Expanding into the infinite: “Star Gazer” by Agnes Pelton

On transcending our finitude

Hello friend,

This past Monday, I drove north to Dixon to help bury a dear friend. The hour and half ride gave me plenty of quietude to reflect on Andrea. Though we had only met a couple of years ago, I had immediately felt a deep connection to her. Our conversations were always filled with light and joy, even as we wrestled with the “big questions” about being human. When you were with her, she was completely present.

Andrea’s shining eyes, her curiosity, her thoughtfulness…where have they all gone? I wondered. Mile after mile under a bright summer sun, I rode through the rolling badlands, through Española, through the winding road that hugs the Rio Grande, wondering.

When I arrived, a group of Andrea’s friends had already joined her partner Cindy around the open gravesite. It was a green burial, so Andrea’s body was wrapped in a blue-patterned shroud and laid at the bottom of the grave. As people spoke, they threw in handfuls of flowers until she was nearly covered in a patchwork of reds, fuschias, purples, oranges, yellows, and greens. I contributed a bouquet of sunflowers from my garden—last year only a single stalk of flowers, this year an effusive bush standing taller than me.

When the last word was spoken and the last poem read, we took turns returning the great mound of excavated earth back to its home, now home to Andrea’s body. Each shovel of dirt landed so softly, it sounded like a caress. After a little while, Cindy said, “Look,” pointing to the sky, “there she is.” The shoveling stopped and everyone gazed upward. At first I didn’t know what she was looking at, the sky was so fiercely blue it seemed to swallow anything that dared cross it. Then a hawk appeared high above us. Its great white-tipped wings stretched out as it slowly encircled us.

The thing you should know about Andrea is that she so loved this world. She loved her partner, she loved her friends, and she loved the abundance the natural world offers us. She was an expert in aromatherapy, a teacher, an author, a mentor, an entrepreneur, and so much more. Her generosity of spirit reflected the generosity of Mother Nature. (Indeed, I couldn’t have started this newsletter without her and Cindy's invaluable advice and kind support.)

In honor of Andrea’s beautiful, vibrant life, this week I’m drawing inspiration from Agnes Pelton’s “Star Gazer.” Like my friend, Pelton’s work fills me with wonder and gratitude.

As sad as I am that I won’t get to spend another afternoon with Andrea on her portal, simply being with each other in generative conversation, death also offers a profound pause to the busy-ness of our mundane lives. In that stillness, the true things arise fiercely: love, connection, the welcoming earth, and a hawk flying free.

May it be,

xxKatarina

If you’d like to know more about Andrea Butje, you can find her books here, and you can read about the Aromahead Institute she and her partner Cindy Black founded. This loving tribute to her (and the beautiful comments) will also give you a sense of what a truly extraordinary and caring person Andrea was. I’m also making this week’s newsletter available to all out of deep gratitude for our friendship.

In case you missed it:

Invitation 24: “Untitled XIX, 1984" by Willem de Kooning

Invitation 25: “Madonna with Canon Joris van der Paele” by Jan van Eyck

Invitation 26: “Les Grisailles” by Brigitte Simon

Invitation 27: “Bad Habits” by Cecile Chong (public post)

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Invitation 28: "Star Gazer" by Agnes Pelton

“Star Gazer,” oil on canvas, 30 × 16” (76 x 40.6cm), 1929.

In thinking about this week’s invitation, I kept coming back to “Star Gazer” by Agnes Pelton (1881-1961). Maybe because her palette reminds me of our Santa Fe sunsets, when the sun has dipped beyond the mountains and land and sky smolder in response. Maybe because my friend Andrea wore turquoise earrings the same hue as the translucent green vessel arising out of the deep maroon and purple landscape. Maybe because the “star gazer”—the lone, bud-like shape—could be any one of us staring into the cosmos, looking for guidance or simply out of wonder.

The painting’s long and skinny proportions heighten the skyward tension, as does the bud, painted so delicately that the blush pink appears backlit. It points unwaveringly at the single white star directly above it. Its gaze is like a finger pointing to some truth, but what that truth is, Pelton refrains from providing any answer. As she wrote, “The people to whom [my paintings] appeal will find their own interpretations.”

Pelton lived a self-described melancholy childhood. A scandalous affair between her married grandmother and the pastor and social reformer Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Harriett Beecher Stowe) had torn the family apart. Pelton’s mother was sent to Germany where she eventually married the profligate William Pelton. He likely died of a morphine overdose when Pelton was nine, and her mother took in boarders and taught music lessons to pay the bills. Eventually they moved to New York City where Pelton began studying at the Pratt Institute.

As an adult, perhaps because of her childhood experiences, she leaned towards a more solitary, introspective life. Deeply interested in Theosophy and Agni Yoga, Pelton portrays luminous, esoteric worlds in her paintings. As she wrote about her early abstractions, “Light is the keynote of these pictures. Not as it plays on objects in the natural world, but through the space and forms, seen on the inner field of vision.”

Her painting eventually caught the eye of several New Mexico painters who would soon form the Transcendentalist Painting Group. Founded in 1938 (and dissolved in 1942 at the beginning of WWII), its mission, according to their manifesto, was "to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual.” Pelton, whose work was clearly aligned with this aim, was named honorary president, despite living in the California desert.

I love how this reclusive woman painted vast vistas of some inner, expansive world. Viewing “Star Gazer,” or any of Pelton’s work, can feel equally expansive. First, there’s the pure pleasure of the light, the colors, and the forms, then there’s how they sink into the emotional body. Pelton asks us to receive her work not through our intellect nor through any philosophical construct, but instead with a receptivity for the mysterious—that unnameable life force that pulses within each of us and throughout the natural world, radiating out into the universe. The upward pull of energy in “Star Gazer” suggests that somehow our consciousness, our love, our connection can expand much further than our individual finitude, into a vast realm beyond. This is my dearest hope for Andrea, for you, and for me.

This week’s invitation:

When you look to the heavens, what are you searching for and what shines back to you? Take a few minutes to write your thoughts or turn them into some other form of expression. I invite you to share what came up for you in the comments section as a way for us all to be together.

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