At the end of July I packed a little suitcase, paints included, to begin 6 ½ weeks of flying and train-ing it (“ghetto” as my little cousin calls it) all over Europe. Well, not all over – just Berlin, Hamburg, London, La Rochelle, Luxembourg, Heidelberg, and Valence – before returning to my wonderful apartment in La Roquette near Cannes. Every stop was to visit friends or my German relatives, and I found out how lovely it is to be homeless!
First was a flight to Berlin where I stayed 3 days. I was so excited to see my cousin Tine again and her family! They have two children, Benita (3 ½) and Tamilo (2 months). Sirko, Tine, and I enjoyed evenings together in their beautifully refurbished house about ½ hour outside Berlin. One eve Tine made a great salmon dinner, and the other, after a long day sightseeing in Berlin, we all walked to the local Italian restaurant which is Tine & Sirko’s favourite. Tine went with me to Berlin, and although I didn’t see some of the sights like the new American embassy that just opened on 4-July and the Brandenburg Tor, it was enough for me. My parents, brother, and I had the once-in-a-lifetime trip to Berlin in December 1989, a few weeks after the wall fell down. I remember that we went to the wall when it was already dark. Cars were lined up with headlights on as hundreds, maybe over a thousand; people clambered all over the wall with hammers and hand-picks. Many of us collected pieces, but many more just wanted the wall gone, letting their sadness and joy out as the cement chunks fell down. So the big sights in Berlin were less of an interest than seeing some of the galleries and museums – Berlin has become quite the art town, probably second only to London in Europe for emerging artists (I think Paris has more of the big-name dead artists, but maybe I’m wrong.) We were near the Dom, the cathedral, about noon when a ½ hour service is given every weekday, so we attended. The cool and beautiful interior was such a fantastic backdrop to the service, which I really enjoyed. About 4pm, after another sweltering day of sightseeing and dragging poor Tamilo with us, we met Sirko after work at the Pottsdammer Platz. Up until a few years ago it was completely vacant since it was “No Man’s Land”. It was an architect’s and city planner’s dream to have this much land in the centre of the city. And after more than 40 years, the subway was reopened, with a bit of updating, of course.
Yes, while another day in Berlin would have been nice, I had a much better invitation to understand what happened there. Saturday afternoon and evening was spent at Sirko’s mother’s birthday party. She owns a farm, about an hour north of Berlin, in what formerly was the DDR (East Germany). After cake and coffee hour, Sirko’s brother gave us a tour of their farm which consisted of about 5 farms pulled under one ownership – highly common as a result of Communism. On one farm they raised pigs, so we got to see and smell the different houses where the piglets were born all the way to where the big hogs were being fattened before going to market. Then we were driven over to the dairy. Outside, the buildings look completely run-down, but inside contain state-of-the-art technology to milk cows. Everything is automatic, from the gates to shutter the cows in and out of where they’re milked twice a day for about 20 minutes, to the disinfecting of the milking equipment to the milk storage – all automated! Someone comes once a day to make sure the plug to the whole place is still in the socket. Finally we drove out to see a small portion of the many fields they own – not that none of us had never seen fields before but because one of their 100k euro threshers had caught fire the day before and burned acres of fields. But the machinery itself was a work of art! The burned thresher was in itself not aesthetic enough to be considered sculpture, but I took many pictures of individual portions of it which made for some great abstracts.
The party was typically German, starting at 3pm with cake and coffee and lasting until midnight after several courses of dinner and dessert and drinks. Some of the guests were, well, interesting – very vociferous about their politics but defensive about East Germany. As bottles were emptied it became difficult to have a useful conversation. One of my distractions was to play with my camera, photographing the table from various angles, including not only the company, but the empty bottles and candles and champagne flutes and watermelon. I’d also taken Tamilo out in his buggy for a little stroll. The village was quiet, and on the road that led out into the fields, I walked to the last house. An old man was leaning on the gate watching not much, so I greeted him. After explaining that I was visiting and attending a birthday party, he wanted to know who. Well, I didn’t know Sirko’s Mom’s last name – don’t think I even remembered her first. He kept rattling off a list of names – I think he hadn’t finished when I slowly wandered back down the street. As I remarked from Sirko’s brother that everyone in the village knows everyone else, their families, business, cars, homes. I don’t know if that’s remnant of communism or just life in a small town where few leave and no one comes. The village population gets older and older, and the young people that stay behind are usually deadbeats. Young people with any ambition (whether to make money or marry someone who makes money) have moved to the cities, namely Berlin. It’s a lost generation – those who were into their 40s and 50s when communism fell. They still needed income and but weren’t mobile or adaptable to go where the little bit of money was. Anyway, that’s old history that everyone knows, but we (my German cousin and aunt) found it peculiar how defensive they are of the old system. First, I suppose, Sirko’s mother did fairly well by owning 50% of this entire co-op. But they long for a strong leader and get frustrated that democracy takes too long and does too little. They seem to forget that the materials weren’t available to redecorate and update the house as she’s done so beautifully. Sirko, who is quite a good piano player, was denied lessons while growing up because he wasn’t potential concert pianist material. Even though his mother could pay for lessons, they were prohibited. We all get defensive of our countries (or kids for that matter, or anything that reflects who we are, I suppose) to people from the outside who think they understand it all, but in many instances the amnesia was strong.
My Aunt Marianne and Uncle Lu (Ludwig) were invited to the mother-in-law’s party, so they drove me back to the little town (now a suburb) called Tostedt, located between Hamburg and Bremen. I lived with them here for 6 months when I was 14, and I’m being modest when I say it was the highlight of my teens (well, except maybe when Jason gave me my first kiss and I was wondering what to do with the bubblegum I was chewing). Happy to be back in Tostedt, I spent about 5 days with them, and when it comes to art, my aunt is the one to hang out with!
A day spent in Hamburg focused on the Rothko Retrospective in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. We rented the headphones since commentary helps much with abstract art. Rothko is known for the large paintings he did at the end of his life, large blocks of colour with undefined edges so they appear to float. I’ll see if I can find one to put in the photos, but it’s probably easier to just look him up on Wikipedia if you really care. What I found quite interesting was his progression leading up to his seminal work towards the end of his life. One of his first paintings is a rather poor portrait of a friend in front of a window. As explained by the commentary, his emphasis on the rectangular elements of the window already showed his style which would be refined in his later works. He continued with exploration of Biblical themes (he was a Russian Jew), as well as mythical beasts and human bodies painted quite abstractly, but usually against some rectangular structure or background. These themes mirrored much of Rothko’s outrage at what was happening to Jews during the period, in the 1940s, and the American government’s casual attitude towards it. Tante Marianne and I explored the two floors of the retrospective, and then went quickly through them again at the end. It is something I learned from her to really get a better idea of the artist’s message and progression and life and art. Finally, there was a film about Rothko, which we really didn’t plan to see, but, being lured by a pair of good seats near the front of the theatre after the film had begun, we were quite enthralled. The film was fantastic. Rothko’s dream was to be able to paint an entire room – fill it with his painting in order to communicate better. He’d been commissioned to essentially do this for the dining room of the Four Seasons in New York – in the 1950s or so. The paintings didn’t quite suit the commissioners, although they did hang for a little while (if I remember this correctly). Rothko decided to understand for himself, so he went for dinner there and quickly decided that anyone who paid that much for food didn’t deserve to see his paintings. I believe these ended up in St. Petersburg, but I’d have to go check. In any case, don’t go to the Four Seasons looking for Rothko. He became friends with the director of the Tate Museum in London. By now Rothko was becoming more depressed, but the director commissioned Rothko and the two collaborated on the project: 8 large paintings for a newly-created room in the Tate – created just for Rothko. With two on each wall, Rothko hung them one above the other instead of side-by-side. They had been made to be presented this way. The director was very excited and enjoyed the energy Rothko had for the project, but all good things eventually come to an end. The day the paintings were delivered to the Tate was the day Rothko was overcome by his depression and died by a medication overdose.
My aunt and I walked around the Alster, the lake in Hamburg’s city centre. The Kunsthalle, visible from where we had a beer and bratwurst on the water, spurred on our continuing conversation about art. After the four hours we spent in Rothko’s world, I was inspired again to paint. I don’t count myself to be any great sort of artist, but what I find wonderful is to be able to see an artist’s progression, to be reminded that they didn’t exit the womb painting floating rectangles or men in bowler hats or drip paintings or 3-dimensional forms visible from two. I related to her the great experience I had in New York’s MOCA last May. After wandering through the Kadinskys, Dalis, Wassilys, and Picassos, I entered a room with Pollock’s drip paintings prominent in front of me and on the wall to my right. To the left were some fabulous abstracts, very bold and strong, and I thought I knew who the artist was but couldn’t quite remember who. I finally checked the nameplate and was surprised that they were also Pollock’s, but ten years earlier than his iconic drip paintings. A week after the Rothko retrospective, my best friend Suzette and I went to the Tate Modern looking for the “Rothko Room” and his 8 paintings hung one on top of the other. While they’d already been removed for cleaning in preparation for the Tate’s upcoming retrospective, I was again fooled by an early Pollock that I didn’t attribute to him until looking at the nameplate. Duped twice! And inspired again to keep doing my art, even if it does just end up on every wall in my parents’ house and attic.
The following day, Tante Marianne and I went off in a different direction in search of art: a humble compound in the middle of the northern German forest, not too far from Tostedt. My poor Uncle Lu was dragged along on this trip, so another fun, four-hour festival of art wasn’t going to happen. The compound was created by Johann and Jutta Bossard ( www.bossard.de ) between 1880s to 1930s. The grounds included a cedar tree cathedral and a labyrinth, and the small museum, formerly the carriage house, had many of their paintings and sculptures. Large sculptures filled the garden leading to the main house as well as another tall building with bas-relief sculpture and interesting geometrical columns on the walls. I walked into it, into an empty, tall space. I’m trying to figure out how to write this... It was the Temple of Art: colourful mosaics on the floor, two-story high paintings with intricately woven stories, stained glass windows, painted glass sunlights, carved wooden beams, sculptured columns, and absolute silence. I sat on the one bench in the middle of this place and just stared. I would love to do this – like Rothko’s desire to paint a whole room, I wanted to build a chapel and paint walls and windows and roof tiles and floors.
I spent the next day walking in the woods from Tostedt to Sproetze, the village where my Opa & Oma used to live, to their house which my Aunt Kitty now enjoys. We took Aida the dog for a run through the fields while I still thought of my chapel. She showed me old photo albums of my mom and she and Marianne, Oma, and Opa. She surprised me with an album of Opa’s that had a black-and-white picture of my parents on the title page – from the year they met and were married in 1961. Opa had hand-written their love story, proudly announcing that my dad came from German grandparents, but outside of “ja” and “prost”, German failed him. The photo album was fabulous, with the engagement parties, wedding, and subsequent diverging directions as coloured photos filled with big smiles and LA palm trees that my mom sent back to him were mingled with formal and serious black-and-white photos of her family back “home”. It was lovely spending the day with Tante Kitty, in her green garden fit for a magazine, surrounded by stories of her and my mom and grandparents from 50 and 60 years ago, as well as life now and all that we have in common.
Before I leave Germany, I have to also write that I noticed German flags in front of a few houses on my aunt’s street. It isn’t unusual in the States, in fact un-patriotic to be without one, but somehow it struck me as odd in Germany, and I asked my aunt if it was just my imagination. No, since the 2006 World Cup held in Germany, German flags had become socially acceptable. In Hamburg we saw a stand selling everything from bags and purses and wallets to shirts and sweats and caps with the German black-gold-red or the Hamburger castle insignia. German pride had been revived by a football match. I asked Marianne if they had a national German day that was celebrated, like 4th of July, Bastille Day, Cinco de Mayo, or Canada Day. Again, it was only in the last two years that the 3rd of October was declared, marking the anniversary that East and West Germany were politically reunited. But what she subsequently told me was even more interesting. She, as well as many other Germans, wanted the 9th of November to be the National Day. On the 9th of November in 1918, the first democratic German government, the Weimar Republic, was elected into power. On the 9th of November in 1938, Nazi SS officers executed an order to destroy all Jewish businesses, shattering glass storefronts, stealing merchandise, and breaking manufacturing machines. The shards of glass all over the streets on the following morning were cleaned up by the Jews and their insurance claims given to the Third Reich. Krystallnacht (“Crystal Night”, or the Night of Broken Glass) was not a bright spot in German history. But 51 years later, on the 9th of November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. It seems the 9th of November somehow covers recent German history succinctly.
Aside from black-gold-red and significant dates in history, I asked my aunt about more current events, specifically about energy resources (OK, that was a non-sequiter for those of you asleep). But I was interested not only because of Russia flexing its muscles and control over energy which supplies much of Germany’s demand, but also because of the difference of opinion on nuclear energy from the French neighbours. From the exhibit in Geneva I’d learned that Germany was planning to shut down all its nuclear plants by 2020 – although they only have about 19, compared to France’s 53. But France’s population is very much pro-nuclear, citing accidents happening in any industry. In fact, solar panels, now seen on the rooftops of many German houses, are absolutely uneconomical in France as it would take at least 20 years to break even due to the low cost of electricity produced by their nuclear plants. Marianne said the bill to abandon nuclear would probably be overturned, as it has flip-flopped in the past. The important thing is to continue R&D on all alternative resources, from nuclear and wind to clean-burning coal. I asked her about Angela Merkel, and she said that she was quite well-liked in Germany. Yes, it wouldn’t suit Germans for her to be having a torrid affair with a Calvin Klein underwear model 15 years her junior.
I barely made my plane to London Lutton after a summer lightning storm felled a tree across the train tracks from Tostedt to Hamburg, but at midnight Suzette picked me up from the train in Croydon and was immediately mad at me that I was only staying 8 days. So we started catching up and ended up sitting in her car outside her house until 2am, already talking about our emotional trials with our lives. Best friends are wonderful – to not see each other for 2 years and immediately have one of those “I can’t tell anyone else this, but...” conversations.
Suzette has two boys who are very much, well, you know, boys. They are about 1 and 2 years old, but the size of 2 and 3 years old. Energy was the only requirement for babysitting them, playing with them, and disciplining them, but by the end of the 8 days, I was absolutely in love with Joshua and Haydon. I was also honoured and amazed that Suzette and Roland asked me to be Haydon’s godmother – and I accepted in a heartbeat! Anyway, Suzette and I took the boys out to parks, shopping, and a couple kid-friendly museums, then escaped without the boys one afternoon to the Tate Modern and one Saturday late night for girls’ night out and a few beers. We caught the Olympic Opening Ceremony in Beijing on TV and were quite impressed, as I suppose most of the world was. So we concluded that we’ll have to get tickets to London in 2012 – why not?
Suzette and her Mom threw me a party with her family and our mutual friends Andrew and Wei from Cannes, who now live in London. Suzette went all out on the food, as usual. We had enough for everyone to eat lunch and dinner, and then her Mom’s curry arrived. I told Sandra we had much too much food and asked why she brought the curry – “Well, it’s a party! You always bring curry to a party!”. So it was just a wonderful week with her family, and Suzette and I both enjoyed just doing the usual daily schedule together.
I probably wouldn’t have left London if my schedule was my own, but I’d promised to house-sit for family friends Larry & Sylvie near La Rochelle while they went to Turkey for vacation with their kids. The main characters in this plot were Ouragan the Horse (“ouragan” = hurricane in French), Calico the Donkey, Stella the English Setter, Cookie the Cat Who Loves Attention, and Frisky and Domino the Scaredy Cats. Oh, I forgot the Herd of bulls and cows with their calves who wandered down the road occasionally and always turned me into a Scaredy Cat since I had to walk by them with Stella, blocked by the canal on one side and the forest on the other. Anyway, that was about the only contact I had with any living creature for the two weeks, with the exception of the throngs of people at Cultura in La Rochelle when I bought a couple canvases and the nice lady at the local Spar market.
About 10 years ago (maybe a bit less), Larry bought an old farm house, actually the main house of a vineyard named Vina, after the vineyard near Stanford in California where the original owner had worked. (Did I get that right, Larry?) So Larry made friends with the guys at the French hardware store and passed French Bureaucracy 101 after many months to create this gorgeous house that he also uses occasionally as a bed & breakfast. The weather was lovely and cool for mid-August, the surrounding fields and forest as quiet as a cemetery, and the first week I didn’t do anything terribly remarkable. In the evenings I replenished the water buckets for Ouragan and Calico and gave them a few carrots or apples that had fallen from a tree nearby. I’ve never made friends so easily! Then Stella would take me out for a long walk along the canal and in the forest. She also likes to go swimming, so when I was worn out and my shoulder was throbbing from her tugging on her leash all the time, I’d let her jump in and swim as wide as the leash would let her. Once she surprised a bird in the tall grass near the path – it startled me as well, but Stella couldn’t keep her excitement contained. She chased the bird (a bit hard to do without wings) then ran back to me to tell me she’d found a bird! Then back around the circle to go after the bird, now long-gone, and returning to me to make sure I fully understood this incredible phenomenon. Anyway, Stella and I got used to each other, and as long as we took the same road without too much new to smell and drink and chase, she was manageable. By the end of the two weeks I think I even became quite fond of her and gave her a bath just before Larry & the family came home.
Behind the house is a fabulous pool, not to mention a Jacuzzi and sauna inside, so a swim or two or three became part of my daily routine as well. Oh, and I can’t forget the courgettes – no, the COURGETTES!! Larry had planted 6 zucchini plants which grew so fast that they produced Godzilla squash. They were about 15 inches long and 6 or 8 inches diameter and were actually quite frightening! Along with the squash were 8 or 10 tomato plants, so I also kept busy in the kitchen searching through Larry & Sylvie’s bookshelves of gourmet cookbooks for zucchini and tomato recipes. By the second week I’d recovered from Joshua and Haydon sufficiently to do some painting. A couple small ones were duds, but I finished the “Red Pirate Ship” which I lugged over to Luxembourg to Gabi’s and eventually gave to my other cousin Anja.
So that was my August, but I still hadn’t seen Anja or Gabi and their families nor my friends the Dawsons in Valence. Coming back to Luxembourg, with its pastel-coulored houses, made me happy. My cousin Gabi and her husband Arnold live in a fabulous house for their 6 kids (2 completed, 4 more in the planning phase) in a little village called Beyren. I used to fly to Lux often enough to have the miles for this around-the-world trip plus a few others when I worked for Hughes. During these business trips I made good friends, and being back in the city and countryside brought back many good memories from 10 years ago. A former colleague, Ray Sperber and his wife Lola invited me for dinner. Lola is also an artist, and Gabi and I were really impressed with her work and all the paintings she’s done.
Gabi’s children, Cornelia (2) and Nicolas (5 months), were so fun! Nicolas is a miniature Arnold, and Cornelia has a personality that fills up the room. We went to the aquarium, took walks along the Mosel (comparing ducks to swans to pigeons), walked to the playground (avoiding all the neighbourhood cats), coloured, played house, made banana-chocolate chip muffins, took silly pictures, and watched the backhoe in the yard tearing up the ground for Gabi & Arnold’s renovations. Most evenings Arnold, Gabi, and I enjoyed dinner and long conversations about the economy (before the crash) and anything else (families) that happened to sound interesting. Other evenings we had a quick dinner and went to the local pub and talked about the economy (before the crash) and anything else (beer) that happened to sound interesting.
I stayed over a week at Gabi’s, and on the weekend we were invited to Anja’s annual Garden Party. Anja, Gabi’s sister and another sweet cousin of mine, lives near Heidelberg with her husband Mathias and their sons Alexander, Benjamin, and Jonathan – all under the age of 5. Unfortunately I didn’t bring the California sunshine since it rained on their party for the first time since its inception. But the kids loved getting wet and muddy and the adults gathered the bratwurst and beer under the tent to tables lit with candles. Mathias works for SAP and many of the guests were colleagues, but by the end of the afternoon and late evening, everyone knew everyone else’s story. Gabi and her kids and I stayed an extra two days while Arnold returned to Lux for work. Aside from keeping the kids entertained and more late-night discussions of Germany’s history, us three girls played Sudoko addictively and laughed and had fun like we did when I lived with them as teenagers. Without kids, I don’t remark how much time has passed, but with them I see how much older I’ve gotten, but kids also have a funny way of keeping us young, too. They hold up our faults and bad habits like a mirror, and I’m still glad I don’t have to look into mine!
Before leaving Lux, I painted “Go Orange” for Gabi and Arnold in a manic two sleepless nights. But I was so happy to give it to them, and they seemed quite excited about it, too. It not only matched the decor, but Arnold is Dutch and reminding you of William of Orange should put the colour in the right context.
After a long train ride from Lux to Valence on a sweltering day, I was welcomed to Matt & Janet’s apartment by their two girls, Jessica & Valerie. Again, the last time I spent a weekend with them, the girls did my hair into pigtails – really quite hysterical. But now Jessica doesn’t think anything is funny because she’s a teenager now and it’s all so serious... but Valerie is still cute and funny and affectionate. But if you see the pics, they still have a great sense of humor.
I asked Janet to tell me again their story of being highly-paid engineers for GM, working in the States and in Lux, and then giving it up to move to Africa to be Christian missionaries when the girls were babies. I won’t write their personal story here, but it helped me to relax a little about “God’s BIG plan for my life”. Most people close to me (or anyone who’s managed to read most of my blog) see that I’m drawn to work out in the field for my faith. Evangelizing isn’t my strongpoint, but I figure I should develop it, or work in other areas in which I am stronger. But after all this travel and learning languages and meeting workers in different countries and cultures, I still don’t feel like I’m supposed to do something like that. Janet helped me see that God might be heading me in that direction, but He does it in His time and I can’t rush it, nor can I think that I’m “wasting” time.
Riding in the TGV along the Cote d’Azur back to Cannes, I felt the familiar tug in my heart that I was coming home. I don’t really know what that is all about because I am surprised that I still feel it. My life in France this year is very different than two years ago, but there’s still something here for me. Friends asked if I would be happy here, and I probably would, but not under the stressful circumstance of just packing up and moving without a reason (especially to do all the paperwork!). So anyway, I get to just live my life with a few mysteries and not figure it all out in advance – God probably doesn’t want my advice anyway.
My final three weeks in my apartment in La Roquette were a mix of everything. After my brother told me about the train wreck in Chatsworth, I kinda checked out for a week or so. I painted “111”, and once I got all those irritating feelings out of my over-sensitive system, I finalized the remaining paintings of the “My Sins” series. My former tutor Christele and I met a few more times, and my friend Pascale and I spent a day in Nice and at the Chagall museum. I wasn’t terribly impressed by the museum, since the paintings seem to be hung in a random order, but his stained glass windows and “The Bible Message” series of 10+ huge canvases definitely made an impression on us. Like deciphering the pictures on the sanctuary walls of the church in San Gimignano, I really enjoyed “reading” Chagall’s paintings for the historical Biblical scenes described.
Jackie’s boys, Michael and Robert, came downstairs to visit me quite a bit. A few nights I made them dinner and watched them while Jackie was out. Robert usually played games on my laptop or told me about his life in France while being “fidgety” as he calls it – the boy has a perfectly entertaining conversation while jumping around the room and being generally, well, wiggly! But he’s a fabulous football player and so seems to have enough energy to power a small village. Michael, much more calm, preferred to “just chat” while visiting rather than playing video games or watching TV. Actually, one night I let the boys paint with my oils, and after that Michael became quite the artist! First he just wanted to paint on paper, but a week or so later, I convinced him to try a small canvas. I taught him how to dilute the paints in alkyd and oil and mix them. A few days later, being bored by video games, he asked if he could paint again. I was out of small canvases, and so he chose one of the long ones I had left over (30x90cm). Previously he painted on the floor, but when I asked him where he wanted to paint, he pointed to my setup and said “there, like a real artist”. He mixed all the paints himself and didn’t need any advice or encouragement from me to paint a really incredible abstract. He was so un-self-conscious – when Robert asked him what he was going to paint, Michael just simply said he didn’t know. I’m sorry that I didn’t take a picture of his paintings, but I also noticed that after I’d made a big deal about his painting to Jackie and other friends, he didn’t ask to paint anymore. I broke my own rules. But I left him several brushes and paints and canvases, a knife and palette and mixing alkyd, so Jackie said she’d try to get him going again by asking him how the paints are mixed. Jackie’s great with the boys, and I miss them all terribly.
At least I know I can stay homeless with minimal rent, since everyone wanted me to stay longer, so that was nice. I’ll just keep flying around… I guess that “free spirit” description of me is accurate.
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