‘Be Ye Also Perfect’

'Be Ye Also Perfect' by Robert O. Hodgell

(From the painting by Robert O. Hodgell)

By Tony Simmons

In the end, naked as the stars and black as the night, the girl knelt before the old woman and waited. The wise woman, holder of the village history, clutched her book of secrets to her shriveled breast — blind eyes focused on the future. Skin ashen with years and etched like bark, limbs like dried reeds, the woman hovered between the girl and her hut. She would almost disappear into the grain pattern of the wooden walls if not for the simple cotton dress she wore, its colors having faded to a uniform yellow, the flower pattern barely discernible.

The girl, head bowed and hand raised in supplication, caught her breath. For a moment, she thought she smelled the perfume of the flowers on the dress, but then she realized her own bare feet and bended knee crushed the nectar from a hundred night-blooming wildflowers. It was their lifeblood she scented, not the past, not the old woman. She hoped the wise woman had not perceived her confusion, and she bowed deeper, closed her eyes, trembling as the future bloomed and hovered.

“Have ye learned the words of the book?” the old woman asked.

“I know them,” said the girl.

“Are ye frightened of the truth?” the old woman asked.

“No longer. I am amazed and sorrowful.”

“Can ye keep a secret?” the old woman asked.

“If I could, I would not tell you.”

“Then ye are prepared,” the old woman said, lightly placing one palm on the crown of the girl’s head. “Be ye also perfect.”

The woman shrugged out of her dress, bent and folded it, and set her book of secrets upon it by
the girl’s bended knee. Her soundless feet treading night flowers, she walked away from the hut and the girl, naked as the stars, into the night and the jungle.

The girl took the dress and the book. She stood and slipped the dress over herself and stepped into the hut, her head raised, her eyes clear, her future having played out before her.

The Beginning

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(Author's note: This flash fiction arose from an assignment I gave my creative writing students. We meet at the Panama City Centre for the Arts, and I directed them to stroll the gallery and pick out a painting that spoke to them. Then I challenged them to write a short piece based on the story they got from the painting. This is mine.) 

Artist's Touch: Breathing Life into Feats of Clay

Meghan Sullivan at Floriopolis

PANAMA CITY — Meghan Sullivan says she has to stay in motion. A sculptor and potter, she works in terra cotta, making tiles, plates and figures. She also teaches drawing at Gulf Coast State College and the Visual Arts Center of Northwest Florida.

“I really like the tactility of making things,” she said during a conversation at the Floriopolis gallery in St. Andrews. “I don’t think I could sit in an office all day long and be happy.”

This year’s artist-in-residence at GCSC, Meghan grew up in Boston, the youngest of six children.

“My parents always had art around us,” she said, adding that her father worked for the city Arts Council. “We had these handmade plates, and we would fight over who got which one, because siblings fight about everything.”

Girl and Frog tile by Sullivan

Her older sister attended a free after-school arts program while in high school, and when Meghan was old enough, she joined the program because “I wanted to be like her.” She spent the four years of high school receiving six hours of art classes each week.

Meghan attended the Massachusetts College of Art, which was across an alley from her high school. It was affordable, and she could live at home. In her freshman year, she took a pottery class that changed her life.

“It was the most challenging class I had taken up to then, and I was compelled by it,” she said, and by graduation, she was creating ceramic figures.
She took a job working 40 hours a week throwing plates, bowls and cups, then got a residency just outside the city, teaching and doing figurative sculptures. She applied to the University of Florida and was accepted as a post-baccalaureate student.

“It was my first time away from Boston,” she said. “It was very hot, and the first time a lizard came into my house I freaked out. But I really liked living in Florida.”

Meghan eventually got into grad school in Nebraska, earned her master’s degree, and joined the AmeriCorps to pay off some of her massive student debt. In that capacity, she worked with elementary schools in blighted neighborhoods, building community gardens with children and organizing big awareness campaigns and events.

She also did creative projects and volunteered as a bike mechanic at a co-op. Finally, she was offered a job with the city. “But I knew if I stayed there another year, I would end up living in Lincoln, Neb., for my entire life,” she said. “I really missed ceramics, and I was teaching but I wasn’t teaching art.”

Conversation by Sullivan

That’s when she learned about GCSC’s Artist in Residence program. She arrived in Panama City in time for the 2014 spring semester, and was invited to remain through the 2015 school year. She was already familiar with Tammy Marinuzzi and Pavel G. Amromin, assistant professors in the college’s Visual and Performing Arts Department, who were also in Gainesville when Meghan was a student there.

“We shared a car ride once,” she said. “I knew how they drove, but I didn’t know them that well. But I’m a figurative artist, they’re figurative artists, so we kind of feed off of each other.”
A solo show of her work will open at GCSC Feb. 27 and be on display through March. Meghan’s artwork is shaped by her personal experiences, according to a statement on her website (MeghanSullivanCeramics.com) — specifically, being part of a large family and growing up in an urban environment. She calls herself “a storyteller,” for whom the journey is as important as the destination.

“While my background has influenced the tone and content, it is not straightforward autobiography,” she said. “One specific instance in a larger experience is used and extrapolated from in order to create the final composition. ... While the conclusion may not be clear, the meaning of my work is found in the pondering of it.”

Finding Redemption Through Art

Holly Scoggins' 'Light From Its Load, The Spirit Flies'

PANAMA CITY — Redemption is more than just a counter where you turn over your collection of tickets from the arcade games in exchange for cheap plastic trinkets.

Or at least, it should be.

The Visual & Performing Arts Division of Gulf Coast State College will allow visitors to explore artists’ interpretations of “Redemption” through the remainder of the semester. An art exhibit on this subject opens next Friday, Nov. 15, in conjunction with the premiere of the college’s stage production of “Les Miserables.”

Victor Hugo, writing about his novel on which the musical is based, said “Les Misérables” is about “a progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from corruption to life; from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God.”

He continues: “The starting point: matter; destination: the soul. The hydra at the beginning, the angel at the end.”

(Which is, in my opinion, just as good a description of the artist’s visceral drive to create art as it is of one’s attempt to redeem one’s soul.)

Throughout the story, characters struggle with their perceptions of themselves and the most extreme of circumstances, and they pray to be redeemed from the lives and choices they have made for themselves and those closest to them.

“Redemption” will feature work by seven artists from across the United States who have, according to promotional materials, “contemplated the idea of redemption through painting with results as diverse as the people who made them.” Participating artists are Dina Brodsky, Gary Chapman, Megan Ewert, Richard Heipp, Logan Marconi, Kymia Nawabi and Holly Scoggins.

“While some address redemption in its most literal, theological meaning, others take a broader approach and focus on the idea of a journey, transformation, or self-actualization and self-perception,” according to a description of the show prepared by GCSC.

The exhibit will open with a reception, free and open to the public, from 5 to 7 p.m. Nov. 15. The work will be on display in the Amelia Center Main Gallery (Room 112) until Dec. 5. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and admission is free. For more details, email professor and ceramics artist Pavel Amromin at pamromin@gulfcoast.edu.

In some views, redemption must be earned through self-sacrifice. Others see it as a gift freely given to those who truly seek it — redeemed by grace, not works, as the Good Book says.

However, these particular works promise a wealth of redeeming value. Give them a look, and let me know if they transport you to a better place.

Peace.

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(This is my Undercurrents column for PanamaCity.com and The News Herald this week.)

Apalach daytrip never disappoints

APALACHICOLA — Driving into Apalach, we were greeted by a bald eagle that floated on still wings above the roadway, finally canting to one side and disappearing behind the pines. We’d been watching for him, as we had seen him in the same stretch of road on our last day trip here.

It’s nice not to be disappointed, and Apalach rarely does.

My daughter’s boyfriend had never been to the Franklin County town, so we decided to make a day of it last weekend. I confess to some worry that he wouldn’t enjoy walking through the downtown area and browsing the shops as much as we do, but our first stop settled that: At Apalachicola Sponge Co. & Smokehouse Antiques, he found a corner dedicated to vintage electric guitars and tried one out while the ladies picked out handmade soaps.

We visited shops including Market Street Antiques, Sirens, the Grady Market, the outdoor menagerie of Peddler’s Alley, and the Tin Shed, where we posed for photos with life-size pirates and pirate wenches. We also got a photo with the life-size Elvis on Commerce Street.

We saw a man building a wooden boat outside the Maritime Museum, just down from the Apalachicola Center for History, Culture and Art, where a 52-foot dugout canoe dominates the open gallery space.

I spoke with Port St. Joe author Linda Heavner Gerald in the back of Downtown Books and Purl, where she was selling and signing copies of her novels, including “Rosemary Beach.” (Here's a featurearticle about her.)

We stopped in to enjoy the scent and bare brick interior at Apalachicola Chocolate Co., and watched the chocolatiers at work. Then we walked through the arch connecting the chop to the gallery of Robert Lindsley Studio, where the artist’s canine mascot happily welcomes visitors.

Having roamed a few blocks under the springtime sun, we took a break in the Old Time Soda Fountain, where we had waffle cones filled with Blue Bell ice cream. Somehow it was a further decompression on a day of relaxation.

We circled through the dock, watching the sun on the water and absorbing the scene of boats rusting and decaying, some actually having sunk or still hanging among the trees after a long-ago storm.

At Lafayette Park, my daughter played on the swing set. I blew apart a dandelion while taking photos. We walked down the slope of the boardwalk to the pier, where a young man worked a cast net, meticulously throwing and retrieving, gathering and throwing again. We looked down on the brown bay water, saw how the afternoon sun filtered through and moved among the bottom grasses, and spotted a large snapping turtle.

And finally, on the drive home, I listened to the soft breathing sounds of a car full of sleeping passengers. The eagle didn’t appear to see us off, but that’s all right. We were not disappointed.

Peace .

(This was my Undercurrents column for this week's PanamaCity.com edition.)

If You Go:

• The annual Apalachicola Art Walk is 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, with a wine tasting from 3 to 5 p.m., and the songwriter festival at The Dixie Theatre at 8 p.m.

Not what you expect to find in Biloxi

Debra and I visited Biloxi, Miss., this week. While she was at the VA, being put through her paces, I drove along US 98 along the shoreline where the casinos used to be (they have moved, and the ruins of their former pre-Katrina locations remain) and stopped in at the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art, drawn in by the beautiful architecture (designed by Frank Gehry).

Named for George Ohr, "the mad potter of Biloxi," (1857-1918), the museum is much more than just his work. It has his ceramics as well as centers for African American art, a reconstruction of a historic house destroyed by Katrina, and other special exhibits. (Entrance was $10, and the exhibits weren't staffed at the time I visited, so I just stayed to the freebies.) In the main lobby, I viewed the work of Trailer McQuilkin (incredible sculptures of delicate and endangered plants that he made from thin sheets of copper. You should check these out.)

I looked at a small exhibit of ceramics that showed some of the historic pieces unearthed in the area, visited the gift shop, had a coffee in the cafe, then took the elevator to the roof overlook. These images below were taken from the overlook across the campus of several buildings.

Next, I descended the winding exterior stairs into a grove of oaks, passed the various "pods" and went to the sidewalk along US 98 to get another shot of the grounds.

Here's another view of the silvery pods showing what appears to be some damage from a fallen oak limb to the one on the right:

Anyway, I really liked hanging out at this place, passing the time.

Obviously, still under construction, but for a moment it was like strolling through the future. I'm hoping that's a metaphor for something.

Peace.

(The quote on the wall reads: "I am the apostle of individuality, the brother of the human race. But I must be myself. And I want every pot to be itself. This pot is here. And I am the potter who was.")