Karen Fitzgerald

Sacred Geometry: Radically Round
Published in Conscious Design Magazine, May, ‘08

Karen Fitzgerald

In 1988 I made my first round painting.  Working on a suite titled Nine Mysteries, I was challenged by the problem of creating a successful composition to express the ideas of mysteries on a vertical rectangle.  The corners were so troublesome!  My stretcher maker brought me a scrap, a round panel left over from making a larger tondo (a Renaissance term for round panel.)  All my problems vanished when I began working on that first circle.  I have never looked back. Many artists will tell you how terrible the tondo tends to be.  Not me.  When I began working on this magic form it felt as though I’d arrived “home”.  Yet round forms are rare enough in the art world to cause wonderment.  Why is round so radical?

Roundness reminds us of our remote origins.  It reattaches us to the whole world.  The round form complements and rhymes with architectural and spatial forms.  It creates synergy in a room, contributing not only to the flow of chi but also to the balance of energy. The tondo form is presentational rather than re-presentational.  It presents qualities that underlie the visible world, those things of profound, essential importance.
From my perspective, the Western tradition of the rectangle reaches back to physical references.  During the Renaissance, artists began to work less on site-specific work such as frescoed ceilings and mosaic applied to walls between architectural frameworks and began to produce work that was designed with its own independent support.  Frames to support a canvas surface were necessarily based on right angled construction.  Windows are framed in this same manner and much has been written about the space of Renaissance painting – its depth and accuracy according to this “view out the window”.
A few artists created tondo work for specific sections of altar panels. Many hybrid rectangular works were also produced as parts of altars, works with an arched or pointed top.  Rose windows continued to be produced to solve the empty architectural space at the apex of the triangle in cathedral facades.  Very few artists have embraced the tondo form for its own aesthetic qualities, separate from architectural necessity.

My work is centered on the soul’s experience in the physical plane.  Over time I have produced a large body of work that reflects the experience of being in the world – a reinterpretation of the landscape tradition.  My newer works use gilding extensively.  Working with silver, 23k gold, copper and aluminum leaf, I uncovered attributes of the material unavailable in oil paint.  Gold leaf possesses a trans-substantial quality – it is at once very physical and also as ephemeral as the wind.  Several years ago I created a small group of paintings called Entropy Undone.  They were ruminations on transformation: what happens at a point of transformation?  What does physical transformation look and feel like?   The title refers to our world – our entropic, physical plane.  Things tend to degenerate in our world, yet there are moments when this degeneration stops or is reversed, when something transforms.  All these works stem from that idea – imagining the point when entropy becomes undone.
Embedded as we are in this physical world, we often see in a limited, literal sense.  From the time I was a youngster I’ve experienced being in the world not just as a sensory excitation, but also as a spiritual-emotional-thinking-feeling being-ness.  When I am in the world in this way, I understand a wide, deep sense of connection.  It is, to a certain degree, ineffable.  Poets have spent their lives trying to articulate this aliveness, and feeling that they failed to do so.*
For me, painting is the language that allows communication about this kind of experience.  And roundness allows the language to go narrow, to go deep, without the distortion due to confusion with the physical coordinates of our world.  The circle is free from gravity, free from the associations of standing embedded in a vertical rectangle, and free from the horizontal associations with the land we live on.  If there is such a thing, the tondo form is a telescopic bridge between the heavens and our earth, between the visible and the invisible.
Over the past several years, roundness has begun to suffuse the design world.  It’s visible in upholstery fabrics, floor coverings, furniture design.  Round mirrors have been around for a longer time as signature pieces.  It is time for the tondo to assert its special qualities and to be embraced as the powerful form that it is.

* Czeslaw Milsoz, comments on this in his Nobel prize lecture of 1980.

The Discovery Museum has generously extended my exhibition to January, 2010.  http://www.discoverymuseum.org/exhibits/ChangingExhibits.html

Confessional communication is compelling in our culture.  People are intrigued with confessions.  This is a confession about love lost.
I met Muffy in early June.  She was six days old.  I took her home in a brown bag.  She chattered the whole way.  Muffy emerged from an egg.  She was sexed as a chicken at five days, and I was delighted to adopt her.  Muffy imprinted me as “mama” in about half an hour.  After that, she would holler whenever she could not see or hear me.  When she was scooting around on the floor, if I happened to go downstairs, she’d stop at the top and protest.  Loudly.  After a day or so, I let her spend most of the time free range.  Our little beagle, Pepe, was jealous.  He didn’t attack Muffy, but ate her poultry mix every chance he got.  When my back was turned, under my watchful gaze, even when Muffy was standing in the middle of the mash.  Pepe has always had passive/aggressive tendencies.
The first evening, I figured I’d set Muffo right next to my bed in her plastic box.  I covered three sides of the box to block the light.  That way she could see me, and not fret.  Well.  Seeing is one thing.  Nesting with mama is another right all together.  She would not stop hollering until I took her out.  Then she settled down immediately on my forearm.  I was tired.  I laid back on the pillows.  Pretty soon, she squirmed her way under the covers and burrowed down to my elbow.  I thought she’d suffocate.  But that little quiet whistling kept rising off and on above the blankets all through the night.  Like a cat purring.
I knew I was a gonner.  By morning, my heart was totally given over to her.
She would try anything I asked her to.  Convincing was straightforward: it consisted of bending down and pecking the floor with my finger.  She’d rush over and peck at whatever I was calling to her attention.  In the garden she couldn’t understand worms or pill bugs.  But grass and dirt; right up her alley.  Right down the gullet.  My garden is full of shoulder-tall bee balm.  She got sidetracked in it and hollered up a storm when she couldn’t see me beyond the forest of stems.  Chicks are extremely fast.  I will always remember glancing behind me and seeing her running after me across the yard, wings spread and that high pitched hollering going full tilt.  She may have imprinted me, but it turns out I also imprinted her.
Muffy rejoined her flock after spending four days in our house.  Her flock accepted her back – my son and I stayed on for a while to make sure there were no squabbles or attacks.  As late as the summer is, I still miss her whenever I hear a young bird demanding something from its mama.
Chicken love is a growing genre.  Michael Perry, Catherine Goldhammer and a few others have written about it.   Their eloquent and patient entwining of stories about love including falling for chickens are funny, witty and entertaining.  Chickens may be the new wave for propping up celebrity longevity.  Can’t you just imagine Britney Spears’ twittering about her new chickens?

Conscious Design Magazine -Copyright-February 2009

Feature
The Stillness of Painting

By
Karen Fitzgerald

We live in a fast world. The race to perfect technological tools obeys a dictum promising greater productivity, more efficiency. Some worry that we are borrowing against thoughtfulness. Beyond anxiety about irreversible changes in the way we process information, there is a sad longing for the quiet found in backwater swamps; woods during a freeze; church pews sans services, or the yoga mat.
Rich as the information our senses supply is, many people have discovered that a wider and deeper experience arises from synthesizing what our senses tell us. This higher order of thought is essentially a creative response to our world. As an internal response, it arrests the motion of the world allowing us to be responsive, to synthesize on a variety of levels and across the time plane of our experiences. This stilled thought creates access to contemplative space.
I find paintings to be a natural container for contemplative space. Their stillness makes room for deep reflection. Unlike verbal conversation, film or theater, paintings do not actively engage with time as a dimension of the work. They silence its passage and provide us with many timeless moments. Paintings do not count down or count up. They invite viewers to step outside of the wild river of information and it’s processing. Over and over again, paintings say: This is now.
Two paintings supply this experience for me repeatedly. Every time I visit them, I experience a profound stillness and a resultant shift in my consciousness. Both are Italian works, residing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Robert Lehman wing. The first, Botticelli’s The Annunciation is a modest panel – just 71/2” x 12 3/8”. It depicts the Angel Gabriel arriving in Mary’s quarters to give the news of her impending motherhood. He carries a stalk of white lilies, symbolizing her purity. Each of the figures bends, bowing to the other. The viewer sees a row of columns on end, plunging away, yet effectively creating a division between the earthly world and that of the Angel’s realm. Again and again I am struck by the graceful tenderness of this image. What happens as I stand in front of it and take in the careful details is always the same. My internal clock stops. This simple act of reverent greeting amidst an abode – not unlike what we could find somewhere on the current earth – breathes on its own. Usually we experience tenderness as a passing gesture – a momentary scene we witness or better yet, are blessed with. Botticelli has managed to distill the essence of tenderness. In doing so, a great stillness is opened up within the painting.
The second work, The Creation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, also modest in size, is by Giovanni di Paolo. A depiction of two biblical events, it packs a great deal into 18.3” x 20.5”. On the left, God activates a round form ringed with the zodiac and symbols of the planets of our solar system. Earth, large, at the center, contains a map with the four major rivers of the cradle of civilization. Archangel Michael ushers Adam and Eve out of paradise on the right. The great stillness within this work has to do with the combination of representational systems. During the

1400’s, our world learned a great deal about place – and our ideas of who we are changed because of the understanding that we live on a ball flying through space around another huge, flaming ball. Time stops for me in this work because di Paolo wasn’t intimidated in presenting all this information. Like a child, he simply put it together. Somehow it works. As a small object, it is interesting to look at the color, the cracking, the gold still glinting after almost 600 years. As a painting, it astonishes me to traverse the astronomical space embedded in the image.
The sweet now of a painting’s space is present not only in the act of looking. The process of making a painting also produces quiet and focus. The creative act is a full manifestation of the now; a deep, wide, breathing space that ignores the passage of time. The stillness within the creative act summons a conversation that spans time – our time, ancestor time, civilization time, Atlantis time. I work with gilding and thinned paint. The paint is runny; capable of settling in plumes that mimic a photograph’s capability to capture the evanescence of rising smoke. When I am handling this medium, I lose my ability to talk. Words are slow, massive blocks when I am painting. It is a divine experience to shape and form material. The act of painting is similar to a singer or master musician shaping sound in the service of communicating what’s in the mind and heart outside of verbal language.
Whether you inhabit the stillness of a painting by looking or creating, one thing is certain: time will stop. In this territory, you can access an enlarged imagination, enriched understanding, admitted emotion, acknowledged transgression; a deeper connection to your place in the world. Processing information can never provide this experience, nor can greater efficiency and productivity. You can find paintings almost anywhere: true gifts as islands of stillness in the wild rivers of information surging all around us.

As Americans pay more attention to global climate change, “green” has become a very popular idea; a new set of “in” attitudes, actions and affiliations. Keeping chickens is an aspect of the new green movement; not only are more people taking the plunge, but poultry magazines are weathering the recession with growth that rivals the recent quarterly earnings reports from Goldman Sachs.
Chicken furnish the perfect metaphor for a life well lived. Like wild geese, their cackling and soft chortling accompanying scratching call us to our membership in the family of things. It’s not about the eggs they produce. After all, industry figured out long ago how to supply a growing population with its egg needs. It’s not about the value-added soil input they provide. It’s probably not about the potential for (learning, fun, challenge, quality time, out-of-your-comfort-zone-into-discomfort-for-growth – you pick the one most appropriate for your circumstance) in building a chicken shelter OR for the discoveries you and all your housemates (e.g., family) will make enroute to successfully integrating chickens into your lives.
Chickens are essential because of the specific way they tie us back to the natural world. Are you worried about how much time you spend indoors? Get chickens. I guarantee you will spend more time outside. Are you concerned about the adverse affects the mosquito population has on your capacity to enjoy the outdoors? Get chickens. They’ll put a few bug bites in perspective lickety-split. Worried about your wardrobe? Get chickens. While they are growing up they will poop on you, your rugs, floors, countertops, steps and anywhere else they pass the time of day. Chicken poop is easier to clean up than baby poop. As you learn to watch your chickens you will probably find yourself deeply engrossed in noticing and wondering a variety of things about their immediate habitat.
You might be wondering what is so important or compelling about reconnecting to the ground, sky, weather, trees and bug-world. It has been, after all, a real slog to move people trapped in an agrarian way of life off the land to make way for efficient, industrial food production. Reams have been written about this transformation – a change that gives the very connotation of the word ‘transformation’ a sorry inheritance. Chickens give us the individual opportunity to say no to many large-scale principles of living and embrace smaller-scale opportunities. I would argue that this is positive because chickens create an immediate community – whether it includes you, your household, your building-mates, your neighborhood and the chickens, or just you and the chickens. They fill the void that always lurks in the back of our minds; the what-am-I/are-we-doing-here notion that dogs us to the end of our days. Taking care of chickens is a good enough answer. And while we’re doing that, the hyper conscious notion seems to get lost in the scratching.