One of the perks of working for the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College is that every day is spent surrounded by incredible art. During my time as the Office Manager of the museum from 2001 to 2005, many of the paintings in the collection became old friends. One of my favorites has always been Tana’s Sink by Joyce Stillman-Myers. I would often stop to spend a few minutes with this painting as it hung in the gallery or on the museum’s storage screens.

I love this photorealistic painting of a kitchen sink for its use of color and the treatment of light reflecting in glass and water and off the metallic stainless sink. Standing away from the painting, it appears smooth and nearly photogenic to the eye. A closer view reveals it to be almost abstract, and the artist’s brushstrokes are painterly and textured.

The baster hints of a turkey dinner. Some of the dishes in the sink resemble those of my grandmother. I  imagine a story of Tana as the matriarch of a large family preparing a meal for her noisy extended brood, much as my own grandmother did every Sunday as I was growing up.

I eventually became curious about the “real” story behind the painting. In March 2003 I contacted Stillman-Myers who agreed to answer a few of my questions:

KF. An artist once told me that she simply wanted people to “feel something” when they viewed her work. Do you have the same goal with your paintings?

JS-M. I remember saying 25 years ago with the ego of a young beginning artist: “All I want is for people to fall down on their knees in front of my paintings, overcome with emotion and awe.” I know better now, but I would have liked to be that good. Having an affect on people is still my biggest thrill, my deepest concern, and the spark that makes me live.

KF. Tana’s Sink is one of my favorite paintings in the Maier’s collection. I never get tired of it. I wish I could have been at Tana’s for that meal.

JS-M. See? That is what keeps me painting when I feel low, stressed or hopeless.

KF. Was Tana a real person?

JS-M. Tana was my best friend, my support, and my biggest fan. She lived in a weird, round house a couple miles away from mine. I lived with my husband. She lived with her lover. All the girls always hung out at Tana’s. We talked feminist politics and listened to music. I often preferred to be there instead of home.

KF. Was she a good cook?

JS-M. Not especially. We all were good together.

KF. Was the sink full of dishes from a party?

JS-M. Yes… and no. Everyone had chipped in helping to create some giant salad. I made a cheese omelet DRIPPING with cheese. It looked like Alien!

KF. When you painted Tana’s Sink, did you work from a photograph?

JS-M. Yes. After things were cleaned up, I set up the sink and put the pestle in the bowl. (We hadn’t used it for the meal.) I climbed up on the sink (which was set in a counter of mosaic tiles—very seventies) with my camera and tool some photos as the afternoon light streamed in the window.

KF. Do you always paint from photographs?

JS-M. Although I used photographs, I found it necessary to have my sink removed from the kitchen and brought down to my studio so that I could see it as I painted. (I had a new sink put in my kitchen.) I took the stuff in her sink home with me and set it up like the photographs best I could. Tana’s sink was stainless, so I had to remember the beautiful purples and other hues I had seen in it that day. Of course, I was always running over there to get another look. Hers was a double sink, but I only painted one side.

KF. The museum has categorized Tana’s Sink under the genre of Photorealism. Would you agree with that assessment?

JS-M. You are the analyst. I am the manufacturer. Is my work Photorealism? My dealer, Louis Meisiel, insists it isn’t. I say it is. On the other hand, compared to other Photorealism, I think it’s more—let me see—it has more mass. I want it to have more presence—to be more palpable than just straight Photorealism. I am not painting the photograph. I am using the photograph. I am painting the thing. Unlike the Photorealists, I don’t have to give any excuses about why I use a photograph. I’m not interested in “flatness”. I’m interested in illusion. The photo is just another tool to help me stop time.

KF. Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. Have I talked your ear off enough?

JS-M. NO. Do you still wish you had been at the meal?

My answer to Ms. Stillman-Myers was then (as it is now, seven years later) yes—I wish I had been at that meal.

Kathleen Fort ’10 is a former office manager of the Maier Museum, and during her studies at Randolph College, she served at the museum as work study and intern. She continues her relationship with the Maier by providing web content management and graphic design on a freelance basis.

In the spring of 2010 Ratzlaff was a guest instructor for Randolph College’s Visiting Writers Program teaching a class on Ekphrastic poetry. “The purist definition would be a verbal or literary representation of a visual work. In textbook Ekphrastic poetry, the artwork and the poem relate one to one. The art and the poem have a fusion.”

Instead of this more restrictive view, Ratzlaff encourages his students to use the art as inspiration—“to use the still moment of the painting or photograph and give it voice or movement… a dialog that can be far ranging. Any time the arts talk to one another can be an Ekphrastic moment.”

Ratzlaff suggests that the first Ekphrastic poem new writers attempt should not be about art they love. He advises, instead, to choose something they are not sure of. “This is good advice for poetry in general,” he says. “If you are so sure about it, there is no discovery about the work or about yourself.”

Ratzlaff began writing poems as a child in his hometown of Henderson, Nebraska, on a typewriter his father brought home from the office. He once wrote a poem for each member of his family, which included five brothers and sisters, comparing each of them to a flower. However, it wasn’t until age twenty-five in graduate school that he began to think of himself as a writer.

Ratzlaff’s most significant experience with Ekphrastics came when he lived in England for a year. He was experiencing a serious writing block partly because his Midwestern voice didn’t match his surroundings. He walked into an exhibition of Paul Klee’s artwork and saw Klee doing something in his art that he wanted to do in his writing. Ratzlaff immediately began doodling verbal sketches of the Klee paintings right there in the gallery. Suddenly he was engaged in language in a new way. “One of the things Klee gave me was a frame to give voice to a particular thing. It was such a relief, because I had been blocked for two years.”

Ratzlaff picks up a copy of his book of poetry, Dubious Angels: Poems after Paul Klee, from his desktop and flips through drawings of angels by Klee. “They’re poignant.” He flips to another. “Grotesque,” he says. “Rude.”

When he was approached about teaching at Randolph College, he looked at the online collection of the Maier Museum of Art and was impressed. He asked if he could hold his class in the Museum gallery. Ratzlaff enjoys teaching the class while surrounded by the artwork. He loves Robert Rauschenberg’s 1973 serigraph, Watermark, in the Museum’s collection. Rauschenberg uses a visual technique to create “combines”—collages in which many pieces come together and relate to one another to make sense as a whole. Ratzlaff has been working with poems in what he calls a collage method where he throws things together, takes them apart again, and puts them back together to make political and cultural statements, much like Rauschenberg’s visual collages.

Ratzlaff also gets inspiration for his writing from watching people or reading. “The New York Times is a great source. I read the paper before I write every day. The everyday world ought to give us everything we need, and art is part of the everyday world,” he says.

Most often, Ratzlaff’s creative writing process begins with sitting at his desk. He looks out the window, and he looks around the room. His triggers are almost always visual. He also walks outdoors and writes notes in a small black notebook. After his arrival at Randolph College, he made some verbal sketches in the College’s Dell.

Ratzlaff feels strongly about the importance of revision. He believes that work often does not come out whole on the first try. When he thinks he has something in his verbal sketches, he types it into the computer, prints it out, and scribbles on it. He then types the revision into the computer, prints it out, and scribbles on it again. He might do thirty to fifty revisions until he feels the poem is done. He likes to keep every draft. “I have a hard time throwing them away,” he says. Yet he rarely looks at the drafts he keeps. He laughs and says, “We make funny rules for ourselves.”

Ratzlaff gave a reading of his poetry in Randolph College’s Jack Lounge on March 24th, 2010. He says he does not get nervous when doing readings. He enjoys them. Classes, he says, give him more butterflies. “In class you never know. Students are variable.” The poet seems at ease as he stands at the podium before the crowd. He is wearing small round glasses and a full beard mixing with gray. He reads his poem, Dill, about his 93-year-old mother’s last garden before she moved from her home into an assisted living facility.

The garden is small
Two tomatoes, one cucumber, some transplanted pansies
The iris need lifting
But she’ll leave that for someone else.
“Whoever,” she says.

The word “iris” comes out of Ratzlaff’s mouth, all air.