"Small, contained, protected." JW flies away...

Oh...
As I was starting to write a different post here, I got an email from an old friend, Allan K, notifying me that a mutual friend from the art college, Jody Williams, has died. She was sixty-seven.

Jody, "JW", was a Wonder Cabinet: a printmaker, writer, and a book artist who taught at the college where I worked in the library, evenings. She and I had collaborated once, in 1998:
we'd invited fourteen other artists to contribute a page to the book Bugs of Summer.
Jody screenprinted it (I helped with that, like, I held the squeegee or something), and we bound the pages into accordion books.

JW was an architect and engineer of paper and board, in miniature. Her work was miniature, and often tucked in boxes, often quite intricate, that she designed and constructed. (A couple in photo below, along with Bugs of Summer.)

Here, Puck and Penny Cooper look at JW's bug page:

"I did kill two kaydids
and now I am sorry."

Oh, my.
I am sad.
I am crying.

I am grateful.
Not only to have known JW, but also I'm grateful that she'd contacted me this summer, and we'd gotten together for the first time since Covid.
She was in an unusually sweet mood the day we met for coffee, though she didn't look well. But she never looked well: she had had ovarian cancer and been on chemo for NINE years.
As usual, she barely mentioned that. She told me that a new treatment had stabilized her at a new normal and, as always, it was a worse one.

Mostly we talked about doing our work--my theme of the decade. I told her about my motto of the year: Just do it badly.
Yes, she agreed, "just do something!"

And she, who was very accomplished, talked about my dolls, the girlettes, as an example of Doing Good Work.
(I wish I remembered exactly how she phrased it, but that was the jist of it: "you are doing it".)

Looking back, I see that Jody always championed me, always saw me as an artist, which certainly isn't the case in The Art World (which can be quite elitist). She was like the artists I've mentioned who frequent the thrift store--Douglas E. & Al W.—seeing art everywhere, and seeing creators for their creations, not their social status.

BELOW, top: Cake in the library: me (left), with JW on my fortieth birthday:
bottom: Jody with her cat on her shoulder--Trixie--who I've house/cat-sat.


Jody was funny and sharp, and she could be rather acerbic; while I knew her for thirty years and counted her as a friend, I wouldn't say we were close-up emotionally .
I wasn't involved in her death, for instance.
However, I'd written a Wikipedia entry for her a few years ago, and I'm glad that in that way I could show her that I valued and honored her. 

If I have any regrets--and I don't, really--it's just that I wish I'd sent her photos of the girlettes' moth funeral in Duluth this summer. (There had been a bee burial a few years earlier too.)
At the time I didn't connect the moth with Bugs of Summer, but it's surely a descendant, and its funeral could be a whole book in itself...
(In fact, thinking about it, I have a theme of bugs in my art--including my film Orestes and the Fly. Huh. I never put that together before.)

I never used the linocut print set I bought this summer. The moth  would look great in prints. I will try and make a little book of its funeral.
A memorial, of sorts, for a life flown away...

____________________

BELOW: JW's pencil pots...

Jody's desk is a portrait of her: meticulous, whimsical, wonderfully sharp and dry. She said:

"With five siblings, and four major relocations before I was ten, I found it necessary to keep my possessions small, contained, and protected."

--from a good overview of JW and her work: "Circumstantial Evidence", Augsburg U, 2016.

 More of her art at Jody Williams's website: Flying Paper Press