June 2018

By Sandra Tyler, Editor-in-Chief

For May, we had our usual varied interviews and site reviews, but also a couple of guest posts by artist Martin Mugar and poet Amy Nawrocki. And this month look for our spring installment of Art Roundups from our WTP art correspondents out in the field. Keep up with the great, engaging art you may have missed, both in museums and smaller out-of-the way galleries in the northeast and in Los Angeles.

And get ready for our 2018 literary and fine art competitions—both open July 15. This year’s categories are poetry and photography. Again this year, the grand prize is the Elizabeth Sloan Tyler Memorial Award: a one-week stay in our WTP Amagansett retreat house in the Hamptons of Long Island. I say “our” because, in the three years since my mother’s death, I have been trying to make peace with this place–one that will always harbor my mother’s spirit, but one also that needs to be redefined. As WTP has largely evolved to become my mother’s legacy, so has her house, imbued as it is throughout with her ambient paintings. Its very character is integral to all she stood for as a visual artist, and in turn, to what many of our WTP contributors stand for: perseverance. As creatives, we dedicate much of our lives to our art, be it painting or writing or performance, whatever shape that needed outlet may take. And that need may ultimately be more of a driving force than our desire—we at times walk away from the painting or draft of a novel or story, in frustration. My mother too would walk away. But inevitably she always found her way back into the studio—back to plant herself in front of that challenging canvas. Because throughout her life—from the time her parents gifted her an oil-paint set at age ten, until quite literally her dying days, when she had only a tiny sketch book for scribbling drawings of  the sunflowers I brought her weekly—persevering as an artist, was finally, the only way she ever knew how to live.

Last year’s winners are hailing from New Mexico and Texas. Our literary winner Jaqueline Kolosov is at the house as of this writing; she has been enjoying many long walks along the beach, and recounted to me the variety of birds bathing or at the feeder in my mother’s wooded yard. There are numerous art books through the house, and she has been reading one on my mother’s favorite artist, Turner.

So enter our 2018 WTP competitions. I open my heart and my mother’s home to you.