SantaFe-magazine.org

A Santa Fe resident for the past two decades, Lorraine Schechter has led a full and varied life as an artist, arts administrator, and teacher of fine arts and yoga. A native of New York City and a rabid Yankee fan, Lorraine lived in the south of France and Northwest Connecticut prior to moving to Santa Fe in 1988. Lorraine first visited Santa Fe in 1969 when she was teaching at Swarthmore College and had just established her first gallery. During that first visit, Lorraine made a promise to herself that took her two decades to fulfill: “I would live and work in Santa Fe some day because it is the first place I ever truly felt at home.”

Lorraine has always been guided by an “inner vision and inner voice” that she has trusted totally. Her philosophy of art is both life-defining and succinct: “a life of change and a journey of becoming.” Lorraine works in a variety of media—print-making, poetry, painting, and constructions—so that “I am able to say what needs and wants to be said.” However, there is an underlying vision that informs all her art. From the mid-1970s on, this vision can be expressed as “giving form to spirit” via her inner voice that “gives expression to” her interests of the moment. In a manner akin to her artistic hero Henri Matisse, Lorraine’s art has evolved throughout her life and been deeply affected by her physical environment. For example, her first paintings in Santa Fe focused on color, space, and light.

Prior to moving to Santa Fe, Lorraine served as the manager of the Alexander Calder estate in Roxbury (CT) for fourteen years. It was a very fertile time in Lorraine’s career. She had a studio on the second floor of Grandma Calder’s house with a lot of time to devote to her own work which during this time was figurative and taken from life. During the mid-1970s, Lorraine began making dye cut paper sculptures for the Christmas season. MoMA in New York was the first museum to publish them and within a few years, most of the major museum shops were carrying Lorraine’s creations. That cycle ran out after five years, and Lorraine returned to the studio doing large landscapes that evolved from abstract to more realistic ones that seemed to look like New Mexico. By the 1980s, Lorraine began writing poetry with a group that continues to meet at The Hickory Stick Bookshop (Litchfield, CT). Though firmly ensconced in her life on the east coast, Lorraine felt it was time to leave her life in Connecticut.

A major influence on Lorraine’s life and art has been her study of yoga that began in the late 1970s. By the mid-1980s, yoga became a spiritual practice for Lorraine who became a teacher and even had a Connecticut public television program entitled “Yoga for Health.” Lorraine’s voice guided her to return to “the home of her heart” in New Mexico. Her first years in Santa Fe were hectic and productive. She was teaching art at the College of Santa Fe and Santa Fe Community College, giving art workshops, and having art shows in the larger Northern New Mexico community.

At approximately the same time as her relocation in Santa Fe, Lorraine’s commitment to yoga led to a study of Buddhist Vipassana that eventually led twelve years ago to Lorraine founding the Vipassasna Sangha with like-minded friends. Also, in 1989, Lorraine founded the Living Art Foundation that envisions “individual and planetary peace and performance through the teaching and creation of the arts.” Thus, Lorraine became a peace activist by combining the major strands of her career: art and teaching both informed by her yoga. These are employed to “open people to practice, rather than just learn forms, to create space for individuals to find their own voice.” One of the axioms that govern Lorraine’s life is the following: “If the gods want you, they’ll hold you.” Santa Fe’s gods seem to have Lorraine Schechter firmly in their grasp.

In 1997-98, Lorraine reached another artistic crossroads with her visual arts mixed media suite of paintings, “The Book of Yes: An Artist’s Answer to No.” This project took over and Lorraine “was at the service of an internal vision that demanded external expression.” For a six-year period, Lorraine was composing poems on light, color, and mood that were directly related to the images in “The Book of Yes.” The individual poems discussed the outer and inner life of the artist from the mid-1990s to the early 2000’s and culminated with the publication of a poetry collection entitled The Seasons of Yes. The art and poetry are “all of a piece…there is a cross-pollination, often unconscious, between the forms that feed one another.”

A curious happening occurred in 2005 in conjunction with a major retrospective of Lorraine’s works on paper from 2001-2005. After the show, Lorraine hit a fallow period in which she had absolutely no impulse to create anything. Every day, she would meditate, practice yoga, and visit the gym. Then that persistent inner voice suggested that she study the cello, which she did on awakening on November 15, 2005. She is an avid student and has played with the High Desert Strings Orchestra and is looking forward to playing in a quartet.

Lorraine argues that without a life full of teaching—“If not a teacher, what am I?”—she would not be able to share what she learns: “My most natural born inclination is to teach.” She taught her four-year old brother to read and do math: “I learn something and then I teach it.” Lorraine sees her art and her teaching as inseparable: “Both are higher Self; they inform one another and are the result of love, interest, and inspiration.” After a lifetime of work alone in the studio and the library, Lorraine finds music a “great blessing that I wouldn’t have been able to do without my teaching and administrative work in the arts.”

Lorraine Schechter’s future projects include designing a two-day set of lectures and workshops on the American premiere of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s Adriana Mater at the Santa Fe Opera this summer. Equally intriguing is her collaboration with cellist Dana Winograd who will be playing Bach, Britten, and Cassado as Lorraine reads her poetry from The Seasons of Yes. This performance will take place at the Georgia O’Keeffe’s Museum Education Annex (123 Grant Avenue) on Sunday, March 30, 2008, at 4 P.M.

Lorraine Schechter’s work may be viewed at www.lorraineschechter.com. For further information, including a studio visit by appointment, phone (505) 438-8294 or e-mail livingartfoundation@earthlink.net.

MARCH 30th at 4 pm

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Annex
123 Grant Avenue
Santa Fe, New Mexico

The Seasons of Yes: Landscapes in Music and Poems
Lorraine Schechter with Dana Winograd, Cellist

In preparing for our program, we selected the music of Bach, Britten, and Cassadó evocative of the color and light, textures and moods of the seasons. We chose a suite from my new book of poems that speak of the New Mexico landscape and explore those numinous spaces where inner and outer worlds meet. The poems and music interact and inform each other, at times overlapping spoken word into the music. Lorraine Schechter

Reservations suggested: 505.946.1007