Alone and in a Circumstance

Acrylic, water-soluble wax crayon, graphite, and polymers on gallery-wrap canvas, unframed, wired, and ready to hang.

This lyrically abstract painting is inspired by a composition from female jazz saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, who wrote and titled her piece after an Emily Dickinson poem of the same name. The composition is from her album Wild Lines, and the painting is part of a forthcoming series called IN THE GARDEN DEEP, which explores and grapples with women's invisibility in the arts and uses the garden as metaphor. I incorporate music, literature, and poetry by female artists in order to deepen the meaning behind each piece.

Since I'm a writer as well as a musician, I like to use the visual, verbal, and musical in my paintings to help deepen the experience for viewers.

Each piece in the series is inspired by a song written by a female jazz composer, who are probably the most invisible female artists of all. We can often name male jazz composers—Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, and Duke Ellington are three who are well known, for example—but chances are, if I mention Jane Ira Bloom, Carla Bley, or Lil Harden Armstrong, you wouldn’t recognize them. And yet their work is just as brilliant as their male counterparts’.

I begin by listening to a musical composition and create a small, 12 x 12 inch study in response to it, using color, shape, mark making, rhythm, and texture to express that response. Then, I share the study with a female poet, who in turn writes a poem in response to the painting. For this piece, I asked local poet S. Stephanie if she’d be interested in collaborating on the painting, since have admired and loved her work for almost 30 years now. She said yes, and I was thrilled to work with her on the piece.

When I received and read the poem, entitled “Circumstance,” the painting gained more depth and meaning for me. With this in mind, I began a new and much larger 48 x 48-inch canvas by writing S. Stephanie’s poem directly on it with water soluble crayon, then sealed the poem with medium so it would remain permanently embedded under the many following paint layers.

For me, this signifies the fragility, but also the resilience and determination of women artists to make their voices heard. We might have been pushed under and to the background in the past, and we might still have to continue to struggle to be seen and heard and compensated justly for what our work is worth even today, but we’re rising up, and we’re demanding the respect we’re due as artists in our own right. I want to give voice to that, to help move people emotionally so they become aware and better appreciate the work of so many wonderful female artists out there. This is the identity of half our population and deserves to be recognized as such.

To make the story even more interesting, the original manuscript of Dickinson’s poem is highly unusual. Dickinson cut out George Sand’s name and Mauprat, the title of one of her novels, from Harper’s Magazine and affixed them with a postage stamp in the middle of the page, then handwrote the words to “Alone and in a Circumstance” around it. George Sand was the pseudonym of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, who lived in the 19th century and wanted her writing to be respected for its own merits and not be reduced to second-class “woman writer” status. The novel's plot has been called a plot of female socialization.

When you read Dickinson’s poem knowing this, you begin to see how she, one of the most reticent artists out there, was no longer willing to be so silent. You feel the frustration, the anger, at realizing her plight as a woman in her time. I continue to be fascinated at how this series is making me realize how wide the ripples are, and how things keep linking and circling back around when it comes to women’s place in society, and how important women artists’ voices are to breaking those chains. I had no idea of this history until after I’d painted this piece, and yet Jane Ira Bloom’s music helped me somehow to capture the feeling. Then, S. Stephanie’s poem helped me express it even further. I hope viewers can feel the weight of suppression but also the jubilance of rising up no matter how alone and in a circumstance any of us might feel. That’s the point of the series—not only to acknowledge and expose the injustice, but also show how strength and joy will always overcome.