Strictly Speaking

Insights on My Art, Other Art or Anything (changes periodically)

On the Visual within Cather
written for the Fall 2017 Willa Cather Review | by Mary Linnea Vaughan

I was a slow reader when young. My parents worried as it effected my ability to learn. One summer day, my mother, an ardent literary person, began reading the novel Lucy Gayheart out loud to me. I started asking questions, eventually taking the hardback from her, not putting it down until I closed the last page. It shocked me and left me dumb-founded. Some things form us and change our lives. This book and what it conjured up in my early observation, put the idea of “artist” and what that might mean in front of me before the age of 13.

My life is about painting. I walk through the world, convinced what pays my bills, is secondary to the choice about how to live. Ironically, the more I work, instead of overthink the risks involved, the artistic process thrives, the paintings speak to people and meaning beyond the composition calls me onward like a kind of “obscure destiny.”

For me, Cather is a “picture-maker.” She is an unexpected visual artist with words. Her descriptions of land, the poignancy she can illustrate within a moment and the way she lights a scene with color, space, mood and even tactile texture, leave me astounded. Within the story is art that transcends the material. It is hard to define, but there, undeniably. The reader feels this as much as sees it.

Because Cather was deeply-rooted to the visual, it makes sense for the Willa Cather Foundation to collect and curate fine art. One might remember, if they dabble in research on this unusually driven personage, that Cather was intensely scrutinizing, so the bar is best set high, in terms of artistic goal and educating toward the full Cather experience. (I am imagining her ghost with a grumpy, bothered look if we fail or choose mediocrity.)

There was a time, I wanted to leave Nebraska for a more cultural hub to build my art life. Like many of Cather’s characters, the author dealt with her own love/hate relationship with the prairie. It turns out, notions of the artful have little to do with a particular place. One aspect of art begins as seedlings do, within the interior of the person and the exterior just serves to shape those tender and meaningful qualities related to creating.

The profound can be found in ones own backyard or in the nuances of any life, anywhere. Sensitivity looks to the less obvious instead of the thing shouting. Willa Cather’s gift is teaching us how to see. For Red Cloud, Nebraska to offer the country a glimpse into fine literature, alongside the woman who seems more Renaissance than Midwestern, is valuable for any serious maker of art. It encourages building a constructive life through aesthetics which often leads to the analytical as much as the visual. Reinforcing the Cather legacy with both the written word and her sensibility to fine art, civilizes. More than any form of expanding ones view of the broad world, art shapes awareness in a way few things can. The ordinary is the magnificent.

The truth is great art expands all things. It is the reason so many authors admired her and still do. I once sat by the aging Eudora Welty who came to Catherland when I was a child. She had an unusual face I recall, smiled at me and offered me a stick of gum. Why I Live at the P.O. would later amaze me and be read with resonating thrill. Others, may not be fans, but if you are not pulled in to Cather’s work, you are not getting the patience of form.

Join me in support of literature being many things we bring to the plate or the palette, seen and unseen. Like a promise that art lives in all of us, we are grateful to the fortitude of those who devote themselves to a passionate endeavor. Cather did this and so does the Foundation. I like to think we are all somehow within the painting by Millet, called The Angelus. Two field peasants hear the village bells and bow their heads for a brief interlude to abundance, but somehow also to labor and strife. Like the process of art itself, “the road is all”, not the destination, which ties in to the infinite movement and curiosity within the art of being fully human.

Mary Linnea Vaughan
September 2018