My parents were friends with Mark Tobey, Northwest artist, visionary,
and mystic whose work is held in major museums. One evening in 1959 after Tobey
had been at our house, I was struck how wise, how deep his thoughts were. (He
was approaching seventy—and I nineteen.) As a university freshman, I also felt wise. After all, I'd
learned to smoke cigarettes without coughing, hold my own in philosophical
conversations, and stay awake half the night cramming for an exam. That
particular evening it struck me how amazing it was that such a great and wise guru had been our guest—this
extraordinarily talented man sitting in our living-and dining-rooms, chatting away
with my family in the same relaxed way an ordinary neighbor might. The
difference was that his thoughts were
profound, his comments scintillating.
I was enthralled by every aspect of the man and wanted to remember his words—immortalize them. As soon as Tobey
departed, I began jotting down in a spiral notebook what I could remember of that evening’s conversation.
M. Tobey Self-portrait 1949 |
Four years ago I discovered those notes in an old box
stuffed with odds and ends, marked “Treasures.” Multiple sheets of notebook
paper were folded in the box, unopened since the very night I recorded them.
The notes are of a one-sided conversation only—Tobey’s—as he chatted with my
parents. Although my parents provided the other half of the dialogue, Tobey’s
musings were all I bothered to capture. After all, he was a great artist, wise
beyond others, while my parents were just ordinary people.
What follows in italics is exactly what I wrote at age
nineteen—words spoken by Tobey—but I’ve augmented a few words [in brackets] and added several
footnotes to help today’s readers make sense of them a half-century later.
Seafair: [1] I just stay away from
downtown [when it’s going on]. Miss Universe, Miss Washington, Miss South
Dakota, Miss Florida . . . [they] all look alike. Same smile, same crown on
their heads. Glamour is substituted for spirit. They have no spirit, so they
straighten their teeth, pluck their eyebrows, paint themselves with grease, and
there is glamor! They look—like the devil? No. They don’t look like the devil.
I’d like to imagine that the devil looks like something!
Sex: One thing about the twentieth century—we’ve
discovered sex, and “they” won’t let us forget it. Aren’t we wonderful! We’ve
discovered sex! Sex in soup, sex in . . . you name it, but don’t put sex in
abstract art! The critics don’t like it.
Fast-paced
modern times: I used to like to
go into Safeway about dusk. It was nice. Now I go, push a go-cart up the aisle
four times—then I ask where the coffee is. All you hear now is ‘ding, ding,
ding.’ People hurry. Why, you can’t even get to know your butcher now. Occasionally
an arm sticks out [from] behind [the] glass. We do all this so we have time to
live. We hurry in and out, but when do we live? We don’t know the butcher. When
do we live? Only humans make life—we can get as mechanized as possible, but
only humans make life. White Henry
Stuart Building[2]
[now has] automatic elevators—music comes on. What for? One street in Hong Kong
has more life than the whole of Broadway[3] because it is
completely human. Only humans make life.
Young
artists cannot grow when snatched
up in [their]youth—[I] don’t approve of early discovery of talent. ‘Debutante
[now], then wallflower. Now days, [there is] no young, exceptional talent that
hasn’t been “discovered.” Scouts all over—too many.
Urban
blight: Trees soften the hardness
of life—the only thing [that] rests your eyes downtown. [For instance, take
the] Pike Street Market[4]—every race, creed,
color, culture. Saturday – [I] took five Yale students there. Top part of their
trip. Never enough time. So many things to watch, to wonder at. Color of
vegetables and fruit seem to put everyone in a good mood. If you go, take lunch up to second
floor—see the whole sound. Beautiful view! Two blocks [away] at second and
Pike, what is there? Nothing. Nothing. Not a thing to look at . . . except the
trees in the front of the bank.
A few catalogs & books about Tobey |
Time changes perspective: a universal truth. That
very constancy stitches us together—whether we’re rich or poor, famous or unknown—into
a continuum of humanity. And what’s perceived as the decline of civilization
continues to be lamented by people on the downward curve of life as they mourn “the
good old days.” I still adore the work of Tobey and revere his genius, but now
that I’m older than he was when last we met, he seems less a deity to me and
more an ordinary mortal who happened to have extraordinary talent.
Copyright ©2018 by Sara J. Glerum
[1] Seafair is a Seattle
month-long summer festival
[2] A Seattle landmark in the first three-quarters of the 20th
century. Sited on Fourth Avenue and University Street, it was torn down in 1974
to make way for the home office of the then Rainier Bank (once an inverted pyramid design, the building is currently under complete redesign)
[3] A lively commercial street in Seattle’s
Capitol Hill district
[4] Currently referred to as
Pike Place Market