SHER: Art Through the Eyes of Those Who Love It

By SHER HOROSKO
Cape Charles Wave

August 7, 2013

I came up in a world where everyone wanted to be like everyone else, which is to say, just the same.

It was a universe of perfect patterns: Carnation Instant Breakfast (always chocolate) for breakfast, Raymond and Glen throwing apples at me on my way home from school, a potato, some meat, and a vegetable at 5 p.m., a father who ate too fast and a mother who told him so every night without exception, religious school on Saturdays, church on Sundays, and best of all, hot rye bread from the Jewish bakery I devoured in the back seat of our white Galaxy.

It was an excruciatingly bland world for a little firecracker girl. I suffered it daily, and vowed to never acquiesce. For those who may be interested as to whether I succeeded at whistling my own sweet song: I did. And yes, I paid for it.

When I was growing up, art was something you hung from a six-penny nail tapped into a long tan wall. Art was a wall covering, really, that acted pretty much the same as a windbreaker on a Kansas prairie. It broke the wind and it broke the tan. It filled an empty space on a tan runway that stretched farther than my little eyes could see. That was art.

Last Saturday night I went to the IVir Danza performance at the Palace Theatre. There may have been 40 or 50 of us in that impossibly intimate jewel on Mason Avenue. Four men and four women from Italy danced on a stage in your yard. They moved like cougars and gazelles; their muscles pulsated with the blood thirst of the Kalahari. They went quiet, and turned into each other, like coils of smoke or butterflies finding each other through scent alone.

It is not often I wish I were young enough to start on a new course. I felt that on Saturday. And you will feel it too if you catch their last dance on August 16 at the Palace.

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Days before, Gertraud Fendler, a local sea glass artist, opened the door to the little theatre cave and flicked the lights on for me. I closed my eyes. It smelled like Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris and Les Miserables. It smelled like New York.

My eyes traced the lines of the stage, examined the walls and strained to see the ceiling. I pushed my hand in the red chair cushion.

I’m a city girl. I was stunned. In coming here, I expected cornfields and vegetable stands, waving and “thank you ma’am.” I expected life to be more kind.

I got a lot of it right. But I wasn’t expecting a vibrant art center in one of Virginia’s poorest counties.

Do you have any idea what you have here? And more is on the way.

Before siting down to write this, I visited with local artist Marty Burgess at his home in Capeville, and Ellen Moore, manager of the Stage Door Gallery, to discuss the upcoming Quick Draw. On Sunday morning (August 11) artists will set up their easels on the historic streets of Cape Charles and paint from 9 to noon. In the afternoon, kids with a spark of art-love inside them will paint, too.

You can walk around and drink up people doing what they love. You will see a place, tucked in a corner of your heart, at the end of a brush. At noon, you can open your wallets and take home a bit of the town you love so much.

If your life has too much tan in it, you can change it up right now. There are people on the Shore living lives of color. Are you one?

* * *

I glance across the yard at Marty’s painting-aprons drenched in sunlight and turn back to watch him dab his brush into the little mound of lemon on his oval-shaped board with his thumb poking through. Yes, I’m sure of it: You will not see a bit of tan — rather the sprays of bluebird feathers and zinnia petals, the curves of pecan leaves and old wood columns. You will see a place you love through the eyes of people who love it no less than you.

I am new here; I can say this: You do not live in a tan town. Fill your walls with the beauty of the Shore-world. And here’s a secret: what you are seeing, is you.

Sher Horosko’s commentary is an occasional Wednesday feature of the Wave. A recent transplant to the Eastern Shore, Sher writes on nature and spirituality at sherhoroskoblogdotcom.wordpress.com.