spending the afternoon with the world-class artist Michele Oka Doner

At the meal following the YoungArts gala, I had the privilege of being seated near Michele Oka Doner, the renowned sculptor, jewelry maker, fashionista, space maker.  Her work can be seen at MOMA, the Louvre, the Cooper-Hewitt, and the FIU-Wolfsonian, where a mural painted by my great uncle Lloyd Morgan, an architectural designer in the firm of Schultze and Weaver, is hung (below).  Michele's art can be experienced in retail stores (Tiffany's, say, or Macy's, or Fifty One East, the luxury superstore in Doha, Qatar), in public sculpture gardens, in the Herald Square Subway Station of New York City, and at the Miami International Airport, where she created a nearly mile-long floor of dark terrazzo celestial sea forms in bronze and mother of pearl. 

Actually, I'm just scratching the surface here.  Michele's work is everywhere.

I'll be joining Michele as one of her new pieces gets cast, and I'll be writing about the experience for the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

This is how fate takes us.  This is the experience we lean toward.

My great uncle Lloyd Morgan, a visionary architect, painted this imaginary skyline of the many buildings he helped design as a member of the Schulze and Weaver design team—the Pierre, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Sherry-Netherland, the Miami Biltmore, the Breakers—and hung the painting in his Tarrytown, NY, home throughout the years when we visited him as a family.  After he passed away, the painting was adopted by my father, who ultimately had it restored and shipped to the FIU-Wolfsonian.  I was able to reconnect with the painting for the first time two weeks ago, when I visited the quite beautiful Wolfsonian during my experience at YoungArts.

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Family Portrait

My cousin Libby gave my brother the gift of family photographs years ago—slides, mostly, taken by my father's father, which my brother systematically recovered and scanned. This is the mystery photo in the bunch. My father's father and mother to the left. My Uncle Lloyd (architect of the Waldorf Astoria and other grand buildings) and Aunt Anne beside them. The gorgeous Marilyn Monroe-like creature and the woman behind her (we don't know who they are).

And then the child—dressed so finely in blue silk and turned-up sleeves and determined to sour the family pose. I wonder who she is. I wonder if she recalls the moment, or would, were she to find this picture here.

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Nothing but Ghosts and the Lost Painting

A few weeks ago the entirely delightful Kelsey Boeckermann invited me to tell the story behind the making of the Nothing but Ghosts cover. Is it all right, I emailed back, if much of the process went on beyond closed doors—and if I had nothing to do with the outcome, save for holding my breath until the official unveiling and thanking my editor and cover designer to great excess in the aftermath?

Sure, Kelsey said, and thank goodness. Because that, in this case, is the absolute truth: Nothing but Ghosts, the cover, is the gift that I was given by two people who worked extremely hard on its behalf. Jill Santopolo, my editor, has appeared on this blog many times before—never gratuitously, always and only because she makes my writing life an infinitely richer one. Carla Weise has had her moments here as well; who wouldn't appreciate an art director who goes the distance for an author she has never even met? (Though I'm coming, Carla, and I'm going to find you.)

Like all my work—the memoirs, the poems, the autobiography of the river, the corporate fable, the young adult novels—Nothing but Ghosts is populated by the known, the actual. In this case, a version of Chanticleer garden, also the subject of my fifth memoir, forms a fictionalized backdrop. Katie, my narrator, is living through loss, something I have had to learn to do as well. And then there's this painting that Katie's father is restoring—scenes inspired by the restoration of the inherited family painting shown above.

In the novel, the painting is similarly strangely skied and time obscured. In real life, the painting was the work of my great uncle, Lloyd Morgan, who designed the Waldorf Astoria, the Pierre, the Boca Raton, and so many other indelible monuments to another time. Years ago, Lloyd Morgan also painted each of his buildings into this single skyscape; when he passed away, the 16 foot x 4 foot canvas was entrusted to my father. Under my father's direction and by the talents of two art restorers, the canvas (once referred to as "the lost painting" in architectural magazines) was brought back to life and now hangs in the Wolfsonian Gallery at Florida International University.

In any case, Kelsey's blogged the Nothing but Ghosts cover story today. Spend some time with her, on her site.

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Architectural Narratives

And so I made it (at last) to the Big Apple, and to the Waldorf Astoria, where this photograph was taken this past Friday night.

I've written previously about this grand hotel and the man, my great uncle Lloyd Morgan, who designed it. This time, as I walked through the lobbies and stood in a ballroom and photographed clocks, mosaics, fireplace mantels, I was thinking about the narrative that good architecture always is, the stories that my great uncle left behind. The stories that are possible because of spaces he created—secret stairwells, rounded balconies, processional-sized hallways. Clothes dress us. Architecture moves us through itself. A man long gone is still and always provoking the possible and untested.

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Photograph of a Lost Painting

Today I paid homage, one last time, to an oil painting that has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. It's too long to be photographed well, and the lighting was wrong, but here it is, just the same, Buildings Designed by Schulze and Weaver Architects, 1921-1936. The artist was my great uncle, Lloyd Morgan, and the primary buildings, left to right, are the Hotel Pierre, the Waldorf-Astoria, and the Sherry-Netherland; the Boca Ratan sits at the feet of the Astoria. My great uncle was the principal designer of them all.

My brother, sister, and I grew up visiting our great uncle's Tarryton, NY, home, and this was the painting that hung on the one, proud livingroom wall. It was his life work, a single cityscape risen against a red-brown sky, and after he passed away, the painting was sent to us, where it resided, first, in my father's corporate office, and, later, in our family basement. None of our walls were ever big enough to hold it.

Next week, following a massive restoration process, the painting gets shipped to the Wolfsonian—Florida International University, a museum that has long been collecting our great uncle's things and had (but we never knew it) been in search of this painting. In a retrospective issue, The American Hotel named it the Lost Painting. It isn't lost anymore.

Once, in a book called STILL LOVE IN STRANGE PLACES, I said that words are the weights that hold our histories in place.

Today, saying goodbye to this family heirloom, I thought of how paintings serve that function, too.

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