I saw the Tempest at the ART, jazzed up with magic tricks.
The best part, by far,  was when Prospero just stood alone 

on the darkened stage and spoke his immortal lines.

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors, 
As I foretold you, were all spirits and 
Are melted into air, into thin air: 
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, 
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve 
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep. "

Acis and Galatea

“Heart, the seat of soft delight,

Be thou now a fountain bright!”

One of the highlights of my career as an arts writer was the week I spent interviewing Mark Morris when he was in Boston preparing for his dazzling 1996 production of Gluck’s “Orfeo.” We talked about everything – life and love and art. He was so funny and charming, and yet so deeply serious about music. So I was thrilled to learn that he was back in town for “Acis and Galatea,” another mythical tale of love, loss, and metamorphosis.

There was much to enjoy in “Acis and Galatea,” especially the music, which was composed by Handel in 1718, re-orchestrated by Mozart in 1788, and beautifully performed by musicians from Handel and Haydn’s wonderful orchestra and their splendid Chorus. The story comes from Ovid, and the libretto is real poetry, written by John Gay, with help from Alexander Pope and Dryden’s translations of Ovid. The dancers were lovely, fluttering across the stage, as nymphs and swains frolicking in a forest glade, dappled with a pale green light.

Sadly, with "Acis and Galatea" Mark Morris seemed to be working against the music. Has he lost his faith in art?

Of the four soloist singers, only the jealous monster Polyphemus was given stage directions that added expression to his singing. The other soloists had to rush around the stage or gesture unconvincingly, while wearing the cruel and comic costumes that Isaac Mizrahi designed for them, in high contrast to the slim and lovely dancers swirling around them in flowing, diaphanous gowns. The dancing was beautiful, but purely decorative, on endless replay. Worst of all, the Chorus of singers, so central to the opera, was kept muffled and hidden in the orchestra pit; they were notes from the underground.

The opera is full of water imagery, written by Handel, the master of water music -- yet the stage was set in a forest; it’s landlocked. The story, the words, and the music, sing about transformation, yet the staging was both cluttered and strangely static.  Galatea sang her beautiful aria “The bubbling fountain, Lo! It flows!” standing completely still, while the dancers swirled around her, their gestures of grief in the final act no different from their gestures of joy in the first. The libretto repeats the word “flow” over and over again, but only the Chorus, concealed underground like the river that Acis becomes, conveyed a real sense of flow: the flow of the music, the flow of the water, the flow of the heart chakra opening into joy.

“Acis and Galatea” takes place in Sicily, in a mythical Arcadia. Galatea is a sea nymph, who loves Acis, a shepherd. After some back and forth, they sing a ravishing love duet (“The flocks shall leave the mountains/the woods the turtle doves/the nymphs shall leave the fountains/ere I forsake my love.”) But when Polyphemus, a giant one-eyed monster who wants Galatea for his own, sees them together, he flies into a jealous rage and hurls a huge rock from Mount Aetna at Acis.

This was the best choreography: Polyphemus sent a dancer as the rock he hurled at the lovers; she tumbled over the other dancers until she reached Acis. But the death of Acis, so poignant and powerful in the poetry and the music, was choreographed without passion, as a set change instead of a sea change. Only the Chorus, hidden underground, expressed the mournful moment: “Ah, the gentle Acis is no more!”

As the music moves from grief to mourning to consolation, the Chorus inspires Galatea to call upon her divine powers: “Cease, Galatea, cease to grieve!” She transforms Acis into a river god, a “gentle, murm’ring stream”, a river forever flowing, slowly, to the sea: “Heart, the seat of soft delight,/Be thou now a fountain bright!”


The tragic love of Acis and Galatea was a theme beloved of painters, and there’s an amazing 19th century sculpture of it in Paris in the Jardin du Luxembourg, showing the happy lovers intertwined, blissfully unaware of their cruel fate, as the raging giant lurks above them, about to strike.

In retrospect, I found it fascinating that Mark made Polyphemus the center of the production – the spurned gigantic lover who deliberately destroys something beautiful because he cannot have it for his own.

Polyphemus is certainly a comic character, but he is also a malevolent force, a snake in the garden, the shadow of death. “Et in arcadio ego,” as Virgil says: Death is present, even in our happiest hours.

Mark Morris was once the most beautiful of dancers – as Ovid tells us Galatea was the loveliest of nymphs. But it was not just his beautiful dancing; it was also his profound understanding of music that made Mark’s best work so brilliant. His “Dido” and “Orfeo” were meditations on the eternal themes of art and nature, tragedy and transfiguration, love and death. This is the first time I've ever seen him miss a step.

“Acis and Galatea” has gone through many metamorphoses since Handel first wrote what he called his “little opera” three hundred years ago. This production is travelling and there is still time for a change. Bring the chorus back onstage, where it belongs. Drape the soloists with the dignity they deserve. Listen to the music’s message of consolation through love and art.

Let it flow.

"Acis and Galatea" at the Shubert Theatre, Boston, May 15-18, 2014.
Mark Morris Dance Group with Handel and Haydn Society Period Instrument Orchestra and Chorus.

Jon and Jill

I was fortunate to be a friend of Jon Imber (1950-2014) both in Boston, where Jon and I moved in the same art world circles, and in Maine, where our family has lived every summer, first in Deer Isle and now across the Reach in Harborside.

Jon met the wonderful artist Jill Hoy in 1989 at the Stonington summer home of legendary painter/printmaker Karl Schrag. It was love at first sight and what Shakespeare (in Stonington) would call “a marriage of true minds.”

I often saw Jon and Jill painting together on Deer Isle with their twin easels set up in a field, by a pond, or near the sea. Jon had been a studio painter before he met Jill, but she encouraged him to go outside and paint what he saw. Even when he moved back into the studio, a few steps away from their house in Stonington, he set up his easel with a view of Jill’s garden, a fabulous multi-colored paradise of lilies, lupine, foxgloves, snapdragons, and wild roses.

Jon and Jill’s paintings changed the way I look at this beautiful landscape, too. Jon immortalized Stonington Harbor; Fifield Point; the Lily Pond; the Pink Lily Pond; the Causeway; the Deer Isle Bridge. Walking or driving around Deer Isle or Harborside, I would often say: “That’s a Jon”, or -- especially when the light was glimmering on the water -- “That’s a Jill.” Even after Jon moved indoors and started painting abstractly again, his work was filled with the spirit of the landscape, the sound of the sea.

In the Fall of 2012, Jon was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a progressive neurodegenerative disease, and began very rapidly to decline. His last summer in Maine, the whole community came together to help. Friends donated physical therapy, built ramps, drove and carried him, helped him figure out ways to keep on painting. Deer Isle artist Holley Mead organized a meal train to bring dinners for Jon and his family. I made soup.

I made soup from the vegetables in my own garden, with help from Four Season Farm, Tinderhearth, David’s Folly, Yellow Birch Farm, Little Island Oyster, and other local farms. Whenever I stopped by to buy supplies, my farmer friends would say, “Take a little extra for Jon.” The whole Peninsula was pulling for him.

Sometime that summer, as Jon was more and more confined to the house, he began painting portraits of family and friends and people who came by to help. And so many people came by to help! It was a great outpouring of love and art.

That summer, although he was more and more immobilized, and using only his left hand, Jon painted a hundred portraits. They were exhibited at Haystack in November, in a beautiful and moving show.

The same outpouring of love and art continued when Jon and Jill returned to their home in an artists’ building in Somerville, near Boston, for what was to be a long, hard winter. Their son, Gabriel, a sophomore at Bates College, took the semester off to stay home and help. Friends and family brought food and flowers. Helpers and healers came every day.

Jon continued to decline, and continued to paint, with the brushes strapped to his hands, helped by his amazing assistants, Chris Hassig and Adam Eddy, and often painting side by side with Jill.

He painted portraits, and he painted flowers. He had always loved the flowers in Jill’s garden; now he was painting flowers in a vase.

Even at the end, when he couldn’t use his hands, Jon found a way to paint with the brushes strapped to his head. In his last days, in Somerville, as the Spring bulbs were just beginning to arise, he was still painting amazingly beautiful pictures of an orchid plant. He was an inspiration.

(A version of this story appeared in the May 1 issue of Island Advantages of Stonington, Maine.)

Thanks to Four Season Farm, Tinder Hearth, Yellow Birch Farm, Little Island Oyster Co., David's Folly Farm.

Elegy for Jon 

1950-2014

I first met Jon Imber in 1975, when we were both working at the Fine Arts Library of Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. We were then young painters emerging from the dominant mode of abstraction and beginning to paint in images again -- to paint from reality, to paint from dreams.

It was a very exciting time in the art world, and we had many interesting conversations about art. It’s hard now for young artists to imagine what a grip abstraction had on the art world in the 70’s – almost all academic and museum art was geometric or color field – Harvard’s one contemporary art course was nicknamed “Spots and Dots.” But Jon and I were always interested in images, in poetry, in dreams. And we both loved Bob Dylan!

I remember how he devoured art books – big piles of picture books were always on his desk -- everything from Giotto to Etruscan sculpture to Courbet and Picasso. I remember how eloquently he spoke about finding a new way to paint – not just paint as paint, but paint as a way of expressing your whole complex emotional and intellectual inner life.

A few years later, we met again at the opening of “Boston Now” at the Institute of Contemporary Art. David Ross was the director and he was making the ICA, then still in the old firehouse on Boylston Street, the most exciting place to be. I was by then an art critic, and I was covering the show for Art New England. The theme of the show was Figuration, and he was one of the featured artists. His paintings were very much alive -- strange, wonderful self-portraits, dreamlike narratives – embodying everything he had talked about so eloquently in the library. A few years later, I did a radio piece for WBUR on his first show at Nielsen Gallery. He once told me that he carried the tape of that story in his pocket for years.

At the same time, in what seemed like another world, my husband, Paul, and I were spending a few weeks every summer in Deer Isle, Maine, renting a cottage or sharing a house with the poet Mark Rudman and his wife, Mady. After our son, Alexander, was born in 1983, we began spending our Deer Isle weeks at Goose Cove Lodge. There, we saw beautiful paintings by Jill Hoy. We loved her work, but never met her because she was always painting outside, en plein air. One summer, we all went to visit her gallery in Stonington, and a young woman told us, “Jill isn’t here today because she’s getting married to some guy from Boston called Jon Imber.” My two worlds – the Boston art world, and the summer in Maine world, had suddenly come together in a mystical marriage.

From then on, we often saw Jon and Jill, and later Gabriel too, in Boston and in Maine, at studio visits, openings, dance parties, all kinds of festivities. We often celebrated Rosh Ha Shana, Jewish New Year, together, either at our house in Cambridge or together with Missy Greene and Eric Ziner in their beautiful gallery in the barn at Yellow Birch Farm in Deer Isle, Maine. I loved visiting his studios in Somerville and Stonington and watching his painting change – the landscape years, the Jill’s garden years, the de Kooning years, the return to abstraction, the loosening up of the brushwork. Always the art books, the Bob Dylan songs, the interesting conversations.

At the end of the summer two years ago, at our Rosh Ha Shana celebration at Yellow Birch Farm, Jon announced that he had been diagnosed with ALS. He had not been feeling well all summer, back and forth to doctors in Boston, and now this. Life began very rapidly to change.

Sometime last summer, as he was more and more confined to the house, he began painting the portraits of family and friends and people who came by to help. And so many people came by to help, to show love and support, first in Maine and then in Somerville! It was the beginning of a great outpouring of love and art, an amazing drive to continue to do what he had always wanted to do, and to be what he really always was. Just as when I first met him so many years ago, he was finding a new way to paint, a new way to use painting to express his whole complex emotional and intellectual inner life.

When I went to have my portrait painted in the studio in Somerville, Jon and Jill sat together side-by-side, painting, looking like an Egyptian sculpture of a king and queen on a double throne. He was helped up and down, with the brushes strapped to his hands. I was facing the wall with all the other portraits, and was suddenly reminded of Manet’s last paintings of flowers – the juiciness of the paint, the petals unfolding and falling, the squiggly stems seen through the glass bowls. Or, as Bob Dylan sang it, “vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme.”

Later, I began to think of all those portraits as a procession of friends coming with him on his last journey. I am honored to have been part of that procession.

This was published in the June issue of Maine Home + Design.