In the 20th century, handwriting was another place where perfection seemed important, in part because people thought one’s character could be improved by working on one’s handwriting. Alfred Binet, who came up with the Stanford-Binet IQ test, believed there was a “science of graphology” that revealed a person’s character in their handwriting. It is an idea still popular in Europe.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Taltavall, was a devotee. She took our penmanship lessons as seriously as she did every other content area. A large, florid woman, she stood in front of the class at the appointed time every day, like a dance master before a ballet lesson. She would sway back and forth, arms shooting up or dropping down like an airport ground-crew worker guiding a plane to its gate, as we followed her body language with our pencils. I liked the symmetry and challenge of getting the shapes “just right”… though “just right” never happened.

A prose poem:

The smooth, suave agent repeatedwhat he had been saying all week.“California prices are difficult.”

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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Sixty houses later, shirt wrinkled,tie loose, glossy flyers fillinghis luxury car, through clenched teeth, he snapped,“This is the last one in your range.”

It was no surprise I paid no attention to running a household or creating a home. In the subtle ways past generations shape future ones, Mother survived a childhood of drudgery compounded by poverty and parents with grade school educations. She wanted neither for her children. She ran the house. I studied. My much younger sister played. When faced with a home of my own, the shock was electric. I had no idea what to do.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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The children grew. I returned to what society called “work”; that is, work outside the household. It is a peculiar distinction, suggesting life at home isn’t work. In both places activities are sometimes creative, often mundane. Both have their share of boredom and stress. But only one has a salary. For many years I apologized for the time I spent at home. I no longer do. It’s the old Gatsby spin: the light through the windows is always more enchanting when viewed from the street outside.

Being able to look back is important, but not enough. Old art, whether magnificent or mundane, is always the raw material of new art. The artist’s job is to build on it or transform it, not offer up comforting familiarity as a talisman against the void. That was the problem with my glass project. It was a bridge backward. Much later, painting became a path forward.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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One January years later, I scanned my new spring term last period class list, fearing the rumor I heard in the faculty room was true. It was. One of the most disruptive high school seniors was in my elective, “The Short Story.” He made his first appearance by swinging into the room off the doorjamb like Tarzan dropping from a tree. Six feet four inches of uncontrolled energy, he electrified the all-boy class with his defiance, his arrogance, his slick BMW in the student parking lot and his athletic scholarship to the University of San Diego if he passed every class the last term. The first week was a nightmare.

Could I be more than a caregiver, housekeeper, cook, gardener — important jobs, functional jobs, exhausting in their relentlessness? Jackson Pollock characterized art as an act of “self-discovery,” positioning the experience of the individual, not the work, at the center of the endeavor. I didn’t need to be the center of anything. I needed something else. Tole painting became that something.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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Ten years later, Oregon became part of our past. I kept a dozen or so wooden tole projects. Beyond the designs — cherries, gooseberries, pears, grapes, ornate Scandinavian florals — was a less obvious lesson I learned from preparing the wood. The more time I spent on the unglamorous, dirty work — stripping, sanding, staining, sealing — the better the finished piece. Shortcuts never worked. The paint flaked, the wood grain interfered, the brushes lost their shape whenever I rushed. Today, a lifetime later, when the speed and demands of contemporary living make it easier, faster and cheaper to buy things rather than make them I often wonder: What are the hidden costs of our shortcuts?

On bookbinding, questioning Plato and poiesis.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

EXCERPT

But measuring and sewing the bindings of my simple books, I knew I was both working and thinking. Buried in the Greek language is a word, “poiesis.” It is the same word used to describe the work of both mechanic and poet. In modern times, we are accustomed to thinking of the inspired artist and the disciplined worker as opposite human types who have nothing in common. But they are more alike than different. Despite what Greeks thought, their language didn’t make any distinction between the work of artists or builders, architects or philosophers. A single word described their otherwise disconnected efforts. Different manifestations. One spirit. Poiesis became a cornerstone of my philosophy for teaching and for life—think and do. Either alone is insufficient.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces | Between stars—on stars where no human race is. | I have it in me so much nearer home | To scare myself with my own desert places. —Robert Frost

Now what? First house. First job. The house was in an almost new tract miles from charming homes we couldn’t afford around the university. The job matched Jim’s research interests in business and labor relations. He had his hands full at work unraveling the byzantine mysteries of academic communities. At home, I faced my own mysteries. Far from the crowded Los Angeles landscape we left, the house was a one-story, three-bedroom rectangle with a triangular roof pitch jutting over the front door, interrupting the flat elevation like a droopy umbrella. The house had been painted in just two colors. The exterior was pale beige; the interior a collection of Navajo white walls, white metal closet doors, white window frames. Inside reminded me of a person trying hard not to be noticed in a crowd; the outside, of KOA campground tent signs jutting above highway billboard advertisements. Tucked in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, it sat midway on a street where every third house looked like ours. The interstate winding through the northwest was lined with towering Douglas firs. The unfortunate, sparse neighborhood saplings were anemic cousins. Standing in the vacant rooms, I thought of Willa Cather’s pioneer stories of life on the Nebraska plains. In a wild leap, I imagined myself on an empty road like the one in the Jules Breton painting “Song of the Lark” Cather used as the title of her 1915 story of a woman seeking a more artistic life. My quest wasn’t so grand but the road was unfamiliar. Where should I begin? Looking for a way to soften the white box in which we found ourselves. Looking for a meaningful life outside the formal workplace I had left. Looking for ways to soothe the fatigue and insecurity of new parenthood. It wasn’t a question of being busy. That’s easy. Yet activity, no matter how layered and intense, doesn’t guarantee keeping emptiness at bay. Sometimes just the opposite.

I found an answer in a Eugene library display for a brand new publication, Early American Life. A cross between an academic journal and magazine, it announced its intention to devote itself to stories featuring architecture, decorative arts, period style, and social history from colonial times to the mid-nineteenth century. Every issue featured homes, antiques, histories of crafts, biographies of forgotten Americans, heritage plants and all things devoted to a “traditional, comfortable, warm sense” of America. Traditional. Comfortable. Warm. It was a start. I subscribed and devoured every issue. Formatted in tiny print in two narrow columns, I poured through not just stories of how our ancestors had gone about creating homes and communities, but instructions for projects they undertook. Early American Life was the unlikely catalyst I needed to begin making sense of a new life chapter. Thoreau was right when he said, “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book?” Many topics I dismissed — blacksmithing, using lye for soap-making, woodcarving, plant propagation and recreating Martha Washington’s Christmas dinner. Others looked intriguing — pinecone wreaths, cornhusk ornaments, rag dolls, cranberry garlands. I tried them all. Bookbinding was first. Our blue-collar neighbors and the young academics we socialized with thought such pursuits were unnecessary, even frivolous. Who cared about old-time-consuming arts when modern life made buying everything, including books, as easy as shopping? I cared, more than I thought I would at the start. And besides, look what shopping has done to us.

I remembered a phrase my high school French teacher used when we complained about his tedious assignments. Squaring his shoulders, he would quote dramatically from Voltaire’s 1736 poem “Le Mondain” — “Le superflu, chose tres necessaire.” The superfluous is very necessary. The trick is figuring out what is superfluous. None of us imagined paper books would become needless for many people before the next century was a decade old. Today, we are awash in e-readers, Nooks, Kindles, iPads and of course, phones. At the same time, scientists tell us the sun has entered a cycle of powerful flares and eruptions. They are catapulting to earth high-energy particles capable of wreaking havoc on electronic and communication systems that support our high-tech civilization. The result may be damaged transformers, orbiting satellites and global positioning systems.

While not catastrophic, temporary computer glitches are commonplace. We have all been inconvenienced in banks, medical offices and stores when clerks mournfully stare at blank screens and then at us, mumbling, “The network is down.” Temporary outages are one thing, satellite crashes another. The tangible may not be as relevant as the cloud, but as necessary. Over time, I grew more comfortable with roads I wouldn’t have chosen earlier in life. Change is inevitable. I began to see my goal of “traditional, warm, comfortable” in a new light. White wasn’t always cold. Traditional is not always desirable. Comfortable might be stagnation. Arts and crafts I undertook at the outset helped me navigate a tangible road. Willa Cather’s heroine started down a well-worn path. At the curve in the road, she saw her life in new ways. Turns out I was more like the girl in the Jules Breton painting she wrote about than I imagined. What is extraneous and what is essential changes depending on what kind of box we are in. Voltaire knew that. Now I know too.

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Part One ***ENERGY UNBRIDLED

Every child is an artist. The challenge is to remain an artist when you grow up. —Pablo Picasso

Draw. Decorate. Design. All were outside my sturdy middle-class school experience. In a curriculum where memorization and outlining were daily companions, art was an infrequent visitor… and never for a “serious” student. I was a serious student.

The Space Age began October 4, 1957, when the USSR launched Sputnik 1, the first Earth-orbiting satellite. In case we weren’t intimidated enough, that same year Soviets also tested the first ICBM, a self-propelled unmanned missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads. The country riveted its attention on the “space race”… a race that focused schools on “important subjects” — science, math, civics. There was little room for art. Americans were busy building concrete bomb shelters in their backyards while peering skyward, positive missiles would be raining down any minute. My classmate, Karen, had the nicest bunker in the city. We all wanted to be her friend. Lillian J. Rice Elementary School, where I began fifth grade that year, sits in the southwest corner of Chula Vista, then a sleepy town eight miles north of the Mexican border. Built in 1938, it had three single-story wings of self-contained classrooms clustered like dominoes at right angles to one another. At the far edge of the property squatted two rectangular portables, the same dusty color as the playground. On the first day of school, our new teacher, a slight, timid man who wore a dark wool suit that day and every day after (despite the hot Southern California fall weather), couldn’t get the noise level below deafening. As 3 o’clock approached, he made an announcement.

We were curious. The room fell silent. It is the singular quiet moment I recall. Longer recess? No homework? The suit should have tipped us off. The quiet disconcerted him. Twisting his hands like someone demonstrating the best way to use hand sanitizer, he told us art and music would be our “reward” at the end of each week. Why? Because we were “stuck” in one of the dilapidated temporary classrooms. Murmurs began to percolate as he rushed on. He explained he would bring symphonic music to play on the record player perched atop the dented gray file cabinet behind his desk. The clincher: while we listened, we could draw. We were unimpressed. We didn’t feel “stuck.” We liked our classroom. We liked being away from the “little kids.” We liked the playground right outside the door. We didn’t know what symphonies were and weren’t interested in finding out.

My classmate, Karen, had the nicest bunker in the city. We all wanted to be her friend.

Every Friday, Mr. Chang arrived, a large black vinyl record in a paper jacket tucked under his arm. Every Friday, chaos ensued. The boys drew insulting pictures on their construction paper, then tore them into tiny pieces for spit wad wars. The girls drew hearts and played “hangman.” Soon after Sputnik, art and music disappeared. By Christmas, the teacher disappeared as well after an unfortunate incident. He somehow ended up stuck in the ball box while we snaked around the room in a jerky conga line in time with a Beethoven overture. Art education was over.

I threw myself into a tracked curriculum dominated by words… lab manuals, grammar tomes, foreign language workbooks, anthologies. Seven years later, I found myself a freshman at Whittier College. Studying in the library one hot, smoggy afternoon, surrounded by piles of books and feeling the world was a huge, fragmented set of competing ideas, I longed to look at something besides lines of text. The bookstore was selling tiny books of famous art prints on a table by the checkout stand — 25 cents apiece. Without much thought, I bought one. Rummaging through my book bag, I plucked it out. On the cover, a red violin floated over the title: “Raoul Dufy—Music.”

Flipping through the 4-inch prints, a stray thought pushed toward the surface like a swimmer coming up from a deep dive. I realized both my education and my heart had been missing something. Something important. Artists and craftsmen look for the same unity beneath life’s disconcerting rumblings as do philosophers and writers. Different mediums. Similar goals.

I went back to the bookstore and bought one copy of every pamphlet on the table. I stood them side-by-side around the wide library carrel desktop like baseball players looking from the dugout toward the playing field. When I tired of unraveling philosophical arguments or slogging through Randall’s Making of the Modern Mind, the abstruse required text for the college’s two-year History of Western Civilization course, I would disappear into one of the miniature pictures. A door cracked open. I wandered through some of the world’s great paintings and handicrafts. Pausing often to study some captivating detail, I recognized although the works were wildly different, they had one thing in common. Artists work in multiple mediums — paint, marble, porcelain, wood, clay, fibers, photography, found objects, and more — because there are no words for what they want to convey. I spent two years at Whittier. The little art books were part of everyday. Towards the end of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, the heroine, Lucy, expresses her debt to old Mr. Emerson. “It was as if he had made her see the whole of everything at once.” I know now it is impossible to see the whole of even any one picture at once, let alone everything. But there was a single moment, long ago in the old wooden college library, where turning my eyes from the book before me to the art around me, I sensed for an instant that perhaps, just perhaps, everything might form a whole, at the edge of awareness in a place we seldom go. These days, I never look for missiles in the sky. I look instead at lights and shadows overhead, underfoot, all around. I look at my paint palette too. The colors start out separated, lined up in anticipation of some project. Soon the palette is messy — colors oozing into one another, unexpected different hues percolating out. More interesting. More exuberant. Wholeness. Waiting to be found. Once more.

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“To create a memorable design, you need to start with a thought that is worth remembering.”

—Thomas Manss

The small box, with its geometric inlaid light and dark pattern, was a gift from my father after one of his Navy deployments. When he pulled it from his duffel bag, I tried to hide my disappointment. It looked like a decorated wooden rectangle. I had been hoping for a Japanese doll, or maybe a jewelry box. “What could it be?” I wondered.

“It opens,” he smiled. “It’s a puzzle. See if you can solve it.”

After several days and many broad hints from Dad, I figured out by pushing and pulling the delicate wood design that the box unfolded to reveal a tiny drawer. It became the destination for treasures — delicate seashells, colored stones, jaunty acorn caps, shiny coins retrieved from couch cushions.

I grew older. The world grew more complicated, more strident, harder to understand. The box became a way of thinking about the challenges we all face on the other side of childhood—homemaking, parenting, shaping time beyond the ring of school bells. Most of my answers came from books. But not all of them.

Facing those challenges was like unlocking the box: frustrating, no instructions provided. Through a process of trial and error — touching, shaking, looking from different angles — I found the secret lever. One step led to the next. The box grew bigger. More appealing. More beautiful than its surface design suggested.

Life is the same. There are those who don’t consider crafts and porcelain painting art — dismissed as the product of technicians or “mere” illustrators. They are art — art for everyone, not just the wealthy or intellectual elite. Society thinks art needs intermediaries. It isn’t important if the public understands it. Even worse if they like it. Oscar Wilde captured the idea: “Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.”

My adventures with crafts and painting led me to an insight I might have otherwise missed. There are all kinds of stories to tell. Most use words, but some do not. The tools I chose and the projects woven through the decades have been simple ones. But in their ordinariness something happened. The dilemmas, disappointments, discoveries and often, the delights that have surprised me, have been easier to understand, as ideas that belonged to the arts became ideas for living.

Most of my answers came from books. But not all of them.

Beginning a craft project or opening my paint box feels like entering C.S. Lewis’s magic wardrobe. Other worlds appear. They are colorful places, teeming with possibilities. They are places where choices often lead to unanticipated outcomes — sometimes worse, more often better.

Alvin Toffler observed in “The Third Wave” that to create a fulfilling emotional life and sane emerging civilization for tomorrow, people need three basic requirements: community, structure and meaning. I disagree. It isn’t only the future that needs those things. We have always needed ways to transform life from a box with no exit, to a place where dreams and discoveries make living a deeper, richer, wider journey.

I was an unsuitable candidate for the kingdoms that make up art and design. Yet with no formal training at the outset, and no apparent aptitude, the time I have spent “thinking” with my hands — painting, printing, creating from scraps and castoffs — have sent shafts of light across countless murky hours.

Set against the backdrop of my decisions to explore old-fashioned crafts, and later, porcelain painting, the essays here are a tribute to my journey with art — its influence and its unexpected lessons.

There are lots of ways to open a box. Art is one.

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