ephemera

əˈfem(ə)rə/

noun

things that exist or are used or enjoyed for only a short time.

items of collectible memorabilia, typically written or printed ones, that were originally expected to have only short-term usefulness or popularity.

Ephemera Collector by Judy Takács
Best in Show at the 73rd Ohio Annual, Zanesville Museum of Art
and also Grand Prize winner of the Artists Magazine All-Media Competition
Available through 33 Contemporary in Chicago, at artsy.net

Ephemera, a fleeting thing that takes its feathery place as a memory without taking up space as a reality. 

Human life is ephemeral.

My dad passed away in 2015, my mom, six months later in 2016. Having lived in the same house for the past 50 years, they amassed and produced a lot of things.

And by things, I mean writing. Both were professors. 

My dad had created mountains of notebooks, carefully penned in flawless Hungarian Cursive. Pages of equations with occasional words peppered in; “therefore,” “it can be concluded” “given” and “we can surmise” separated paragraphs of calligraphic sigmas, lambdas, x’s, y’s and equal signs.

To my artistic eye, these scripts were like Ancient Arabic, Chinese or Hebrew…so beautiful to look at, but (sorry) Greek to me.

Some of it (18 boxes actually!) went to be scanned and archived at Case Western Reserve University, (link to come) where he retired as professor emeritus in the late ’80s. My dad’s legacy as a Pioneer in Queueing Theory will be preserved and useful to generations of future mathematicians who can actually read these calculations…which, I’m told, are brilliant.

And some of the writings were absconded by me…as ephemera to incorporate into my art and to be appreciated for its visual beauty alone.

My mom’s writings were more readable.

As a professor of English Literature at Notre Dame College of Ohio, a scholar of the Irish Dramatists and Shakespeare, and a contemporary author and historian, she had mountains of beautifully organized notes for teaching, research, study and analysis. She had journals too…galore…which will be kept intact for the ages, and for me to read about who she actually was, independent of being my mom. She also sowed many seeds of ideas for novels and stories. These may some day serve as inspiration for paintings. 

I also absconded bits and pieces from her loose writings to incorporate into my art, drawing great comfort from her familiar handwriting. 

So I present to you my Ephemera Series.

Instead of posing myself yet again (some say all our portraits are really self-portraits) I chose my model as a timeless angel for the ages…collecting, defending and dispersing wispy whispers of Ephemera with luscious vintage butterfly nets and expressive hands and face.

Into my oil paintings, I collaged butterflies torn from my parents’ combined writings…floating, fleeting ephemera.

As with all the found things from my parents’ home, life and legacy, I try to pass them forward for a new life and purpose.

Ephemera Defender, included in the Manifest Gallery In Memoriam Show, 2017
Judy Takács

I have thus far given pages of these written ephemera to Alia El Bermani in the form of a cut paper snowflake to use in her painting, to Leslie Adams for her “Handwritten Dreams” project at the Gerald Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, to Amy Kesegich for collage work, to Karina Fassett as wallpaper inspiration, to a mathematical niece to fuel her STEM fire, and have dropped off three baskets full of everything ephemeral to Liz Maugans at Zygote Press for all manner of printmaking.

I was thrilled to see that my gold starred kindergarten math worksheet found its forever home plastered front and center in the middle of Liz Maugans' monolithic collage at the Hedge Gallery.

Five year old Judy Takács got a star on her kindergarten math worksheet

I can't seem to get organized
My worksheet featured front and center in Liz Maugans’ Multi-media print collage

I have also passed along boxes of jewelry from my mom and grandmother’s compounded collection to my favorite jewelry artist, Kim Mettee…who has fashioned them into two amazing commissioned necklaces for my sister and myself along with a host of other adornments.

Earrings and necklace by Kim Mettee Designs
inspired by pieces from my grandmothers jewelry from Istanbul

My dad’s books have found loving homes with the Math Grad Students of Case Western Reserve and with my own math-loving boys. My mom’s books on Shakespeare and Drama are the start of a library for theatre majors at Baldwin Wallace University. The Hungarian books have been carefully distributed in the U.S. and in Hungary by a good-hearted docent at the Cleveland Hungarian Museum. And a couple of Irish Fairy Tale books found their way to my Irish neighbor Teresa’s house to read to her many nieces and nephews.

Pieces of their furniture have become part of the collection of the Cleveland Playhouse prop warehouse…I’ve already seen one of their 1970s padded folding chairs in “Between Riverside and Crazy” just last month. There were no takers for their 60 year-old twice re-upholstered extra-long yellow French Provincial couch, so it now sits in my studio awaiting inspiration…and the right model. 

What I still have left, however, are many (many) writings. 

Zoom in to see the gorgeous handwriting from my parents’ ephemeral writings.

If you would like to incorporate some of these ephemeral bits of handwritten Mathematica and Literature into your art, shoot me an email with your mailing address at judytakacs@me.com. I will send you some to use as you choose…the ironic preservation of fleeting ephemera from one generation of creative thinkers to the next.

Ephemeral Whisper, included in the Catharine Lorillard Wolf 121st Exhibition in NYC

Judy Takács

Ephemera Collector (up top) is now available through
33 Contemporary Gallery in Chicago
on artsy.net.

The Final Chapter…A Mother's Day Portrait

The Final Chapter
Judy Takács

There is so much symbolism in this work I don’t even know when to begin. 

I’ll begin at a time that was very close to the end. 

Late in May of 2016, I asked my mom to come to my studio and pose for me from life. Neither one of us said, “one last time.” 

She was at the end of her four-year journey with Ovarian Cancer, had decided to forgo the last cruel bout of debilitating chemo…that wasn’t working anyway… and let the chips fall where they may. 

I told her she could read while she posed for me.

This is something I do not encourage because the sitter’s downward cast face moves from one side to the other, changing the head angle with the regularity of a slow and frustrating metronome.

But I bent the rules for her…just this once.

As she posed, she also dozed, giving me even more frustrating head angles. But, I embraced the experience and came up with this portrait of a disappearing little gray person painted from life. (below)

Little Gray Person
Judy Takács

While I was painting, I also snapped photos because I knew there was a better painting yet to come. I also had no idea how long the photos would sit on my hard drive after she was gone, before I steeled myself to approach them as painting reference…let alone look at them. 

Now it’s been not quite two years, and I felt the time was right to approach this “final portrait” of my mom…especially with the advent of my solo show, SECRETS, coming up in May. 

I’m not a believer in the afterlife per se, but my mom was. To her, the afterlife was a glorious journey where you find out everything you didn’t get to find out during your lifetime. Ever the control master (like mother, like daughter) she wrote her own eulogy reassuring us that she was now on to new discoveries about historical and scientific questions that had plagued the ages. I’m sure she is.

As I watched her read while I painted her, the pages of the book began to look more like angel wings…allowing her to soar via the vast knowledge she was gaining in the afterlife. 

I surrounded her with her own words. If you’ve read my other blogs on my Ephemera paintings, you’ll know that my mom, Dalma Takács, was an English Professor who left mountains of handwritten words; journals, plays, concepts, fictions, histories and class notes. These class notes were color-coded on multi-colored notecards. From this vast store, I tore juicy tidbits of her observations on the many books she read and lectured to her classes about. There are reflections on heaven, hell, good, evil, puritans, monsters in fiction and reality and Beowulf too. 

The ancient poem, Beowulf is particularly pertinent, because the day before she died, she told me all about Beowulf, and his quest to slay Grendel. 

The actual book she was reading when she came to pose was one about Greek Tragic Drama. In the painting, however, I decided to substitute the book she was reading when she died. It was a book by her own father, Lajos Páloczi Horváth; an autobiographical account of his life during the Second World War, Communist Hungary, his time in political prison and the Hungarian Revolution that released him. 

The name of that book was, “Két Világ Határán”…Between Two Worlds…kinda perfect actually.

And, the name of my painting is The Final Chapter. She made her debut this summer at SECRETS, my inaugural exhibition with Marilyn Szalay at the Artists Archives of the Western Reserve.

And now, she's hanging in New York City as part of the:

Allied Artists of America 105th Annual Exhibition
Salmagundi Art Club, NYC
August 30-September 16
Artist reception and awards ceremony:
Sunday, September 16th from 1:00 to 5:00

Another study for The Final Chapter
Judy Takács