Smuggled by Emily

In 2013 a facsimile edition of Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems was published by New Directions. The title of the book is The Gorgeous Nothings. Scholars Jen Bervin, Marta Werner, and Susan Howe describe the small scraps of paper with scribbled words in the context of Dickinson’s life and other writing. The book itself is stunningly beautiful with clear and exact reproductions of the flattened envelope pieces on high quality paper alongside a transcription of each word into legible typeface. The fragments are intriguing! These fiber art pieces are inspired by Emily Dickinson. I have created hand-guided, thread script of particularly resonant phrases from the fragments. The fabrics and shapes are reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s own style of dress AND of the envelope sections on which she wrote.
Smuggled . . .Spry Arms . . . Emily
Gleam and Understand . . . Profound by Accident . . . Emily.
The three sections are ribboned together and hung from a child’s whimsical magic wand or a wooden spoon. ($118. each)

Smuggled by Emily (3 attached pieces, approx. 6” by 8” each) and

Gleam and Understand (3 attached pieces, approx.. 6” by 8” each)

Making

What are you making?
Making a home. Making friends. Making community. Making art. Making poetry. Making sentences. Making time. Making peace. Making rainbow. Making love. Making breakfast, lunch, dinner. Making meaning. Making connections. Making a life. Making cookies. Making space. Making sense. Making balance, more or less. Making possible. Making harmony. Making delight. Making memories. Making surprise. Making whole.

Persnickety Pockets

Persnickety Pockets (Varied: approx.. 5” by 8”)

About two years ago, my friends Rose and Jackie drove several hours to visit and take me out for lunch. I wanted to give them each a small gift I had purchased on a recent trip to China. I didn’t like any of the wrapping options I had at home, so I turned to my sewing table and improvised a cloth gift sack that I could tie at the top with a piece of ribbon. They enjoyed the wrappings as much as the gifts, and I found that once I started, I couldn’t stop! It was like eating potato chips! The colors, shapes, and sizes are the crunch, flavor, and salt that add up to an addiction! I don’t much care for the word bag, so I decided to name these, Persnickety Pockets, a more whimsical tag that hints at the scissors and scraps that snip and swop in the process. Here’s what my own Persnickety Pockets carry: my Kindle e-reader, my favorite silk scarf, small gift loaves of zucchini bread for Thanksgiving, and many other small gifts for friends and family. ($15 to $20)

Hurricane Sandy

“Hurricane Sandy: Broken Glass” (25 inches by 40 inches)



I wanted to express feelings about the sharp, broken edges of everything destroyed by the storm. The different areas of thread quilting on the piece represent the strong winds and shearing force. It seems a contradiction to create art about horrific experiences. I’ve wondered about this since first encountering Guernica by Pablo Picasso and Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf. I find the piece pleasing to look at, even though I meant it to express devastation. There is nothing symmetrical in the piece. The colors could be more jarring to convey excruciating sounds and sights, for example, the dark blue background could have been a sickly greyish green instead of this rich cruise-ship midnight blue. (In private collection; not for sale)

Dad's Workshop

I stepped into the upholstery shop on Main Street in Wakefield, Rhode Island and was catapulted back some decades into our family’s basement workshop in Montgomery, New York where my father labored on weekends and evenings at his private upholstery jobs. He worked 51 weeks a year for an interior decorator in a back-room workshop that looked much like our basement. There were big cutting tables in both shops, and wooden horses to elevate the furniture off the floor.

The workshop of my memory was more organized than the shop I walked into yesterday. Below the cutting table was a shelf where long rolls of fabric were stacked. At one end of the shelf were sample books with more fabric cut in swatches of multiple colors of a single pattern. I coveted those sample books and never tired of flipping the heavy pages reviewing how a change of color would tilt a pattern toward or away from my developing visual taste.

My father organized his tools and materials, and I suppose that I have inherited that innate sense of order—a place for everything and everything in its place. The varied-size and purpose hammers and screw drivers were visible hanging from clips along the wall under the high window that peeked out at ground level. Shelves elbowing into one corner held boxes of larger nails and the tacks that he consumed in great numbers, almost literally. He tossed a handful into his mouth when he was in his most efficient mode. He would position them with his tongue for the magnet at the tip of his tack hammer and one by one they left his lips and briefly arced across space to be expertly tapped into the edge of a cushioned, fabric covered seat or the wooden curve of a soft sofa.

As the oldest of five children, I became my father’s constant companion and assistant. The other kids were represented by the empty baby food jars that migrated to our basement workshop. Dad nailed the lids to the bottom of the shelves and then filled the jars with small clips and tiny nails, all visible and just a quick twist away from any job in progress.

In the upholstery workshop I was the equivalent of a trained surgical nurse, studying the surgeon’s every move, anticipating his needs, and slapping into his outstretched hand the correct instrument at the most opportune moment. Dad was a teacher, too, and would explain the purpose of each tool and stage of the process, including careful disassembling, making a pattern for the new fabric, tying the springs, applying webbing, muslin, and the ornamental finishing touches. I learned to thread the long curved needles that he used to sew secret stitches. I loved the sound of the huge shears in his hands as he cut fabric. My hands are still not big enough. One lesson he emphasized to me and the smaller kids: never put the tacks in your mouth!

On Sunday mornings in the fall, our work was more like actual surgery. He would take a few hours off to hunt wild rabbits and squirrels and I would help him skin and clean the small furry bodies. Afterwards, I would take the meat upstairs to help Mom cook dinner; rabbit in the Sunday sauce and squirrel roasted in the oven with lemon and oregano.

My father’s care with his tools and his family was earned the hard way. I was named after his mother, Giuseppina Carubia, who died in Cianciana, Provincia di Agrigento, Sicily, when he was six years old. He and his two sisters were virtual orphans with their father far away and underground, mining anthracite coal in western Pennsylvania, USA. Andrea Carubia could have abandoned the three children to extended family in his hometown, but he made them United States citizens on his naturalization papers and paid for the long journey by boat to bring them to a new home in Astoria, Queens, New York City. The immigrant child who had never seen a banana quickly learned not to eat the skin, how to speak English, and how to protect his milk money from Irish hooligans in the neighborhood. One teacher recognized a spark and guided him toward Stuyvesant High School. Service in WWII was followed by marriage, apprenticeship and the five of us kids.

After three or four of us were launched on our own, my father stopped working in the basement and created a new workshop in the boys’ empty bedroom. His creativity shifted focus from fabric, tacks, and furniture to shells and leaves. First he collected and sorted, then he began creating: refrigerator magnets, mirror frames, vases, bowls, napkin holders, and whimsical animals, all carefully glued into shape and lavishly covered with polyurethane. “Carubiasaurus” is the most famous of these; perhaps you have seen it somewhere? We accepted the clever creations as gifts for ourselves and then for our children, and finally for our grandchildren. I have at least one piece in each room of my house and I see others in my grandkids’ bedrooms. His spirit lives in each and every one.

We laughed a little at Dad’s “projects” as they multiplied and filled shelf after shelf in his house and our own. He’s gone now, just a little over two years, and I realize that his workshop has proliferated: there are now five of them! All five of us dabble in or even make a living at crafting something or other that can be traced back to that basement. We all put our tools back into the appropriate slots when we are finished using them, and none of us puts tacks in our mouth! When I go into my son’s basement and see his beer crafting worktable and tools, I am seeing the third generation of Dad’s workshop in action!

Leaf Lessons

Ripe and bright yellow,
Eager to take this morning’s
Quiet chill sunshine fully to heart,
Hundreds of leaves are diving,
Spinning, floating, tumbling
To earth, to rest, to death.

Some are languid, broadside, ambling
Left to right, even lingering in the
Red Japanese maple awhile.

Others plunge with serrated knife edge or
Point directly down and flutter around a
Determined, descending stem.

Some let go and fall every which way;
Some dance, swoop and flip.
A few drop like stones, impossibly dense, or
Spiral in perfect geometry.

Though complex, tenacious, and beautiful,
All will fall, today or perhaps tomorrow;
All will fall.

Look: I will be
the laughing, twirling, joyful one,
All the way to ground.

“Désiré” by Breughel

I am looking at a Breughel, not a Rubens, from my window seat at Désiré de Lille Tea Room. I would frame the artwork better by switching my own seat with the two ladies at a nearby table. Petite, well dressed, mature women. They both have silver hair, cut short and youthful. I think they are sisters catching up on family news, not just the what of it, but the why and the how, going deep inside the family stories to make meanings of new alliances and old fractures. They are wearing skirts and low heels. One wears glasses, one does not. The window begs to be bordered by their warm russet and brown brocades.

If they sit here in my place at the window table, the word Désiré will be just above their heads as read from the outside looking in. How would Breughel frame this? Will that word become the title of the entire piece? I like Breughel’s busy composites of folk sayings or parables. Each tiny scene is an illustration of some human foible. What is going on in my Breughel?

A woman walks into a shop labeled with a blue fluorescent sign. It might be a jewelry store. I can’t quite see from this angle. The name of the store is clear however. It is Choice. What is she going in there to choose?

Another woman, dressed in brown with short dark hair and glasses, walks out of a shop with a package over her arm. She is purposeful, stepping into the flow of pedestrian traffic to her right with eyes only for the next steps of the day. What is in her bag?

There is a large Buddha statue in the window of the shop she has just left. Buddha is holding a lit candle in his lotus-flower hands. The shop is called Rituals: Home and Body Cosmetics. Above and behind the Buddha is a board with writing on it. It begins . . . “Onze filosofie . . .”

Two women in slacks and short coats with their collars up walk a medium sized black poodle. We see only their backs as they walk from the center of the canvas off to the right. The woman on the left is older, perhaps the mother to the daughter on the right, the one with longer hair and slighter build. They aren’t touching, but their bodies say intimacy.

Two young men in shirt sleeves unload flats of water onto a hand cart just to the left of the center of the scene. Their bare hands grip the heavy trays.

A boy in a black coat is running, running through the scene. He is not alarmed, just late. Late to pick up a package from a shop closing soon? A package he has promised his mother he will bring home, but he was talking on his cellphone so long that he’s late. The twilight is shading down on him and soon that sharp scimitar, Magritte’s moon (in Breughel’s painting!) will be hanging over his head.

Tequila tempts passersby two or three at a time. Tequila’s final letter, the “A” is designed to look like the top of a minaret. The door of the minaret, as well as the spaces within the letter “e” and the letter “q” are filled with a deep pink, almost red color. What is Tequila offering besides a blush of intoxication? Costume jewelry, scarves, bags are visible along with an elephant and a giraffe. Outside on a pole a deep pink package tied with matching ribbon beckons with an exchange of imagination for possession.

The clerk of Tequila keeps busy in the tiny, spot-lit shop: folding and unfolding scarves, organizing small leather wallets in a display box. A mother and daughter, arm in arm, pause, turn away, and then turn back and enter the minaret’s door. They are darker than Northern Europeans. Are they from a minaret or from tequila? Drawn by the aura of the bustling shop, another woman enters.

A little family doing passagiata –two tiny girls, and mom and dad. A shopgirl on her cellphone making plans for the evening.
Which of us is Icarus, falling from the sky with melting wings from the dizzy heights and fiery sol?

Behind the tingle of the minaret’s door, is it the young woman in houndstooth trying on a scarf?
Or the young girl behind the Buddha who has just blown out the candle?
Or the young blond woman with a stiff-legged walk?
Or the woman with graceful packages pausing beside the “60% Off Sale” sign?
Or is it me?

The young man carrying two suitcases, one red, one grey, crosses from left to right and then from right to left ten minutes later. Where is the woman who belongs to the soft things in the red bag? Is she lost, or is he?

This tea room is really a series of rooms, each one lined in framed mirrors and deeper, deeper into the perspective of distance mirrored back smaller and smaller.

Tequila! Tequila! Number 11, the magic windows, the magic door. Did the woman whose face I never see put one irresistible gem among the fake chains and baubles?

The boy in the black coat runs across the scene again, in the opposite direction. On this little street, Schrijnwerkers Straat, are we at the fold of time? Every action will have its mirror, its reverse, sooner or later?

It’s almost dark; our reflections go deeper within the lighted windows and enfold one another across the narrow street.
No one goes in or comes out of Hush Puppies despite the pastel-bright colors splashed across the windows. Perhaps Breughel’s eyes cannot see into pastels. We’ll ask Renoir for his view.