suspect they've been used at least once a week since we returned, and we never fail to think about our wonderful trip when we eat that last bit of food and reveal the red tomato.

My favorite things 42

As a professor of graphic arts, my father was an inveterate collector of all things related to printing, an enthusiasm that washed down to my own generation.  Our favorite method was letterpress -- where the letters or images are raised above the surface of the printing plate to accept ink rolled or pounced over the top, like a rubber stamp.  But just to make the collection comprehensive, Dad acquired some lithographic stones.

Lithography works in a non-intuitive manner: the image and the printing plate are perfectly flat.  The ink adheres to the image and not to the rest of the plate through basic chemistry -- because oil and water don't mix.  Start with a porous stone, perfectly flat.  Draw on it with a greasy crayon or paint.  Slosh water over the entire stone; it will be repelled by the crayon but absorbed into the background areas.  Roll greasy ink over the entire stone; it will be deposited onto the greasy area of the image but repelled by the water-wet background.  Now you can print the image onto a piece of paper.

Commercial printers were apparently quite frugal with their raw material, the heavy and painstakingly milled stones.  Both of these stones have several letterheads and documents crammed as closely together as possible.  Apparently the cost of making a separate stone would far outweigh the extra care it would take to print just the one you want.

One of the stones was from Georgia, blank checks from banks in Wrightsville, Savannah, Maysville, Senola, Colquette and Fitzgerald.  (I flipped and lightened the images in photoshop so you can read the type.)

The printer must have had to do a lot of tricky masking to make sure just the right one got printed!  In those days, financial papers typically included a blank space for the date, printed like this:  _______________ 190__.     Maybe a clever way for the printer to insure that people came back and had new letterheads printed at least once per decade.

The other stone came from Paris; it has letterheads for a dressmaker, an electrician, and a stockbroker, if my bad French is correct.  It was a decade later, 191__.

I was reminded when I pulled the stones out for photography just how heavy they are!!  My brother, who lives in Australia, reminded me the last time he visited that one of the stones actually belongs to him.  I told him he was welcome to take it home with him, but since he's always just a nanogram this side of the weight limit, he declined.  So I think both stones are going to stay with me forever.

My favorite things 41

My mother gave me a crystal ball -- not for fortune-telling, but to hang in my kitchen window.  It's about the size of a golf ball.  When the sun is at the right angle, and if I have wiped the ball clean of grease and dust, and put a little spin on it, brilliant little rainbows dance throughout the room.

It varies with the season, of course, but this week rainbow time starts about 8:30 a.m. and lasts maybe 20 minutes, 20 minutes of pure magic.

My favorite things 40

When I was a senior in high school I saved up my babysitting money and bought a record player, which meant I needed to acquire records.  For some reason, I decided that what I wanted to hear was classical music, and having joined the Columbia Record Club, with its infamous negative option membership setup, I soon amassed lots of music.  Despite flirtations with Motown and Broadway, I remained a classical girl at heart, and was delighted to learn that my husband-to-be also loved classical music and had his own bazillion records.

Records, of course, are hard to integrate into your daily life, because they require tending, even if you have a turntable with a changer to drop a new one into place when the old one is finished.  You can only reliably hear the music from the same room, which doesn't work if you're doing housework or tending children or making dinner (whoever would have put their record player in the kitchen???).

Fortunately we've been blessed in Louisville with great classical radio.  For several years in the 1970s, we even had two classical stations!  If you didn't want to listen to Hindemith, you could flip the dial and see if you could get Tchaikovsky on the other station!  We're down to one station now, but it's 24/7, so we turn on the radio when we get up in the morning and turn it off when we go to bed.

#2 of 5

Some years ago we stopped at an outlet store on our way home from vacation and bought a Bose radio for Ken's office.  It was a splurge, but what a quantum leap in quality from the previous radio (a pale green Grundig that Ken had bought 50 years earlier) in that room.  I immediately became jealous, and a couple of years later I stopped at the same outlet store and bought one for my own office.

Meanwhile our radios in the other rooms were getting old.  The radio/stereo system in the living room was getting increasingly unreliable.  We own more than 1,000 CDs, and I realized that CDs are an almost-obsolete technology.  I worried that one day the system would refuse to play a CD, and this would occur two weeks after every manufacturer of CDs in the entire world had decided to stop manufacturing CD players.

A Bose outlet store had just opened less than an hour from us, and as Christmas approached one year I announced that I was going to buy a Bose radio with a CD changer, in the hopes that it would outlast both us and our CDs.  When I got there, I decided to buy not only the radio plus CD player for our living room, but one for our bedroom and one for the kitchen, a total of five.
 
Ken accused me of over-splurging, but I pointed out that if you listen to the radio during every waking moment, why not have great quality?  All the radios are equipped with remote controls, and the three new ones also turn off and on if you simply touch them -- a great boon when you're walking through the kitchen with greasy hands and can do the honors with your elbow.  I'm not sure whether this works through temperature, pressure or ESP, but it's pretty neat.  As is the ability to have music throughout the house throughout the day -- wouldn't Bach be jealous?

My favorite things 39

In 1979, I guess, because that's the copyright date, I bought a set of World Book encyclopedias.
Son #1 was seven years old and it seemed like this was a good time to get set up for the inevitable school routine of looking things up for reports.  Strangely, I don't remember that we ever used the books all that much.  The boys weren't old enough for the Internet to become the school routine of choice, but maybe the style in pedagogy was to downplay looking things up.  Or maybe they did it in the school library.  Or maybe they just blew off their homework.

Time passed and the World Books continued to occupy their prime shelf space in the office.  The Internet came along.  We hardly ever touched the encyclopedias.  And in 2009 I had a brainstorm, which was that they might have a second career of great usefulness.  I decided that it would be OK to cannibalize them for art.

You must realize that I was raised to worship books.  I thought it was a venial sin to set a book open on the table face down or crack its spine.  It was a mortal sin to write in a book, or cut it up.  The thought of defacing a whole set of encyclopedias was terrifying.

But I told myself that (A) we hadn't opened the books in decades.  (B) this was not a valuable artifact; probably there are 3 million unused sets of World Books lying around in offices, basements, attics and landfills.  (C) nobody else could possibly use them; even if paper encyclopedias themselves aren't obsolete, the 1979 version surely is.  And (D) if I used them for art it would be better than not using them at all.  So I cut out pictures and articles for a series of daily postcards I was sending to various family members.

Since then I've gone into the encyclopedias with gusto.  I've cut out pages to use for found haiku; I've cut out pictures for collage; I've cut out words and phrases for my daily text project.  Never a week goes by without me consulting the books; surely a lot more than we ever used the books in their first career.

I still haven't reached the point where I'm willing to tear the covers off the books, although I have made art with covers from other people's discarded World Books.  I still need mine for "reference" -- if you need a picture of Harry Truman or a fish, it's so easy to just grab the right volume off the shelf, look it up and cut it out.

My favorite things 38

In 2013 I had a solo show at the beautiful art gallery at St. Meinrad Archabbey and Seminary, a monastic institution in St. Meinrad IN, an hour or so west of us.  It was founded in the 1850s by Benedictine monks sent from Switzerland to the frontier; their presence generated a large and thriving Catholic community that still exists in southern Indiana.

My husband and I drove over to deliver the quilts, and as we went through the closed gallery we saw that the artwork from the previous show was still there, leaning against walls and stacked near the door.  It was sculpture by Brother Martin Erspamer, a monk at St. Meinrad with an MFA who paints, designs worship spaces, and makes furniture, ceramics and stained glass.

Ken fell in love with a ceramic Jesus and we bought Him and took Him home with us.  It's a ceramic bas relief, about an inch thick and amazingly heavy.  After we got it home I went to hang it on the wall and realized to my dismay that there was no hanging apparatus -- no holes so you could slot the piece over nails in the wall, no wire loop embedded in the clay.  Hmmmm.

Having seen it in the gallery only leaning against a wall, I had no idea how they had displayed it in the show.  I called the gallery and said how am I supposed to hang this?  Well, they really had no idea.

Thank you.

Jesus leaned against the wall in Ken's office for several months until my wonderfully practical son figured out how to put Him securely on the wall.  The solution was two wooden railings, long enough to be screwed into the studs, rabbeted to make lips that keep the ceramic slab from coming loose.

I surrounded Jesus with a bunch of appropriate companion artworks: two medieval handwritten manuscripts, a 16-pointed cross, a wax replica of ivory saints from a cathedral.

I particularly love this piece of art because it was Ken's choice.  For 47 years he has been graciously welcoming art of my choice into our home, with only a few pointed comments about how so few of my paintings have any people in them.  (Yes, I'm a landscape junkie....)  This time he got what he wanted.

My favorite things 37

One of the nice things about being a member of a co-op gallery is that you get to spend time hanging out with the art while you do your shifts of gallery-tending.  After I joined Pyro Gallery last fall, we had a pre-holiday show in which all the 22 member artists displayed work.  During my shifts I noticed that some of the art was definitely priced to sell -- perhaps it had been sitting in the studio so long that the artist didn't want to bring it home again.

I was drawn to a limestone sculpture by Mike McCarthy which looked vaguely pre-Columbian, and when we held a 10 percent off sale the week before Christmas, I pounced!  I wanted a sculpture for our front yard, something that would hold up to the weather, too small to be noticed from the street and too big to be easily stolen if a miscreant did spot it.  This one filled the bill.

When Mike brought the statue over, it was the dead of winter and this part of the front garden was just dirt.  My husband the gardener thought it was pretty much plant-free, although he wasn't sure what might come up again in the spring.

We sited the statue so it gave the big eye to people walking up the path, but also to those coming down off the porch.

As the spring wore on, daffodils came and went, sometimes crowding the statue on one side while leaving it empty on another; obviously no professional landscaping had occurred in the testing of this product.  But in August all of that changed -- brilliant zinnias came up to the left, scarlet sage came up to the right, framing my pre-Columbian guy in color.  He guards my front walk with a stern, all-seeing eye (and peeks into the guest room window with his back eye if you open the curtains).

My favorite things 36

During the Great Depression my father, like so many other people, had a hard life.  His dad died of cancer, but not before using up the family's savings on hospital bills; he had to drop out of college after two years; he had a bunch of crappy jobs that he hated, including selling Libby's canned goods on the road in central Michigan.  But as things got better, he had a great opportunity, to work at and subsequently buy half of a weekly newspaper in Frankenmuth, Michigan.

Frankenmuth was a tiny town settled by German immigrants in the 1840s.  Their plan was to save the heathen Indians not by sending a single missionary but by sending entire villages of people who would set a good example by living in Christian harmony in a community centered on the Lutheran church.

Unfortunately for the missionary effort, when they got to Michigan the Indians were long gone, driven out by loggers and settlers, so the immigrants simply went about their business, living in Christian harmony in a community centered on the Lutheran church.  My great-great grandfather was one of those immigrants, arriving in 1853.

Dad and a bunch of other young men came home from World War 2 determined to breathe new life into the staid old town, where people still spoke German as easily as English.  Dad had a great idea: Frankenmuth should capitalize on its German heritage and go for tourist business.  There were already three hotels in town that had become famous for serving chicken dinners, and people were accustomed to stopping for a meal on their way to and from Detroit.  The guys persuaded the local bank, ready for a new building, to use Bavarian architecture, and from then on other businesses did the same.

Pretty soon Frankenmuth had become a kitschy tourist town famous around the world.  Dad's buddy Wally Bronner opened a year-round Christmas store, selling ornaments, artificial trees, inflatable Santas, every kind of holiday stuff.  The hotels, now remodeled in Bavarian style, cranked out chicken dinners by the bazillion.  Main Street was filled with shops selling Germanic souvenirs.  The town was the first place outside of Germany to get an official imprimatur from Munich to hold a sanctioned Oktoberfest.  For years Frankenmuth was either #1 or #2 in the list of tourist attractions in the state.

When our family moved away from Michigan (I was 9 years old) Dad still kept his half of the paper as an absentee owner.  He always said he was waiting till I got out of journalism school and could take it over.  Privately I thought I would sooner move to Siberia and herd yaks, but didn't say this out loud.  Nevertheless, I was kind of hurt when, in my senior year of college, he sold out to his longtime partner without even discussing it with me.  All for the best, of course.

We buzz Frankenmuth whenever we go back to Michigan, which isn't all that frequently.  We always bring a cooler so we can load up on sausages at Kern's, and of course drink a beer and eat a chicken dinner.  And I always walk by the Frankenmuth News building, which is now the local history museum.  As Oscar Hammerstein wrote, "This nearly was mine."