MEI SAVAGE BRADY

          BY ACCIDENT more than 3 years after I had written this post and had not publish it, I have now published it. It lingered in the written but not published. Awaiting a day when I opened THE ADVENTUROUS HEART by Ernst Junger where I had put a printed out version of this post.  Today I had taken down Junger's book as I had been reading in Blanchot's THE BOOK TO COME since in a new novel by Patrick Modiano he quotes a passage from Blanchot on Diary and Story where Junger's book was mentioned.

        To be arrogant: I learned about art by looking at it in galleries, in museums, in books, on walls of friends' houses, from gossip, from who knows where: just like Baudelaire I will claim.  

        I have never sat in art history classes which are nothing more than slide shows with an exam at the end testing your ability to ID pictures, worse than a police line up you could say.

       ... and so I have come to writing about John Wesley, Andy Warhol, Pati Hill Martin Rameriz, Michael Madore, Howard Finster, Jeff Adams... 

       So, I have come to the art of Mei Savage Brady: 

                                                                           (a detail)
photographed badly, framed badly yet given the ability now to present a picture captured by a cellphone I am willing to state these two pictures are Mei Savage Brady's claim to not be forgotten...

NOT TO BE FORGOTTEN

but most likely to be as she did not really scratch the earth beyond my rescuing these pictures, beyond the memory of an aging daughter and in turn two grand children who... but in the available sources all the soil fully necessary to fill in her grave out there again and again on Long Island but before I get to the burial---these paintings, water colour... as if bandages across a still leaking wound... she was almost guilt ridden sending them to be as they did not look at all like her other work: realistic, commercial, well- executed, entered into "juried shows", these abstractions of  a life that she did not lead, comfortable because of a successful husband (over-head garage doors, of all things, a nice guy..and she had unlimited money for materials, a grand studio, collection of books...and yet these pictures, send off to me, rolled up and never to be in handsome frames... how afflicted she was by classic allusions and then these bindings across the wound of her life--- that began as her family worked in a duck farm on Long Island and the language of Belorussia, not even Russian, but the overlooked center of both the whole of World War II and the Holocaust for good measure... but finally  these two pictures with the signature of the artist as a sort of talesman: this student of Philip Evergood, who at one time lived in Patchogue before burning to death in Connecticut--what  a fate for a teacher... but Mei was the only person I ever knew in Patchogue to describe herself as an artist but very quietly and she the mother of the girl who would have the mis-fortune to be my muse, Melinda, to be found looking into a locker on the second Floor of Patchogue High School in 1961-62--- so now you have the whole story, again... these corpse wrappings disguised as paintings...


The shovelfuls:           one

Mei Savage BradyNoted North Fork artist and sculptor Mei Savage Brady diedFriday,  Oct. 8, at her home in Mattituck. She was 78 years old.  Ms. Brady's works were exhibited widely on Long Island and in New York City over the past 50 years. She was honored for her work by the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, the Hecksher Museum in Huntington, Guild Hall in East Hampton, the East End Arts Council in Riverhead and the Smithtown Arts Council. Several of her pieces are in the permanent collection of the Islip Art Museum.  Muts. Brady was born Jan. 1, 1921, to Anthony and Mary (Choprowski) Savage in the hamlet of Brookhaven on one of Long Island's first duck farms. She graduated from Bellport High School in 1938 and studied painting and drawing in New York City in the early 1940s. In the 1950s, artist Philip Evergood of East Patchogue became her mentor. She painted throughout her adult life, and her most recent work currently is on exhibit at the Clayton & Libertore Gallery in Bridgehampton.  A spokesperson at the gallery described the Brady exhibit as a "new phase" of "semi-abstract" black and white paintings that had been completed since March of this year.  Ms. Brady also was an active environmentalist. She was instrumental in the founding of the North Fork Preservation Society in the late 1960s and, later, the creation of the North Fork Environmental Council.  A statement released by family members said: "All who knew and loved Mei Savage Brady will miss her endless energy, talent and generosity of spirit and mind."
Surviving are Ms. Brady's husband, Warren; her daughter, Melinda Munford Jaques of Water Mill; two sisters, Veronica Bergin of Westhampton and Helen Adams of Center Moriches; her brother, Benjamin Savage of Brookhaven; two granddaughters; and a stepgrandson. She was preceded in death by a brother, Frank Savage of Center Moriches.
A funeral mass was celebrated Monday morning at Our Lady of Good Counsel R.C. Church in Mattituck with Father Peter Allen officiating. Burial followed at Cutchogue Cemetery. Arrangements were made by the F.J. McLaughlin Funeral Home of Riverhead.


                                twoMei Brady painted and sculpted for sixty years. Her work is in permanent collection of Islip Art Museum, Long Island. She exhibited her work at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton; Hecksher Art Museum, Huntington;  and Guild Hall, East Hampton.   She received an award in a juried show by Henry Geldzahler, former Curator, American Art at Metropoitan Museum of Art in NYC.   Submitted by Melinda Jacques, who houses the collection of her mother.

                                three
Goddess of the Sound.  This is the weekend that Teima, goddess of Long Island Sound, will take to the seas. For the last five months Teima has been waiting to get her feet wet in the Mattituck studio of Mei Savage Brady, an artist. Ms. Brady created Teima, a figurehead, from a six-foot-long piece of bass wood  It was her husband, Warren's, idea that a figurehead was what his 43-foot Island Trader ketch Arabesque needed. "It's part of the lure of the sea," Mr. Brady said. So are mermaids, and figurehead carvers, it turned out, are just as elusive.

"My husband looked for three years," Ms. Brady said. "He couldn't find anyone to make the figurehead. So finally I decided to do it."  Ms. Brady has painted, sculptured and carved, so making a figurehead combined her talents, she said. And because she displayed her work in East End galleries, why not also on East End waterways? Five extra coats of varnish were the only concession she made to Teima's marine backdrop.  Teima, goddess of Long Island Sound -- "the name just came to me," Ms. Brady said -- appears as a young blond woman in a multicolored short skirt. "Most figureheads are just the bust of a woman," Ms. Brady said. She decided to give her husband the whole body. But with a bit of excitement.  The finished figurehead is bare-breasted. "I didn't intend it to be nude," Ms. Brady said. "I was working on the anatomy and I got so involved with it I thought it would be a shame to destroy it by covering it up."  Mr. Brady said that was just fine with him.

                               four

Art; SURPRISES AT PARRISH SHOW By HELEN A. HARRISON  Published: December 13, 1981...  to the consternation of some artists, no firstplace award was made. The juror, Dore Ashton, a well-known writer on modern art who is a professor of art history at Cooper Union, instead picked seven artists for special mention, and the museum has opted for a group exhibition of their work next fall.
Mei Savage Brady's ''Shut the Mountain Door'' is also powerful, but makes its impact with ambiguity, appearing to alternate between two and three dimensions and even seeming to radiate an inner light from beneath its Lucite surface.

                          REBUTTAL  

Fully accepting the verdict of disappearance while this person possessed of his eyes and his typing these sentences the ability to urge other eyes, other words remains for a moment, but for not that long as soon enough, soon enough

 

THE BULGARIAN PSYCHIATRIST (pages)

 

For many years I have been writing a book about four men I contained in a book NOTHING DOING.  These are some pages...

George has been drinking again and I have been listening to him in The Grass Roots.    One of those nights when no one we knew came it.  

It had been a long day with my patients.  I am old fashioned. They become part of my life even though I have them out there as I am supposed to.  But how to remain human, isn't that all anyone can ask for…

       Once one of them, even back in Bulgaria, you know who I mean, became human for a moment and said to me, very quickly as we walked near Sveta Nedelya : just leave, or maybe it would be better to catch it exactly: just go away, he said

This man didn't have to say anything more.  It was all he was capable of.  I had helped him with his son who was very sick.  I won't tell you who he was.  It doesn’t matter but I knew that he was speaking for them.  I had had helped some of them when they had no one else to turn to:  for some reason they understood that nothing else worked.

George is talking about Bulgaria, a Bulgaria that no longer exists and even then it did not exist or at least people did not see it or even know it might exist. 

I am still sometimes in Bulgaria.  You can not take a language out of the brain.  A new language does not replace the old language. Bulgaria under the communism:  people look at me when I say that:  none of that exists except in books.

But in my head, I want to say and I know they are holding back from saying: poor man. 

45

I should tell you--- like I told George--- about going into The Guardian office in London having come back from Sofia and trying to talk about the Freedom Village that was set up in front of the Communist Party building in the summer of 1990.  I did not know how to make it vivid to these English people.  They had a man in Bulgaria.  They did not want another voice.  One voice was enough and he had his two or three inches somewhere in the paper.  No one that summer, that hottest summer on record in England, wanted to know about a Freedom Village in Bulgaria. It sounded like an American resort filled with people waving Bibles and shotguns, Clare told me and everybody in England knew enough about Bulgaria.  I had known Clare for twenty years.  That didn’t help.  At all.  She thought I was making it up and I wasn't trained to look at things like their man in Bulgaria.

And George embarrassed me by saying, you understand this Bulgaria, all these Bulgarias, without speaking the language.  You are as powerless as all this implies and is understood.  No one in the West will care what you have to say.  No one in Bulgaria will understand what you are saying.

45

If they find you still in Bulgaria, this man was telling me, you would be sent to the psychotic ward, George was saying.  That is how I was to understand this man's words: just go away.    I understood what they meant:  just go away.  They didn’t need to say anything more.  If I did not understand what they were saying they had a place for me in one of their hospitals…

45

To try to understand driving across the Air Force range--- I should have looked carefully at the map, the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range--- with a road like a wire bisecting it on the way to Barstow---  this time--- and  George nudging aside the man in Ajo who I see walking into a diner in a small strip mall just outside… 

though George is going to talk about violent death also: torture, beatings, and how a man put on a dead man's clothes as if he always belonged in that clothing:  without the slightest twinge of guilt: something that is not in his or their vocabulary… but this man in Ajo… where has he gotten to?  

Can I pretend I knocked on the door where he was staying or can I write, his car was not there in the morning?  Probably on his way up to Phoenix and then to get the lead out as he had to be in Chloride before it got dark.  His wife was waiting for him and the child was going to need a lot of love, and he would curl his lip as if anyone knew what the phrase:  she will need a lot of love.

45

Forget the local colour, George is saying.  You are not some guy stuck in a pig hole in the countryside.  I want you to move me about in your mind.  I want not to be fixed like some dead bug tacked to an exhibit wall.  I was happy, every day I was happy to see the new buildings going up in New York--- do you remember where we lived in Brooklyn?  None of it is there anymore.   The landlord moved to Florida.  The building was torn down and no one knows what it looked like.  That is not something to mourn, at all.  A person can always go to Paris to see things that stay the way they were.  Every city is different.  People get confused when they try to criticize a city with the standards of another city.  It is a way to go crazy.  You have to see what is in front of your face, first.    You go crazy if you can not look and see what is really there…   never forget that.

45

So throw in the picture from that cemetery.  A moment before the plastic flowers get blown apart to become burial rubbish against the barbed wire fence.  Make sure you mention the birthday candles arranged in the earth but not lit.  To be lit by lightning, you can suppose…memorial rubbish for someone going to a shop, buying, carrying, leaving behind, blown away… idle sentimentality, poor man.

 You told me once of walking around in Dublin and wanting to almost cry because it was all so painful… to have admitted that is sufficient.  No one walks around in New York talking:  do you remember when… the city is a wonderful drug wiping itself clear and wipes away those thoughts from the people who find themselves living here.  And it’s something to be proud of, not scorned like some pretend.  When I go Upstate Katya's sister has a photo book of OLDE NEW YORK.  She bought it because she thought she would impress me with her new found interest in history.  I wanted to tell her what Ed said in the Grass Roots:  Francis Bacon liked old photographs of masses of people because all the people in the photographs were dead, now, and I am alive looking at them. 

45

While George did not know the novels of Gerhard Roth--- it is a permanent regret  we were not able to talk about them--- George did tell me he had read two books by Max Frisch:  Man in the Holocene and I'm not Stiller.   

He did not want to forget his German.  While no longer having a desire to go to Germany the language allowed him to think, he said.  Only if you know German could you know what I am trying to say.  It is not that German is better than English but English is the language of the streets, of this bar, of the television, the language my patients speak to me, the language my children use and which I talk to them in.  German is my other language.  The language took me out of Bulgaria even during the Communism.  I have told you all of that and even in East Germany the language, though damaged by the communism, could not have been hurt at its center which even resisted the Nazis contrary to what some would have you believe.  People do not lose everything and yet rebuilt everything if there is nothing at the center.  That is a mystery, George would say.  I wonder if everything was wiped out in the United States if it could all be re-built.  To think of the United States broken into pieces and then divided into two competing systems and then re-united!  Americans do not know what it is means to lose.  Bulgarians only know about loss and it is nothing to be proud of, nothing is gained from the experience.  Germany is different, in some way, and it drives some people crazy but they can't do anything about it.