Sarah Westlake Drawing Sculpture Edited by Alston Conley McMullen Museum of Art Boston College This publication is issued in conjunction with the exhibition Sarah Westlake: Drawing <-* Sculpture, organized by the Charles S. and Isabella V. McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College. The exhibition celebrates the recent gift of several works from the estate of Sarah Westlake to the Museum. Principal Curator: Alston Conley Co-curator: Mary Armstrong Director: Nancy Netzer June 1 4 - August 29, 2004 This exhibition and catalogue are underwritten by Boston College with additional support from the Patrons of the McMullen Museum of Art. Copyright © 2004 by the Charles S. and Isabella V. McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 Library of Congress Control Number 2004104573 ISBN 1-892850-08-7 Exhibition and Publication Coordination by Alston Conley and Naomi Blumberg Copyediting by Naomi Blumberg and Naomi Rosenberg Designed by Keith Ake, Office of Marketing Communications, Boston College Printed by Lavigne, Inc. Cover Art: Breeze, 2000, mixed media on paper, 1 7.25 x 28.75 in., Collection of Tom and Jill Delbanco. Photo Credits: Victoria Munroe Gallery nos. 1 ,4-5; Alison Shaw no. 3; Jim Thomas nos. 2 and 6; Bruno Debas nos. 13-20; Gary Wayne Gilbert, nos. 21-26, fig. 1. Contents 4 Sarah Westlake: Drawings and Sculpture, 1984-2002 Alston Conley 8 "I am teaching myself to see what I cannot know in any other way" Mary A. Armstrong 12 Reasons for Leaving the Studio Sarah Westlake 14 Works in the Exhibition Sarah Westlake: Drawings and Sculpture, 1984-2002 Alston Conley "There is at the back of every artist's mind something like a pattern or a type of architecture. The original quality in any [woman] of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of [her] dreams; the sort of world [she] would like to make or in which [she] would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of [her] own secret planet; the sort of thing [she] likes to think about." 1 — G. K. Chesterton Examined in this exhibition is Sarah Westlake's mature work from the last eighteen years. During this period, 1 984 to 2002, she alternated between drawings and sculptures. Formal ideas shifted from two-dimensional works to three-dimensional works and back again. The Fantasy Carden series, a case in point, was inspired initially by visits to the Generalife gardens of the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain. Westlake developed a series of drawings depicting structured geometric spaces and curvilinear lines that include an array of natural forms. The geometric shapes can be read as a series of largely abstracted architectural spaces — as rooms, doorways, arches, and windows. Adjacent diagonal forms and fluid natural lines offset rectilinear geometry. In Fantasy Carden #26 (1984, no. 1), a series of vertical rectangles subdivides the long horizontal drawing. Each rectangle is described with a variety of gray tones and graphic marks; ges- tural and controlled additive layers and erasures build a language of contrasts. The spatial reading is flat, like a Japanese print, an influence since her student days at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Within this organ- ized geometry, however, are trees, plants, windows, and doorways — rectilinear and arching. A similar geometry structures Paul's Palace, Fantasy Carden #30 (no. 2), a lithograph from 1984. Here, also, the controlled graphic marks are juxtaposed to quiet, empty expanses and looser gestural, organic marks. This lithograph inspired the sculpture Paul's Palace, Fantasy Carden #31 (no. 3), a collaboration with cabinetmaker Harry Jones from Martha's Vineyard, where Westlake also had a studio. The sculpture reads as a semi-transparent folding screen and also as a construction of gestures captured in wood, plaster, and paint within a geometric space. The folding screen serves no traditional function; it neither blocks a sec- tion of a room, nor provides a series of painted dec- orative surfaces that subdivide space. It is the view; its structure is both functional and aesthetic, and is both partially opaque and transparent. Westlake synthesizes three main influences: the structural elements found in the minimal reductive work of Agnes Martin, the senously decorative, as seen in the work of Henri Matisse, and the flat space of Japanese prints and painted screens. It is in Japanese culture, in which humans are perceved as part of nature (in contrast to the biblical story granting man dominion over nature, which evolved, within Western culture, into the truism of man versus nature) that Westlake finds her inspiration for integrating natural forms into man-made architectural structures. Two drawings, Fantasy Garden #41 (1985, no. 4) and 4 Fig. 1 Sarah Westlake. Paper sculpture from studio, ca. 1994. Fantasy Carden: Cat Tails (ca. 1987, no. 5), exem- plify this fusion. In the former, the diagonal and hor- izontal linearity establish the space and contain the loosely drawn organic and floral forms. This piece is reductive, tonal, without color, and controlled, even in the gestural passages. The composition's strength lies within the intelligent, rigorous minimalism that is inherent in its formal complexity and tonal subtlety. By contrast, Fantasy Carden: Cat Tails has rich color com- bined with tonal areas and the floral forms; here, the structural components of the composition are indis- tinguishable from the decorative. The folding screens, from the years that follow, alternate emphasis on the structure and on the dec- orative function. Her screens and drawings influence each other in both ways. The functional quality of a screen as room-divider disappears from Pungo River Crass, Fantasy Garden #51 (1987, no. 6). The painted planar wood forms are reduced geometry merged with organic form. These are interspersed among linear steel elements, resulting in a rhythmic composition that captures the movement of marsh grass. The geometric planar forms are reminiscent of screen panels that have dissolved and left traces of their former structure. From one view, the tall planar shapes are covered with richly colored curving areas that echo the steel linear arches. As one views the other side, the forms appear as dark silhouettes, emphasizing the structure of the piece. The linear, curving, metal rods recall the grass motif seen on six- teenth-century Japanese screens, such as "Pampas grasses," 2 or the butterfly flower ( Gaura Lindeimeri ) that grew in Westlake's Vineyard garden, and whose tiny white blossoms grow at the top of a tall stem. The tall, thin-stemmed butterfly flower sways with the breeze and echoes the arch of the spouting water in the artist's garden fountain. The spray in the Generalife garden's fountains might have been an inspiration for her garden, as well as for the linear elements of the Pungo River Crass sculpture. In her drawings from the early 1990s, Westlake continues to depict various juxtapositions of composi- tional elements found within her sculptures. The dif- ferentiation between linear and planar, vertical, hori- zontal and diagonal, geometric and organic, warm and cool colors and the individual mark and the larger color field structures and balances each of these draw- ings. The complexity of the shifting elements holds the viewer in "aesthetic arrest." 3 Like a haiku, a traditional Japanese short poem with a rhythmic division of syl- lables that are thought to more nearly capture reality if they contain no center, Westlake's drawings evoke an impression of nature within a defined structure. Each drawing of this series is named after a natural phe- nomenon: Light Wind, Plankton, Inner Stream, Celestial Air, and Salmon Run, (nos. 8-12), suggesting a natu- ral moment as an interior reflection. The untitled series of sculptures that follow in the mid-1990s again evolves from earlier drawings. In Westlake's studio there is a small paper sculpture made from a drawing (fig. 1 ) . The paper is folded over on itself, curling the flat planes into three- dimensional forms. Working with a plaster material applied to a shaped metal screen, Westlake built 5 Fig. 2 Artist Unknown, Whose Sleeves ?, Japanese Edo period, Genno (161 5-1 624) or Kan'ei (1624-1 644) era Japan Six-panel folding screen; ink and color on gold-leafed paper, 167.7 x 321 cm. KJM2-Ukiyo-5, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Gift by special Contribution 08.169. Photograph ©2004 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. forms that curve inward and then reopen. These forms are both painted and inscribed. The scraffito-like drawn marks reveal the white plaster underneath the paint, not unlike the European tradition of decora- tive scraffito plaster walls. Small, twisting, organic forms simultaneously hide and reveal the sculpture's interiors, an appropriate metaphor for the emotion- ally expressive objects and their reflection of the artist's creative process, alternately revealing and concealing their maker's interior life. These works, like Untitled #9 (1995, no. 18) that has a womb-like opening, have a strong relationship to the human body. In a grant application from 1 968, Westlake connected dance to drawing: "Exposure to dance principles has increased [my] knowledge of the body's potential for abstract form and movement, and through it I have gained the confidence to leap over much of the intermediate ground between a literal use of anatomy and non-literal translation of the human image into abstract ideas." The untitled sculptures of the mid-1990s appear imbued with these abstracted ideas of the human form. The 1994 Untitled drawing (no. 19) relates to the sculptures of the same year; ideas seem to flow back and forth between media. It has the vertical orientation of Untitled #3 (1994, no. 15) and the inwardly turn- ing planes in the form of two inverted cones folding in on themselves that resemble Untitled #7 (1995, no. 1 6), yet, it is Untitled #1 7(1 996, no. 20) that the 1994 drawing seems to precede and most resemble. The sculpture's inwardly folded planes, pinched open at both the top and right side, appear like a figure bowing, a dance under a cloth. The Untitled drawing resembles an abstracted biomorphic head with a slen- der neck-like form under a shawl. The six drawings from 2002 that reinvestigate the geometry of architectural spaces were made soon after a visit to Japan. Much like Japanese prints, which appear flat, lacking the "Western" light and shadow strategies that create the illusion of depth, Westlake's 6 drawings rely on diagonal lines and forms to imply spatial depth. In such works, the bottom of the picture exists as foreground while the diagonals draw the viewer's eye across and up the composition to the sug- gested background, and yet the shapes are flat. The geometric shapes are colored with paint and textured with incised drawing marks. Many of the elements are collaged onto the already complexly textured planar surface. Three of the drawings, Breeze, Dragon Limb, and Whose Sleeves? (2002, nos. 21, 22, and 23), have black linear structures from which hang patterned forms that appear to be cloths or garments. The title Whose Sleeves? suggests a connection to the Japanese Edo period screens of the same name. "'Tagasode,' meaning 'whose sleeves?' — was frequently the title used for Japanese paintings that hint at the presence of a woman, but refrain from actually portraying her. This, it was felt, is more evocative than a literal repre- sentation." 4 In Japanese "Tagasode" genre painting, richly patterned and decorated kimonos hang from clothes racks. Occasionally these prized garments are joined by other personal possessions, such as an amulet or a musical instrument. These images float on a gold ground, intimating the beauty of the unseen owner, as in Whose Sleeves?, a screen in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (fig. 2). Flecks of gold leaf in Westlake's planar surfaces further recall the large gold-leaf grounds in these Japanese screens. The title Breeze both suggests the cause of the lilting cloths and connects the viewer to nature. Like the "Tagasode" screen paintings, Westlake's drawing "reflects the ideal of Zen artists — to express the true life of something, the essence, rather than merely to display what is seen." 5 Her artworks are visual haiku, with rhythmic divisions of forms that function like syllables. And like haiku, they record the poet's, or the artist's, impression of a moment from daily life. Painstakingly constructed, yet delicate, Westlake's pictures have the immediacy and freshness of haiku, a moment in nature — a breeze blowing the garment that has been hung out to dry. Among Westlake's favorite haiku was the following poem by Basho's companion, Sora: What a cool, summer breeze! Here, I make myself at home. Rest, and take my ease. 6 It is the concept underlying the "Tagasode" paint- ings, of a beautiful woman suggested but unseen, that most embodies Westlake's work. Her creative pres- ence is implied in each of the artworks, and it was her choice, like the Zen artists, not to settle for the repre- sentation of just the visible. Westlake was one of a handful of women artists of her generation from the Boston area who had an accomplished professional career. She moved between media with complexity and variation, graphically recording her creative thought process. These works from the last eighteen years of her career show a searching, personal visual language that was strongly felt, yet steeped in restraint. They were exhibited, but perhaps not seen and appreciated widely enough. I, for one, would have been poorer without having viewed and known these works and the creative life they represent. NOTES 1 Gender altered quote, qtd. in Visual Notes: for Architects and Designers by Norman Crowe and Paul Laseau (New York: Van Nostrand Rheinhold Co. 1984). G. K. Chesterton, forward, W. H Auden: A Certain World (New York: The Viking Press, 1970). 2 Pampas grasses, 1 6th century, six panel folding screens; ink, color, and gold on paper, the Cleveland Museum of Art. From Turning Point: Oribe and the Arts of Sixteenth-Century Japan. Edited by Miyeko Murase (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2003) 220 - 221 . 3 Joseph Campbell. Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Lecture, referencing James Joyce's discussion of aesthetic vision within the novel Portrait of The Artist as A Young Man (1916). 4 "Aspen No. 10," Section 10 (New York: Aspen Communication, 1971). Qtd. from Miyeko Murase. Bybu. Japanese Screens from New York Collections (The Asia Society, Inc, 1971). 94. 5 "Aspen No. 10," Section 10 (New York: Aspen Communication, 1971). 6 Sora, A Haiku Journey, Basho's Narrow Road to a Far Provence, trans. Dorothy Britton (Kodalisha International Ltd., 1974) 60. 7 "I am teaching myself to see what I cannot know in any other way" Mary A. Armstrong Sarah Westlake came of age as an artist during the 1 940s and '50s, entering the heady, male-dominated world of abstract art. Over the years, abstraction would become the most authentic expression of her knowl- edge and experience. In 2003, Sarah wrote: I have learned over time that while I am making a drawing I am teaching myself to see what I cannot know in any other way. I used to think that it was the other way around — that if I looked at something long enough and carefully enough I would be able to bring it to life on the paper's flat surface. But I know the process differently now and this is why I draw. I cherish the knowl- edge that drawing gives me and which allows me to weave that knowledge into an abstract idea. Westlake and I met in the mid-1980s, long after her children had grown and had families of their own. When her two children were small, Westlake, deter- mined to protect her working time and space, set up an easel behind the basement furnace. Later, her hus- band, architect Merle Westlake, designed a proper studio for her. The studio was a wonderfully airy room built up and cantilevered out from the third floor of their house. The main room, where Westlake worked, was designed with high ceilings, three major working walls, and a row of floor-to-ceiling windows that framed enormous white pines. The tops of these large pines, viewed at eye level, transformed the space into a mag- ical tree house. Westlake filled two rooms adjoining the workroom with her extensive art library and, in a third, furnished with an elegant chaise lounge, she rested. An early riser, she was often in the studio by five AM, and would not emerge until the evening. She often returned to her studio just before bedtime to tuck- in her work and to prepare her mind for dreaming. In her very large art library, Westlake had affixed tabs, page after page, in most of the books. Her inter- ests were far ranging. Japanese Art, particularly the prints and screens from the Edo period, profoundly and consistently inspired her. She admired and desired the seemingly spontaneous, deliberately unrefined beauty of Matisse, as well as the strict, minimalist elegance of Agnes Martin's spare, linear abstractions. The slices of rich patterns in the paintings of Edouard Vuillard inspired the lush, crisp-edged patterns in her work. The discipline in making art is about showing up, keeping the studio door closed against the world and the soul's door ajar, just in case. Westlake was obsessed with maintaining a peaceful atmosphere around her work so that it could come into being. Until she was ready for it to be seen, she kept her work very private. In one of Westlake's first letters to me she wrote: "You have seen me and my work in keeping with my deep- est sensibility. I treasure that and I trust it!" In a letter from the early 1 990s she addressed the intensity of her struggle: In some ways we will probably always be at simi- lar points of some battle. Knowing that it is nec- essary to step back and just breathe seems the 8 best defense, even if one can't always do that. It takes so much striving to remain aware and present to the work, often with the assumption that happiness is part of the goal. This last is mostly hogwash I think, but we are conditioned to feel we aren't being responsible if we don't have [happiness] too. Perhaps at the expense of "happiness," Sarah Westlake was a fiercely self-searching and self- questioning artist. The rigorous nature of her search for the truest imagery and process gives Westlake's work tremendous authenticity and refinement. Her self-doubt, though painful, was vital to her creative process. When doubts derailed her, between bouts of great creative activity, she sought solace and inspira- tion in nature, her garden, music, and poetry. Westlake was battling for her work to become more fully itself through her. Comfortable with paradox, she had taped to her studio wall a quote that originally read: "The substance of space should = the weightlessness of volume." However, Westlake had crossed out "should" and had written "can." "Should" is a rigid statement of fact that may or may not be true. It halts action and curtails possibility. "Can" is more flexible, gen- erous and forgiving. For Westlake, "can" opened up the space for a dialogue within her work, rich in possibilities. Repeatedly, Westlake struggled to come to terms with the vicissitudes of the creative process: the fun- damental disparity between the need for solitude and the desire for an audience, the long solitary hours in the studio, and the fickle nature of inspiration. Describing a particular painting that she had worked on for months, she wrote: "(It) is tantalizing me every day ... I see more each day (tho [sic] I haven't painted on it at all) that I know has merit. Wish me luck when I finally touch it." In early 1990, she wrote: I have been hibernating these past weeks adjust- ing to a decision to give myself a break from painting. I stubbornly told myself that [my paint- ings] could have it all! I had not realized that the overload had blitzed my thinking machine. Some days I actually laugh out loud to myself when I realize my thoughts were behaving like some Rube Goldberg wonder machine which got out of control. Now the only thing that makes sense is to distance myself for a while from any expectation. In the winter of 1 993, she put her paints away and began to draw again, with charcoal, gray pastel, and rags with turpentine on huge sheets of paper stapled to the studio wall. She wrote about that process: I hope to draw [fragments of natural things] sloppily without regard for color or composition or anything like a finished result. I don't work at it. Some days I go to the studio and just read poetry. Waiting patiently was something that Westlake had learned to accept about her process. That year, mid- summer, she wrote: Some small wall sculptures are emerging for me. I'm hopeful and excited by the way it is happen- ing. I almost don't dare talk about it, but I will tell you more when I write next and really answer your letter. With this letter she enclosed a poem by Mary Oliver, "Crossing The Swamp," which she thought expressed her "experience of the last many months." The last lines of the poem reveal the depth of faith and the joy she experienced with the renewal of her work. — a poor dry stick given one more chance by the whims of swamp water - a bough 9 that still, after all these years, could take root, sprout, branch out, bud — make of its life a breathing palace of leaves. Later that summer she wrote excitedly about her work's having taken on, literally, a new form. She was referring to the beginning of the wall sculptures. Especially since these few weeks have been a time of real joy in the doing. This has not been so for a long time and I am reveling in it, wrestling with ordinary builder's materials to make shapes that hang on the wall and receive some paint to delineate them. They are rather peculiar shapes. They feel honest and strangely both intimate and distant. Whatever they are, I am not questioning them beyond trying to make them work. I will love showing them to you when we can arrange a visit. These "shapes that hang on the wall" are the untitled sculptures in this exhibition that were made between 1993 and 1996 (nos. 13-18, 20). In her poem "Reasons for Leaving the Studio," Westlake addresses her need to replenish herself and her work by sometimes turning her back on the studio. Nature, unfettered and untamed, appealed to her. But gardens, where she could experience the forms, col- ors, and design possibilities in nature on more inti- mate levels, inspired her throughout her career. In 1989, in the text for a catalogue, Westlake wrote in the third person: For the past ten years the abstract work of Sarah Westlake has focused on the subject of gardens with allusions to the planned arrangement of flowerbeds and the often tangled growth within them. White space becomes an ethereal sub- stance contrasted with suggestions of earth and its organic yield, offering a challenge to conven- tional solid-void [sic] relationships which has been apparent in all of her work. She often wrote to me about her garden, linking it metaphorically to her work in the studio. Many of her drawings and sculptures refer to garden spaces — her own garden at the Vineyard and those she had visited on her travels around the world with her hus- band. In September 1993, she wrote: My garden has been a real delight to me this year, gaining in age and fullness. I see my fun- damental task with it is to pay attention to the quality of the foliage I choose for the perennials. They must remain O.K. after the blooms are gone. Then I can be content with very little 'color.' Structure? Right! [sic] My garden has taken me through that looking glass and it is shaping itself. Always in Westlake's work there is the dynamic ten- sion between unruly, organic or natural forms and the planar structures of the artist's personal interior archi- tecture. In April 1991, Sarah was working on pieces like Light Wind, Inner Stream, and Salmon Run (nos. 8, 1 0, and 12). In one of her letters from this period, she described the connections in her work among nature, spatial structure, movement, and design. She was choreographing space using strict geometry to define the boundaries of the movement. I need to walk in channeled paths through the woods ... or air ... or wherever the natural world invites me. They seem most times to be diagonal ones, starting from my lower right side and stretching upward toward my left, or the center vertical divide may become a double path. It's sometimes hard for me to get back out of them, and I find this disturbing. The painting then develops a rigidity I must work against. But 10 if I try to accept what they suggest ... a contin- uum ... an experience of infinity, or a discipline that I must honor, I am less frightened and my confinement starts to work for me. Looking at these works, one senses them in the body as did Westlake. Her letter continues: I try to cross over the divides by making various connections between the spaces. I don't know where the channel comes from, or why its direc- tion is such. I didn't invent it. It just began to appear in the work some years ago. When Wes and I faced a particularly difficult time with his health I found comfort in the diagonal one. It seemed a repository where all the love others showed us could be concentrated (consecrated?) for my benefit. Moving the viewer along with the artist into her "channeled paths" are the rhythms of marks as they find their way up and down the strict diagonals and ver- ticals. These lush, richly colored patterns of roughly hewn marks fasten the eye to the surface. Westlake refuses to allow a form to coalesce, for that would impede her movement and that of the viewer. These diagonals, shafts of light and delineators of space, thrust us into the picture plane. The strong verticals urge us back to the essential flatness. In the Fantasy Gardens series (nos. 1-6) and in other works like Salmon Run (no. 1 2) and Whose Sleeves? (no. 23), she uses this dynamic structure. Westlake's appreciation for Japanese art had an enduring influence on her work. This influence is most striking in her final body of work. During the summer of 2001, she began this series and wrote that she was learning not to jump at the work, but to simply pass by and wait. From that restraint, so full of breath and breadth, emerged the first piece in the series, Breeze (no. 21). It launched the others. She never attempted to obscure the influence that the screens and prints from the Edo period had on her work. In this series, she again relishes and celebrates the charged interface of the organic and the archi- tectural. She appreciated the truth of the flat plane and the vibrant living presence of the human touch in these gorgeous patterned pieces of kimonos left draped casually on their stands. The sensuality of the draped cloths appealed to her. She said she admired the subtle combination of humor and sex- uality. In these drawings on plaster she incorporated the slanted dynamism of the diagonals to deepen the space, embellishing it with pattern, texture, and color. The flexibility of the plaster surface and the collage elements allowed her to change her mind; the patterns etched into the plaster could be sanded out and the delicately placed bits of cloth, rearranged. Westlake was certain that the piece was finished when, paradoxically, she saw its existence as wholly distinct from her intentions. The work was complete when the richness of the physical space she had cre- ated held the ineffable. In this last quote, she put all the struggle and self- doubt aside and stated a profound belief in herself and in her work: The good news is I do not have to give up a studio life! Yes, I really did think I might have to. It seems ridiculous now to have been afraid, though I don't discount the misery I felt. You see what I have learned is that I am an artist. To have doubted it was to insist on proof. The proof I have is not what I thought it would be. It is simply a way of life (1 993). Reasons for Leaving the Studio Sarah Westlake I need to tell you about my day — so like most of my days — well before noon, uncertain and discouraged with my work, I escaped like an errant school child, and went walking by the shore, still robed in my tattered, paint spattered butcher's coat; the one I wear, I can't think why, to protect old clothes, except that its big pockets can be stuffed with rags, odd notes to myself, a stubbed pencil or two, and still have room for a few found treasures; stones, shells and the like. I often wear it all day as a badge of identity to make me feel a little safer in a world with dubious purposes all around. Its accumulated streaks of stray paint, wiped from eager hands, remind me of my chosen identity. I seek comfort there at the edge, where sunlight and sea appear bound together like inseparable lovers, no arguments between them, no competition or sense of failure, no need to be recognized. Still, I am a witness, and glad for the privilege of watching waves caress silky, green mollusks resting in the sand, whispering their inner secrets; glad that I can follow an osprey with my eyes as it soars high above me, and happier still that whenever I wish I can call up the moment just before it plunged toward the sea. Today, I caught a glimpse of its pale yellow under feathers, so delicate on this powerful creature, and when it pierced the hard, wet surface moving faultlessly toward its prey I took hope that I might fill my brushes until they are fat with pigment and let them fly like this hawk, answering its hunger. But mine is a hunger far less specific. I go without eating, attempting to satisfy it. It rules my days, confuses and mystifies me so that I think I will never feel nourished again. Yet, a thrill runs through my whole being, when I see form, color, substance, physical 12 and soulful finding peace with one another on the same surface, especially when my hand and heart may have had something to do with it. I wander about endlessly searching for a means to make this happen more often. No, let it happen — On today's walk I came upon a strand of seaweed lying just beyond the shifting waves. Faint, transparent color lent hints of how it looked before the tide abandoned it. Some thing in this withered remnant urged me to gather it up. Its beauty was ephemeral. I lingered there, wandering along the water, wonder-filled for most of the day, holding this treasure gently in my pocket until it could join other finds on my wide, white studio shelf. Then as the sun began to drift down, casting a glow on a changeable sky, I retraced my steps up hill, listening to the gull sounds punctuating the summer with strident calls, and musing on a day spent looking for solace in any of God's creations I might chance to see. Even as it continued shriveling from lack of water, this small one I now possess, offers me the vain hope of owning it twice, if I can breathe its essence into the painting just forsaken. — I do not question my need for such talismans. The images I most care to make are realized from the lessons sight affords me, like this seaweed and the hawk. And, there is always more than sight. There is touch and sound and smells through which those images are filtered. I know that these are treasures it is not possible to place on a shelf or put in one's pocket. — So, in the fading light I am taking time to prepare clean tools for tomorrow — and leave again slowly. Letting the door remain slightly ajar. SLW 12/17/01 13 1 Fantasy Garden #26: Royal Apartment 1 984, charcoal on paper, 1 2.5 x 40 in. McMullen Museum of Art: Gift of Merle Westlake 2 Fantasy Garden #30: Paul's Palace 1 984, Lithograph, 11 x 2 1 in. Estate of Sarah Westlake 14 3 Fantasy Garden #31: Paul's Palace 1985, (in collaboration with Harry Jones) painted wood and plaster, 70 x 23 x 1 26 in. Estate of Sarah Westlake 15 4 Fantasy Garden #41: Snow Lily 1985, mixed media on paper, 40 x 25.5 in. McMullen Museum of Art: Gift of Merle Westlake 16 5 Fantasy Garden: Cat Tails ca.1987, mixed media on paper, 46.5 x 31 in. Collection of Alan and Rhea Bufferd 17 6 Fantasy Garden #5 1 : Pungo River Grass 1 987 (in collaboration with Harry Jones), painted wood and steel, 1 08 x 1 06 x 60 in. McMullen Museum of Art: Gift of Merle Westlake 18 7 Untitled 1 989, mixed medio on paper, 33.5 x 1 8.5 in. McMullen Museum of Art: Gift of Merle Westloke 19 8 Light Wind: Reflections #7 1990, mixed media on paper, 44 x 20 in. Estate of Sarah Westlake 20 9 Plankton: Reflections #8 1 990, mixed media on paper, 44 x 20 in. McMullen Museum of Art: Gift of Merle Westlake 21 1 0 Inner Stream: Reflections # 1 0 1990, mixed media on paper, 44 x 20 in. McMullen Museum of Art: Gift of Merle Westlake 22 1 1 Celestial Air: Reflections # 1 1 1990, mixed medio on paper, 39 x 16 in. Estate of Sarah Westlake 12 Salmon Run: Reflections #J2 1990, mixed media on paper, 39.5 x 14 in. Estate of Sarah Westlake 23 1 3 Untitled #2 1 994, mixed media, 1 0 x 1 8 x 6 in. Estate of Sarah Westlake 1 4 Untitled #3 1 994, mixed media, 1 9 x 1 1 x 6.5 in. McMullen Museum of Art: Gift of Merle Westlake 15 Untitled # 5 1 994, mixed media, 1 0 x 7 x 9 in. Estate of Sarah Westlake 24 1 7 Untitled #8 1 995, mixed media, 8 x 1 1 x 9 in. McMullen Museum of Art: Gift of Merle Westlake 1 6 Untitled #7 1 995, mixed media, 1 2 x 1 1 x 6 in. Estate of Sarah Westlake 18 Untitled #9 1 995, mixed media, 8.5 x 4.5 x 4.5 in. Collection of Carol Westlake Quimby 25 1 9 Untitled 1994, mixed media on paper, 27 x 20 in. McMullen Museum of Art: Gift of Merle Westlake 26 20 Untitled #11 1996, mixed media, 24 x 1 1 x 7 in. Collection of T.L. Westlake 27 21 Breeze 2002, mixed media on paper, 17.25 x 28.75 in. Collection of Tom and Jill Delbanco 28 i 29 25 Given 2002, mixed media on paper, 29.5 x 22.5 in. Collection of Allan and Rhea Bufferd 24 Ether 2002, mixed media on paper, 17.25 x 28.75 in. Private Collection 26 Water Stones 2002, mixed media on paper, 17.25 x 28.75 in. McMullen Museum of Art: Gift of Merle Westlake 31 22 Dragon Limb 2002, mixed media on paper, 17.5 x 29.5 in. Collection of Katherine Selfridge 23 Whose Sleeves? 2002, mixed media on paper, 1 7.25 x 28.75 in. Private Collection 32