[Art_beyond_sight_theory_and_research] Michael Naranjo - Touching Beauty

[Lisa Yayla]

<!-- body{margin-left:10px;margin-right:10px;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;} -->
Michael Naranjo - Touching Beauty
  
Occurrences:   Dates:    Friday, Sep 15 2006 to Saturday, Sep 15 2007
Times:    8:30 AM to 5:00 PM
Recurs:   Every day
 
Presented by:    Department of Cultural Affairs
Location:    Bataan Building   
Address:    407 Galisteo Street
Description:    Sculptor Michael Naranjo invites you to "see" some of his bronzes the way he creates them - by touch! Here's an exhibit where you can, quite literally "get your hands on art". This totally accessible and touchable exhibit contains 15 of the artist's bronzes, ranging in size from 10" to life size. The Atrium Gallery is open Monday thru Friday.
Contact:    Michael A. Naranjo
Email:     mailto:naranjostudio at hotmail.com naranjostudio at hotmail.com
 
excerpt article
http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itsv/1106/ijse/contributions.htm http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itsv/1106/ijse/contributions.htm
Michael Naranjo, Sculptor
Chandley McDonald
A blind sculptor creates and shares touchable art.
Please touch! Please touch these beautiful bronze statues. This uncommon invitation was made by the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. The exhibit is a collection of statues created by Michael Naranjo, a New Mexico native who was blinded as a soldier in Vietnam. His inspiration is nature and what art he remembers seeing in galleries growing up in his hometown of Taos, New Mexico.
Michael Naranjo was born in the Santa Clara Pueblo with nine siblings, many of whom are practicing potters. His mother, Rose, was a celebrated ceramic artist who taught her children and grandchildren the art of pottery. For Naranjo, learning to make things from clay was a natural outgrowth of his artistic spirit.
After returning from Vietnam, Naranjo attended the California School for the Blind. He returned to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he began the challenge of trying to sculpt without having sight and with greatly reduced use of his right hand, which also had been injured. He married and set to work learning his craft, while he and his wife raised two daughters.
Working with intuition and touch, his art began to emerge, to flow with composition, balance, and movement. Naranjo's style is simple; he uses his fingers and fingernails to etch the details in his sculptures. He does not use traditional sculpting tools since he cannot see what impact the tool has on the clay. Understandably, Naranjo will scrap a piece of work if its "feel" isn't right. Laurie, his wife of 27 years, sometimes has to rescue his work before he destroys it in his quest for perfection.
An interesting aspect of Michael Naranjo's sculpture is that over the last 30 years, his sense of touch has been refined by contact with the masters. The Academy Gallery in Florence, Italy, and the Louvre in Paris allowed him to examine their treasures-&#8212;in Paris, the Medici Venus, and in Florence, Michelangelo's
David. The authorities granted the rare privilege of allowing him to observe the masterpieces by touching them. By touch, Naranjo was able to observe minute details of the statues, such as the fact that in the eyes of Michelangelo's statue, the pupils are shaped like hearts. But while he observes the eyes of others' work, his own statues never have eyes, something it takes a while to realize as one appreciates the many other aspects of his work.
Through the traveling exhibit of his touchable art, organized by the Heard Museum, Naranjo seeks to share with others what he views as an opportunity for transformation through direct contact with art. He and his wife have established the Touched by Art Fund, a Santa Fe community foundation to enable public school students in New Mexico to visit museums and galleries. The gallery that currently carries Naranjo's work is the Nedra Matteucci Gallery in Santa Fe. The gallery's Web site is http://www.matteucci.com http://www.matteucci.com
.
article
http://www.aasfe.org/jen-barol-2.html http://www.aasfe.org/jen-barol-2.html
A vision in his hands
By Jen Barol
Albuquerque Tribune
Albuquerque, New Mexico
SANTA FE -- Michael Naranjo can't remember a day he hasn't felt the pain inside his skull.
Sometimes it's a subtle ache on one side of his head. Sometimes a constant throb, a suffocating pressure, always sabotaging his concentration, stealing his energy, leaving him fatigued and groggy.
"I would say 90 percent of the time I have headaches," the 56-year-old Santa Fe sculptor says.
When they get really bad, Naranjo's headaches are like crippling squalls that reroute him into a bottle of codeine or into a quiet room somewhere.
"When it gets bad, you can't concentrate; you can't focus," he says of the pain, the result of a 1997 surgery to repair a spontaneous spinal fluid leak. "All you want to do is lie down and sleep it away."
But right now the lingering discomfort is tolerable, and Naranjo snuggles into the corner of his living room couch, one faded-bluejeaned leg casually draped over the edge of a cushion, his shoeless feet wrapped in bleached-white socks. He is ready to talk about his life, his family, his art. And his blindness.
A 5-by-8-inch color photograph of Michael Naranjo hangs on a wall in the entryway of his home, located at the end of a dirt road 15 miles outside of Santa Fe. In the photo it's 1967. The 22-year-old U.S. Army infantryman sits cross-legged in a field of motionless sunflowers somewhere in Vietnam. He stares reflectively at an open notebook that rests in his lap. It's been too long to remember what was in that notebook. Perhaps a letter to someone back home. Maybe a collection of thoughts to himself. Could've been a drawing. Or a poem about the perils of war.
His hair is short and black. His white T-shirt is tucked into a pair of fatigues. The photograph is one of the last images of Naranjo as a man who could see. Fewer than two months later, on Jan. 8, 1968, a Viet Cong grenade would shatter his right hand and erase his eyesight for good. Just like that, the boy from Santa Clara Pueblo would venture forth into a world of permanent darkness. The innocence of a child who spent his summers swimming in the ditch he and his nine siblings dammed up would be replaced with a craving and a determination to make his life worth something. As he healed in a hospital bed in Japan, Naranjo would return to his childhood dream to be a sculptor.
"I always wanted to sculpt," says Naranjo, whose mother, Rose, a potter, taught him how to mold shapes out of Santa Clara clay. "As a child, I would make a bear, a horse out of clay from the earth around our house."
He started over in that hospital bed. He began simply, creating an inchworm out of clay given to him by a hospital volunteer.
"The minute I made the inchworm, I knew I could do this," he says.
Social workers and psychologists and physical therapists, though, told him he was wasting his time. He would never be able to sculpt, they said.
"But if you feel strongly about something," he says, "you find a way to do it."
A few months later, his story received national attention after a news wire photo was taken of him during a hospital stay in Denver for more skin grafts and surgery. By then, he'd lost the brown eyes he was born with and replaced them with blue ones ("Why not do something different?" he says confidently.)
After completing rehabilitation in Palo Alto, Calif., he returned home to New Mexico, and in March 1969, he had his first show of wax maquettes -- small models of sculpture -- at the Albuquerque Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
"At the beginning it was difficult," he says. "But when you're backed into a corner, you either stop living or you step forward. "I wanted to live. I want to experience life."
The life-size hoop dancer dangles from a crane just above Naranjo's head. As Naranjo stands alone by the west steps of the state Capitol, a slight morning breeze plays with his cropped salt-and-pepper hair. The early-May sun shines on his upturned face and accents his unwavering expression of tranquil confidence. He looks like he's watching the undertaking around him.
Journalists, groundskeepers, family members, art curators and passers-by scamper around him as the 6 1/2-foot-tall bronze sculpture comes to rest on a rusted 5-by-5-foot steel base that sits in an unlandscaped area two or three feet from the sidewalk.
The swarm of helpers reassures Naranjo that the sculpture is in just the right place. He doesn't nod. He doesn't smile. He doesn't acknowledge their gestures in any way. He just speaks in his quiet, unobtrusive manner.
"I'm going to trust it's in the right spot," says Naranjo as he stands there, a minimalist of movement. "I can't picture the sidewalk or the angle of the building; so I have to stay out of it and leave it alone."
"Emergence" is the most recent permanent sculpture on the Capitol grounds.
The Capitol Art Foundation, which collects art for the Roundhouse, is purchasing the piece with money collected by selling maquettes of the piece for $5,500 to $6,500.
"It's an honor to have this here," says Laurie Naranjo as she watches her husband carefully climb onto the base to caress for the last time the piece that he began working on a year ago. "I know Michael is so pleased to have it here."
Currently, the foundation has sold four of the 25 maquettes.
The process of transforming a maquette into a life-size sculpture is strictly scientific. Foundry workers recalibrate the size, translating the finished piece from the 1- to 2-foot-tall original. It's not exactly the same piece, though. So once the larger version is made, Naranjo goes back and reworks the surface to more closely resemble the original. Looking up at the piece, it's hard to believe that Naranjo relied on touch and memory to create the flowing line and gesture of the hoop dancer.
The figure is beautiful, realistic but slightly expressionistic, as if blurred by memory. Again and again you can't help but think: How can you make something so sensitive, so realistic if you've been trapped in darkness for more than 30 years?
"You get ideas from talking books, from dreams," he says. "Listening to people talk, a thought, a moment I remember back when I could see."
But it doesn't come easily for Naranjo.
"To clear the cobwebs and look through all that time and bring back memories from the recesses of time, it's not that easy," he says. "It can become a struggle."
Right now Naranjo sits on his living room couch. He pauses for several moments. He takes his time as he talks, seeming to juggle and fondle his thoughts before moving on to the next thing.
This is how it goes: Sometimes using a model, Naranjo will take stock of a jawline, a neck, the dip of a collarbone, trying to memorize the contour and relationship in order to translate the living truth to the maquette.
A nearly impossible goal.
"It's like a picture puzzle or a chess game that's constantly changing. The challenge is retaining what I'm touching and transferring to what I'm working with. I start to get tired. I start to get distortions."
As the April morning passes into afternoon, a subtle tightness comes to rest on his brow, his words are less descriptive, his enthusiasm dampened. A headache is approaching. But he insists he's fine and goes on to talk about his working process, like how he prefers not to use tools when he sculpts.
"These are my only tools," he says, holding up the thumb, index and middle fingers on his left hand. "If I have a tool in my hand, I can't feel what the tip of the metal piece is touching."
As far as the reality of his work, he says it comes from "a place inside."
"If you can't see it, what it comes down to is a feeling," he says. "And art is a feeling for the most part. It evokes emotion. If it doesn't evoke that feeling for me, I destroy it and start over."
It's 1977. Laurie Naranjo is still Laurie Engle and is living alone in an apartment complex in Albuquerque while she works as a nurse at a local hospital. Living next door is Tessie Naranjo, who introduces Laurie, 25, to her brother Michael, 32.
"When I first met him, there were no bells or whistles," Laurie says, followed by just a hint of a laugh. "But after I went out on a date with him, I pretty much fell in love with him then.
"It was love at second sight."
Michael's self-assuredness impressed Laurie, who says she was never bothered by his blindness.
"I think I thought about it for one second," says Laurie, a petite brunette who, at 49, still looks and sounds like the girl who fell in love with Michael 24 years ago. "Sometimes I wonder why I didn't give it more thought. "But for myself, when we met, I loved his blindness. It actually helped me become much more aware, to see things differently."
They were married a year later in the mountains behind Santa Clara Pueblo outside of Española. Since then, Laurie has been his chauffeur, his guide, his agent, his everything.
But being Michael's sight is not a burden, says Laurie, who works part time as a nurse at a Santa Fe hospital.
"We just make the best of our situation," she says.
It's 1972 in the black-and-white photograph. Michael Naranjo is standing next to Richard Nixon in the Oval Office. Nixon is smiling at Naranjo, who is pointing to a 1 1/2-foot-tall bronze sculpture of an Indian eagle dancer that poses on a table next to them, a gift from Naranjo to the president.
What happened moments after the photo was taken is a story Naranjo loves to tell.
"One minute he was standing next to me, and then I heard his voice come from somewhere below me," Naranjo says. "He touched my hand to pull me down to the floor. He said to me, 'I want to show you something.' He wanted to show me the eagle embroidered into the rug. "So there we are crawling around on the floor of the Oval Office, feeling the eagle in the rug."
Lisa Yayla
Huseby Kompetansesenter
Oslo Norway
mailto:lisa.yayla at statped.no lisa.yayla at statped.no