Artist's Notebook

Remembering a friend who conjured up artistic coincidences.

Illustration by Demian Johnston for City Arts 

Recently I attended a memorial service for my friend Jan Sleicher, who died at age seventy-eight. Years ago I taught with Jan at Bellevue’s Little School. Starting as classroom teacher, eventually Jan became the school-wide “culture lady,” traveling the world with her UW-professor husband, Charles, and bringing back artifacts for the kids to see: carved and woven goods, crafts, anything of interest she could “transcribe” for her young students. She often lifted a pattern from a basket to be recreated by the kids with paper and crayons or tongue depressors and raffia. In my classroom, the five-year-olds were thrilled to have her join us — her big apron pockets full of fascinating tidbits and exotic samples.

When they weren’t traveling, Jan and Charles also took pleasure in mixing and matching people. At one of their fine dinner parties, I was introduced to UW biologist Gordon Orians. At that point, nearly a quarter century ago, Orians was gaining recognition for his pioneering theories about how our beginnings in Africa predispose us towards open-vista landscapes. I was just back from a Fulbright year investigating the urbanscape of Bologna, Italy, about as different from the Pacific Northwest as Orians’s beloved savannah. We fell into conversation and he recommended some articles he had recently authored.

Orians posits that we appreciate park-like settings because our most distant ancestors felt secure in places where they could see far across the grass.

He writes,

"An observer may ask of an environment — How easy would it be to enter it, explore it, and find my way back if necessary? . . . when we look at trees in a landscape, we think of them . . . as objects suggesting opportunities for doing things, such as picking fruit, seeing further, hiding better, or climbing to safety.” “Nature and Human Nature,” Daedalus, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Spring 2008

This fall I received an e-mail from a niece who is doing her graduate work in architecture. She and I shared a memorable end-of-summer day when I was in Portland to complete work on a sculpture for Cathedral Park, itself a large expanse of grass and trees. My niece helped out. Working together that day provided us with a fine excuse to catch up. In her e-mail she mentioned a class she would be taking on man’s place in the landscape. I wrote back suggesting she look up Orians’s writing.

A few weeks later, I learned of Jan’s death, and I attended the Sunday memorial at the UW faculty club. In the “mingling” time afterwards, I saw Orians across the room. I reintroduced myself after two decades. I learned he is now professor emeritus at the University. I reminded him that it was through Jan that we had met, and we acknowledged how pleased she would have been that we were once again talking. I told him how I had just shared his work with my architect-to-be niece.

Walking to my car across the deserted campus, I found myself looking anew at the wide expanse of lawns. As I drove along the winding road with a view out onto the Cascades and into the Fall City woods, thick with trees, I thought about relationships and coincidences, culture and landscape, about Jan and Gordon, and about open space. Later I sent Orians an e-mail suggesting that we get together. He wrote back saying that was a fine idea, so after all this time we are really beginning the artist-biologist conversation that Jan had instigated twenty-five years ago.

Orians left town for a while after that, and while he was gone I read some of his recent articles and found myself thinking about coincidence in evolutionary terms. Could the special pleasure we found in the coincidence of our meeting have played a role in getting us to see the importance of repeat occurrences? Does the recognition of pattern somehow help us survive? Or do we find a series of overlaps in our lives so compelling for other reasons? Plots in plays, novels and films have pivoted on the geometry of coincidence for centuries. Is this one of the ways we incorporate inherited human experience into our cultural and personal lives?

Coincidences feel like a kind of magic. To find someone from the past and begin where you left off is like opening a gift: it is an experience of pleasure that reaches backwards and forwards at once. Collaborating across science and art offers some of that same powerful magic, transporting its participants to a place where neither lives, but both feel at home.