David visited from London at the end of the summer, 2017. A large storm brewed off sea. It didn’t affect our weather, but churned up violent waves and such high tides that we had no beach, which forced its closure. We went over, just to look at the odd sight.

So we trundled over to the lap pool at our club. We’d never sat there before, but it was pleasant. We swam, then sat in the lounge chairs with our reading material. I leafed through “Vineyard Magazine” and came across an ad for a gallery we enjoy: The Granary Gallery. The painting in the background was a night scene, moody, beautiful. The interiors eminated glowing light. This is Jeanne Staples’ hallmark. We were intrigued. Off to the left was a favorite restaurant on the bottom, our club on top. In the forefront was the building used to weigh in the fish caught each day during the annual MV Derby competition, a big deal competition with various categories for various fish, caught from a boat or surf-casting from shore and adult and child divisions. Grand prize was a large motor boat, suitable to fish from. We would occasionally go to watch the weigh-ins. All fish were cleaned, gutted and the meat donated to the island senior center.

I loved the image as depicted in the ad, but didn’t know how large it was; was this the entire image? What were the dimensions? How much did it cost? We were looking to replace a few antique charts with real art. Would this be appropriate?

I showed the ad to Dan, who also was intrigued. We showered, dressed and headed over to see the show in West Tisbury. The painting is large and was hanging on the back wall of the gallery. It was stunning, one truly couldn’t look away. It was also too large for any space we could think of, and too expensive! The magazine image was cropped, it didn’t show the entire right side of the image.

But we really liked Jeanne’s work and immediately were drawn to a few other pieces of hers; cows grazing in Katama Farm (near us, actually), and continued to look for something for our dining room wall. Nothing quite fit the bill. The gallerist pulled up images that were not at the gallery, but scattered around the island. We went in search. A few turned out to be in Jeanne’s studio. She kindly brought a few over to our house to look at where they might work. She was very pleasant.

The assistant from the gallery brought over the large cows painting for us to try up in our den.

 

We loved it and agreed to keep it. We also decided on a scene on Beach Road, entering Oak Bluffs from the Edgartown side, along State Beach to hang in our dining room.

Clever Adam also brought the large, gorgeous “Derby Evening”. We protested; we had no good place for it. But it was SO alluring, such a fabulous painting, how could we resist? We walked from room to room – nope too large, or the colors didn’t work. We wandered into our sun room, all blues, green and white with lots of light. We had a blue barn star hanging on the white bead board wall. Could this be the spot? Adam valiantly held it up. MAGIC! It looked fantastic! Oh my goodness! Adam told us to live with it for a bit (always a great strategy; then the owner can’t live without it)! Of course we were totally over the moon about it. We had close friends come over to give their assessment. They loved it too.

We went back to the gallery owner to negotiate for all three works. He gave us a nice deal. Still, that one piece was the most expensive work of art (or anything else – clothing, jewelry, anything), we’d ever purchased.

We sit in the room all the time. It makes the space. Even when not in the room, I admire it when passing by. Our house was on the Edgartown house tour last year (for the second time). The artwork got the most comments (someone thought we had built the upstairs den around the cow painting). But the “Derby Evening, 2017” was the most admired. We held the house open a few extra minutes so that Jeanne and her husband could come and see where her works live in the world (we have since bought four more, smaller pieces by her; we are true Jeanne Staples collectors). But nothing compares to this work.

 

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A soft, blue velvet regaled The Los Angeles night. The concentric circles of the Hollywood Bowl’s procenium glowed with a warm, eggshell white. White-jacketed waiters served last suppers on trays and scuttled away. Onstage, two microphones bracketed a single, straight-backed chair. Without announcement, a man in white tie and tails walked from stage right, carrying a cello burnished by age and a rich orange-red hue.

The lights dimmed and the concave shell of the Bowl changed to the same blue velvet as the color of the Angeleno sky. The man sat down, placed the instrument between his knees, and smiled at the amphitheater’s masses. He placed the bow on the strings, took a breath, and began the first notes of the first movement of Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G major.

For two hours and 40 minutes, the Hollywood Bowl reverberated to the arpeggios, octaves, and double stops of Bach’s baroque homage to this perfect instrument. The tiny man played on through the intricacies of each suite’s preludes, allemandes, courantes, sarabandes, bourrées, and gigues. When he finished each composition, he launched into the next.

The cello’s rich sound, meticulously amplified, flowed out of the bowl and into the sky. I became aware of layer after layer of impressions — the diminutive figure’s exertions with bow and digits on the ebony fingerboard; the complex timbre and overtones of the instrument; the shape of the sound that rippled out of the layered arcs of the Bowl’s shell; the shower of notes falling onto the placid surface of the warm night; the musician’s synapses sparking with memory and tactile application.

Bach’s cello suites are arranged in order of difficulty, the first being the simplest, continuing through over two hours of notation to the most complex. As he traversed this experimental composition — Bach had rarely written for solo stringed instruments — I became aware of a larger reality: I could trace the sounds of the suites backward, from the vibration of the instrument: the strings oscillating the bridge, which, in turn, vibrated the soundboard, passing through the unseen sound peg placed beneath one foot of the bridge between front soundboard and the cello’s back. I followed the sound into the player’s movements along the neck, where Ma’s fingers altered the resonating length of each string, set in motion by the horsehair bow. From these touch points, I followed his fingers backward through the tendons to the shoulders, each moving independently in their contrary tasks, the strong, smooth sweeps of the bow, the muscular attack of fingers on strings.

I felt the flow of impulses from Yo Yo’s right auditory cortex upward through the top of his skull and into the cosmos where elapsed time disappeared, and Ma’s movements connected to the cerebral energy of the old composer who sat, meticulously present through three hundred irrelevant years of calibrated time. Yo Yo Ma’s boundless energy (he began to tire slightly in the sixth and final suite), radiated the cascading arpeggios of Bach’s composition through the fragile endurance of the Stradivarius instrument, older than the Suites themselves. My senses began to swirl around the focal point of the single man, alone with the rich, red instrument, a unity of precision and love, given to us all beneath the vast, blue arc of the Hollywood Bowl. I suppose I sat as close to my own, weird god as I ever come.

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