I love art: old masters, sculptures, cartoons, line drawings, wood-cuts, assemblages, pictographs, color-drenched quilts, rich abstracts, the sweet simple studies of a face or a body or a cat. We worshipped Mother’s stormy sea painting over the Stromberg-Carlson and admired our friends’ original Birger Sandzen prints. Mother’s weighty box of 1930s calendar and magazine images—designed to jumpstart her art students’ imaginations lived under my side of the bed. I salivated over its contents—fashioned bulletin boards and notebook pages from its riches. Even now, I collect and preserve the artwork that presents itself so abundantly in magazines and second-hand books and greeting cards.
Also in these retirement years, I treasure the Facebook algorithms that drench my feed with art. It’s magic. How is it that I can sit in Helena, Montana, and be given luscious paintings, clever cartoons, grand music, words that teach and inspire—artistry in all its forms. Some from originators whose names I know, but many more that I don’t. If only for a few moments on any given day, this much-debated social media site—and sources to which it’s tethered—bring me the artistry of so many cultures.
But not long ago, I stopped in my viewing tracks at a painting labeled “naïve art.” Naïve me—I hadn’t heard the term before and it raised my hackles. It seemed denigrating. Snooty. Dismissive. And I didn’t feel at all better when I went to Wikipedia to see whether it was a thing. Not only is it a thing. I discovered that the term was embedded in a confusing and, to me, silly and unnecessary wrangling over related terminology: folk art, outsider art, primitive art, pseudo-naïve art, autodidacticism, post-impressionism, faux naïve art. Most all of which revolved around artists who hadn’t been formally taught and who didn’t quite “grasp” commonly understood design principles.
What the %%##++! There’s no question that my thinking about all this will itself seem naïve to most folks. Nonetheless, I am stumped by society’s need to categorize, to classify, to create boxes. To compare—a process that all too quickly becomes the basis for slimy, dangerous judgment.
Great and good art for me evokes an “aha!” A catch, a flash of new awareness: a splinter of remembering or joy or horror or comfort or laughter or awe. A moment that slices through whatever else I’m doing or fearing or thinking—and takes me outside myself for an instant. To a place or feeling or time.
In the summer of 1967, when I was a 20-year-old guinea pig at the National Institutes of Health, I had the luxury of tackling Washington D. C.’s National Gallery of Art one wing at a time. And that’s where I first experienced those out-of-body moments. El Greco flat out scared me. Vermeer made me want to turn on the lights so I could sit down and talk with his women. Early “Christian” paintings repulsed and horrified me. Later, when I worked in D. C. and visited the new Hirshhorn Museum and its contemporary art, I discovered Giacometti’s incredible thin people. And swear to god, I literally sucked in my whole body wanting to join the very-much-alive stick figures. How on earth did Giacometti capture whole human souls with such spindly shapes!
For me, all arts—naïve or not–carry possibilities, revelations. I am confounded by the artistry of gardens as I run errands. That neighbor who can turn a plot of land the size of my desk into changing, radiant color from spring to fall. I go out of my way to drive the Helena roundabout graced with Alice in Wonderland caterpillars made of wheel rims and engine parts. Simon Cowell’s talent shows unearth incredible artists of every genre who would never otherwise surface—the latest in 2024—a singing janitor from Terre Haute, Indiana. I am enchanted by Andy Goldsworthy’s careful but transitory arrangements of leaves and ice and rocks and branches. Beautiful artistry from the earth’s natural materials meant to last only an hour or a day—until wind or water or heat disassembles them. My front yard showcases a similar freestanding rock sculpture created by my friend Jeff.
No, I wouldn’t buy the room-sized elephant crocheted by a retiree. And I wince when I come to a lawn full of blow-up Halloween figures. But that’s about taste and preference. The family who purchased the witches and pumpkins wanted to improve their home. Delight their kids.
The Weddles were our long-time friends—linked to us by my dad’s young years in western Kansas with that wheat growing family. In the town of Bloom to be specific. His own dad–a struggling, part-time Church of the Brethren minister there. By the time I remember visiting the Weddles long after the Depression, Bloom was a grain elevator and a railroad siding in the middle of a flat, gold landscape. In their last years, Merle Weddle, the family’s matriarch, painted my dad a picture of Bloom. He so treasured it that I brought it back to Montana after he died. Merle was self-taught. I can only guess what label a gallery might attach. But it is anything but naïve. In it, Merle captured the landscape of my dad’s best memories: childhood friends and hearty dinners and the camaraderie of harvests. His sweetest years. In a place whose name couldn’t have been more ironic except in his reflections.
I am forever stunned by the ingenuity and emotion and drive embedded in paintings and essays and musical compositions. In stain glass and embroidery and assemblages and chain saw bears. Skill I only begin to fathom. Purpose and yearning and imagination far beyond mine. Artists of all persuasions and gifts and intentions and backgrounds sit down to CREATE. They see quirks and connections that elude me. They invest themselves in the statement, the portrayal, the depiction that they are feeling and dreaming that day. Ivan Doig pointed out that the letters of “heart” rearrange themselves neatly into “earth.” For me, both are anchored by the word “art”—itself the product of this earth and of the hearts that try to capture the universe’s meaning.
We judge the sophistication of the earliest people by their art—by the stories they told on cave walls and impossibly high rock faces. Now, in a world teetering on the brink of self-destruction, epic hunger, power struggles, territorial and religious warfare, thank the gods for those who live out loud in their creations. Who manifest the continuum of speaking in the tongues of art—naïve or not! ©
