ART and LIFE IN THE FACE OF WAR

Dear Jane,

"A gray shape, an owl, passed overhead" (Prognosis) -- a magnificent epiphany-- I know you! The Circle of Grass left by your eighty year-old elder also is mine. December winds took down Grandpa's fifty year-old spruce. IT WAS MY TREE, the remains cut, chipped and hauled with 1999 efficiency. I didn't bear witness, I'm not as strong as you.

Like you, I have experienced the touch of timothy with the lower case 't' ( In the Grove: The Poet at Ten). My grandmother also knew "That the body is the temple of the Holy Ghost" (Staying at Grandma's), but she never spoke to me of dying. I can but imagine her departure "the men struggle (ing) with the casket just clearing the pews" (The Pond at Dusk). I was kept safe from such real things.

It is February, dear Jane, and I am planning the work to be done in my perennial gardens. You did that each year and, had we been friends, there would have been notes to compare, plants to trade, and searches made for the hardy Party Girl for me, Sidalcea rosea for you. My Mount Hood daffodils and Thalia would have been most pleasing to my sister "garden snob."
The mid-winter planning for summer blooms helps to cast off the blue devils. Your poetry speaks of your depressions; so much depression. I take an occasional dip but thankfully my head remains above water. You nearly drowned. Otherwise, the poem and the book, are memento mori. Perhaps it is best to be alert to these inevitable things.

My current focus in the studio is on Finding a Long Gray Hair, your slender and telling work. I won't illustrate it, Jane. I will interpret your words and play upon the meanings. Sometimes I will move away from Finding a Long Gray Hair and even away from you. After all, this work is mine. Thank you for allowing your layers of meaning into my layers of visual images. Your work is real.

I sobbed aloud as I read The Sick Wife. The Pear, that's me, now, and I don't like that! But there is nothing I can do about the onward march of time. My work is fiction with a touch of reality found between the layers. I like to leave a little room for laughter and I will add a few little twists to your words because I like to be safe from the too real things.

Dear Jane, you remain on my mind. When winter passes and I dig, rake, and plant, I will envision you along Rt. 4. A smile will cross my lips when I use my "gray-brown wooden clothes pins" and again, as the cycle nears completion and when I scratch the frosty autumn soil to plant the Mount Hoods. This is now but at any time it can be Otherwise.

Adrienne Kernan LaVallee c 2000 REV. 2006

This letter was written as part of a collaborative project in which I worked with members of the Women's Caucus for Art in New Hampshire. "Dear Jane" is mixed mediums piece inspired by a poem, Finding A Long Gray Hair, by Jane Kenyon.

I didn’t know Jane Kenyon but I felt a bond the moment I read "Finding A Long Gray Hair". Within two of Jane’s books, Otherwise and A Hundred White Daffodils, I found Jane the poet, the gardener, the wife; and I felt her depression and the connection to family and friends that helped to keep her whole. Everything she wrote seemed to me to be about Finding A Long Gray Hair.

Over a period of several month, I began to write to her spirit, Jane's ghost. I respond to our shared feelings in a series of drawing and digital collages. "Finding A Long Gray Hair" is about the interconnectiveness of our lives and the lives of those who are now gone. Kenyon’s poem is reflected literally in Dear Jane through the use of hair in several of the digital collages and at metaphorically, it bears witness through layers of visual and written meaning. Within Dear Jane is the strong influence of my ever-present ancestors, “my life added to theirs” (Finding A Long Gray Hair). I am the keeper of my grandmother's grey hair. The strands were clipped the day she died in March 1962. I listen to Aunt Mary's piano rendition, Valses nobles et sentimentales, her studies with Cortot continue to delight my sensibilities long after her death (1987). My great grandmother Kate was born a hundred years before I came into the world yet her strength of character remains and provides me with comfort during trying times. Their likenesses appear in my work; their lives are reflected in mine. These connections are important to me.

Jane Kenyon was connected to her family and to the little everyday events that shape everyone’s lives. She loved gardening and working on her art...her poetry. I share her love of gardening and I share the need for aesthetic expression. Jane used words, I use traditional as well as new painting, printmaking and drawing media.

THE WAR SERIES- Three Altar Pieces each approximately 5"X4", 2.5" deep. Wood, Altered Dolls, and Mixed Mediums.

Strength, details
Axis, details
War, details

Each piece was made to reflect intimacy of human interaction in WAR. The intamacies of family and friends left at home; the closeness of soldiers entering the war zone; the act of dying or watching as a friend falls. There are the innocents who are in the wrong place. They have nothing to do with governments or organizations and now, they have nothing.

For many, life goes on but for others, it ends or is horribly changed for all time. (addition, December 23, 2006)

It's the Christmas season and it's unhappy for so many. The casualty count in Iraq continues to go up; the government is contemplating sending more troops; and thousands of Americans and Iraqis are being injured, some mamed. Horror is in my mind and I'm having trouble concentrating on anything but sorrow in the studio.