Judith Vivell has interviewed me for the blog. Jude is a fellow artist and beloved friend working in Soho, New York City. In the seventies, she hosted a radio program called "Talking About Art" on the moderately radical, listener-sponsored station WBAI. Jude and I met on Instagram over our art, please find my interview with her under "The Interviews."
My lovely parents on a picnic, during their courtship in Boston, Massachusetts, 1956.
Where did you grow up? Who were your parents? What did they do for a living? Tell me about your education. Were there teachers or mentors that influenced you?
I grew up in Vermont, where I live still, a purely magical place. It is a land of introspection, with a degree of isolation, and home to many artists. My parents were both in education at various times in their lives. And each the first generation to receive a college degree, my father was a business manager at IBM, and later became a college professor. My mother was a bright woman, dedicated to civil liberties and progressive change. I have a BS in Education from the University of Vermont. I had two mentors while there; one was renowned for his methodology in the teaching of reading. He and I became good friends. Professor Lyman C. Hunt taught me to write. He worked solely in the grad department, singled me out and overwrote me into his classes. We had a remarkable connection. Dr. Hunt was about to retire, and my life was beginning. The other mentor was Professor Ted Brenneman in the religion department.
A goat farmer...his specialty was mythology. The buzz was, Dr. Brenneman, talked to his goats—Findhorn-styled phenomenology. Professor Brenneman was short, and his heavy-set beard reminded me of Tolstoy. Arriving at Myth and Creation class, his wool plaid jacket had hay sticking to it, and his Bean boots bore the muck of the barn. A big Joseph Campbell proponent, he introduced me to the concept of cosmology and culture married as one. It was fascinating sitting for his lectures. His grounded exploration of the metaphysical enthralled me. Dr. Brenneman saw the world's religions at the point where they meet head-on, something we all need to practice.
Portrait taken by Johns, the summer we courted at the Atlantic beach in Little Compton, Rhode Island.
What are your metaphysical beliefs now? How have they evolved?
You asked question two in a timely fashion without knowing what question number one held in store. I am not surprised, as new friends Jude, we are quite adept at bouncing off the other in meaningful ways. As a child, I began asking the big questions about existence. I guess you could have called me a born seeker. According to Dr. Brenneman, by walking the path of personal growth—a youth followed the way of expansion. My metaphysical framework at the time told me 'there must be something more.' And in that period I believed the search had structure. I don't anymore. I see spiritual growth like a continually ebbing river; I can relax about it because waterways are always flowing. There is a ripple on even the calmest of surfaces. It all comes back to rivers and tides. The big gain of enlightenment I once believed I chased has taken a backseat to my passions, and to the art of becoming compassionate.
I called Dr. Brenneman one day out of the blue a decade ago, to ask him a question, having spoken with him after graduation once. I'd been researching the history of Black Madonnas. I am a Virgo, and that might be why the imagery of Madonnas follows my life. He answered the phone, and I asked, "What is your opinion of the Black Madonna?" And he nearly jumped out of his skin. Dr. Brenneman had just walked in the door after arriving back home from a world tour with his wife visiting Black Madonna sites, having taken the Black Madonna pilgrimage. He was a bit freaked by my question, asking, "How did you know? Why did you ask that?" I had no answer. He then relayed his encounter. Standing, peering over a hole in the ground above a site below deemed sacred, he had the sensation the goddess screamed at him, in an attempt to pull him into the bowels of the earth. Terrified, he'd never experienced anything like it, Dr. Brenneman wore the chilling phenomenon on his spine when I'd asked him my question.
All this said, my metaphysical belief has a great deal more to do with the everyday mystical, if you will, encounters we experience than with the great hereafter. I do believe in a God, or Great Spirit, that is unquantifiable, and I believe in free-will. I think we are placed here to become mighty oaks, and that happens daily. I imagine souls return like the seasons, and there is an unseen universe above us, around us—a mirror image of the now. I think physicists one day will show us the string dimensions of time—physicists will prove if you will, the concepts of our spirituality. As I understand it, they are hot on the trail of incredible discoveries now. Though that reality's far off, I imagine. The mystical is not in a book written between pages. It is in the minimal encounters we record each day. It is the voice calling from the earth screaming at us to see. Paradise is the earth we stand upon, in magnitudes of love, we can't understand, created for us, for each living creature.
Johns Hopkins Congdon II and I, just after his proposal in the kitchen of the first home he built by hand, from the ground up to the last shingle. Late summer 1987, I was twenty-eight and he thirty-four.
What is your writing process? In painting? Do these activities feed back and forth, or are they separate?
I was born a doer. Johns is the same. Marriage meant we'd teach each other what it means to do a job well. I take my paintings to bed, just about, and spring from bed to write a storyline. I am all in when working. Passion consumes me, either in writing, painting, designing a house, or a piece of furniture. I often forget to eat. If examined, there is little separation between the disciplines in my life. I cut a hole in the wall where there was none, and board up the original door. I cut and paste and edit. The walls of my house appear as an oversized canvas, and so I paint a floral frieze with dragonflies. When it no longer resonates, I paint it over. Very little is static in my life and everything matters. I've been known to rearrange the furniture in a hotel room even though we're spending one night. Anything ugly goes in the closet and comes back out precisely so before we leave. My demands might make me the last person you'd want to live alongside indefinitely. Nonetheless, I've learned patience living in unfinished houses most of my adult life, because we accomplish it ourselves. It could be said, I seek or prefer "blank documents" that perpetually ask me to write upon them. We get the house done eventually. And they've been called works of art—"A home you've crafted like a piece of furniture." On my writing and painting, I spend eight hours a day. I can't say I've ever experienced writer's block, and am never bored. Please don't hate me for that admission. Blue, yes, but not bored. I shun superlatives as in never but have to give credit to my mother who encouraged my sister and me to be creative. In life, I am disciplined: my writing entails a binder per character. When one talks to me their words then have a place to land until the whole package falls together. I have a new canvas dreamed up before mid-point on the one before me. I try to get one project completed; I've just finished a memoir. Not yet published, the hard work starts soon. I am finishing work on a novel set in the Highlands, dedicated to my Scots grandmother Lily's memory. I bounce between brush and pen until one screams at me "basta"—enough is enough, get your ass back over here.
Ballet in the White Room, by Giovanna Brunini Congdon, oil on canvas, 14" x 14," 2018.
What is the relationship between your painting and your writing?
I like my work to tell a story. I guess you could call me a realist with a vivid imagination. Often my work references my love of history, either universal or personal. My most recent canvas Boy Posse, 2018, harks back to the time I spent in Mexico my nineteenth year. Leda and the Swan, 2017, is my interpretation of a stonewall carved frieze from 9BCE at the Roman temple Ara Pacis, now a museum in Rome, Italy. I like realism and beauty in my writing and my art. In this way, my life responds to my inner world, the feelings that well up inside me have to come out, and so, I write and paint. If I had to give up one, it would be designing, but writing and painting are my oxygen. Artists are complicated souls, who think the rest of the world understands them, and this naivete can get them in trouble. It is also our gift.
June 2012
Tell me the story of your romance with Johns. What is it like to work together?
I can merely say this—good things come to those who wait. Oh heck, I'll say more—imagine Dante meeting Beatrice for the first time along the Arno River in Florence, Italy. Our love story merited writing, you'll read it in my memoir—again, not published, but I am hell bent shortly to make it happen. Johns and I have thirty years logged together. Neither would be who we are without the other. We work so well together because we are two individuals producing with the same intensity. We are both perfectionists, with an unerring eye for detail—on an unending, one could say, quixotic, quest for beauty, thus the blog title. We meet over furniture and home design, often with surprising results. I am not a builder. When I draft furniture and Johns tells me, "I can't do it." I tell him "Figure it out!" He does just that, and we learn together in the process. Not knowing something is impossible, or difficult, or unexpected means we arrive somewhere different than a venture begun on the back of habit, or the customary. On my writing, he listens at the end of the day, often reading a chapter, new or revised out loud together while I take my candlelight bath before dinner. On the novel I'm at work on, he's particularly a hard driver, like a pushy pony curbing at the fence in the springtime, "Give me more! What about poor Henry? Is this all you've got for me?"
Portrait from "The Blue Series," 2012, by my eldest son Johns H. Congdon III. I painted the room in three layers of ragged color to produce a turquoise abalone shell effect.
How would you describe the process for your painting day? Is it the same for writing or a poetry day? Do you intermingle them or does each get its day—space—time?
In all honesty, art isn't something I structure—it's something I am. I've done art all my life. It's time that's the problem, never having enough. That said, I drive my life with structure, things don't fall apart so quickly. I am a runner, I run before breakfast and then get to work with a pencil or brush, lots of pencils, not enough brushes. Running and yoga are my meditation. When the children were little they had my full attention, you couldn't have torn me apart from them. As an empty nester, I hate leaving a project. I move my easel or computer following the sun across the day. In the northeast, sunshine is a commodity I can't ignore. If I've begun a canvas, I'm not letting go of it until I've finished. The writing I can park and jump back into, but poetry like painting, I don't walk from till I hammer it out. Writing inspiration often happens when running. An opening line or piece from the middle fully formed appears, and I'll run inside with Hugo, my Australian shepherd, and scribble it down. If I haven't written a poem in a while, I'll sit down and give it a priority. I'm an emotional person. I have a log of topics waiting. I've found leaving the memoir and novel to rest advantageous. In my absence, a scene or protagonist has gained strength or empowerment. I get a kick out of my characters; they are alive. I love them like attractive, complicated people I want to meet. I have a blast; I laugh a lot at myself. I love writing dialogue and painting pictures when I write.
The three kids and I bask in the sunshine, Rome, Italy, 2000, where I taught first grade at an international school.
Who are your painting, writing, and poetry gods?
Painting: Da Vinci, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Artemesia Gentileschi, Rembrandt, Titian, Wyeth, and William G. Congdon. (There are so many...)
For whatever reason, Caravaggio's story vibrates in my memory. He lived a tormented life, to put it mildly, imagine white heat dressed entirely in black, yielding an impressive sword, with a small black dog for company A very mysterious guy, Caravaggio swore a lot, almost as much as me. I think he represents how human it is to be your own worst enemy, and still, somehow he accomplished great work. Leonardo, for being not only genius but compassionate. Botticelli influenced my imagination as a child. Artemesia rose above male supremacy, surviving abuse, and in that experience we are sisters. Rembrandt painted raw emotion captured in the light. American Abstract Expressionist painter Bill Congdon was Johns' uncle, an amazing person, and an energetic impassioned painter. I'll post on his work shortly.
Writing: Anna Karenina, and War and Peace by Tolstoy, In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, Issac Bashevis Singer, The Odyssey by Homer, The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, Joseph Campbell, and most recently, I've appreciated James Rebanks' memoir, The Shepherd's Life.
Tolstoy, Steinbeck, and Issac Bashevis Singer, I fell in love with my seventeenth year, and over my early youth, they opened chasms within me. Proust, I met in my mid-forties with Balzac. Proust and I, see and hear, the rustle of a skirt hem down a hall. Homer, I open and read a passage randomly.
Poetry: Lord Alfred Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, John Keats, Lord Byron, The Complete Poetry and Prose by John Donne, and Maya Angelou.
I've loved Tennyson forever and a day. Dylan Thomas and I played hooky in the school library, instead of acing an A in chemistry. Which never would have happened anyway, I am glad he led me astray. He was divinely distracting across my teen years. My journal script was written all in lower case as a dedication to Dylan Thomas. And it's been said Maya was a redwood tree, and she was.
Jude and I began a discussion on the place of women in art and the world. The following is part of my response which will pick-up in Part II. I will ask her the same questions in Part II of her interview.
—Women are asked to set a higher bar of perfection than men, women don't get the same breaks, as Bette Davis said, "When a man gives his opinion, he's a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch." The differences between how men and women are expected to present themselves in the world intrigue me. I seek frankness and simplicity when I can. Make-up, or no make-up, die your hair, don't color your hair—none of it matters in the grand scope of things. For me, my stance is a way of encountering head-on (pun intended) gender inequality. The male figure sporting a head of cropped white hair is deemed elegant and dignified. Women have been paraded and powdered, and stuffed into corsets between miles of fabric since time immemorial. Not buying entirely into it—though indeed I love beautiful things—is my conscious decision and political statement. The conscription to an idealized female beauty means our twelve-year-old daughters believe they need a new nose. And the sad reality is it happens. I watch the TV journalists, and political analysts, as one brunette after another, in the warfare against age, slowly morphs into a blonde. Isn't her beauty as compelling as his?
To be continued. Thank you, Jude!
