Culture:

Wendy Tremayne’s painting, like Athena, born fully grown

by Kathleen Sloan | November 16, 2019
4 min read

Wendy Tremayne has been a conceptual artist since her 20s, but she stopped herself from painting—which she has always longed for—saving it until her 50th birthday, calling her self-imposed prohibition “the rule.”“I wanted to save something for later, when my body couldn’t take as much. My conceptual art was very physically demanding. I always wanted to paint. I felt it would be something utterly fresh and had the potential to be a battery, with stored energy and magnetism for my later years.”

Tremayne speaks of her art in spiritual terms, steeped as she is in Sufism since her 20s, but just looking at the paintings aesthetically, without the spiritual narrative, they are astonishingly well composed for someone painting for two years.

She dove right into oils at the suggestion of David Barnett, a local brilliant oil painter who encouraged her. She surprised herself and Barnett by becoming something of a portrait painter. “I paint faces I fall in love with,” she said.

The faces are facets of a collective soul. She discovers the story the beloved is trying to reveal as she builds the painting. “I look up and I’ve been painting for nine hours. That’s a meditative state. All art is channeling. I try to get out of the way,” Tremayne said. “I’m trying not to be the one painting and let what’s trying to come out come through.”

Tremayne believes women are closer to nature, carrying the power of birth within them. “I feel as if I am always operating as a gateway between nature and humanity,” Tremayne said.

“My Sufi tradition’s keynote is nature,” Tremayne said. “We say that nature is the truest book because it needs no liaison to read it. As part of nature knowledge is right there, we simply need to tune ourselves to see it.”

This is the meaning of her painting “The Sufi,” a young woman who is inherently equipped to be a wise woman, being part of nature. Tremayne dressed her “in a cloak of light,” with books at her feet and placed her in the woods.

The painting “A. Billi Free,” is a portrait of a real person of that name, a hip-hop artist who lives in Deming, also an extraordinary being. “I fell in love with her face,” Tremayne said. “She’s cosmic and vibrant.”

“Neither Neither” revolves around a figure with another face Tremayne fell in love with that she found online. She’s actually a stand-in for Tremayne, who recently discovered her connective tissue is not the norm, making her highly elastic, but also prone to injury if she pushes her body too far. The woman is interwoven with the trees, symbolizing her connection to nature and her connective tissue. The red bird is her higher self, interweaving her spirit like a ribbon through nature. The fox “is Father Time, who is totally bored” with Tremayne’s disappointment and worry over discovering her physical limits. The lesson the fox imparts is, “Whatever will be is meant to be,” Tremayne said.

The three paintings all depend on patterning and a shallow push-pull space between fore-, middle- and background for their dynamic composition.

The flesh tones in the bodies and faces come to the fore, their detailed modeling making them still focal points, the North Star in the painting’s revolving universe.

The faceted cloak on “The Sufi,” the faceted earth around “A. Billi Free,” and the aspen-like trees with chips of color in “Neither Neither” set up a pulsating middle-ground.

The grayed wood in “The Sufi,” the soft sky in “A. Billi Free,” and the soft mountains and sky in “Neither Neither” act as a shallow background, moving like fog.

Compare Tremayne’s dynamic spatial compositions to Paul Gauguin’s “Noa Noa,” and you can see the similarity in the glorious color palettes. The use of pattern is also similar, which evokes a mysterious, dreamy space. The modeled flesh in both contrasts with the high color and arrests the eye, creating focal points. But Gauguin’s painting doesn’t have the same heightened contrast between fore-, middle- and background. In particular there is no pulsating middle space.

Compare Tremayne’s work to medieval painter Robert Campin’s “Merode Altarpeice.” The modeled flesh again arrests our eye, creating focal points, and the Virgin’s face is indeed one to fall in love with. The angular drapery, brightly colored, is similar to Tremayne’s faceted middle ground, and creates a flattish pattern that competes with the dun-colored walls and smoky view out the window. This middle space has some of Tremayne’s dynamism.

In this comparison with masters, you can see how sophisticated and unique Tremayne’s spatial relationships are, and how well they convey her mysterious narratives. It’s hard to believe she’s been painting only two years. It proves her battery was charging mightily during her imposed abstention.

Tremayne is showing at the Desert Archaic art gallery at 324 Broadway in Truth or Consequences. The show will be up until Dec. 13 and may be extended until Jan. 10.

 

author
Kathleen Sloan is the Sun’s founder and chief reporter. She can be reached at kathleen.sloan@gmail.com or 575-297-4146.
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Understanding New Mexico's proposed new social studies standards for K-12 students

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
—National Council for the Social Studies 

Reader Michael L. Hayes of Las Cruces commented: What impresses me is that both the proposed standards and some of the criticisms of them are equally grotesque. I make this bold statement on the basis of my experience as a peripatetic high school and college English teacher for 45 years in many states with many students differing in race, religion, gender and socioeconomic background, and as a civic activist (PTA) in public education (My career, however, was as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy and the environment.)

The proposed social studies standards are conceptually and instructionally flawed. For starters, a “performance standard” is not a standard at all; it is a task. Asking someone to explain something is not unlike asking someone to water the lawn. Nothing measures the performance, but without a measure, there is no standard. The teacher’s subjective judgment will be all that matters, and almost anything will count as satisfying a “performance standard,” even just trying. Students will be left to wonder “what is on the teacher’s mind?” or “have I sucked up enough.”

Four other quick criticisms of the performance standards. One, they are nearly unintelligible because they are written in jargon. PED’s use of jargon in a document intended for the public is worrisome. Bureaucrats often use jargon to confuse or conceal something uninformed, wrong or unworthy. As a result, most parents, some school board members and more than a few teachers do not understand them.

Two, the performance standards are so vague that they fail to define the education which teachers are supposed to teach, students are supposed to learn, and parents are supposed to understand. PED does not define words like “explain” or “describe” so that teachers can apply “standards” consistently and fairly. The standards do not indicate what teachers are supposed to know in order to teach or specify what students are supposed to learn. Supervisors cannot know whether teachers are teaching social studies well or poorly. The standards are so vague that the public, especially parents or guardians, cannot know the content of public education.

Three, many performance standards are simply unrealistic, especially at grade level. Under “Ethnic, Cultural and Identity Performance Standards”; then under “Diversity and Identity”; then under “Kindergarten,” one such standard is: “Identify how their family does things both the same as and different from how other people do things.” Do six-year-olds know how other people do things? Do they know whether these things are relevant to diversity and identity? Or another standard: “Describe their family history, culture, and past to current contributions of people in their main identity groups.” (A proficient writer would have hyphenated the compound adjective to avoid confusing the reader.) Do six-year-olds know so much about these things in relation to their “identity group”? Since teachers obviously do not teach them about these other people and have not taught them about these groups, why are these and similar items in the curriculum; or do teachers assign them to go home and collect this information?

Point four follows from “three”; some information relevant to some performance measures requires a disclosure of personal or family matters. The younger the students, the easier it is for teachers to invade their privacy and not only their privacy, but also the privacy of their parents or guardians, or neighbors, who may never be aware of these disclosures or not become aware of them until afterward. PED has no right to design a curriculum which requires teachers to ask students for information about themselves, parents or guardians, or neighbors, or puts teachers on the spot if the disclosures reveal criminal conduct. (Bill says Jeff’s father plays games in bed with his daughter. Lila says Angelo’s mother gives herself shots in the arm.) Since teacher-student communications have no legal protection to ensure privacy, those disclosures may become public accidentally or deliberately. The effect of these proposal standards is to turn New Mexico schools and teachers into investigative agents of the state and students into little informants or spies.

This PED proposal for social studies standards is a travesty of education despite its appeals to purportedly enlightened principles. It constitutes a clear and present danger to individual liberty and civil liberties. It should be repudiated; its development, investigated; its PED perpetrators, dismissed. No state curriculum should encourage or require the disclosure of private personal information.

I am equally outraged by the comments of some of T or C’s school board members: Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup, two white Christian women, who belong to one of the larger minorities in America and assume white and Christian privileges. In different terms but for essentially the same reason, both oppose an education which includes lessons about historical events and trends, and social movements and developments, of other minorities. They object to the proposal for the new social studies standards because of its emphasis on individual and group identities not white or Christian. I am not going to reply with specific objections; they are too numerous and too pointed.

Ms. LaFont urges: “It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans. It’s not good to differentiate.” Ms. Stroup adds: “Our country is not a racist country. We have to teach to respect each other. We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination. We need to teach civics, love and respect. We need to teach how to be color blind.”

Their desires for unity and homogeneity, and for mutual respect, are a contradiction and an impossibility. Aside from a shared citizenship, which implies acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law and equality under the law, little else defines Americans. We are additionally defined by our race, religion, national origin, etc. So mutual respect requires individuals to respect others different from themselves. Disrespect desires blacks, Jews or Palestinians to assimilate or to suppress or conceal racial, religious or national origin aspects of their identity. The only people who want erasure of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-American origin aspects of identity are bigots. Ms. LaFont and Ms. Stroud want standards which, by stressing similarities and eliding differences, desire the erasure of such aspects. What they want will result in a social studies curriculum that enables white, Christian, native-born children to grow up to be bigots and all others to be their victims. This would be the academic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

H.E.L.P.

This postmortem of a case involving a 75-year-old women who went missing from her home in Hillsboro last September sheds light on the bounds of law enforcement’s capacity to respond, especially in large rural jurisdictions such as Sierra County, and underscores the critical role the public, as well as concerned family and friends, can play in assisting a missing person’s search.

Reader Jane Debrott of Hillsboro commented: Thank you for your article on the tragic loss of Betsey. I am a resident of Hillsboro, a friend of Rick and Betsey, and a member of H.E.L.P. The thing that most distresses me now, is the emphasis on Rick’s mis-naming of the color of their car. I fear that this fact will cause Rick to feel that if he had only gotten the facts right, Betsey may have been rescued before it was too late. The incident was a series of unavoidable events, out of everyone’s control, and we will never know what place the correct color of her car may have had in the outcome. It breaks my heart to think that Rick has had one more thing added to his “what ifs” concerning this incident.

Diana Tittle responded: Dear Jane, the Sun undertook this investigation at the request of a Hillsboro resident concerned about the town’s inability to mount a prompt, coordinated response to the disappearance of a neighbor. From the beginning, I shared your concern about how our findings might affect Betsy’s family and friends. After I completed my research and began writing, I weighed each detail I eventually chose to include against my desire to cause no pain and the public’s right to know about the strengths and limitations of law enforcement’s response and the public’s need to know about how to be of meaningful assistance.

There was information I withheld about the state police investigation and the recovery. But I decided to include the issue of the car’s color because the individuals who spotted Betsy’s car emphasized how its color had been key to their identification of it as the vehicle described in Betsy’s Silver Alert. Because the misinformation was corrected within a couple of hours, I also included in this story the following editorial comment meant to put the error in perspective: “The fact that law enforcement throughout the state was on the lookout in the crucial early hours after Betsy’s disappearance for an elderly woman driving a “light blue” instead of a “silver” Accord would, in retrospect, likely not have changed the outcome of the search” [emphasis added].

I would also point to the story’s overarching conclusion about the inadvisability of assigning blame for what happened: “In this case, a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, many of them beyond human control, hindered the search that it would fall to Hamilton’s department to lead.”

It is my hope that any pain caused by my reporting will eventually be outweighed by its contribution to a better community understanding of what it will take in the future to mount a successful missing person’s search in rural Sierra County.

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