By Erika Lally and Tug Yourgrau
Editor’s note: One in a series of posts showing work from The Art of Words exhibit, which ran in the gallery of Follow Your Art Community Studios in November 2021. For this collaborative exhibit, FYACS writers and artists in residence exchanged words and art, inspiring each other to create something new. Find out what happens when words and art come together.
Prompt
Margot
by Tug Yourgrau
In 1995, while visiting Brandeis University’s library, I come upon a book, Journeyman in Jerusalem: Memories and Letters,1933-1947 by Raphael Patai. I recognize the name. Thirty years earlier, at my mother’s urging, I had met Prof. Patai in New York. He was, she had said, “a great friend” in Palestine in the 1930s. Patai and I chatted only briefly, and I did not see him again.
Flipping through the pages, I come to a chapter, “Women in My Life”. Patai gives one of his lovers a pseudonym: “I shall call her Margot.” He encounters her first on a busy street in Jerusalem. She was “… slim, with a statuesque figure and noble head… . Her black hair, parted in the middle and pulled back … into a bun at the nape of her neck. … She had large, dark brown eyes, an aquiline nose, a broad mouth, arched lips.”
The description matches exactly a charcoal portrait of my mother drawn in Jerusalem in 1936.
There’s no question: “Margot” is my mother.
Patei introduces himself to Margot. They chat. “We made an appointment for the next day. I went home with a song in my heart.”
I put the book back. When I return home, I order a copy … and what I learn stuns me.
—an excerpt from the writer’s memoir-in-progress.
Response
Margot
by Erika Lally, mixed media collage
Prompt
Haunted Forest
by Erika Lally, mixed media collage
Response
Haunted Forest
by Tug Yourgrau
Stand back ten feet. Admire the symmetry and balance of the composition, the clear perspective, the rich autumnal colors. Notice the flat tongue of the plank path cut off abruptly.
Come closer. We’re in a forest, yes, but it feels like we’re trespassing. Into a dreamscape? Those two tall figures in the back — guardians of the place? Totems? Memorials? Mummies? The one of the right — a Druid? On the left, the memorial bust of a philosopher? Is that a wooden stump on the lower right? Or someone conversing with the Druid? That child on the left — offspring of the Druid?
And what of those strange yellowish decorations on the sides. Ah, dried lichens on bark. They stand out. What was the artist’s intent?
Finally, come within a foot or two. See how the artist has cut long, delicate grooves into the tree trunks and wooden path to give them an added dimension. Those black “rocks” placed on the planks? Surprise — they too were made by cuts. So much skill, so much craft, so much mystery. The artist has given us room to wonder, imagine and dream.
Tug Yourgrau is a TONY-nominated playwright. His work has been performed on Broadway, at major regional theaters in the US and in Australia. His reporting and opinion pieces have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, on NPR and on GBH TV. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker.
Erika Lally is a mixed media artist with a Masters in Art Therapy from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Her work can be viewed on her website at www.erikalallyfineart.com and on Instagram @erika.lally.art. “My art is mixed media and collage… My art explores the multiple layers of images and the interplay of the parts that make the whole.”
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