Last month I had the bittersweet experience of attending a small exhibition of botanical drawings and watercolors by my late friend Lucylee Chiles. The exhibition was held at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where Lucylee had earned her Ph.D.
Lucylee died exactly a year ago today, after a long and courageous battle against ovarian cancer. During the last two years of that battle, she had become happily immersed in the rigors of botanical art. It is a demanding discipline, combining scientifically accurate observation with artistic skill in depiction. She loved it. And her love of it showed in the meticulously rendered images I saw at T.C., some of which are reproduced below.
The eldest child of Major General John (Jack) Chiles—who served on Douglas MacArthur’s staff in Tokyo after World War II—Lucylee had developed a passion for art as a child in Japan. And in her adult years she taught art in exotic locales around the world, continuing the peripatetic life she’d become accustomed to as an army brat. She was among the last Americans evacuated from Iran after the Khomeini coup in 1979—one of several close calls she had in an adventurous life. In her final decade, she signed on with cruise ships to give watercolor lessons to novice passengers, traveling as far as Tasmania on one of her last voyages.
Botanical art was a late discovery for Lucylee. In a Christmas note she sent in 2011, she related that a small garden project she’d undertaken for her apartment building had led to her
working towards a certificate in botanical illustration at the NY Botanical Garden. Having to go to the Garden regularly is a delight. Find I quite like drawing with a magnifying glass—the polar opposite of the fast and loose style I teach on the cruises.
What that note didn’t mention was that the treks from her apartment on Morningside Heights to the Botanical Garden in the Bronx were sandwiched in between bouts of chemotherapy, with their unpredictable toll on her energy and well-being.
But the art vitalized her. And she was eager to share her excitement over it. In the fall of 2012, she invited me to attend the 15th Annual International Exhibition of the American Society of Botanical Artists with her. When I responded enthusiastically to what we saw there, she was clearly pleased. And when I told her, on a visit to her in the hospital only a few days before she died, that a little exhibition of her own work might be planned at her alma mater, her face visibly brightened.
What better way to honor Lucylee, then, than to show to a wider public some of the lovely products of her forays into this very exacting art form. [CLICK ON THUMBNAILS TO ENLARGE]
[All the above works are Copyright © 2013 by The Estate of Lucylee Chiles and are published here with the permission of the estate. No other use is permitted without prior written authorization.]
“Art Education” Now
I must add a sadly ironic note here about what art education students at Teachers College are now learning. The contrast would surely not have been lost on Lucylee. She often deplored the lack of standards in today’s artworld. From time to time, she’d send me a news clipping that touted some dubious work—having annotated it with a few words of scathing critique.
Evidence of the current drift in art education stood in the room just next to the one containing Lucylee’s botanicals. It was the arrangement of table and chairs pictured here.
Items on the cluttered tabletop included half-empty beer mugs, some playing cards, and ashtrays heaped with cigarette butts.
Moving closer, I thought “who on earth is smoking like that these days?” It then occurred to me that this was a student installation. As explained in the exhibition brochure, it was a “visual history project” commemorating the “celebrated artists” who once inhabited the Chelsea Hotel, and “their influence on art education history.”
Who were these celebrated “influences” in the eyes of aspiring K-12 art teachers? In particular, Andy Warhol (who once said he didn’t “love roses . . . or anything like that enough to want to sit down and paint them lovingly and patiently”), Jackson Pollock (of drip-painting fame), and the (occasionally pornographic) photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Such artists, the brochure claimed, “were concerned with critiquing the consumerist culture that they lived in.” Indeed? Some might say they were more concerned with drugs, sex, themselves, and (in the case of Warhol, at least) capitalizing on consumerist culture. In any case, I shudder to think that, to quote the brochure, “The study of their art provides contemporary students in art education with a broader horizon of possibilities.”
Saddest of all, it was clear from conversation at the show that neither the students nor their professor-mentor had any inkling that the “art” represented in and by that crude little installation (so typical of today’s “conceptual art”) is, in effect, a travesty of all that Lucylee had striven for as a teacher and in her own art.
8 Responses
I was General Chiles’s first aide-de-camp at Ft. Hood in Texas and during the Cuban Missile Crisis and knew the family well. She was such a sweetheart, as was her mother. My wife and I were talking just now and we’re wondering about her. Last I had heard years ago she was in Lebanon. I am so sorry to learn of her passing. I had stayed in touch with General and Mrs. Chiles until their deaths some years ago. Her art interest fascinates, and I would love to have something of hers as a memory of her family. Do you have a suggestion how I can acquire a piece? General Chiles had a big influence on my life. Bill Beanblossom.
Thank you for your touching reminiscence about Lucylee. She was indeed a sweetheart. I will try to get an answer for you.
I first knew Lucylee in the late 1940s, 1950 when both our fathers were stationed in Tokyo, Japan assigned to General MacArthur’s staff and headquarters. We attended Yoyogi Elementary School that was located on Washington Heights.
She was quite an artist even then.
We next renewed our friendship in the 6th grade in 1954 in Carlisle, PA . Again, both our dads were attending or instructing at the Army War College. That is the last time I saw her.
Sad, such a nice person.
A truly wonderful person indeed! I miss her. Thanks for writing, Phil.
I am so sad to hear of this, even 7 years later. I was in the Women’s International Leadership Program at International House in 1991-92, as was Lucylee. She had a wonderful, soothing presence during what was for me a very stressful year as a journalism student at Columbia. I remember interviewing her for an article about how different cultures perceive time. She told me that as a girl that she would have to sit in at dinner parties for guests who ran on a slower clock when her parents were in the diplomatic corps in — I think it was Mexico. Anyway, I am very sad to learn of her death and love the botanicals you have displayed. If I saw one on sale (say the bird’s nest with eggs) I would buy it in a heartbeat.
Many thanks for your heartfelt remembrance, Meredith. Lucylee was indeed a wonderful presence. I continue to miss her.
I was a young teenager when Lucylee taught summer camp art class at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, in the late 60s. They didn’t give her particularly nice places to hold class. I remember the spaces being kind of small and dingy, but that didn’t stop her cheerful encouragement and bright smile. Simple summer camp art projects but she made us all feel so accomplished. She inspired me to be creative ever since. Sadly when I started using the internet to find Lucylee and thank her I found she had passed away.
Thanks so much for writing, Bobby! Lucylee retained her sunny disposition to the end, despite a long and difficult battle with cancer. She was in every respect a beautiful person, inside and out, and I am sure that she would have greatly appreciated your warm words of gratitude.