The other day, while waiting an hour or so down the road for a friend to arrive for a long-planned lunch date, I stole a few minutes with the February 25 issue of
The New Yorker, which I had slipped into my oversized bag.
The magazine fell to page 77, Joan Acocella's story on Adam Phillips, called "This is Your Life." This first paragraph needs no Kephart intercessions. Just read it, and see if, on this day at least, it might save you. The photo above, by the way, is of Jeb Stuart Wood, whom
I profiled in the Inquirer on Sunday. He's a foundry man at work here on a piece for the great sculptress Michele Oka Doner. Behind him are the old mobiles he restores when he finds time. Elsewhere are his own sculptures, suspended and waiting. I thought of Jeb often after my interview that day—of how broadly and peaceably he was
living. From
The New Yorker:
Adam Phillips, Britain's foremost psychoanalytic writer, dislikes the modern notion that we should all be out there fulfilling our potential, and this is the subject of his new book, "Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Instead of feeling that we should have a better life, he says, we should just live, as gratifyingly as possible, the life we have. Otherwise, we are setting ourselves up for bitterness. What makes us think we could have been a contender? Yet, in the dark of the night, we do think this, and grieve that it isn't possible. "And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives," Phillips writes. "Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless trauma about, the lives we were unable to live."
Yesterday
I told the story of my first meeting with the internationally acclaimed artist Michele Oka Doner, and how that conversation became a friendship became a
Philadelphia Inquirer story that celebrates artists in collaboration, the foundry master Jeb Stuart Wood, and the resurgent Port Richmond neighborhood.
Today I
share the link.
Weekends in the
Inquirer are like Christmases of long ago—I wake even earlier than usual, and eager. My eagerness now is for the early edition of the Sunday news, where I've written of
Chanticleer garden and the
Jersey Shore, of
ballroom dancing and
Philadelphia light, of the
Schuylkill River and
the cemetery where I often go before I teach my class at Penn. This weekend my story features the internationally acclaimed artist
Michele Oka Doner and a spectacular Port Richmond foundry owned by the artist Jeb Stuart Wood. It's a story about collaboration, trust, and a converted warehouse in former collier country.
I met Michele during
National YoungArts week in Miami. I mentioned how much I liked the pin she was wearing. She said she'd made it, slipped me her card, mentioned the loft where she lives in New York City. When I told her that I hailed from Philadelphia she replied that she has much of her work cast there in a foundry she trusts—the sort of work that ends up in the Louvre and MOMA, the Hayden Planetarium and the Miami Airport, a Tiffany's in New York City or a store clear across the world, a private home. "Come visit us at work," she said, and a few weeks later I showed up at the door of Independent Casting.
From Jeb I learned about the resurgence of a part of Philadelphia I'd never traveled through. I learned about the art of casting, about what it takes to run a foundry and to work with some of the world's leading sculptors. From Michele I learned about art as conversation, about the bronzing of organic stuff, about rivers, history, mythology. I was out of my element, and I loved it.
Tomorrow I'll share the link to the whole story, which features a photograph of Michele at work in the foundry. Today I share the photos above and this first scanned page of story.
At the meal following the YoungArts gala, I had the privilege of being seated near Michele Oka Doner, the renowned sculptor, jewelry maker, fashionista, space maker. Her work can be seen at MOMA, the Louvre, the Cooper-Hewitt, and the FIU-Wolfsonian, where a mural painted by my great uncle Lloyd Morgan, an architectural designer in the firm of Schultze and Weaver, is hung (below). Michele's art can be experienced in retail stores (Tiffany's, say, or Macy's, or Fifty One East, the luxury superstore in Doha, Qatar), in public sculpture gardens, in the Herald Square Subway Station of New York City, and at the Miami International Airport, where she created a nearly mile-long floor of dark terrazzo celestial sea forms in bronze and mother of pearl.
Actually, I'm just scratching the surface here. Michele's work is everywhere.
I'll be joining Michele as one of her new pieces gets cast, and I'll be writing about the experience for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
This is how fate takes us. This is the experience we lean toward.
 |
| My great uncle Lloyd Morgan, a visionary architect, painted this imaginary skyline of the many buildings he helped design as a member of the Schulze and Weaver design team—the Pierre, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Sherry-Netherland, the Miami Biltmore, the Breakers—and hung the painting in his Tarrytown, NY, home throughout the years when we visited him as a family. After he passed away, the painting was adopted by my father, who ultimately had it restored and shipped to the FIU-Wolfsonian. I was able to reconnect with the painting for the first time two weeks ago, when I visited the quite beautiful Wolfsonian during my experience at YoungArts. |
So true. Thank you for sharing this, Beth!
I have nothing to say about this article I just want to say that I am still laughing about our exchange this morning. You are so funny that you could never be in protracted mourning. There. Full circle!
This is so often in my Thinker - good to find someone in agreement -and it's encouragement to hang on to this belief. Thanks, Beth. Once again, you've hit the mark in my heart. xo
This message has been coming to me from so many different directions lately. It is one I need to hear, and hear often, and it's expressed just beautifully here.
Thank you for being another angel messenger :)