Because my mind was going a mile a minute when I sat down to meditate this morning, I plopped a vase of mums directly in the line of my meditative gaze. I'm not sure that this helped me step out of the thought stream but they sure were beautiful to look at. Before I stood up to move along with my day, I gathered them between my hands, buried my face in them and inhaled deeply. I love the smell of mums!

It is too, too easy to be sucked into the virtual world of (often) horror and mayhem. Make it a practice to focus on the beautiful objects in your space. After all, you put them there, didn't you? If you haven't filled your space with objects of beauty that the light can find, please, do yourself a favor and do so now.

The objects that the light finds and illuminates will illuminate your mind, whether you love them or not. Practice seeing what the light illuminates. Practice loving that.

This is a short post. I'm looking away now. Looking for the beautiful in my immediate vicinity.

Earlier this summer, I found a pack of letters my father wrote to me during the period after my high school graduation and before his death. Here's one excerpt that delighted me. It's from a 1973 air mail to Edinburgh, Scotland, where he'd paid for me to stay at the University for a month to study works performed at that year's festival.

He refers to a case that he was working on for O'Brien Diesel.

"I was at Washington on O'Brien Diesel which is set for trial here on September 25/26 and the next morning I found I had dreamed up an accounting theory which with Adam Shoriak's help went out yesterday and has the appearance of being foolproof."

The wonderfully synchronistic thing about finding this is that my brother had just told me that, when he was fresh out of Villanova, after a long, unsuccessful search for work, Shoriak had hired him because he recognized the name McDermott, and learned the connection.

Anyway, here's a list of things about my dad in no particular order of importance and definitely not in chronological order.

My father

• entered St. Joseph's College in 1927, at the age of 15.
  
• rowed single scull on the Schulykill River.
  
• graduated third in his class, Order of the Coif, at University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1930.
  
• was one of the youngest lawyers to go before the Supreme Court of the United States in 1932 at the age of 24. 
  
• was once arrested on Atlantic City beach for bathing without a top on.
  
• had just come back from horseback riding on Atlantic City beach when he heard the news that Pearl Harbor had been bombed.
• taught Naval officers accounting at Penn during WWII.
  
• was a master bridge player.
• regularly bought records from Sam Goody at his first record shop on 9th Avenue in NYC, relying on Sam for au courant recommendations.
• said, "Here. I understand that you should listen to this." while handing me a copy of Meet the Beatles.
• taught me how to work an amplifier and tone arm when I was about five years old and later, how to change a diamond stylus .
• built a woofer and tweeter into the playroom wall of our first house.
• learned the hard way about storing LPs above a tube amp.
• built two giant sound boxes on casters for speakers when stereo hit the market.
• taught me how to body surf.
• took me to see a matinee of Forbidden Planet and explained to me how it was based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. Best first date ever. Decades later, I went to a matinee of same and sat a few rows behind a father with his very little daughter. The three of us were almost the only ones in the theater. Yes, I cried.
• always said "Go into the ocean, it'll heal you up." when I hurt myself at the shore.
• read Donald Francis Tovey's Essays in Musical Analysis for fun.
• collected all of the Arthur Quiller Couch and John Dover Wilson editions of Shakespeare.
• knew Shakespeare's plays by heart and would turn to the act, scene and line to show me source of title when I'd come home from school with reading assignments like Brave New World, or The Sound and the Fury.
• loved to walk and took me jogging with him around our neighborhood park or up and down the beach at Longport when jogging became a thing.
• took me regularly to the Robin Hood Dell in the summer. One time, it started raining while Van Cliburn was in the middle of a concerto. Daddy pointed out to me all the umbrellas popping up in the "Friends of the Dell" section and as the Friends scurried out, we dashed up and watched the rest of the concert, a few feet from the stage, sitting on the concrete steps, in the rain. It was fantastic!
• ​loved convertibles filled with beautiful girls before he was married.
• drank a lot when he was young until, according to my late aunt, his doctor told him that he really had to stop.
• attended 6:30 am mass every morning, without ever saying a word about it, at St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church at 13th and Market Streets in Philadelphia. 
• collected every volume of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History. When then master photographer, Mr. Okada asked Daddy to give me something to hold in one of my baby pictures, he handed over Toynbee's Greek Civilization and Character. I don't know for sure but this may have been with a sense of humor. At least I think it's funny.
• loved history and the idea, philosophy of history. 
• kept his possessions simple and elegant. This approach applied to his clothing, tools and memorabilia. He splurged on books, records, his wife and children.
• had two good coats (one camel hair, one black cashmere), a cream silk tuxedo scarf, a sports jacket, a couple of fine wool suits, a seersucker suit, Norm Thompson slippers, an Irish Tweed Walking Hat and a classic, Gregory Peck, fedora.
• was an early "health nut" and we always had plenty of wheat germ, black strap molasses, honey with the comb, protein bread.
• kept his treasures on and in the top drawer of his bureau. On top of his bureau, he kept two framed photos, one of his mother, the other of his father. (They were the only photos I ever saw of his parents.) In his top drawer, he kept a letter from Arnold J. Toynbee, a short story he once wrote, a sterling silver swizzle stick from his drinking days, a pair of gold and amber cufflinks, and his Order of the Coif medal. Later, after his brother, Charlie, passed, he added Charlie's eye glass frames. With these, he also kept a scrap of paper with quick notes about my maternal grandmother's origin after a surprise visit from an unknown cousin on my mother's side. But that's another story.
• bought a copy of The Beach Boy's Surfin' USA for my 2nd grade school Pollyanna. I, of course, went for the LP shaped gift and listened to that album as much as any. Over the years, I occasionally wondered who's parent had bought that gift until, decades later, it dawned on me. Of course, Sam Goody.
• rarely gave me advice but once told me, "Always work for yourself."
• was very excited to hand me a copy of the 1973 U.S. Court of Claims document for the Williams & Wilkins Company v. The United States decision, indicating to me now that he knew then that my work would primarily concern intellectual property. And it has.
• had a distinctive whistle: a long G# followed by a smooth ribbon of short G, G#, G, G#, G, repeated twice to call for my brother and/or me. 
• could play untold variations with impeccable skill and invention on the piano of "We are Collegiate" and that's about all I ever heard him play. 
• married late, had children in his late 40s and absolutely loved and adored my mother, my brother and me.
• compiled and published the multi-volume Modern Federal contract law: Modern digest of decisions of United States Court of Claims and of Supreme Court of the United States (U.S. Court of Claims cases) 1969
• specialized in the United States Court of Claims and wrote an article for the American Bar Association Journal, The Court of Claims: The Nation's Conscience. 
• ate half a grapefruit every morning. My Dad loved grapefruit.
• ate oranges over the sink.
• made sure that my brother and I found an orange at the bottom of our Christmas stockings every year.
• enjoyed reading authors' works in chronological order: Graham Greene, Ian Flemming, Erle Stanley Gardner, Joyce Cary.
• collected Modern Library books. 
• was excited by all new technology.
• took some exceptional photographs that demonstrated a sophisticated sense of composition during the 1940s through early 1950s.
• loved the TV show, Secret Agent Man, The Prisoner, and early Masterpiece Theater.
• would love to have gone to Ireland.
• was the son of Charles J. McDermott, originally a drayman, later a Teamster, finally a Motor Freighter. I think that his father owned one of the first trucking companies in Philadelphia. His mother's name was Margaret F. Murphy and I am very sorry to say that that is all I know about her except that she looked very sad in the photo of her young self atop my father's dresser and that my Aunt Peggy threw all photos and identifying information about her parents away after they died.
• used Gaby Suntan Lotion and Noskote.
• walked to the Overbrook, later the Wynnewood train station every weekday morning during our life together and took the Paoli local into Philadelphia.
• taught me to drive in our 1968 Grecian Green Camaro on Sunday mornings in the John Wanamaker Parking lot in Wynnewood, PA.
• signed my brother and me up for swim lessons at Friends' Central when we were knee high. I took to the pool like a fish.
• Santa left me a guitar for my tenth Christmas. When I later found the guitar in two pieces in the attic thanks to my little brother and his friend (boys!), Daddy took me out to Main Line Music and bought me an Aria guitar. When I started performing at local colleges and clubs a few years later, he bought me a Martin D-18. 
• A few years after my father passed, I was at the opening party for the American Film Institute's festival at producer Marty Ransahoff's house in Bel Air. Chatting to an elderly attorney next to me on the sofa, I discovered that my father was his upperclassman at University of Pennsylvania. I'd never met anyone in my personal life who had known my father. The man turned to me and said, "Your father had a huge​ mind."

There's more, and I'll add to this later, but that's enough for now. He taught me to love music, history, Shakespeare, learning and physical exercise, to think critically, and to be myself. I wish that I could have been more helpful to him at the end. Always my first love.

Now, listen. Not every artist is prone to be a magician. I am not going to even try to define what constitutes an artist. But I will say this much.

Magic is all about transformation. Whether we're talking about turning a base metal into gold, climbing through a wardrobe into an alternate reality, or pulling a rabbit out of a hat, magic is about changing the nature of reality.

Artists are always tinkering with reality. Representational painting is about working a two dimensional surface to appear as three dimensions. Music does not actually exist in three dimensions. Composers translate something they "hear" into symbols on a page that are then interpreted by musicians who interpret those musical ideas into vibrations of sound. Novelists and screenwriters make up worlds left and right, crammed with characters in places who have relationships and histories. Architects imagine structures and spaces then pull together materials and build. Voila! Where there was a meadow now stands a building.

All of this is work is transformational. All of this is a form of magic. And all of it demands some level of a shift in consciousness. 

The comics writer, Alan Moore beautifully draws up the idea of the Artist as Magician. Here's an excerpt.
​

More than ever, at this very moment, we need artists of all stripes to consider their transformational skills and role in our culture and how they're going to use those skills and play their parts.

Exploring this very consideration is what I'm after with my Creative Wayfinding course. If you are an artist or creative (whatever you call yourself) and this resonates with you, click here and let me hear from you.

You never really know for sure.

It's hard not to judge an experience or situation that, on the surface, in the context of our limited frame of reference, may seem like a horrible tragedy or a major win. Something "bad" or something "good".

It's a helpful practice to question what we think we know, to test the boundaries of what we think is real. Each of our realities is based on a set of conventions established early on in life. The boundaries of these conventions were set up via family systems, societal rules, religion, and education. Not all boundaries are without good reason. But reason, as in "the intellectual faculty that adopts actions to an end" is likely to change. And change, as you've probably heard, is the only constant.

You don't have to change your mind but you might want to entertain the possibility that what you think may not actually be true. Or at least entirely true.
 
Only when we do not try to resist change, control an outcome, or cling to any solid thing or certainty are we free to experience the mystery of life unfolding and all the gifts that way of being brings.

No one can exactly predict the future. Why not stay centered in the present moment and wait to see what actually unfolds? This is a practice for an open mind.

Is That So?
(Zen Story about Hakuin)

The Zen Master Hakuin lived in a town in Japan. He was held in high regard and many people came to him for spiritual teaching. Then it happened that the teenage daughter of his next-door neighbor became pregnant. When being questioned by her angry and scolding parents as to the identity of the father, she finally told them that he was Hakuin, the Zen master. In great anger the parents rushed over to Hakuin and told him with much shouting and accusing that their daughter had confessed that he was the father. All he replied was, “Is that so?”
​
News of the scandal spread throughout the town and beyond. The Master lost his reputation. This did not trouble him. Nobody came to see him anymore. He remained unmoved. When the child was born, the parents brought the baby to Hakuin, “You are the father, so look after him.” The Master took loving care of the child. A year later, the mother remorsefully confessed to her parents that the real father of the child was the young man who worked at the butcher shop. In great distress they went to see Hakuin to apologize and ask for forgiveness. “We are really sorry. We have come to take the baby back. Our daughter confessed that you are not the father.” “Is that so?” is all he would say as he handed the baby over to them.

The Farmer's Son
(Taoist variation on a theme)​

An old farmer who had worked his crops for many years set his aging horse free to pasture. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors said, "Such bad luck, to lose your only horse." "May be," the farmer replied.

The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. "How wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed. "May be," replied the old man.

The following day, the farmer's son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. "May be," answered the farmer.

The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. "May be," said the farmer.

And then, of course, the young village men were killed in the war and the farmer's son, limp and all, was the only able bodied man remaining. The farmer and his son prospered. When his neighbors praised his fortune, well, you know how the farmer replied. "May be".

Here's Eckhart Tolle’s commentary on Hakuin’s Zen story and its Taoist variation:

“The story of the Zen Master whose only response was always “Is that so?” shows the good that comes through inner nonresistance to events, that is to say, being at one with what happens. The story of the man whose comment was invariably a laconic “Maybe” illustrates the wisdom of non-judgment, and to the fact of impermanence which, when recognized, leads to non-attachment. Nonresistance, non-judgement, and non-attachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.” 
​
― Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose)

The other night, I walked out to get some air and screen relief. I watched Venus rise above the high school, directly under the paws of the Leo constellation. Just now, when I checked my astronomy app, Leo appears to be walking on a path of Venus, Mars, and Mercury, directly into the Sun. It looks like Sirius is on a trajectory to become part of that pathway for a little while at some point tomorrow, August 8th.

I am posting my weekly words a little early because we're about to pass through what’s called the Lion's Gate Portal which, this year, happens to coincide directly with the New Moon on August 8th.

While I was growing up, we called this time of year the Dog Days, the hottest, most miserable time of summer. That term can be traced to ancient Greece describing the same and also the time of year when Sirius (aka the Dog Star because it’s part of the Canis Major constellation) rises and is visible above the horizon in the morning at dawn, just before sunrise.

The ancient Egyptians also honored Sirius and this time of year as it was when the Nile overflowed and flooded the Delta.

These days, many astrologers and New Age writers refer to the period of July 28 to August 12, as the Lion’s Gate Portal, culminating on the 8th of August. I couldn’t tell you when this trend started but personally, I can buy into the idea that this is a special moment in time. Especially this year. Especially in conjunction with the New Moon.

Without getting into a cosmic mashup of theories about energetic resonance, the basic idea of the Lion’s Gate Portal, is that this is a time of increased cosmic energy flowing between the spiritual and physical realms, between heaven and earth.

If the stars transmit energy, and of course they do, then it stands to reason that, because we’re all traveling through space in various configurations, on occasion, Earth will find itself in a certain proximity to massively energetic stars that can’t help but have noteworthy effect on Earth’s systems which happens to include us, the human beings. Some of us humans are more sensitive than others. It’s only logical that some of us, especially those of us who are aware of these astrological moments, might take advantage of and be affected by the same.

There’s no getting around the significance of this simultaneous New Moon which is already a time of darkness, star gazing, and quiet, providing perfect opportunities for new intentions and fresh starts. This New Moon is in Leo, and Leo is ruled by fire and connected with the heart, with courage.

There’s also a numerological significance to his event. August 8th is the 8th day of the 8th month. That’s a double 8 which represents spiritual enlightenment and intelligence. It’s also the number of constellations in the sky.

And, as it happens, August 8th is the 220th day of the year! In numerology, 22 is the master number of the builder, bringing together the spiritual and the material.

There it is again. The connection of the sublime and the material.

I am spending the 8th communing with nature, meditating, and entering a new phase of my life. How about you?

You can listen to my long-time fave, Gregory Scott's take on this New Moon, and another regular fave, Molly McCord's New Moon and Lion's Gate Portal.

I've jettisoned my old list and have started a new mailing list for this phase of my life and work. You can sign up here to receive at least monthly mailings.

"I watch the choppy, shining sea
as I walk beside the sliding waves.
On the sand, in the sun, at the shore
breathing hazy air, bright white and brave

filled with liquid, brisk, exquisite sounds
I am found, content and most secure
where everything is moving
and the sand is shifting evermore."

--Suzanne McDermott, from Mine for Good, 1995

Mine for Good is a little love song to the Garden State, to the sea shore, and to embracing change. I wrote it while walking along Cape May beach after a big October storm. The place was littered with huge knobbed and channeled whelk shells, some of which I am looking at right now.

Any coastline is a space of constant change. Water alters land. Remains are deposited and retrieved. Life and death and mysteries abound. Colors shift in the blink of an eye. Wind slaps waves and splatters sea foam. Salt evaporates. Sand gets into everything. Ghost crabs skitter and steal. Birds fish. Rays flap. One day the surface of the sea is still and silky. The next day, churning and explosive. Although the level of drama depends on the sea in question, there is never a dull moment along any coastline.

The world at large has started to feel like a long, dramatic coastline. So many of our individual lives have shifted or are shifting in ways we may never have imagined. But the fact is that the world has always been in a process of constant change, as have our individual lives.

Leaves fall, snow drifts down, winds whip up, new green shoots appear, and summer comes in. Coastlines have always been shifting. Our bodies, minds, and orientation in space and time are different moment by moment. Change is decidedly more dramatic now thanks in large part to anthropogenic climate change. Try as some people might, there's no getting around that fact. But that's not the only cause for the drama.

At some point, we got it into our heads that life is stable, that we can rely on facts and material assurances. This may have been true for some, or even for many for a while. But it isn't true anymore. In fact, it's often not clear what is true anymore.

If we've made up our minds that life should be stable, well, that makes facing change that much more alarming and difficult to navigate. If we cling to some illusion of normalcy, we're resisting change and actually clinging to the past which doesn't exist anymore.

Contending with change involves accepting considerable uncertainty. We like to think that we can control an awful lot of our experience and uncertainty is a control freak's nightmare.

I think that there are two keys to riding the waves of change. One is to recognize that we can only control ourselves. The other is to practice being present, here and now. Easier said than done. Interestingly enough, these are also the two keys to surfing.

And what do you know, going within and learning to know ourselves so that we can control ourselves, and being here now are the keys to a fully realized human life.

In the late summer of 2002, I recorded my last album of songs in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Ankie Keultjes produced, CRS/Rounder Europe paid for the production and manufacture, and I was able to work with two of my fave musicians, Eric van der Lest and Menno Romers. Much of this was thanks to Ankie (who helped produce Ephemera) and Ad van Meurs with whom I stayed and performed while in Holland during each of my European tours.

By the time I finished recording The Glory, I was out of money, energy, tricks, and all of the other things it takes to support and sustain a career as a singer songwriter uninvolved with the “star maker machinery behind the popular song.” It’s a shame because without any promotion or further touring, The Glory was lost and I really love many of the songs we recorded.

Until I unwrapped a CD copy just now, I'd completely forgotten that I included this quote in the liner notes:

I've had this post planned for a while but only this morning did I realize that today is the 52nd anniversary of the first moon walk. I love synchronicity!

This coming Friday, July 23rd, we’ll be under a Full Moon at 10.37 p.m. EDT. It’s not a supermoon or any sort of eclipse this time but it will look full for a few nights and you can watch Jupiter and Saturn chase the moon.

I've kept my eye on the moon since high school, and kept the full and new moons on my calendar for fifteen years, but I started paying attention daily the year I lived on a remote strip of beach in South Carolina. It was so dark and open there that I could walk to the shoreline at night, lay back on the sand and see the Milky Way and more stars than I could comprehend. Because I planned my days around long beach walks, checked the tide app on my phone every night. When the tide was high, there was no beach for walking.

Mostly, when I mention to…pretty much anyone, “Oh, it’s a full moon tonight,” they are not aware or need reminding or don’t see the relevance. But it is relevant. It’s important to pay attention to the moon.

All you have to get is the way that the moon affects the tides and the fact that humans along with almost all life on earth are primarily made of or critically reliant on water. So, if the moon affects the tides, it most certainly affects us and every other living thing on this pretty blue planet, individually, socially, culturally, and commercially.

When I was working for the MIT Office of the President, there was an actual file in a filing cabinet, just inside the inner office door labeled “Full Moon File” into which fell paper documenting any and all unusual campus happenings on or around a full moon.

Which reminds me to mention that the word lunatic is defined as someone who is "affected with periodic insanity dependent on the changes of the moon.” The word can be traced to the 13th century and is rooted in the Latin, lunaticus, literally “moon struck”, and the French, lunatique,  "insane". It helps to be compassionate with yourself and others while keep your own head in check over the day or two surrounding the full moon.

Remember the Ever Given? That ship that ran aground and blocked the Suez Canal a few months ago? (Yes. That was four months ago, not last year.) The full moon freed that ship and, as a result, reopened the passage. 

I couldn’t help but note that the beachfront, Surfisde condo collapsed just 13 hours before the apex of the last full moon on June 24th.

Our bodies swell with the waxing of the moon and contract with the waning. This is probably true for women more so than men. When all synced up, women—individually and often as a group—menstruate in coordination with the full moon.

Following the moon is a way of keeping time. Native Americans looked to the sky to plan their lives. Each tribe created its own conventions for particular locations and needs.

As a way of tracking personal time, the full and new moons gives us opportunities for beginnings and endings, to set intentions and mark completions of projects and other involvements. If you have any experience with creating just about anything then you know that some ideas are realized and some are not. You can launch fresh desires with the new moon and close whatever loses energy or doesn’t eventually manifest with the full moon. That’s twelve or thirteen potential new beginnings in one year! I love this notion and take full advantage of it.

One seemingly paradoxical perk of paying attention to the phases of the moon is that monitoring what is happening in the sky helps to keep us grounded on earth. Looking at the visually changing moon occasionally will remind us that we’re on a spinning planet, rotating around a star while hurtling through space. It’s kind of thrilling and not a bad idea to remember, if not daily, then at least every once in a while.

Finally, the moon is beautiful, even in its seeming absence. At the new moon, we can more easily see the other planets in our system and the stars beyond. Or what once were stars.

Living by the moon enriches our human experience and reminds us that we are both mere and magnificent beings on earth. Just for a little while.




©2021 Suzanne McDermott

When I was 26 years old and living in Santa Monica, a friend invited me to a barbecue in Bel Air. I dressed for a barbecue, in Kelly green painters pants, a shell pink cotton crew neck, and Jack Purcell sneakers. I remember my outfit so vividly because the party I actually walked into was jammed with a well-heeled international crowd dressed in Valentino, Albert Nippon, Hermes ties and custom tailored suits. Marty Ransohoff was hosting the opening night party in his home for the first American Film Market. It was a party I’d remember all my life.

I settled into one of the sofas so as to not feel quite so conspicuous and struck up a conversation with the man sitting next to me, an older, entertainment lawyer. It turned out that he had known my father slightly as an upperclassman at University of Pennsylvania Law School. My father had died several years earlier at the age of 73. It was the only time I ever met anyone outside of the family who had known my father as a young man. He told me, "Your father had a huge mind."

Later in the evening, our host, Marty noticed me looking at one of the paintings on his walls, learned that I was a painter and set things in motion for my first ever painting commission of his two step-children.

On the heels of that encounter, a Dutch producer chatted me up. When he learned that I was an artist and musician, he took out one of his business cards, knelt down beside me, wrote a date, time and place on the back, told me that my name would be at the door and that, no matter what, I must attend the screening of a film called "Charlotte". I did.

The screening was at the Directors Guild and there were only a handful of people in the audience. After the screening, the producer invited me to dinner with the director and a few others. I gave one of the group a lift to the restaurant in my messy VW Bug. As we approached my car, he said, "I used to have one of these!" I later learned that he was one of the top Dutch bankers at the time and the rest of the group had a good laugh when they saw him climbing out of the passenger seat in front of the restaurant.

The producer sat me next to the director, Frans Weisz, with whom I began a long friendship. Before he left Los Angeles, Frans gave me a copy of the newly published, very heavy Viking book, Charlotte: Life or Theater?

It is an understatement to say that, at 26, I identified with the subject of the film and the book. Over and over again, through the years, I showed friends and acquaintances the book and told them the story of Charlotte and how, in 1975, Frans and Judith Herzberg set out to gather background information in order to make a film about her.

In the process, they interviewed Charlotte's father at the very end of his life, her step-mother, an associate who possessed papers in which he described Charlotte, the wife of the doctor to whom Charlotte entrusted her work, and others who had known her. They also discovered additional paintings that had been treasured privately over the years. They walked around the grounds of the Villa where Charlotte spent her final years.

To a large degree, it is because of the dedication of Frans Weisz and Judith Herzberg that attention was brought to Charlotte Salomon and her work at all.

It was another dozen years before Charlotte’s story and work started entering the mainstream. Then, only in the framework of Holocaust studies. Now, after decades of the development of academic art history programs, and a few generations of art history scholars, you can easily read about her story here.

In 1996, on my first tour of Europe as a singer songwriter, I visited the Joods Historische Museum in Amsterdam, where I saw some of Charlotte’s original gouaches. Later that fall, I spent about two weeks making small watercolors along the Côte d'Azur, including a couple of days in Villefranche-sur-mer, where Charlotte spent the last years of her life. Standing on these steps to the sea, I was not very far at all from where she created Life? or Theater?

When I eventually started teaching long courses in drawing and watercolor with excursions into art history, I always tried to include Charlotte Salomon and her work.  One day, almost forty years after that screening at the Directors Guild, a student said that she’d just read an article on Charlotte Salomon in The New Yorker. I went home and read it, too. After all those years, I understood Charlotte in a new light which, in retrospect, made perfect sense.

I completely missed the documentary Frans made in 2012, Life? or Theater? and would still very much like to see that with English subtitles but it's more or less impossible to watch in the US. Having published that statement, my dear friend, Mineke sent me a link to the original Dutch version of the doc which you may watch here. Still, that is not yet the end of Charlotte's story!

In a nutshell, this is my personal history with Charlotte Salomon as she and her work were revealed to me and the world.

Before closing, I recommend an excellent book of biographical fiction based on Charlotte's life by David Foenkinos called, what else?, Charlotte. I could not understand how anyone might pull such a thing off without pictures but when I started reading the book, I could not put it down. With all that I have learned, I think it's a pretty great book.

Life? or Theater? Good question. What will the next act bring?

One thing that fascinates me about studying the history, the lives and work of artists (of all forms of art), is not only how individual creative expression evolves over a lifetime, but also how attention to and perception of artists and their work changes, sometimes dramatically, over the years.

I am interested in how artists will evolve now. Now, that the state of the earth and culture and society are shifting so dramatically. It’s a nice to imagine that we can “go back to normal”, but I think that ship has sailed. Normal, at least in the last forty years or so has been sort of insane anyway, in my opinion. Longer, but definitely since the start of 1981.

How creatives will evolve now is what I am after in the Creative Wayfinding course I am about to open. I’m really not interested in people making more stuff (though we'll probably make some stuff). I’m wondering if we can transform creative experience and expression into a different sort of paradigm. If this piques your interest, get in touch. I’ll be opening the course to a small group soon.



©2021 Suzanne McDermott