Art lovers' guide to Proust

There are 300 references to paintings in Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time, and Eric Karpeles knows them all.

“I don’t think there’s anything missing,” Karpeles said about the amount of detail in his recently published book, Paintings in Proust. He was barefoot on the deck of his home in Bolinas, sipping coffee on a Monday morning. “I wanted to err on the side of having more rather than less.”

The project began as simple curiosity, melding his loves of art and of the daunting French novel. As he re-read the series for the fifth time, Karpeles began to slip scraps of paper between the pages at every reference to a painting.

“It’s such a rich tapestry of ideas, images and philosophy. I have a lifetime of experience with this book, and there were references that I still couldn’t come up with,” said Karpeles, a sturdy man with an easy smile. “At some point, I realized, ‘This is a book.’”

The result is a colorful and densely compact companion guide to Proust’s work. Every page offers a passage from In Search of Lost Time that includes mention of a painting, as well as Karpeles’ introduction to where you are in the plot. On the opposite page is a high-quality color reproduction of the piece.

On Page 156, for example, Karpeles describes the book’s narrator in a drawing room full of people who don’t share his admiration for a Elstir, certain fictional artist. Below this context is the translated passage from Proust.

‘A masterpiece?’ cried M. de Norpois with a surprised and reproachful air. ‘It makes no pretence of even being a picture, it’s merely a sketch.’ (He was right.) ‘If you label a clever little thing of that sort “masterpiece,” what will you say about Hebert’s Virgin or Dagnan-Bouveret?’

On the facing page are Hebert’s gilt-edged, dark-eyed Madonna and infant. Flip forward to another introduction, another passage and a demure bowl of roses. Flip backward and see a luminous tangle of grapes, butterflies and geraniums. And so on.

Designed as a reference tool as well as a visual treat, a list of artists in the back includes minor references that the publisher opted not to print. There one can learn that only a single reference was made to Hebert in Proust’s entire novel, whereas Sandro Botticelli was mentioned seven times—six of which are illustrated in Karpeles’ book.

It’s a spectacularly sweeping introduction to art history, as well as to Proust. Dip into it as an unseasoned reader and you get a taste of the novel without the intimidation; dip into it as a scholar and even obscure details become vivid.

“It breaks the book down to digestible, readable portions,” Karpeles said. “A 4,000 page novel is hugely intimidating to most people, and they won’t approach it because it’s too big or too daunting.”

Though Karpeles speaks reluctantly about his accomplishments, compiling this book is just the latest in a lifetime of daunting undertakings.

As a child growing up on the fringes of New York City, he had an early facility with drawing and painting. His parents enrolled him in a program at the Art Student’s League. From age eleven on, he spent his weekend mornings painting and his afternoons exploring the museums of Manhattan.

Despite his attraction to art, Karpeles described reading as his “salvation.” At 17, a teacher introduced him to Proust—and he was immediately hooked. “I knew from the beginning that you could live in that world. And I guess that’s what I was looking for: an alternative universe.”

In college, Karpeles veered away from his familiar practice of art and pursued the life of a classical scholar. It seemed, to him, more challenging. He went to Haverford College and then to Oxford, where he studied ancient Greek for a year. But ultimately art drew him back.

“It was in London that I finally decided to be a painter,” Karpeles said, smiling. “It was one painting. A Cezanne landscape. That was my moment.”

From then on, he embraced painting as his life’s work. A painting fellowship took him to France for two years in his early 20s, where he lived in Cassis and Paris, and read Proust in French for the first time.

Karpeles returned to spend a restless half-decade in Manhattan before settling on a farm in the rural rolling hills of Pennsylvania in 1984. There he built a barn-like painting studio, where he worked for the next two decades.

All of Karpeles’ canvases are large, but his accomplishments include two monumental room-sized works: the Sanctuary Project, designed to be a supportive space for people touched by AIDS, led the Rockefellers to commission a nondenominational Chapel of Hope and Remembrance. Both are meditative swashes of color that speak of galaxies, clouds or even the textures of pavement, lichen, skin.

To stand in front of one of Karpeles’ canvases in the austere Bolinas studio where he now works is to confront a wall of color and emotion—dense and yet also full of light. It can take him over a year to finish a single painting, and the process of time and thought is visible in each one’s carefully balanced and refined chaos—an observation that makes Karpeles think of Proust.

“For him, art became a bulwark against the ravages of time,” Karpeles said. “Paintings held time, and the world moved around them.”

(Originally published in the Point Reyes Light)

Paula Fava explores the elements using encaustic, wax

In a room that smells faintly of tar and honey, charred colors play across large wooden panels. This is the acrylic, encaustic and mixed media work of artist and former San Francisco firefighter Paula Fava, of Inverness Park.

“I’ve always been attracted to fire,” said Fava, who was raised in a house behind the fire station in Sacramento, and dreamed of being a firefighter from the time she was five. But that wasn’t an option for little girls in the 1950s, so she grew up to study modern dance and journalism instead.

Her mother was an artist and a dancer, and as a teenager Fava picked up a camera and began to make art of her own through photography. She was always handy: if she saw something nifty, she would try to make it. And while working in marketing and public relations for a pager company, she started a small jewelry-making business with her sister.

The San Francisco Fire Department was opened to women in 1989 after an extended lawsuit. Four years later Fava applied and placed fifteenth out of 6,000 people who took the entrance exam. For the next fourteen years she lived her childhood dream.

“I’ve seen everything from people who committed suicide to horrible accidents on the Golden Gate Bridge,” Fava said. “And, a good amount of fires. Everything is so fast and furious when you go to a fire scene.”

One of the more memorable moments in her career included attended helping a woman whose legs had been shattered by a hit and run driver. Her legs were only held together by her black stockings, Fava recalled, describing how she talked with the woman who was drifting in and out of consciousness. A week later, she was told that she was the only visitor the woman wanted to come to the hospital.

“That really spoke to how we touch people’s lives and we don’t really know it,” Fava said. “Every day we all make an impact on each other and have no idea.”

While driving fire engines and working on haz-mat crews for her job, Fava remained inspired to take photographs and make art. On repeated trips to Hawaii she swam with dolphins, and began making silk paintings inspired by that experience that became prayer flags and altarpieces.

Fava began painting shortly after she moved to West Marin in 2001, when she took a class. It was one week after September 11 and ten days after her father died. “Art just exploded out of me,” she said. In the process she felt connected to her identity as a firefighter, to her father and also to her mother who had died years before.

“When I started painting I used a lot of yellows and reds, and made series’ that involved the towers and my father’s blue eyes,” she said. “Definitely it was a lot of processing—frustration, sadness, disappointment, an inability to go to New York and help.”

During that time, she also felt that her mom was nearby, a spirit sipping tea in a corner of the room while she painted. The next year she got married, and when she changed her name she took that of her mother—Fava—as well as her husband’s. Now she goes by Paula Fava as an artist, and Paula Fava Corcoran in her personal life.

In 2003 an Indian guru entered Fava’s life and art when she attended a lecture by Swami Sri Kaleshwar at Ions in Petaluma.

“I was raised Catholic and I haven’t disowned it,” she said. “But I was taught by my first nun that there is no wrong religion and I’ve kept opening my heart to what is out there.”

Over the last five years Fava has been to India four times to visit Kaleshwar, who is known as a living saint and a national treasure in India. “I’ll be honest: I’m still testing this all out,” she said. “But when something is working you want more of it. Everything that he’s offered so far as a healing technique or a teaching has worked; I can’t deny that.”

On her last visit, Kaleshwar invited his students to make a wish—a wild, outrageous, selfless wish—that would be his gift to them. Fava struggled with what to ask for, and after talking with some friends realized her wish boiled down to her art.

“Our teacher tells us that the biggest pain in the world is heartbreak. We all carry it with us,” she said. “I want people to be healed of heartbreak through just looking at my art.”

Last week—less than a year after making her wish—Fava’s first solo show opened at Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station.

“I’ve already had two strangers contact me, and they said, ‘I cannot believe this but I feel like it healed the pain in my heart,’” said Fava, who wrote of her wish in the artist statement displayed at the gallery. “To me, its like, ‘Gosh if it happened to even one person then that’s enough.’”

In the show, Fava used understated swathes of pigment and intricate Indian prints to explore themes of earth, fire, air, water and sky—the five elements in the Hindu tradition.

On one panel, white tones floats like smoke across a background of ashy gray. On another, a russet corner flares with the patterns of paper or a white-painted wall that has just begun to burn.

These are the pieces that Fava feels are the most satisfied with—and it’s no coincidence that they are fiery.

“It’s an earthy, guttural chemical reaction,” the Inverness Park artist said about her process of combining roofing compound with beeswax and encaustic pigments using a blowtorch. “I’ve always been earth and fire in my alchemical makeup,” Fava said. “Over the last few years and I’ve brought in water and air with all the spiritual work I’m doing, but I might have gone back to my roots with those last pieces.”

(Originally published in the Point Reyes Light)