Several hundred miles and a few days of visiting with family later, I am finally, blessedly, alone. It took days to get myself settled into the casita I rented in Santa Fe but I have felt wonderfully at peace being here in this place… as if I have both started my life over and at the same time returned to my roots. Santa Fe and I go a long way back. I spent summers here as a teenager, actually from about age ten on, because my grandparents lived here and are now buried here. My Mother always wanted to live in Santa Fe but was frightened off by the lousy reputation of the hospital here . So she tried to content herself with living in Albuquerque instead, and visited here often. I, in turn, visited her often for as long as she lived in Albuquerque. When I met my husband I brought him here, just a few months after we had met. When our daughter went to summer camp we found a camp for here, which worked out very well for all of us. And when my mother died, I brought here ashes here, because I knew this is where she would want to be. Everywhere I look in Santa Fe I have great memories and I see myself, my grandmother, my aunt and my mother sitting together laughing, or my husband and I in our early years, or our daughter discovering this same magical place that has always been home to me (though I have never actually lived here). It is a place of the best of my memories and roots as well of the place of my greatest artistic inspiration.
Art also runs deep in my life and my background. My grandmother owned a small gallery in New York before she and my grandfather retired to Santa Fe. My mother was art editor of Time, Life and Fortune magazine for so several years and was also an artist in her own right. As a child I often stayed with the painter Stella Pearlmutter in Saint Louis. I loved watching her paint, cigerette dangling fro her mouth, while at the same time she counseled a steady stream of friends as well as cooking a meal for a dinner party. She was a one-woman ringmaster. I had an art minor in college but oddly, given my mothers background, my parents wanted met to find a degree in something “more practical” (as in leading to a job) and so I majored in psychology instead. I married an artist, who manages to make very good living designing for the entertainment industry. And though I very much enjoyed my years as a psychotherapist it is not at all surprising to me that my hunger for producing my own art (as opposed to just thinking about my own art) has become profound. Every visit here over the years I have wished I could actually MAKE art…not just view art. I would get so excited by what I saw, keep loads of notes, and then reluctantly go home only to instantly get so caught up in my everyday life that by the time I got to my art the inspiration of my trip seemed like a dimmed memory. Last year, when we brought my mother’s ashes here, my daughter pointed out a sign for me on Canyon Rd., where an artist was offering painting lessons. After speaking with the artist, Judy Poldi, who was offering the lessons, I decided to stay on in Santa Fe and extra week on my own and do several days of painting with her. It was a perfect counterpoint to the sadness of my mom’s passing and something she would have loved to have done herself.
Now, some eighteen moths later, I am here for a bit more than a month, finally giving to myself that which I have craved so long. It has been hard to give this to myself, to justify the money, the time and the (omg) leaving my husband on his own for five whole weeks. Thinking back now I can see this creative crises or breaking point, this “do or die” moment coming at me like a locomotive headlong for years. But also nothing short of the premonition of the head-on crash would have to overcome my guilt and fears and moved me to make this happen.