Photograph by Robert Scheer
Writer Adam Klein of Florida is working on a novel and a collection of short stories.
By Mary Ann Cook
Doomsday, tomato paste, World War I, a Gertrude Stein poem, tiny ladies. These five subjects may not seem to have any connection, but each one is the concentration of one of the artists now in residence at Villa Montalvo.
One painter, one sculptor, one writer, one poet and one composer have successfully competed with others throughout the world for the opportunity to live at the artists colony for a month or more to devote themselves entirely to their craft. Some 35 people win residencies each year, about 10 percent of those who apply.
The current Montalvo residents have already attained considerable success in their fields. Artist Paul McDevitt has exhibited in half a dozen shows, including one solo exhibit. Sculptor Susan Shantz has exhibited in Canada and the U.S. and recently sold an installation composed of seven doors inset with ceramic pieces she created.
Writer Adam Klein has published a book of short stories, The Medicine Burns, and is the co-author of another, Jerome, After the Pageant. Poet/painter Pam Bernard has a poetry collection, My Own Hundred Doors, whose cover is a detail from one of her paintings. Composer Alex Freeman, fresh out of grad school, has 14 pieces to his credit.
Paul McDevitt
The doomsday theme belongs to painter McDevitt. With the millennium approaching he feels that there are more disasters than ever. "Just pick up a newspaper or check what's playing at the cinema," he says, to see how increasingly pervasive disasters are in our culture.
He'll be working small, on 9-by-12 inch canvases. And fast, with an urgency born of his limited stay at Montalvo. He expects to turn out a canvas a day. After two days, he has a Madonna weeping blood and a waterscape with an airship crash.
"There's nothing more exciting than disasters," he says.
For McDevitt the physical process is part of the excitement of painting. "Process is everything." Because of accidents and mistakes, the end result of a painting is something entirely different from what the artist expected or intended. He doesn't like his own work immediately after he's finished.
"After I've done something, I despise it. But then after about a year I begin to like it again. I don't know why. Maybe it comes too close to the bone when I first do it." And he doesn't believe in correcting paintings. "When you do that you lose the freshness. You'd end up with an illustration."
Susan Shantz
Susan Shantz is a sculptor who teaches art in Saskatchewan, Canada. At Montalvo she has a special kinship with tomato paste: She'll be covering household objects with the stuff, letting it dry, later adding another section, another layer. These objects will eventually find their way atop a 2-by 28-foot oval pedestal, being built for her out of fiberglass by a bathtub manufacturer in Canada. And thus will her latest installation be created.
"This weird image of using tomato paste to cover objects came to me in a dream while I was at Banff, [Alberta]," she says. She decided to "try it on, try it out," and began covering things like ashtrays, vases and candy dishes with layers of tomato paste. The effect made the everyday objects look bronzed, as though they had been unearthed in an archeological dig. Others describe the effect as looking like a cityscape.
Shantz uses objects she finds in junk stores, whatever shape appeals. It has to be manmade, rather than natural, because the juxtaposition of nature with culture is a recurring theme in her work. Many of the things she covers with tomatoes are food containers themselves, another linkage that appeals to her. Once covered, the objects often look like body parts or internal organs: A goblet looks like a breast; a vase has fingers like a hand. That tie-in adds further fascination and ambiguity to this particular work-in-progress, called "Satiate."
Most objects need two layers, some three or four, and she can only work on small areas at a time, so the work is very labor intensive, four or five hours at a stretch. She's been using tomato paste as an art medium for two or three years, and her older pieces show no signs of deterioration or mold, she reports. Viewing them after being away from them a while, she decided, "This has a lot of authority."
Shantz has a master's degree in religion and culture from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, and an M.F.A. degree from York University in Toronto. She has won awards from the Saskatchewan Arts Board and the Canada Council.
Adam Klein
Writer Adam Klein is working on his new novel, Tiny Ladies: "I've found the voice," he says, after reworking the first 100 pages he brought with him. It's already been sold to High Risk/Serpent's Tail Books, which also published his short stories.
Klein's favorite time to write is evening. "The stillness here enables me to hear the voice of my characters." He works into the wee hours, often until 3 a.m. At Montalvo he constructed a short story in one 12-hour session. Klein wanted to try out that method: "I liked it. I got the full bones of the story." Of course, it's many rewrites away from completion, he adds.
Klein likes to deal with complex characters, and he's most interested in the underpinnings of his stories--"questions of mortality, individual responsibility, questions of the spirit."
Besides his two published books, his story "The Medicine Burns" was anthologized in Best Gay Fiction of 1996, and an essay, "The New Eyes," was in the book Life Sentences: Writers, Artists and AIDS . His stories have been published in literary quarterlies, and he has won two grants and an award for poetry. But poetry wasn't his milieu. "I wanted a larger audience. I wanted to chart a course for my characters, see their growth, where their humanity comes from their actions, not just from thought."
Klein has worked as both teacher and editor at Bastard Books in San Francisco and New York, but he's taken this last year off to finish the novel, a self-imposed sabbatical. He hopes to find a college teaching job in Southern California by fall.
Pam Bernard
Poet Pam Bernard is both writer and artist and is at Montalvo for the month with her husband. Together, they run a graphic arts business in Boston called The Creative Team. She also owns and operates an artists' co-op gallery. Montalvo is one of the few art colonies where significant others can be included.
"After the snow and slush of New England," Bernard says, "spending a month at Montalvo is like paradise. I can keep the door open, and it's March."
When the Bernards first arrived at Montalvo, it was nearly dark, and she couldn't figure out what the noise was. Maybe a train? It turned out to be the rushing of the Saratoga Creek. "To open the window . . . you don't know how wonderful that is from what we're used to.
"I'm here to write about World War I and my father's experiences in that war. That period of time fascinates me. The carnage. The pointlessness. You can't pick up any book about it without weeping. I want to see what we can learn from that war, because its legacy is still with us. Pointless wars are still going on."
Her father was 16 when he went to that war and 14 when he fought with Pancho Villa, lying about his age. Bernard, 52, has been writing and painting seriously for the past 10 years.
Bernard has been published in 18 different literary magazines, and her artwork has been exhibited in 13 different shows, three of which were solo exhibitions.
She has won an NEA Fellowship in creative writing, the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry from Nimrod and the Grolier Poetry Award. The publication of My Own Hundred Doors, a book of her poetry, was the result of winning a competition from Bright Hills Press.
She will be teaching poetry at Emerson College this fall. Her M.F.A. degree is from the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers, which she calls an "amazing program, working with the best poets in the world." Her bachelor's degree is from Harvard.
Alex Freeman
As a youth, composer Alex Freeman started with piano lessons, began to hate them, then took up the trombone and singing with the Raleigh Boychoir in North Carolina. He was fascinated by how music fit together, "the loudness of the trombones, the prettiness of the strings," and his trombone teacher encouraged him to try composing when he was 15.
At Montalvo he has just completed a composition called "New," based on a Gertrude Stein poem. What he has done is "complement the already musical form of the poem." The piece is for chamber orchestra, and "it's a stepping stone to stylistic eclecticism," he says.
"The piece is fiercely organic, seemingly random, stylistically ambiguous, the kind of thing I'm interested in. There's a tonal land and then an atonal land. I wanted to see how many different shapes it can take, the same notes. It can be jagged, or I can make it soothing."
He likes the idea of starting a musical piece as a question and ending as an answer.
After a year off from study, he'll look for a doctoral program. "Money isn't the point. The only thing I care about enough to spend my life at is music. There are 50,000 composers in this country, so getting a job as a composer is not going to be easy. Fortunately, I like to teach." His master's degree in composition is from the Boston University School of Fine Arts, and his bachelor's degree in composition is from the Eastman School of Music.
At Montalvo, Freeman is staying in the second floor of the villa itself, in an apartment with a baby grand. Shantz lives in another suite upstairs in the villa. The three other artists live in studio apartments separate from the villa.
Montalvo books only two resident artists during the summer months because it hosts so many events then--weddings, receptions, music and theater performances.
The deadlines for applying for residencies are March 1 (for residencies from October to March) and Sept. 1 (for residencies from April to September). Montalvo also awards five fellowships a year, based strictly on artistic merit, says Judy Moran, artist residency director. The awards cannot be applied for separately but are part of the rating system. Most residencies are a month to six weeks but can be longer, again depending on the rankings. A blind jury of professionals in each discipline does the rating.
For more information about the residence program, contact Judy Moran, 961-5818.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, April 2, 1997.
©1997 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.