Friday Night at Rebecca’s

We had a windstorm Friday evening. The wind was vicious and sensible stayed at home in their houses but I had talked to Rebecca earlier in the day and she invited me to dinner. I have written before about Rebecca living in Walker Hancock’s old studio. It is always fun to share a meal with Rebecca, it is doubly enticing to do that in that wonderful building. So out I went.

When I arrived, she greeted me at the door with a flashlight. The electricity was out and she had filled the house with candles and lanterns and had a fire going in the wood burner. What could be better? We sat in the studio with glasses of wine listening to the wind howl outside and talked about writing. She is working on her dissertation on Anna Hyatt Huntington. This has been a long process for her hampered in part by a car wreck two years ago. Ironically she was in Boston and anxious to get back to Gloucester because the George Aarons exhibition was about to open. Rebecca was the curator for that exhibition and wrote the catalog which I designed. That was the second catalog she and I collaborated on, the first being for the Manship Retrospective a few years earlier.

It is interesting how art and writing has woven through our friendship. We met when she was a co-curator for the Gloucester City Hall Sculpture Exhibition in 1998. Ironically it was during that exhibition that I also met Walker Hancock who was to die a few weeks later. Now Rebecca lives in his studio, both of us are writing and both of us wonder about what life holds next for us.

So, in the room in which Hancock created so many of his great works, she fixed soup and grilled cheese sandwiches on the wood burner and we drank wine and ate chocolate and let our thoughts and imaginations wander. I told her that my short story in Windchill, “Homemade Pie and Sausage”, has been nominated for a Derringer award from the Shorty Mystery Fiction Society. She told me about her recent retreat in Tennessee with her guru. It was a good evening for talking about art and writing and mysticism and wonders.

Picasso once said that the reason he lived such a long and vital life was because, when he was working in his studio, he left his body outside the door. That is a fine sentiment. The best art is a transcendent act, an act of communion with a higher part of the self as well as with the universal. There is a sacred dimension to great art which rivals, and often surpasses, that of religion. It may well account for the spiritual, church-like atmosphere of many artists’ studios. I have a book somewhere in the stacks in the living room --- it is one of those big, coffee-table art books filled with photographs of studios in which some of the world’s greatest artists worked. It stands to reason that the environment in which art is created often becomes a work of art of its own.

Even after all these years artists travel to Giverny, France to paint in the gardens that surround Monet’s studio. You look at the paintings brought back from Giverny and the settings are as familiar now as when Monet was alive — the yellow bridge, the rose arbors, the oriental trees. And woven them through them is the soul of Monet himself as though he still lingers and maybe, just for a moment, cannot resist the urge to reach through the brush of an aspiring artist and put a few final touches on the painting.

So Rebecca and I linger in Hancock’s studio and talk and are quiet, too. In the flickering firelight it is possible to wonder if he is listening to what we have to say.

The lights came on shortly after midnight as I was about to leave. On one of the walls in the workshop is another angel Hancock made — not the magnificent, sad, beautiful angel in the Philadelphia train station that I love, but a pretty, flying angel raising a trumpet to play heavenly music. Rebecca said she feels so blessed to be living in that place. I am blessed just to visit there. It is a sacred place and I hope its grace will bless us both.

Thanks for reading.