I just returned from nearly two weeks in Oaxaca, Mexico, where art is everywhere. I am not talking about Precious Art that you only see in galleries and museums, often separated from daily life by entrance fees and a tiresome aura of cultural superiority. I am talking about art that lives in the hearts of local artisans and is expressed through the creation of beautiful objects for everyday use: prints; jewelry; ceramics; weaving; embroidery; wood carving and metalwork. Vendors could choose to sell any number of foreign-made trinkets to visiting tourists, but when possible, the vast majority prefer to create and offer their own work .This artistic pride stretches back to pre-hispanic times. Oaxaca was always a major center for skilled and sophisticated art production.

Every day, I saw ancient techniques reinvented for 2012 (exquisite, nearly abstract  weavings) and new techniques that featured innovative applications of traditional design motifs (laser cut jewelry made from recycled x-ray film painted with iridescent acrylic paint). Every museum and crafts shop was filled with an unusual and almost overwhelming visual exuberance.

Some experiences stood out. I visited a small, high quality crafts fair held outside in a lovely park, where booths were set up by local artisans from outlying villages. Here, once a year, artists bypass agents to sell personal creations themselves. Since I spoke enough Spanish to get by easily, I learned from several of the artists that many tour guide agents (who routinely accompany tour buses to their villages) often receive more in commissions than the artists who actually produce the work.

On "opening night" at the booths, I only had time to pass by casually. Round and round the displays I walked, but kept returning to one only, which featured unusually simple and striking dresses made from soft unbleached cotton, lace, meticulously applied cream colored satin ribbon, and two simple borders of luminous, gracefully executed silk thread embroidery. They stood out from all the other work at the fair for their quiet elegance.

I have always had a weakness and a great respect for fabric art. Maybe it is due partly to the legacy of my Nebraska quilt maker grandmother and great grandmother, who created orderly beauty from colorful, cast off fabric scraps. Or, maybe my own history as a determined, small town, ten-year-old 4H sewing queen had something to do with this. After all, my perfectly hemmed tea towel and potholder won first place at the Yakima County Fair.

Now, half a lifetime later, as I stood in the little Oaxacan art booth surrounded by lovely embroidered variations on a theme, I was in heaven. I spoke briefly to the artist and asked about the occasions for which these elegant dresses would be worn. Her son, a young man in his early twenties, took my questions and replied. I explained that I did not have time to talk at length but would return the next day to look more carefully.

I reminded myself that I did not really need a dress, but I could not forget those dresses all night.

At the opening hour the following day, of course I was there at the booth. This time a handsomely featured gentleman was presiding alone. He said that the artist I had met the night before was his wife. We began a half hour conversation that included many subjects and a lot of hearty laughter. Soon his wife arrived from across the street. She smiled at the conversation in Spanish but said nothing. When she spoke to her husband in an unknown (to me) language and he replied, I realized that the artist understood Spanish but appeared to speak only Zapotec, one of the indigenous Oaxacan languages.

I left the park with a beautiful dress, warm smiles all around and a sincere invitation to visit the family in their home village of Mitla. I feel fortunate to have made a valuable and inspiring artistic connection beyond the "marketplace".

I am preparing a nice letter bound for Mitla, way ahead of time....

Around the time of the Year Turning, between Solstice, January first and my birthday, I light candles, review accomplishments, deepen friendships and plan for the future.

The planning for the future portion always brings me back to my collection of forty-eight Chaconne Series thumbnail sketches, only three inches square each, folded together into cycles of twelve, so I can more easily follow the transitions between individual drawings. I unfold the sections of twelve thumbnails into a big block on my studio floor so I can study the whole sequence together.

As I begin the process, I always ask the same questions. How can I make the internal flow of the entire series clearer? How can I make each individual drawing interesting, both on its own and as a part of a collective visual story? How can I best maintain a balance between introspection and outward appearance? How can I punctuate the high points in different sections with the proper drama?

These are questions that other composers must ask as well. For help with answers this year, I returned to the best possible (for me) inspirational source: several new CD interpretations of the Six Sonatas and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin by Johann Sebastian Bach. My total collection so far contains ten different recordings, with more to come.

I divide these Bach violinist guides into two camps: the Meditators and the Astronauts. The Meditators emphasize the elegance, sophistication and beauty of Bach's musical architecture; the Astronauts prefer to touch down in territory marked Not for the Faint Hearted, where Bach's genius approaches near-blinding intensity. As I follow each trailblazer along on his or her personal exploration,  I try to translate their various musical insights into visual form.

This year, Gidon Kremer's 2005 recording of the Sonatas and Partitas stopped me in my tracks. Deeply thoughtful, technically mesmerizing and emotionally charged, Kremer's interpretations definitely fall into the Not for the Faint Hearted camp. Equally as impressive as the music were the CD's liner notes, which seemed to speak directly to me with an uncanny synchronicity, just as I was re-shuffling my new Chaconne project studies into their final places. Years ago, I unconsciously chose the image of a swirling spiral galaxy as the central visual motif for the drawings, whose many variations eventually return to their own beginning. You may imagine my astonishment when I read the following passage included in Kremer's CD commentary, written by his friend and musical colleague, composer Victor Kissine:

"...in the end of the chaconne from the second partita in D minor, we find it hard to imagine the possibility of repeating the path we have traveled, although at the conclusion we are indeed returned to its source. The musical thought (to use a favorite expression of Bach) is carried through to its conclusion with exhaustive completeness, but it still pulsates outside of a composition that seems perfect in its completeness.

Bach, of course, had his own techniques − tonal, rhetorical and architectonic − for creating this complete incompletion. Their common principle can be reduced to the opposition between gravitational attraction and the condition of weightlessness. Their goal is the expansion of the galaxy."

The forty-eight, revised little thumbnails laid out before me, with an embryonic spiral galaxy opening and closing the sequence, are carrying a similar message: 2011 will be a good year for more expansion.

In the past week, I have been re-reading violinist Arnold Steinhardt's immensely entertaining and passionate musical memoir, Violin Dreams.

You don't have to be a violinist to appreciate his story.

Since my current Chaconne art project attempts to unravel the mysteries of  Bach's musical composition from a visual art perspective based on images experienced in a dream, I was particularly interested to read Steinhardt's acknowledgement of his own dreams and their intuitive insights, which intersected with practical work and serendipitous coincidences throughout his life to reveal an unforeseen and unique artistic direction.

Steinhardt's book reminds me that there are more ways than one to make an artistic pilgrimage.

For more about Arnold Steinhardt, visit his website at http://www.arnoldsteinhardt.com

Is that one of my drawings on the cover of this book?

The answer is no. The image is one of many remarkable photographs of the invisible "vibrational world" made visible, taken by Dr. Hans Jenny, a Swiss medical doctor, natural scientist, artist, musician, and philosopher. His book, Cymatics, (after the Greek "Ta Kymatica", matters pertaining to waves) documents the extraordinary research of this modern day (1904-1972) Renaissance man.

Hans Jenny's meticulous research into the nature of dynamic formative processes in motion reflects the insights of artist Paul Klee, who was also a musician and a student of the natural sciences. In a lecture to his Bauhaus art students in 1923, Klee explained the basic law of all growth and form mirrored in Jenny's 1960's photographs:

First life, then the shelter for it. That is the way it happens, even on the miniscule scale.

In all liklihood, creative power is itself a form of matter, with the same senses as the more familiar kinds of matter. Yet it is through these familiar kinds of matter that it must reveal itself. It must function in union with matter. Permeated with matter, it must take on a living, actual form. It is thence that matter derives its life, acquiring order from the its minutest particles and most subordinate rhythms all the way to its higher articulations.

Let us therefore think not of form, but of the act of forming.

Cymatics, A Study of Wave Phenomena and Vibration, by Hans Jenny, M.D., Macromedia Publishers, 2001.

On a visit to the Arthur Sackler Museum in Boston few weeks ago, I discovered that paintings by my seventeenth-century Chinese art hero, Tao-Chi, were all in storage awaiting the completion of a new museum. Many other excellent painting and calligraphy pieces were available for viewing however, and I passed the afternoon in blissful study. In the photo, I am following my usual custom of physically recreating the artist's calligraphic brush movements in order to feel the rhythm of the work even better.

It had been an in-person encounter with Tao-Chi's paintings in the British Museum, many years ago, that had placed me on a path of artistic pilgrimage to search out his work wherever I could...

As I turned to leave the room, I noticed a glass case in the center, dimly lit and filled with a magnetic presence I could feel from far away. When I mentioned this excitedly to the museum guard, she replied (with a shrug) that the glow was just from the lighting inside. But as I came closer, I saw that this was not entirely accurate. There, inside the case, were several small, incredibly lovely and yes, glowing paintings by my hero, Tao-Chi, the seventeenth century free spirit, artistic innovator and deep thinker whose ideas had influenced me so greatly.

I stood for a long time at that case, drinking in the unique Tao-Chi "vibrancy" that had been missing in the subdued and scholarly paintings on the walls. I vowed to infuse this quality into my own work which was just  starting to find a voice of its own.

I returned home comforted and already looking forward to my next Tao-Chi Pilgrimage.

For more about this extraordinary artist, see The Wilderness Colors of Tao-Chi, by Marilyn Wu and Wen Fong, published in 1973 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

After many months of research, design, and inevitable delays, my new website is finally finished.

As you can see from the photo above, a delicious celebration is being planned for those involved in its creation.  My thanks to Linda Campbell of Campbell Design for the elegant page design and good-natured coordination of a myriad of tedious details, and to audio/technical whiz David Bilides for helping with stubborn coding issues and posting the musical excerpts on the “About Bach’s Chaconne” page. I think you will enjoy this site’s unusual and striking combination of visual and musical artistry.

I just do the art and by comparison, my job is easy.

I have been saving this bottle for just the right time, and that time would be…now!