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)

Park burns Limantour

The fire started as a thin dribble of flame.

Within moments the entire grassy hillside above Limantour Road in the Point Reyes National Seashore was engulfed; grass blackened and coyote brush burned with a crackle that sounded almost like falling rain. Eerie brown shadows raced across the ground as columns of smoke scudded in front of the sun.

“Someday this could save Bolinas if we get another big fire,” said park Superintendent Don Neubacher yesterday, as he watched the flames gradually spread.

Wednesday’s prescribed 25-acre burn is part of a network of fuel breaks designed to stop another disaster like the Vision Fire of 1995. Keeping the vegetation low through burning and mowing should help slow or stop a future wildfire.

The park plans to burn the Limantour sites every five to ten years, said Jennifer Chapman, a fire communications specialist with the Point Reyes National Seashore (PRNS). This will keep the coastal scrub in an immature stage with smaller, widely spaced coyote brush where fire will move more slowly than in areas with large, dense coyote brush.

“We want to punch little units of different age classes along the road,” said Roger Wong with PRNS, who was in charge of the fire crews.

Having patches of younger, recently burned vegetation is also healthy for coastal California landscapes. Many of the historic fires, thought to have been started by coast Miwok, benefited plants and animals that are adapted to coexist with fire.

Bishop pine, for example, can only release seed after its cones are opened by a fire. Coyote brush can survive a hot burn, resprouting from the roots even if its leaves and stems are killed.

Without regular fire, forests get clogged with tinder and grasslands disappear under dense shrubs. Fires benefit tule elk, rabbits and myriad bird species, which rely on open grassy areas to survive. Endangered Myrtle’s silverspot butterfly only lays its eggs on the leaves of grassland violets.

“A lot of people think that one of the top five threats to the native ecosystem is a lack of fire,” Neubacher said.

It’s also possible that fire suppression has contributed to the spread of Sudden Oak Death, PRNS senior science advisor Sarah Allen said on Wednesday.

PRNS first used prescribed fire as a resource management tool during a small burn in 1978, Chapman said. By the 1990s a prescribed burn program was well established. Fire management is the first goal of the program, and improving ecosystem health through reducing non-native plants and improving biodiversity is the second.

Control of the invasive French broom is one goal for a second 115-acre burn scheduled to take place this Friday along Highway One. That site, which will mainly serve as a fuel break, is scheduled to be burned more frequently in order to control the broom.

Almost 60 firefighters from nine different crews came out to participate in this week’s burns. Participants included the Inverness Fire Department, Marin County Fire Department, the Mount Tam fire crew, the Golden Gate National Park fire crew, and a Yosemite National Park crew.

“We have more engines here than we need, but it’s sort of a training opportunity,” Chapman said. “We get to bring all the agencies together and work on a project.”

Painter draws inspiration from her West Marin roots

In artist Susan Hall’s tall, airy studio in Point Reyes Station, paintings of West Marin cover every wall. Outside her windows you can see fruit trees, golden grass and the house that she was raised in.

“My sense of self has really been influenced by growing up here,” Hall said during an interview at her home on Monday. “I am the environment and the landscape; there’s no question of that in my mind.”

Hall, a trim woman who wore her hair tucked in a neatly tied scarf, spent 22 years as part of the New York City art scene before returning to spend another 15 years refining her craft in West Marin. A show of her work opens at College of Marin on Thursday. She will also read from her creative memoir about her life as an artist, River Flowing Home, which is due to be published in January.

“One of the reasons I wrote the book was to show people what I went through, and maybe inspire them to follow their deepest urges,” Hall said.

Even as a child, Hall knew she wanted to be an artist. She wrote poetry and played the piano, but was most drawn to painting.

Through sixth grade she attended the two-room Black School—where the fire station stands today—moving on to be in the first class at the West Marin School. After graduating from Tomales High she studied at College of Marin and later at the School of Arts and Crafts in Oakland before moving on to get a masters degree in painting from UC Berkeley in 1967.

There, studying under teachers such as Mark Rothko and David Hockney, she said that her life really changed. “Rothko would go to each student’s studio and spend a day there, looking at their work,” she said.

“Back then there was no…separation,” she added, waving a hand for emphasis. “The art world was really very small; I could make a connection that was very personal.”

After graduation, Hall worked alongside other bohemians, hippies and artists at the Post Office in San Francisco and also taught drawing, painting and design to undergraduates at Berkeley.

When she was 26 years old, she decided to move to New York City and paint. She traded her loft in an old warehouse that looked over the bay in North Beach for a musician’s apartment on Bowery and Grand in Manhattan.

Hall and her boyfriend took a taxi from the airport to their new home on an early morning in January of 1970. Homeless people were warming their hands over fires on street corners; the city seemed to be a raw, intimidating place and Hall wondered what she had gotten herself into.

“It was hard – it was the Bowery – it was the real thing,” she recollected. “At the same time, there was a very tight knit community of artists and writers and so on.”

Her first show opened a year and a half later at the Whitney Museum. It was an auspicious beginning that she credits to the welcoming art community, where she continued to thrive for the next two decades.

Hall’s work gradually evolved from the intricate paintings of women and their lives that first showed at the Whitney. First it began to include landscapes, which were often urban and surreal. In one, an orchid floats on an envelope above a city skyline; in another, a bathroom mirror inexplicably reflects a black and starry night sky.

Gradually, simplicity and natural scenes became more prominent in the paintings that she showed. Shortly before she moved back to West Marin, boats and silhouettes dominated her exhibitions.

By that time, she felt that the New York art community had become commercialized, and was ready to move. “Things had changed a lot,” she said. “I was longing for the poet’s life, and had done all that I could in New York.” Her paintings from that time were dark and graceful, with lots of water—closer to her current, spare style.

After the move, people and buildings disappeared from her work almost entirely, while hills, rivers and trees became prevalent.

On the surface, her early canvases looked almost nothing liker her current ones, but Hall said that the way she sees things has never changed. Even though her subjects and style were different, she said her compositions had an openness that wasn’t found in that of her colleagues.

“My friends who grew up in big cities have a very different way of taking things in,” she said. “For me every object has a lot of space around it. The atmosphere builds the objects, almost.”

Today, Hall’s work is viscerally evocative of West Marin. Bold blackbird silhouettes congregate on a telephone wire, against a background of reds and oranges that form the starkest suggestion of a landscape in one painting. On another, hills and trees are rendered in a wash of gray and green so fine the texture of the canvas shows through.

Others pieces are less abstract; cypress trees arch over a pathway illuminated by sunlight; white deer browse under a looming cloud; a grand and slightly canted barn dwarfs a landscape with a single tree on the horizon.

“I’m not a plein air painter, partly because I take out a lot and I put in a lot,” Hall said. “Personally, I feel the deeper part of the landscape requires editing to get at the core of it.”


Susan Hall’s work can be seen at her solo show, River Flowing Home, at the College of Marin from September 22 to October 24. The opening reception will take place on Thursday, September 25 from 6 to 8 p.m. and will feature a reading from her forthcoming book.

Gumption and luck make stars out of West Marin twins

In the hush of the high-ceilinged Kabuki Theater, the film Touching Home rolled before a sold-out audience at the 2008 San Francisco International Film Festival last week.

At the back of the theater, two identical young men in suits sat on the floor and watched the struggles of their early 20s play out on the screen.

After being inches away from playing professional baseball, Logan and Noah Miller landed back home in Nicasio. They tested their bond as brothers and their commitment to their dreams, while coping with their alcoholic, homeless and loving father.

Logan and Noah, twins from West Marin, had no background in making movies when they decided to write, direct, produce and act in Touching Home. What they did have was perseverance learned from years of being athletes, hope, and 17 credit cards.

After two years of gumption and luck, the pair had recruited actors Ed Harris, Brad Dourif and Robert Forster; secured a Panavision New Filmmaker grant, which gave them access to professional cameras and discounted film; hired a film crew; and learned how to act.

“Many, many people told us we were insane, but we’ve always loved the people who’d say, ‘Why not? You never know,’” said Noah and Logan, who complete each other’s sentences, tossing them back and forth between them like a baseball.

EARLY YEARS, AND BASEBALL
The brothers started life fighting, they said. Born six weeks premature and weighing three pounds each, Logan had a hole in his heart and Noah’s appendix ruptured. Several surgeries later, the boys grew up tough, athletic and prepared to take on unfavorable odds.

They spent their early years in Lagunitas, gradually moving east through Forest Knolls and landing in Fairfax, where they lived with their mom as they attended Manor School and then Sir Francis Drake High.

West Marin remained their stomping grounds. They fished, hiked, and spent weekends with their father, who lived in a trailer in the San Geronimo Valley. In the summer they would pull crawdads out of Lagunitas creek, and they played baseball on every field in the area, they said – guaranteed.

“I don’t even remember the first time that we played catch,” Noah said. “I mean, there were two of us; it was just something we always did.”

They do remember one of the first places they played, though: an old horse pasture on Tamal Road, which has since been built over with houses.

In addition to playing, the boys started working early on. Their father became homeless when the boys were teenagers – but he held down a job as a roofer and construction worker even when he was living in his pickup.

“We started going to jobs with our pops when we were really young,” they said, “We would clean up shingles that fell off the roof, and used to sell them in front of the Cala Market in Fairfax.”

Versed in manual labor, the boys pinned their future on baseball. They were good, and when they graduated from Sir Francis Drake High, they were drafted into the minor leagues. Close enough to taste the big leagues, the two worked hard despite the challenges.

Eventually, Logan played with the Blue Jays; Noah played college ball for Southern Arkansas. But at age 24 the two had become old men by baseball standards, and they landed back home with a resume that included nailing shingles, digging ditches, and not much else.

So they decided to make a movie.

CHANGING CAREERS
The idea hit them when they visited a friend in Los Angeles, the twins said. They call it their epiphonic summit.

“When you’re there, the allure of the movie industry is…” Logan said, and Noah finished with, “…palpable.”

Making a movie about their lives, and their father, seemed like a crazy but possible dream. Friends and strangers had always been fascinated with their life story: their father who was homeless but went to work every day; their charisma as twins who did everything together.

They bought a book on screenwriting and finished a draft of the screenplay on cheap spiral-bound notebooks within a month. It was terrible, they said, and though they wrote 11 different scripts they never put any serious effort into turning the drafts into drama.

Then, on January 5, 2006, their father died in Marin County jail. His loss, and the undignified way that his body was treated, filled them with a sense of helplessness and anger that needed an outlet. Turning their screenplay into a film became a way to heal, and they threw all of their energy and determination into the project.
“We said, ‘We have to at least try to do something positive with that guilt and pain,’” said Noah. “We bought a whole bunch of books on movie production.”

Less than two months later, the two had been awarded the New Filmmaker grant. Two months after that, they took their movie trailer to the San Francisco International Film Festival on a laptop, with the idea of finding some way – any way – to show it to Ed Harris.

“He was the only guy to play our dad,” Logan said. “He looks just like him.”

After failing to intercept Harris on the way into the theater, and after failing to get a microphone during his Q & A, Noah simply tried to walk backstage, with Logan on his heels. Though they were stopped, an employee pass on their request for a few minutes of Harris’ time, and they wound up showing the actor their trailer in an alley, while he smoked a cigarette.

He took their script and their phone number; he read it and liked it; the rest is history.

Everything about the creation of Touching Home is improbable. The twins first funded the filming of a trailer on credit cards; then they recruited a major star, who thought they had funding; then they found the funding –and they still had to direct, star in and produce the movie.

And the film that eventually appeared in the Kabuki is a polished, tender film that may be, more than anything, an ode to West Marin.

TOUCHING HOME
The Miller brothers’ film is an emotional, allegorical version of their life. Facts are blurred and mythologized into what becomes, for the viewer, a greater truth.

Maybe the grandmother in the film was a great-grandmother in real life; maybe they worked with their father as roofers instead of at the Lunny quarry. But for the viewer, that doesn’t matter – and the twins were perceptive enough to know that.

The movie gets rolling when both Noah and Logan return home, temporarily spit out by the world of baseball.

On the long drive to California they had assured each other they would play ball again as soon as they regrouped; but failure, romance and working alongside their alcoholic dad strained their commitment to baseball and their relationship to each other.

While the plot of the movie focuses on the boys struggle to return to baseball, the emotional meat lies in its subtle exploration of the complexities of the illness that is alcoholism, and the many ways that a goodhearted man can fail himself and his sons.

To zero gravity and beyond: an interview with Astronaut Leroy Chiao

Dr. Leroy Chiao was a NASA astronaut for 15 years, logging over 200 days in space (and 36 hours on spacewalks) before retiring to aid a private spaceflight company called Excalibur Almaz and raise his 14-month-old twins, Henry and Caroline. Theme interviewed Dr. Chiao from his home in Houston. Though he went into space on four missions, most of our conversation involved his life on the International Space Station, where he lived for six and a half months with Russian astronaut Salizhan Sharipov, whom Chiao called “the brother I never had.”

Theme: Let’s start at the beginning. What does launch feel like?
Dr. Leroy Chiao: It depends: if you’re on a Russian Soyuz rocket, it’s so smooth you can’t actually feel liftoff. It feels quite different on the Space Shuttle—when those solid rockets light, it’s like someone kicked the back of your chair. You’re getting shaken around a lot and you feel the acceleration pushing you back in your seat as you take off. Then after the solid rocket boosters come off, it’s glass smooth. It’s not that uncomfortable, it just takes a little more effort to breathe. It’s like someone’s sitting on your chest.

Read interview at:
http://www.thememagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=203&Itemi
d=109