Starling: Home
A Conversation About Home & The Art of Marc Chagall
You Can Never Go Home Again
Listen in to the episode at the link below.
All this thought about home, also made me think about the homeless population. Please consider donating to help support homeless people in your local area.
Helping Homelessness
The best way to help is often at the local level, so wherever you are...look for local organizations and shelters that support our homeless brothers and sisters.
Below is a link to a few national organizations here in America. I know I have listeners in other countries and would love feedback on organizations in your homelands that help this venerable population.
National Coalition for Homelessness
My Sense of Home
The House I Came Home to
304 Roberts Ave
Granny's Yellow House
Relationship To Home
I lived in Johnson Hall at VCU, then eventually moved into this house on the first floor. This was my first apartment with my longtime friend Jeremy. 1634 W. Grace Street, in The Fan in Richmond, VA. It was the nicest place I had ever lived and only cost $550 a month, so my half was $275.
When I dropped out of college and moved to outside of DC, Jeremy and I rented a house on Executive Avenue in Falls Church with another friend, Alyssa. From there, I moved to San Francisco and lived on Powell St. in Chinatown with my friend Jeff. There were 9 of us in a 4 bedroom there to try to make that work. So it didn't last long...and I was couch surfing with friends in DC within a year.
I saw an ad in the newspaper that said, "come live with dead presidents"...which I could not pass up. That is how I ended up moving into the gatekeeper's house at Hollywood Cemetery. The turret on this beautiful victorian home was my kitchen. I lived there until graduating from VCU and getting my first job teaching.
Then I rented a townhouse, next door to one of my best friend's, Roxanne. I know that townhouse was off Gayton Road in Richmond's West End. Eventually I moved back to DC and into a different townhouse community with Jermey again. I remember we called that place "Rat Hill" cause there were rats all over that area.
While living there I was dating my now husband, Travis and I moved in with him to our first house together at 110 E. Braddock Rd in Alexandria. Travis got a job transfer to Kansas City when I was pregnant with our first son. Oliver was born and brought home to our KCMO house on W 70th Terrace.
After taking a severance package at his KC job, Travis and I sold the house in KC before we had a place to go. So we lived in his Mom's condo in Cocoa Beach Florida till he got a job that took us to a suburb of Philadelphia. Henry was born there and brought home to 801 Rosewood Drive in Chester Springs, PA. That is also where I got cancer and lost my father to cancer, but when that was done...we moved again. We now live here in Collierville, Tennessee...a suburb of Memphis and have been here for 8 years.
110 E Braddock Rd, Alexandria, VA
738 W 70th Terrace, Kansas City, MO
801 Rosewood Dr., Chester Springs, PA
Home...now...
Marc Chagall
Figuring our how to "carry" home within us is part of maturing, but often only possible if we establish a good sense of this in our early life. The experience of not having a home...whether that be through exile, poverty, destruction or any other means can be incredibly damaging to our development.
I and The Village
Visiting Chagalls
And you can see how happy I was standing next to I and The Village at MoMA while explaining it to students back in 2016
Chagall's Love Story
The Birthday, 1887
Over Vitebsk, 1913
The Bridal Pair with The Eiffel Tower, 1939
Transporting His Work During WWII
Recommended Practices:
- Consider your earliest memories of home and think through it with your senses. How does your childhood home and hometown look, feel, smell, taste…sound? What memories of that place in time arise when you allow your mind to go back there?
- How did that initial structure organize your relationship with the world and your viewpoint? Can you see how that place and your home has structured the relationship you have created with the world?
- How is home now different than home then?
- Go through the physical places in your mind where you have lived. Close your eyes and see if you can recreate a sense of being in the space. How did rooms flow in the first place you lived that was not your parent’s home. Can you stand in your college dorm room and map our your orientation? Recall as much as you can of each place you have lived.
- What did you hang on your walls when you were a child, how about as a teenager?
- How has what you surround yourself with evolved?
- How has that evolution in what you choose to surround yourself mirrored your own evolution?
- What does it mean to own art? And what does the art you surround yourself with say about who you are?
- In creating work around this theme, consider how color gives meaning to memories. What colors are part of your idea of home? Consider this more as an emotional and metaphorical connection to color rather than a literal interpretation.
- Create a new work around your relationship to home. Perhaps start with childhood memories around home and see where that takes you. Try to make this timeless and more about your own memory and relationship with who you were when located in certain places.
Playlist:
What songs do you connect with home?
How To Connect With Starling:
You can simply email me at starlingcreativeliving@gmail.com, check out my website www.starlingcreativeliving.com
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Check out my developing online community: Starling Community