Solo Retrospective December 10, 2024 to January 31, 2025

On the grounds of our Historic Woodbury Friends Meeting 122 Broad Street, Woodbury, a formerly rented building had become vacant. Long story for another time. It is a flat, one story very accessible building with a lot of windows. It winds along, rancher style with a string of about half a dozen rooms on either side of a main reception area. Since it was just sitting there empty, I asked the Meeting if I could use the reception area for an Art Gallery and they agreed.

First, five of us formed a gallery committee and had a group show, a stained glass artist, Jerome and his partner Susan, who now rent a studio in the building, another Quaker artist in the Meeting, Diana, the property manager, Carleton who does a good deal of work with computers and has a 3D printer, put up a group show. (Which stayed up for about a year).

The South Jersey Artists Collective is in the process of getting a grant to rent the building from us in the Spring 2025 and their plan is to turn the Gallery into a Resource room, so I decided I had better make hay while the sun was shining and realize a long standing dream of mine to have a solo retrospective art show. My sister and my Right-Hand-Woman, helped me hang the show and I made postcards for it.

What an interesting area of emotions the show engendered in me, looking back on all the phases of my life represented in that show. Admittedly it is a modest, humble little exercise, but it is deeply satisfying to me. This is the age of looking back, the 70's, which I am about to leave in a year and enter the 80's. Heaven only knows what that will bring.

Anyhow, I chose one or two paintings or prints to represent a series of works I did in each of the decades of the last 60 years, represented in the show. It begins with two linocuts I did in the 70's before I went to college, and progresses through work I did in college, such as a lithograph I did while at Rutgers, when my major was printmaking, through the University of Arts, when I was getting my masters. it goes right up to this past summer when I had work in the most shows I could have imagined, seven group shows!

I have within me a well of melancholy and it is far to easy for the bucket to fall into the well and for me to roll it up and drink from the tearful waters. It has become a life-long practice for me to turn that melancholy into writing - whether in my daily journals, this blog, or my mamy writing experiments sitting on my book shelves, spiral bound or in looseleaf binders. It is a manifestation of the magic of the many folk tales where the beset protagonist uses her skills to spin straw into gold or to spin a fabric that exposes the arrogant king in his nakedness. My thread is ink and my fabric is the page.

For the month of December, now, I have been inviting friends to visit the gallery and see the show which is by appointment only which means I have lunch with a friend or two and in their kindness they come and see my show. I have thought about the paintings and prints and the periods of my life that they represent.

This week, for two nights, I enjoyed a 3 part documentary by Ken Burns on Ernest Hemingway. I paraphrase a quote by Edna O'Brient interviewed in the film 'writers are self-centered; we spend hours every day thinking about what we are thinking.' And that is certainly true of me. It is a trait I have criticised in myself through my life, that I am too solitary and too centered on myself and my life. But what if that is the natural trait of an artist - a writer or a painter?

The documentary gave me an idea of how to use the memories dredged up by touring my solo-retrospective, I think I will write a memoir to go with each piece! I feel an edge of excitement at the prosepect of it. I LOVE to write! This anticipation and creative urge is a boon, a gift, that makes retirement wonderful.

Merry Christmas everyone! Jo Ann

wrightj45@yahoo.com >p/> I think I will post each essay here too!