For a full year during the pandemic, Teresa drew or painted a bird each day. In this short film, she reflects on what the practice taught her about our connections to nature and to each other.
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Covid Pops Up in Art
Sheep on Hot Ground • Oil on canvas board
The Sears Gallery in St. George, Utah, is mounting a pop-up exhibit, “Covid Pops Up in Art,” each artwork accompanied by a story. I contributed “Sheep on Hot Ground.” Here’s the backstory:
My husband and I recently gave four Navajo Churro sheep to the Navajo Nation. The tribe has a saying: Dibé éí Diné be’iiná at’é, sheep is life. They developed the Churro to thrive in the desert, beginning in the 16th century from Spanish stock. Twice, the US government tried to annihilate the breed. Only recently have they been brought back from the edge of extinction. My husband, Hal Cannon, and I acquired a few after Hal reported on the breed’s revival for National Public Radio. They became beloved pets and my favorite life models.
The Navajo Nation is experiencing Covid-19 infection rates higher than New York, which means among the highest in the world. In the midst of wide-spread sickness and loss, many children who rely on school breakfasts and lunches are going hungry. Hal and I felt it was time for these sheep to return to their people.
I miss them every day. But that is not the only hole I feel in my heart. I ache for the terrible inequities of the virus, and the toll it is taking on Native people and other people of color.
Happy Mother’s Day
A few years ago, I created this “illustrated moment” in memory of my mother. Today, as I think of her with love, I post it again for Mother’s Day. Click here to view on YouTube.
The Big Book of Hal
Photo by Jessica Lifland
My beloved husband, Hal Cannon, has just turned 70 and I created this memory book as a tribute to a visionary and restless spirit who is defining his senior citizenship through outrageous creativity. He is not, after all, a normal person. Through some mutant quirk of culture and genetics, he is the sole specimen of a unique species, Heraldo magnificus. There has never been anyone quite like him before and there will almost certainly be no one like him in the future.
Although the book is a limited edition for family and close friends, you can read the digital version online here. You will have the best experience if you click the “view full page” icon in the lower right-hand corner of the progress bar.
Remembering Ursula K. LeGuin: A visionary with “a knack for home life”
Photograph by Dana Gluckstein / MPTV Images, from “The Subversive Imagination of Ursula K. LeGuin,” The New Yorker, January 23, 2018
I have been terribly blue these past few days over the news that Ursula LeGuin has passed out of this world. I came to know Ursula in the 1980s, when we lived a few houses apart in Portland, Oregon. We had a mutual (and mutually dear) friend in Andrea Carlisle, and we connected initially through our love of cats. We each had male cats of extraordinary character – Ursula’s Lorenzo, Andrea’s Max, and my Abraham – and soon we imagined a newspaper that they produced, The Cat News, “By Cats, For Cats, and About Cats.” Abraham, a big snowshoe Siamese, would be its major sponsor, with his product Kitty Pristine, the Paw Whitener for Cats. Cats loved Ursula and if she came to visit, Abraham made a beeline for her lap, where he was received with satisfying enthusiasm. Continue Reading →
Mike Bell–a love story
Photo by Christine Magnusson
On Sunday I got two calls from friends in Wyoming asking me if I knew who Mike Bell was. My great aunt and uncle, John and Marie Jordan Bell, had the Iron Mountain Ranch north of Cheyenne, near the Jordan Ranch where I grew up (and where Marie also was raised). I said I didn’t know––John and Marie didn’t have any children. Perhaps it was a one of John’s nephews. I thought it was odd that two people called me on the same day asking about a Bell I had never heard of before (I thought I knew John’s extended family). It turns out that Christine Magnusson’s seven-year-old son had unearthed this gravestone and she had posted it on Facebook. (The Magnusson family now lives on the Iron Mountain Ranch.) Continue Reading →
Influence: Deborah Butterfield (1949–)
Meridian and Bonfire, 1995
I have followed the work of Deborah Butterfield for thirty years and it never fails to reduce me to tears. It also leaves me in a puddle of the most pure and absolute desire. If I was allowed only one art book to last me the rest of my life on that proverbial desert island, it would feature the work of Deborah Butterfield. If Christie’s Auction House gave me a blank check, I would buy something by Deborah Butterfield. If only, if only, I could live with one of her horses. Continue Reading →
Influence: Mark Rothko (1903-1970)
When I was 11 years old, I visited cousins in Downer’s Grove, a Chicago suburb, and they took me to the Chicago Institute of Art. I had never been to an art museum before, and I was thrilled. Back at the ranch, my mother subscribed to a series of art books from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and every month or two a new volume would arrive and we would pore over the 8×10 cut sheets from the envelope inside the back cover. But to see some of these works in person—Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, Monet’s Haystacks, Grant Wood’s American Gothic —took my breath away. Continue Reading →
Influence: Franz Marc (1880-1960)
The Red Horses, 1911
I believe that I am an artist, at least in part, because of a print that hung over the love seat in the isolated Wyoming ranch house were I grew up. All the other art in the house was Western, reproductions of works by Charlie Russell, Frederic Remington, and Will James. “The Red Horses” by Franz Marc was the single exception, something my mother had brought back from Germany after my father’s service there in the post-war occupation. Continue Reading →