Bethany Pierce

Acing Cakes and Devilled Eggs

Since the move, I've gotten back into a routine of divided days: mornings for writing and afternoons for keeping "house" a chore that happily results in plenty of time in the kitchen with my new post-wedding pots and pans. Of great help in this area has been cable television, or, more specifically, the Food Network, a station featuring smiling cheese-balls who for twenty four hours a day offer free advice on how to simmer lamb in olive oil and wine, how to pick a chicken, how to quick-chop parsley into savory, tiny bits.

"Maybe you should do that slowly," Aaron said while watching me attempt the chef quick-chop with our shiny new cutlery.

My affection for Paula Dean aside, my favorite Food Network show thus far is Ace of Cakes.  Chef Duff, owner of the company and artist several times over (aside from creating the world's most incredible confectionery marvels, he is also a sculptor and musician), opened his cake studio by hiring all of his cake making friends. Essentially, Charm City Cakes is a building full of artists who get to wear whatever they want to work, laugh it up, and make dough (money) sculpting marzipan. I first saw this show at my Grandma's house last year while taking a break from painting. It was the only cooking show that made me think about something other than cooking: It made me think about how much I missed being in a studio with other artists who knew how to play as hard as they worked and who sometimes forgot the distinction between the two.

I received my M.F.A. from Miami University of Oxford, a very pretty school but no World News and Report gold medalist for art making.   I was just lucky enough to attend the school at the right time. For two years I shared a studio with a dozen of the most hilarious, eager, and talented fellow painters. Together we enjoyed the undivided attention of hard-working, ambitious professors. The studio we shared was divided into partitioned spaces that allowed each upperclassman a semi-private area to work.  The first year, after each area had been asssigned, a few of us requested shared sovereignty over the one space that remained empty. We wallpapered it in 70's green paper, furnished it with a television, a Play station, and a couch, and quite literally lived in studio for the remainder of the semester. We painted, but I don't remember when or how. In memory it seems the paintings just appeared of their own accord, slapped haphazardly onto canvas rather quickly between trips to Goodwill or late night showings of Spinal Tap. The paintings I did those two years remain my best.

This is nostalgia talking.  I know those painting required work. I just don't remember it. Painting conditions have been less than good since school and I'm inclined to romanticize things in the past, especially when the present disappoints. Watching the artists on Ace of Cakes having too much fun brainstorming together only underscored the banality of my circumstance. Painting in Grandma's suburban basement certainly wasn't what I had in mind for my future as an artist. I listened to bad radio and forced my way through one panel at a time, taking periodic breaks to eat lunch in the picnic room or drag my feet through Elder-Beerman while Grandma dressed me in half price women's wear.  Eventually, the emotional stress of working in her house took its toll: the wood-shop reminded me everywhere of Grandpa, which in turn reminded me of my Grandmother's isolation and never -spoken-of but ever-present grief; despite her cheerfulness, the loneliness of that house was oppressive. I couldn't put a dent in it, no matter how many hours I stayed or how many cups of coffee and pints of ice cream Grandma and I shared. Summer came. I wasn't satisfied with my paintings. Around my grandmother's fervent good spirits I felt guilty for my negativity. The year was starting to look like a bust.

Then, shortly after my wedding and just a week before I planned to move out of Grandpa's wood-shop, Grandma went to the ER with chest pain.  She slipped into confusion then sleep and was gone. I haven't cared about the failure or success of those paintings since; I just thank God every day I had a year with Grandma before she left.

*

Shortly after the funeral, Aaron and I packed our cars and headed south. Aside from a thirty minute wind through the highways of Charleston, the drive to Virginia was all country: country on the radio, country out the window.  We live within sight of Monticello, wedged between moutains and beach, intellectually afloat on the academic life of the University of Virginia.  I've considered applying for a teaching position at UVA, but this town is new territory, geographically and emotionally, and I feel myself retreating from the public performance of teaching, content to sit and my desk and make things, to be an artist and to play house and to not do much else. I might even split infinitives  (for those grammar mongers out there).

Thankfully, Charlottesville has made this sabbatical possible: Thursday I received an acceptance letter from the local artists collaborative. The McGuffy Art Center has two studios waiting, both ready as early as next week.  For at least the next year I'm back in a building of artists, the one place I don't have to try to belong.

I'm doing my best to contain my excitement. The studio is available starting next week. Until then I'll wear the wrinkles out of my apron and channel my creative energy into Paula Dean's deviled eggs.  

Breekbaar verlangen (revisited)

I've spent the majority of the last month attempting to put my life in order by balancing the checkbook, trying to make sense of 1040's, writing thank you notes,and making box blueberry muffins in alternating fits of boredom and domesticity. Sometimes I feel content. More often, I end up crying in the living room over mismatched laundry socks, explaining to the plants how worthless I am as an artist. 

The shipment of books my old publishing house mailed me this week came as a timely affirmation. Several months ago, my editor told me that Feeling for Bones had been chosen for translation into Dutch, but I didn't hear anything more about the project until last week when four complimentary copies appeared on my doorstep:

I've been working my way through Part I (or "Deel I"),  happy to absorb the story in its unrecognizable state; being unable to read my own writing drives home the conviction that a novel can live a life of its own, quite separate from its author. 

The Spaces Between: Thoughts on the New Paintings

Since August, I’ve been working on a series of paintings for the 930 Gallery in Louisville.  Originally the show was to center on the theme macrocosm/ microcosm: the greater universe the miniature worlds it comprises. To generate images for the show, I spent inordinate amounts of time on the Internet printing and then drawing neurons and nebula, embryos and birthing suns.  As with any painting project, the final product bears little more than a tangential resemblance to the original inspiration; if you’ll bear with me, I need to retrace my steps and discover where these three unusual works came from and what I meant by them.

A few Christmases ago, while on our annual post-Thanksgiving family shopping day at the Beaver Creek mall, Dad and I hid the bookstore under pretense of shopping and fortuitously stumbled on an anthology of Hubble Telescope photographs. While looking at one of pictures of a nebula, I made the offhand comment that if you crossed your eyes a bit and tried to forget what you were looking at, the texture of the nebula was almost identical to that of neurons seen under a microscope. Thankfully, Dad saw the possibilities in the idea and bought the book for me as my Christmas gift.  (So, thank you, Dad, for the book that made this show possible.)

I kept the book in my studio for two years, occasionally flipping through its pages to wink my eyes at the images, trying to trick my mind into recognizing the cellular in the interstellar. When it comes to my understanding of macro and micro, distinctions collapse: both are equally baffling. I wanted to make images that invoked that kind of wonder, paintings that visually captured the mystery of the profoundly expansive and the profoundly minute by making them look one and the same.  In practical terms, this means that when confronted with a successful painting, you would find yourself asking, “So, is it a brain cell or a burning sun?”  Ideally, you would eventually stop caring and just be absorbed by the beauty of the paint: you’d be in left to wonder at the mystery of things science often tricks us into thinking we understand.

None of these things happened.

My skills weren’t up to the vision, and halfway to the show deadline I woke up to find myself on auto-pilot, illustrating pictures that would look great in a sixth grade astronomy textbook but that did not stand on their own as significant works of art.  I was bored. I was uninspired. I was frantic. And I was plagiarizing from NASA.

                                

                                      (above: me in studio, close to the cracking point)

To remedy the situation, I fell back on another idea that had been gestating while I worked, a concept that could be easily translated to the canvas. I stretched masking tape across the bottom of a panel I was working on, painted the space below a solid burgundy black. In seconds I had a horizon.

The word horizon denotes the apparent boundary between the earth and the sky. We also use it as a term to describe the limit of perception, knowledge, and skill. For me, these two definitions conflate in the landscape drawings of children.

Have you ever seen a child draw a picture in which the ground constitutes a green bar of scraggly crayon on the bottom of the page and the sky, a blue streak of crayon across the very top? For whatever reason, this child conceives of ground and space as separate entities that do not touch—the sky is above and the ground is below and between you find the white space not of sky but of a total blank: she cannot comprehend what lies between the meeting of the concrete and the abstract. 

While painting from my book of Hubble telescope pictures, I couldn’t resist the fact that each image had an edge: the page cut off after six inches of infinity.  And what a mercy; how could we stand to see more? Similarly, the jungle we see under the microscope is contained within the circular halo of the lens.  The boundary is drawn: we are given a window, but our view is limited, and everything we learn only further reveals the depth of our ignorance.  

As a gesture towards my original vision for these paintings, each contains a central figure or image that in some way mimics the infinite or the infinitesimal. The black blanks that frame the image represent the horizon: the edge of the page that precedes the edge of canvas, the blank spaces of a child’s drawing that reveal limits of knowledge:

                    

This horizon is the juxtaposition of the concrete and the infinite, where the ground we walk on kisses the vacuum. You can drive all night along this horizon and never catch it, but you can get on your knees, press your hand to your carpeted living room floor, and have in hand the intersection between earth and space.  

These paintings are on display with the work of Mitch Eckert, Michael Koerner, Gabrielle Mayer, and James Michael Starr at the annual Cultivate Beauty Exhibit hosted by the 930 Gallery in Louisville, Keucky. The work will be up from March 26th through May 3rd.

 

 

Winter Weather Advisory

The forty-eight hours Fox News spent so tirelessly forewarning Ohio of imminent danger were not in vain: the White Doom is upon us. Woke this morning to heavy snowfall, Christmas post card thick flakes everywhere. Aaron has the morning off and University of Dayton classes are cancelled until 4:30 when, unfortunately, my class begins. Here’s hoping the roads prove too formidable for even the late night classes.

In the mean time, what to do with a day? I feel I should celebrate by baking that banana bread I’ve been promising to make—or at least by throwing out the three bruised, blackened bananas intended for the bread in a Spring Day in Winter cleaning spree. I could tackle that Russo novel I’ve been reading since December or make that thank you card that’s overdue.

But here’s the kicker: when you work from home seven days a week, a snow day is not all that different from a regular day. What excuse do you have to avoid work when your office is four steps from the fridge and five from the bedroom?  So in all likelihood, my snow day will most likely be spent doing precisely what I do on any given work day.

If you’re tempted to feel sorry for me just remember: as a part time teacher assigned to a single evening class, my every other day is a Saturday.  Weeks of Saturdays: a forever summer. So you don’t owe me any pity. 

Feeling for Bones Interview

Author and blogger CJ Darlington recently interviewed me about Feeling for Bones. If you're interested in reading this most recent  Q & A check out her blog at titletrakk.com.

Change of Plans

Due to several unexpected circumstantial changes, the next four months will be nowhere near what I'd anticipated.

First, for those of you who read my recent (now absent) post about the upcoming novel, there's been a delay in its publication. I don't know how long this delay will last, but if you're interested in the book's progress, keep an eye on the blog. While I'm disapointed that I won't get to see the story in print this summer, I'm grateful for the extra time I have to go back to the drawing board and touch up aspects of the story that felt rushed. 

I've also had a second deadline more or less suspended. Rather than feature my work in a small show in April, the curator of the 930 gallery has requested I submit five paintings for a second Cultivating Beauty exhibition (at which he first saw my work a year ago). Because of the vast array of ecclectic art,the opening will most likely draw a more solid audience than a show of a little-known.  I'm under less pressure to produce a large body of work and I also have the relief of knowning the responsibility of drawing in a crowd does not rest primarily on my paintings.

Last and least in the list of unexpected course changes (no pun intended), I was informed over Christmas break that my ENG 102 class had been given to a tenure professor and that I was to return to ENG 101 to teach students who need to retake the introdoctory course. Again, a seeming setback, unless you take into account the fact that instead of designing my 102 course I'd spent the majority of Christmas break systematically working my way through 40 plus hours of Lost. By trading my class away, the department unwittingly rewarded my procrastination. After two and half years of teaching intro composition, I can grade 101 papers in my sleep. And in 101 there are far less papers than in 102. So once again, Bethany scores.

The end result of these changes? Instead of running around like a madwoman, stomach cramped with anxiety and brain laced with caffeine, I'm at my leisure to paint my few paintings for the Cultivating Beauty exhibition and to plan my upcoming wedding, an event that has sadly taken backseat to all the professional deadlines. I now have high hopes that this wedding may actually go off without catasrophe--at least none that could be directly linked to me.

On Lake Michigan

  

Last weekend I spent four days in Chicago to visit my college roommate and to spend time with Aaron who’s been in the city for an away rotation since the end of October.  

 Saturday, my roommate took me out for high tea on Michigan Avenue.  We sat beneath a cathedral ceiling at a table overlooking a rooftop garden.  Three men in tuxedos played violins from the balcony. Our food arrived on tiered plates: asparagus on triangles of fresh cut bread; chocolate tortes with edible filigree; quiche the size of Barbie pies. When the waiter poured my tea, pink tips of rose petals dropped into my teacup.

After two weeks of bad coffee and a steady diet of Rice-a-Roni, the biscotti made me swoon. My roommate tasted one of the scones, moaned, and announced it had ruined biscuits forever.  We tried very hard to behave in a dignified manner, napkins in laps, pinkies pointed, but I suspect we blew our cover when we started creating still lifes of the leftover food and photographing the teapots.  

Sunday, Aaron and I had lunch in Chinatown, then spent the day driving around the city, investigating potential neighborhoods. Though Chicago is one of ten places Aaron will be interviewing at this winter, it's long been a favorite for its blend of Mid-western familiarity and urban novelty (meaning a novelty to us). We also have several friends who have already migrated to the city or who are thinking about doing so.   

Our tour of Chicago environs ended with Evanston. We circled Northwestern’s campus, parking by one of the university sports fields to walk along Lake Michigan. It had begun to snow—thick flakes, fat off the lake. The university ran the length of the water's edge to our right. Where the university ended, the land continued, curving out into the water so that if we stood on the lake’s edge facing forward we found ourselves looking directly on  downtown Chicago.  This moment on the black lake, in the white snow, seemed emblematic of where we are in life: our now shared path just beginning to wind around the unknown towards the yellow-orange lights of the city.   

Aaron and I both admit we’re country bumpkins who prefer trees to skyscrapers, but we have this incurable fascination with city life.  I spent the summer living in Boston, as Aaron’s now spending four weeks in Chicago. We’re tying the knot in downtown Cincinnati and are flying to San Francisco for our honeymoon.

 For my part, the city means access to art.  Painting and writing are so different. When it comes to books, the masterpieces are at the ready. For five or twenty dollars (or, God bless libraries, for free) I can have an “original” Fitzgerald, Austen, or Dickinson.  Paintings are not so easy to come by and they do not translate well to print.

Obviously, neither Aaron nor I have final say on where we’ll be moving in seven months. For now it’s exiting to plan and dream. To look out across the lake and watch the snow fall and hold hands and, for once, not think too hard.  

Starbucks Nation

When it comes to English 101, there are days I feel as bored as my students look. I know composition is dull. It’s not like comma splices and MLA citations exactly put a spring in my step.  I do like teaching rhetorical analysis, though.  For the last two weeks, we’ve been analyzing the way commercials manipulate our emotions in order to sell us their product. More fascinating, we’ve also discussed how commercials have evolved from merely selling  a product to more subtly selling lifestyles, behaviors, and values.    

In her essay “The Economic Citizenship of Gourmet Coffee,” Paula Mathieu analyzes the way Starbucks uses a strategic vocabulary that borrows from the European connoisseur tradition to sell us the idea that their coffee is a transcendent, refined experience. By using a bizarre hybrid of scientific terms to describe the making of their coffee (which is brewed at “optimum temperatures”) and wine- tasting terms (“brimy” or “earthy” or “mellow”) to describe the flavors of their espresso, they promise consumers a sensual pleasure delivered with pharmaceutical exactitude. The sizes are not small, medium, and large, but tall, grande, and venti. The workers are “baristas”; terms like “doppio” and “con panna” are also Italian. Because you have to memorize and use the particular lexicon of the Starbucks menu, requesting coffee, size, and otherwise in a particular order, the company’s success relies a great deal on “in-crowd appeal.”  Just by opening your mouth at the counter you identify yourself as an insider or an outsider. At my undergrad university, a Starbucks cup was as much a symbol of fashion and class as a Vera Wang purse.

 Of course, we shouldn’t just abuse Starbucks.  Many companies succeed in creating a perceived need for their product or in making us identify with a certain company/product for the prestige it transfers.  We all know commercials have come a long way. They rarely rely on logic to sell their product, choosing instead to manipulate our emotions and desires, teaching us to think we “need” a product to maintain the lifestyle we are supposedly entitled to.

Just compare a car commercial from the 1950s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUB4s-9lwjo to an ad for a car produced this year http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkEw1rsBUak

The question is no longer which car is most efficient/ safe/dependable. (Look around. Very few of us buy cars for their gas mileage, despite the many economic and environmental incentives.)

No: as Kate Welch so seductively purrs: “The question in today’s luxury game is not whether your car has available features…the question is: when you turn your car on, does it return the favor?”

 

Seasonal Decor

It's autumn, election year, and the neighbors of Oakwood have decorated their lawns accordingly: Obama, McCain, Obama, McCain, Obama, McCain--with a few Rices and Quinns spattered throughout. Opposite these lawns, in an island of grass that demarcates the two one-ways strees I take to and from campus, local troops and companies have erected competing scarecrow exhibits. There are pumpkin heads operating on a dead body in a cemetery; pink butterfly pumpkin heads announcing breast cancer will soon be defeated;  a mute Boo Man Group.

The air is cold and smells of sweet-crisp dead leave. I've always loved fall. Glad for the change of season and the change of mood that comes with it.

Dillard's Innocence

Mid-terms are done; writing has hit a roadblock. I’m sitting at my desk trying to screw up the courage to paint.

I’ve been rereading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. This morning I read a passage that jolted my painter’s sensibilities awake:

“Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people—the novelist’s world, not the poet’s. I’ve lived there. I remember what the city has to offer: human companionship, major league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. I remember how you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think, ‘next year…I’ll start living; next year…I’ll start my life.’  Innocence is a better world.

“…What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.”

One of the few places I find that place of unself-consciousness is when painting. Occasionally, if I wait long enough and work diligently enough, the panel ceases to be a panel and the paint ceases to be paint. I forget the radio, the day, my butt numbing on the cold basement stool.  I am completely in the moment and completely unaware of myself.

Maybe if I made that moment of self-forgetfulness the aim, if my objective shifted from a finished work to what Dillard calls “innocence”, I wouldn’t drag my feet to the drawing board.