This past weekend, my family and I drove to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, via Minneapolis, to celebrate the art of our dear friend, the painter Tim Lowly. A large retrospective of Tim’s work is currently on exhibit at the Visual Arts Center of the Washington Pavilion in Sioux Falls. In conjunction with the exhibit, a book entitled trying to get a sense of scale—Tim Lowly has hit shelves. The book, replete with gorgeous color reproductions of Tim’s paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptural objects, also casts a retrospective glance at the last 27 years of Tim’s dedicated artistic practice.
Here I am, trying to get a sense of scale as miles roll by.
In addition to beautiful reproductions, trying to get a sense of scale holds essays and creative nonfiction pieces by the likes of Riva Lehrer, Kelly VanderBrug, Henry Luttikhuizen, and Sherrie Lowly, an interview with Kevin Hamilton and Tim, and a short story by me. Tim was kind and generous enough to encourage me to write a fictional piece about his work this time. I’ve been living with and reflecting on his art for more than 20 years, and always as I’ve essayed a response to what he makes, I’ve found my way by finding quiet first—the extended quiet that moves in and out of meditation, or contemplation, I guess you’d say, because always I find this kind of quiet by gazing upon Tim’s paintings as one might icons. (One of my previous reflections is also included in trying to get a sense of scale; it previously appeared in the catalogue of a 2002 exhibit of Tim’s paintings, Trouble the Water, and explores this experience of gazing, among other things.)
This writing time the quiet led me to these 2 images, clumsily captured here on my cell phone.
The man standing beside the paintings is Tim. The figure painted, both as a young child and as a young woman, and the subject of Tim’s work featured in both the exhibit and the book, is Temma Day Lowly, Tim’s daughter. “As a newborn infant, Temma had a cardiac arrest, and the ensuing brain damage rendered her life as one on the margins of ‘normal’ human existence,” the opening paragraph of trying to get a sense of scale explains. Very true. Yet as the book and the Lowlys’ lives reveal, there’s so much more to it than that.
In his work and in his life, Tim Lowly has remained attentive to Temma’s presence, as has Sherrie Lowly in her work as a writer, and in her life as Tim’s wife and Temma’s mother. (Sherrie is also a Methodist pastor.) They have returned to her, and returned to her, and returned to her, and she has been there, being for them
Over the course of this past weekend some of us who collaborated with Tim in the making of trying to get a sense of scale also participated in a panel discussion at the Washington Pavilion. Sherrie, Kevin, Kelly, and I were there, along with Kim Ellison, a videographer who is currently making a documentary about Tim and his work, and who acted as moderator during the panel. To me the conversation we shared felt gentle. Tender, even. There was an air of listening, cushioned by quiet laughter. The experience felt appropriate to Tim’s work, and true to the environment his work creates, as we spoke of dreams, vulnerability, silence, attention, practice, brokenness and transformation, our very human stories—the stuff that trying to get a sense of scale, as a book and an exhibit holds, and less and more, more and less, and at the end of the day, a full portion, just enough.
Actually, at the end of the day, or rather, evening, Tim played music with his band Baby Mountain, and then it was really, truly just enough indeed.
This weekend was a journey and a joy, like life with the Lowlys always is.
And a crocheted mandala encircled Temma’s aspect all the while.
