Irene Y. Ladwig (May 17, 1925 – March 30, 2013) was an
un-acclaimed artist who specialized in Chinese brush stroke painting and the highly evolved artistic craft of
Fabergé eggs in the dioramatic format. The Steiny Road Poet here publishes a tiny art show
for a woman of strong convictions, starting with her wish that no memorial
service be organized. She told her niece, the person named her heir since she
had no children, that dead is dead.
Years ago, Irene asked to see the musical score of my opera Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On, the collaboration with composer William
Banfield. She no longer had a piano having given it to our condominium
association for general community use, but she said after she finished reading
the score that she could hear the music in her head as she read the notes. She
liked the music, but noted that some of the word settings were not inflected
correctly which made me keenly aware of how talented my neighbor was. Before
she married her husband Marion Ladwig at age 40, she had been a music teacher
in her home state of Texas. Another neighbor of ours told me recently that she
had had a beautiful singing voice.
When I decided to study Mandarin in preparation for a 21-day
trip to China, Irene gave me numerous Mandarin resource books including
dictionaries and how-to-shape-the-characters guides. She also gave me special
paper to practice my writing of the characters. She had studied Mandarin for
years but she said her teacher did not have the best accent, a problem I ran
into when I signed up for Chinese 102 at the local community college after
having a superb Beijingnese professor for Chinese 101.
Among the many things I saw in China were the misty
mountains of Guilin. Irene’s painting puts me back there on a foggy morning on
the boat traveling down the Li River as well as reminds me of the spiritual
side of Chinese culture. In the tradition of the art form, Irene has placed a
tiny dot of a man, probably sitting zazen, within our sight, but probably not
his, of an almost hidden temple. In the philosophy of Chinese brush stroke
painting, the artist is given one chance to get it right. No corrections are
allowed. This is the life philosophy Irene Ladwig embraced.
Here is a tiny glimpse of her eggs. These are most likely
not her best pieces since much of the 90-some eggs she retained in her collection were given away quickly to
her family and friends, something she would have approved since she said there
was no amount of money that could satisfy the time she put into making these
jewels. She did however want to exhibit her collection and that never happened.
Few artists are good at marketing their creations. Therefore the Steiny Road Poet shall be her curator.
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