Can There Be Too Many Influences?!
Whoah, so many people/things/ideas have influenced who I am as an artist! Thanks, Everything!
Greetings, dearest hearts! Happy July!
In this letter, you’ll find
a partial (!!!) list of influences that have shaped my life as an artist, sweetly requested by my teenager
a creative writing prompt
a love letter to our outgoing residents Harley, Zach, and Rebecca
and a bat signal to the universe for our next 2 wonderful new residents…
could one of them be you?!!
an invitation to GARDEN OF LIGHT retreat in France this fall—registration opens soon…
But first, two quotes that resonated this week:
“Your ambition, desires, goals, and wishes are gifts. Honor them as such by moving toward them. What do you want for your artist life? What are your deepest ambitions? Say them out loud.”
–The Artist’s Deck, by Beth Pickens
“For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living and better at loving, and just possibly better at seeing.”
–Sally Mann, Hold Still
Over lunch at our favorite restaurant, Juniper asked me to tell the story of my life in artistic influences. There’s nothing in the world I ever wanted to do more than exactly this: to let my mind rest on each of the art influences that made me who I am, not just as an artist but as a whole person, because who I am as a person is entirely who I am as an artist, and then share it with my daughter, as a way of both giving thanks for the seeds of influence AND giving her context for why art is such a huge part of our family’s story.
So when my teenage daughter, herself an artist, who is poised to drive away as soon as she gets her driver’s license in a couple months, asked me to tell her my life story as art influences, I vaporized. Her attention and curiosity was a kind of gift I’d never yet experienced, and I’m so grateful for it.
My list carried us through 3 dishes of Indian food and several refills of chai–and bless her, she was interested for the whole recounting. The soul gifts of that conversation– thoughtful questions and loving encouragement to go deeper and then deeper still– kept piling up around us. Guests spilled into the previously empty restaurant– we barely noticed.
And my daughter shared hers, too- another pile of gifts for her mother. Hearing what experiences and opportunities from her childhood mattered to and moved her, and to learn what seemingly insignificant ones meant as well, was the bountiful reward for an already rewarding parenting journey. It was a relief, too, to hear evidence that I’m doing my job to situate her in a context for being an artist.
I’ve always felt so grateful to be part of a lineage of makers because my position in the lineage not only justified but gave permission (which I’ve always really craved) to pour my time, energy, effort and resources into doing a thing I deeply loved but didn’t necessarily financially support me. My birth into a family of artists and art lovers holds me in a woven cloth, gives me some ground and context for why I do what I do: it tells a complete and satisfying story that makes good sense. Without the constellation of influences and lineage I belong to, I’m just a random star, hard to find in the deep night sky. But once I’m situated within a constellation of other art stars that has a name and a whole mythology behind it, making it so much easier to find in the night sky, well, I’ll never be lost. There’s so much comfort in that. And so I want my daughter to have that context and connection, too; her influences tell me that her constellation is fixed in her mind, and she’ll always know where to look in the deep sky to find her place. What a comfort to this mama.
(Parents, adults, teachers, family and friends: it all matters! What you say AND what you do goes in, like food, and sets up shop in kids’ minds and hearts. What we give them, and also what we don’t, builds their personalities and preferences from scratch. So be conscious of your choices! Try hard to only give them the best of what you have to offer! And if you can’t, don’t worry, they’ll learn and grow from that, too!)
So, if you have the kind of generosity and curiosity my lovely teen did, here’s my life in artistic influences. It feels self-indulgent to share these, especially long-form, but also: maybe you’re dying to know what shaped my life in the same way I was dying to know what shaped my daughter’s. And yours! May reading my list of influences encourage you to write your own, and in so doing, may you find the radical and benevolent permission you need to keep doing the awe-inspiring, life-affirming work you do. May it help you find and name your own constellation, so that you’ll teach it to me, and then you’ll never be lost. I’ll always know just how to find you in the dark. What a comfort to this friend!
Meg’s Life in Art Influences— part 1, from birth to age 30
Loneliness. Boredom. Extremely frugal parents. Cannot overstate the importance of these influences!
My dad’s students’ old chemistry tests.
Spirographs, paper dolls, Etch-a-sketch.
Watching my mom draw faces on napkins as she talked on the phone to her sister.
My aunts, artists who drove up from the Gulf Coast and Alabama to spend weeks during the summer with us, who would paint at the kitchen table with mom, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, telling stories.
Handmade birthday cards from my mom and her sisters,
My mother's handmade anniversary card for her parents in what had to be the forties, depicting her parents' house, her siblings, and their living room at the time. It's such a precious treasure. and Aunt Jean’s hand-embellished envelopes depicting Mardi Gras floats, bayou alligators sunning, egrets in the mangroves, and carnival characters. It felt like a whole Mardi gras parade come to my mailbox, just for me, when I got a letter from Aunt Jean.
Ezra Jack Keats’ The Snowy Day, whose color scheme I adopted and have carried in my soul for 45 years.
Faeries, by Brian Froud and Alan Lee; Gnomes, by Rien Poortvliet and Wil Huygen: two books given to my mother by her dear brother (my Uncle Lou) that I pored over as a child. Their beautiful drawings and handwritten pencil descriptions of the fae folk and woodland spirits that lived alongside us terrified and thrilled me– I could not put them down.
The imagery from these books lives in my mind/heart/soul to this day. The Gibbes Art Museum in downtown Charleston, and the Gibbes Studio, where my sister worked and where I sometimes “got to” hang out while my mom ran errands. Because of my time in those places, art museums and working art studios felt like home.
A photographer took a picture of me sitting cross-legged in front of this painting in the Gibbes Museum when I was 5. These women feel like family. All of downtown Charleston, the city where I grew up– the colorful stucco houses downtown, the clear and slanting coastal light, the sharp shadows of palmetto fronds on pink stucco walls and cobblestone streets, the bursting-with-flowers window boxes and tiny, plant-filled hidden alleys.
Downtown Charleston, SC takes window boxes to a whole 'nother level. Early MTV– the Police, U2, Wham! videos…With their gauzy filters, teased hair, and basic studio backgrounds. I was transfixed by the new form, and also bored by it.
My high school art teacher, Mrs. Bolton, and her lavender and pink silk caftans and blue eyeshadow, and her exquisite and sensitive watercolor paintings of marsh, herons and egrets, live oaks, and the faces of her neighbors on Wadmalaw Island. The gap between her front teeth that showed when she smiled, and the way she said to me when I was just a freshman, “I see that you understand that purple and green love each other.”
My beautiful art teacher who changed the course of my life, Virginia Fouche Bolton, surrounded by her high school art students after our end of year gallery show. Must have been 1990? She was the loveliest. Orange shrimp baskets full of fresh-caught blue crabs left on the back steps by my brothers.
The surrealists and the impressionists: artists who used art technique to create reality as they saw it, for different purposes. To see a world—and its myriad possibilities—through the eyes of another became my deep hunger.
Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined tea cup and Monet's waterlilies in abstraction broke my brain. I just didn't realize artists were allowed to do things like... cover teacups in fur and paint the surface of a pond in loose, gestural strokes and let it cover whole walls. In college, I started to view art not just as a way to see the world through another’s eyes but to experience their feelings through their expressions captured in paint or ink or spray paint, too. I got really into public art and graffiti– art that was meant for everybody and that was meant to enrich everybody’s daily lives. Keith Haring and his subway paintings were my everything. And I loved the accessibility and “freeness” of Ray Johnson’s collages/letters to friends. (Plus I think mail art stitched me back to my own lived experience of getting mail art from my Aunt Jean.)
Stills of Keith Haring taking from: Charles Osgood takes a look at how Haring managed to get his works up, in this profile first broadcast on the "CBS Evening News" on October 20, 1982. After college when I was living in a small town in NC teaching at a huge public high school, I became obsessed with portrait painters, perhaps because I was surrounded by people I didn’t know (and whose culture was opaque to me back then) and saw portraiture as a way to understand and get to know strangers. Alice Neel became my biggest obsession: she painted everybody from all walks of life and her gaze was unflinching and full of love. She wanted to capture them as they really looked– whether they were tired and cross or happy and playful or rich and bored. She loved the human face and form and all their peculiarities, and I loved her for that. Alice Neel introduced me to my current concept of body positivity: that all bodies are beautiful and worthy of being not just beheld but immortalized in vivid color.
Some favorite portraits of artists-- Faith Ringgold on the left, and Isabel Bishop on the right. Vincent Van Gogh. Well, I call him “friend” which feels both disrespectful and true. Would I have been his friend when he was alive? Would I have been brave, patient, and loving enough to call him friend– and BE his friend– through his clinginess, through his need, through his obsessions with people and ideas? Through his deep depressions? I like to think I would have, but I don’t know, I need my space and privacy, and from what I can tell, he longed for a best friend. But OH, what I would give to have been able to work beside him in the field while he painted cypress and almond trees and country churches. What I would give to be able to watch over his shoulder as he painted the postman’s and doctor’s portraits, or his own. I’ve read that boundaries are the distance from which you can see someone’s whole self and still love them. With the boundary of over a century of time between us, I can honestly say I love Vincent and all he was, and I cherish what he continues to teach me about being an artist/being a human. PLUS, he’s the reason I met my dear friends Agnès and Camille and their whole wonderful family– and for that I’m forever in his debt.
Some Van Goghs that had me entranced at the Musée D' Orsay this past March The Transcendentalists: Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and also the Modern Transcendentalists– Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, and Wendell Berry. People who found/find God in nature, as nature. I read Walden and Leaves of Grass as a junior in high school and my world was rocked: I’d found another couple of dear friends, folks who understood and felt about nature the same way I did/do. And the opening passage of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek rocked me again at 30. To write like that… to capture the feeling of an encounter with God/nature in words that so exactly and precisely described it, such that I got to encounter God/nature simply by reading the passage… is a miracle. Is, for me, to know God.
The opening pages of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the words of which give me chills to read to this day, despite having read them many times.
…to be continued next month. There’s more. So many more, but I’ll try to distill them down to essentials.
Until then, your creative prompt:
Try to tell the story of your life as art influences (or writing or music or teaching or dance or accounting… Anything you do that you’re passionate about and you have a specific way of doing it, you do because you’ve been influenced by things/people/experiences.)
See if you can make a list of 10. or 20. Or 50.
I had to close my eyes and go silent for a few minutes to go waaaaay back to the beginning, when I was tiny. See how far back you can go, if you like that kind of challenge. When did you first know you were born to be… an accountant, or a jeweler, or a diver or a physics teacher? Retrace your steps from that point to where you are now. What’s shaped your worldview? What’s given you the singular, wild heart that beats inside you?
Write an ode to those things— bullet points on a napkin or sonnet on a laptop— and please, for the love of Pete and me, share it!
UPDATES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
Farewell to our dear residents Harley and Zach, who’ve just finished their 6-month residencies at Cloud House. And a much belated farewell to our previous resident, Rebecca, who was with us for three months after Hurricane Helene last September. They’ve been the beating creative heart of this house during their stay, and we’re so grateful to all three of them for their energy, creative brilliance, and spirit. Having Harley’s paintings and ceramic work in the house has felt just exactly right, and our discussions of painters and thinkers we admire has gotten me so inspired to get out and see more art. Witnessing Rebecca’s daily (I should say nightly, because she primarily shot after dusk) photography missions to document life after Helene was an education in commitment to one’s own aesthetic and creative purpose. I learned so much about using one’s art form as a way of rigorously showing up for the truth. And the house feels a little empty without the yummy smells of Zach’s delicious cooking (thank you for all the good meals, Zach) and good company of Rostov (Zach’s dog who for some reason liked me but hated Josh, the true dog-lover in the house). Zach’s creative brilliance, clear thinking, and editorial excellence lives on in all the good, thoughtful work he did while interning here. Thanks so much for all the richness and life you’ve brought to us at Cloud House, Harley, Rebecca, and Zach— we’re so grateful for the many gifts you’ve shared with us!
We’re so curious: who will be our next residents? Who will change our lives with their creative brilliance, spirit, and camaraderie? We’re looking for 2-3 new residents for this fall… could it be you?!! Learn more HERE, or just reach out to Meg at cloudcollectiveresidency@gmail.com.
Cloud Mountain Arts Camp is a dream. It’s a little new baby summer arts camp that I get to raise with such dear, wonderful people. We’ve done two sessions and two are yet to happen. I felt like a new person at the end of each session.
I’ll be teaching 6th grade Humanities at my beloved old school, Hanger Hall, this coming year. I’m really excited about that for eleventy-seven reasons, one of them being that I get to read The Odyssey with sixies again.
My spring Artist’s Way and Path workshops resume in August after our summer break. I’ve missed them in ways I didn’t anticipate, and I’ve been feeling adrift without my weekly deep dives into creative process with fellow seeker-adults.
I’m co-leading a workshop called Camp Creative in Northern Michigan this October with my dear friend Beth Hockman and her mom, Mixie Hockman. We are all 3 so looking forward to spending time being creative with a group of dear women.
And joy of joys, REGISTRATION OPENS SOON FOR
GARDEN OF LIGHT RETREAT
Agnès, Camille and I are teaming up to run another Provence By Heart retreat called “Garden of Light” this November (we’re just finalizing details and specifics, like the exact dates, but we’ll let you know on social media as soon as we have them.) We’re looking for 6-8 women who are willing to step away from a Big American Holiday and give thanks in totally different ways, for totally different things and reasons, in France, in the Garden of Light that is Provence.
We’ll stay in Villa Thébaïde, as always, within an easy walk to old town St. Rèmy de Provence and the hiking trails and vistas of Les Alpilles, and eat such good food and make art as a way of slowing down and soaking in the beauty of this special corner of France.
For women who:
Love nature, art, and intuitive inspiration
Want to slow down and open up space for curiosity
Long to create without expectations— simply for joy
Dream of traveling solo, yet want to be gently held by a meaningful experience.
Wish to discover an authentic provence, guided by locals who truly live it
Long to engage in self-discovery with a group of fellow seekers through an open-ended creative exploration.
Villa Thébaïde has 4 available rooms (viewable on our website) that can be double or single occupancy. Bring a friend or just come solo.
To learn more, please visit our Provence By Heart website
OR
find us on social media: PBH Instagram and PBH Facebook
OR
just email Meg at Cloudcollectiveresidency@gmail.com!
Will it be YOU who makes us so happy by signing up?!!!
That’s plenty for now, friends. Thanks so much for being here. I am (BEYOND THE CAPABILITIES OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE) grateful for you. Thank you, truly, for caring and reading and being curious about my life and work. It seriously means the world to me.
With love!
Meg
Cloud Collective Residency is a creative haven for makers of all sorts located in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Asheville, NC.
Built with Love for Collective Liberation.
Together, let’s build a nimbus of love!
This was SUCH a great read! I’m closing my eyes and pretending to be in your dining nook, drinking your stroonnngggg sludge coffee. THAT’s my inspiration.
Ahhhh, what I wouldn't give to be sitting in that nook drinking strong sludge coffee with you! I'd LOVE to know your life story in art influences, Oli. OXOXO