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“WHO IS MARY CROVATT HAMBIDGE?” “SHOULD I CARE?”

June 9, 2016
ARTISTIC VENTURES, AUTHORS, IDEAS, PEOPLE, THINKING AND THOUGHT
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“We are what we believe.”  –Mary Hambidge [1885-1973]

A lifelong pursuit of creativity, along with a love of dynamic symmetry and natural beauty, led Mary Hambidge to develop an artist’s community in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Rabun Gap, Georgia: Located in northeastern Georgia where the Blue Ridge and Nantahala Mountain ranges meet.  Hambidge is 100 miles from Atlanta, and 80 miles from Asheville, North Carolina.

Hambidge is the oldest artists’ residency program in the Southeast, and one of the oldest in the nation, founded in 1934, to provide artists and other creative thinkers with the setting, solitude, and time necessary to create,

HAMBIDGE CENTER

Meeting House from search Courtesy of Hambidge House

Mary Crovatt became involved with Jay Hambidge (1867–1924), an artist and writer who achieved fame with his books on design and “dynamic symmetry.”  Though they never married, she took his last name.  After his death, she had envisioned a place in the Georgia mountains where crafts and agriculture could be practiced according to the principles developed by Jay.  She expanded dynamic symmetry and imagined a self-sufficient lifestyle emerging from the practice of balance and proportion.  In his memory, she created the Hambidge Center, believing that creativity can best be nurtured through working closely with nature.

In the early days of Hambidge, she employed local women to create exceptional weavings, but with the industrialization of the 1950s and the availability of steady mill jobs, the weavers slowly disbanded.  Hambidge broadened the scope of the center and invited creative artists and friends to come for extended stays there.  

One landscape architect often brought his son along with him; Eliot Wigginton returned to the Hambidge Center while a teacher in the area in 1966. Discussions with other Hambidge guests inspired him to develop the Foxfire program, in which students explored their local and regional heritage for the magazine that they created under his guidance.   

Foxfire books from eBay“The teacher’s approach put to action John Dewey’s progressive premise that classroom learning should be a form of democratic life in which students actively demonstrate their knowledge and skills by immediately using them to improve society.”  [in Carl Glickman, KAPPAN, Feb. 2016: p. 55]

Foxfire remains alive where it was created.  For others, “it is realistic and imperative to expect that students today can apply what they are learning in English, math, science, history, and the arts to making their communities healthier, more caring, economically viable, and aesthetically better places to live.  That would be the ultimate success for Foxfire and for our country.”  [Glickman, p. 59]

Mary Crovatt Hambidge, from native of coastal Georgia to New York model and actress, to student and creative artist and weaver, to builder and visionary to missionary for the arts, remains in spirit as a driving force at Hambidge today.

. . .

The Hambidge Center has gathered many of her writings and papers and put them together in a book Apprentice in Creation: The Way Is Beauty.

“Work is one form of worship.” 

“I’d rather be one little cog in the wheel of truth than the entire wheel in a machine of lies.”

“What the world needs today is love, not religion.  …psychological love.  Religion comes from love, not love from religion.  The world was created by love, not religion.  Religion is man made.”

“Never have the forces of the world met together with such power.  Shall it be for destruction or creation?  I believe in the divinity of man and the immortality of his soul, therefore I believe that creation will triumph.”

“All life is working towards a state of exaltation.  One does not stay in this state, but by means of it, one is led into that world of beauty where one remains.  Moments of ecstasy come when the divine inner beauty of things, of life, is overpowering.”

“One knows that everything that contributes to this life that goes on, this making of perfection, is important.  Everything we suffer, every shortcoming, every weakness we must struggle against is the result of someone who has gone before who has not conquered it.  If we abandon the fight, it is not only we who suffer but those who come after.”

“I know now that to lose one’s faith in humanity is to lose one’s faith in God.  Humanity is God.  Life only is God, and humanity is the highest expression of Life.”

© The Jay Hambidge Art Foundation Question_mark_(black_on_white)

 

 

“LOVE BEYOND WORDS”: THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE: A BOOK INTO A MOVIE

June 2, 2016
ARTISTIC VENTURES, EMOTIONS, IDEAS, PEOPLE
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“You can’t tell a book by its cover.”  “Read the book first.”  Really?

“Time traveling is very confusing.”  –Rachel McAdams

“A movie, for me, is a completely heart-, gut-level experience.  And occasionally, the mind comes into play to sort of engage what’s happening…but mostly movies are not observed in the mind.  And often, when your energy goes into your mind to watch a movie, you disengage from the story, and it takes a little while to get pulled back.” –Bruce Joel Rubin, Screenwriter

“The movie is gonna exist alongside the book.  But I think you can get in trouble if you don’t give the movie a life of its own.  If you don’t have time to tell it in the movie, you can’t assume the audience knows it, because you have to tell your story for people who haven’t read the book, and who are maybe gonna read the book later as well.”  “  Gomez,” Ron Livingston

“You can create the illusion of a novelistic feeling in a film, but it’s not really what film does best, for the most part.  I think films are probably closer to a short story.  Films work toward a single cataclysmic event…most of the time at the end, and that’s a short story: ‘When is it gonna happen?  How is it gonna happen?’”  –Robert Schwentke, Director

“…there is a presence that goes beyond death.  I play with that a lot in the movie Ghost.  I play with it a little bit in Jacob’s Ladder.  It’s a theme I really care about.  The great love stories are always stories that are ultimately about loss…about not being able to have forever, in the physical sense, the one you love. 

“As a writer, I get this enormous joy of knowing I get two hours at any given moment to talk to the world.  But I realized early on that each movie is like a sentence, an idea, one idea.  

“And a career, if you’re lucky to have a career, is a paragraph.  And that’s what I want.  I want to be able to have one paragraph of understanding that I can share with the world.  And all of these films put together, I think, create that paragraph.  And Time Traveler’s Wife fits into that paradigm perfectly for me.

“It’s not a full 100-percent statement of what it means to be free of death, but it is a real intimation of love continuing beyond time.”  –Bruce Joel Rubin

© 2008 Internationale Scarena Film.

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time traver's wife movie.jpg

 

REMEMBERING MOTHERS

May 7, 2016
EVENTS, PEOPLE
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BY: JAMES F. O’NEIL

“Men are what their mothers made them.”  — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I thought and believed at one time that my mother was God, or at the very least a god-like figure:  https://memoriesofatime.com/2014/05/09/your-mother-is-not-god-shes-not/    

For the past few weeks, I have been going through old journals, scissoring out unwanted and unneeded material.  Old essays, old emails, and old class notes–among other things.  Glued-in essays no longer relevant.  Gone.  Deleted.

So volume by volume, I page through.

On May 5, 2016, I was working on Volume 91: 12-11-2008–10-12-2009.

My reading became deliberate.  My entries slowed me down.  Few clips of the scissors.  More attention to the words.  A Mother’s Day.  A mother’s illness, and hospitalization.  A mother’s death [10-7-2009].  A chronology of events, details. 

Ironic timing: Another Mother’s Day is here. 

And some vivid memoriesofatime:

Mom in Ohio 2008Mom Relaxing on Swing, Ohio Cottage 2008

 

©  James F. O’Neil   2016

 


 

 

APRIL 23 1564-1616

April 22, 2016
PEOPLE
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“Are there any dates that are important to remember?” “Well, your birthday, your wife’s birthday, your mother’s birthday for sure, and Shakespeare’s birthday. NEVER forget your wedding anniversary.”

. . .

On April 23, 1616, many will be celebrating the life and works of William Shakespeare, though it is the 400th anniversary of his death on that day. (Some speculate he may also have been born on the 23rd in 1564). Death is certainly part of many of his plays: dead bodies in Romeo and Juliet, bodies lying about in Hamlet, bloodied messes in Macbeth.

Yet there is also joy and happiness, and love and justice, friendship and mercy, drunken silliness, and even magic, sprites, ghosts, and witches writ large in his story telling.

And some good history, some bad history, some sad history–war, defeat, executions, conspiracy, deceit. Good rulers, bad rulers. (Alas, even some made-up history.)
So this is a time of remembering, for some reason, any reason, no reason. Some of what he wrote might just be worth remembering. “This above all: to thine own self be true.” (Hamlet 1.3)

. . .

*“He jests at scars that never felt a wound.” (Romeo and Juliet 2.2 1.)

*“We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” (The Tempest 4.1.156-158)

*“O, I am Fortune’s fool!” (Romeo and Juliet 3.1)

*“The fault, dear Brutus, is not with our stars / But in ourselves that we are underlings.” (Julius Caesar 1.2)

*“But I do think it is their husbands’ faults / If wives do fall.” (Othello 4.3.87-88)

*“It is excellent / To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant.” (Measure for Measure 2.2)

*“The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” (The Merchant of Venice 1.3.99)

*“Oh, beware, my lord, of jealousy. / It is the green-eyed monster. . . .” (Othello 3.3.165-66)

*“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” (Romeo and Juliet 2.2.43-44)

*“Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.” (Macbeth 5.5.23-28)

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