In the Woods

By Michael Depp
Scat Magazine, January 2004

At the easternmost West Bank periphery of Orleans Parish, where fast food restaurants and strip malls give over to pastures and earth-brown expanses of knuckly-branched trees, the tenuous, first-draft notes of a jazz clarinet noodle out for a scattered audience of three people, two dogs, some cats and a barn owl.

Dr. Michael White, the year's fourth and final artist-in-residence at A Studio in the Woods, has sequestered himself in one of the studio's three buildings. It's a jointy, angly space where the only distraction to compete for his attention is an amoebic-shaped pond whose surface has been shaken over with shavings of dead winter leaves like fish food in a tank.

White's clarinet stops, and after a pause the owl coos from the other side of the pond, minor ripples of sound in a place where quiet otherwise settles over all things like a heavy blanket. Just yards across the road, freighters rest at the Mississippi riverbank where they can anchor for free, and even their hulking forms are noiseless for the moment from over the levee, as though acknowledging and respecting this small pocket of serenity.

"The world comes to our door," says Joe Carmichael, gesturing in the direction of the river. Carmichael and his wife Lucianne first came to this place in the woods as a picnicking spot nearly 30 years ago when there was even less here than now - just a smattering of pig and cow farms, trailers and an old metal bridge that pre-dated the high rise now sleekly extending over the Intracoastal Waterway.

Carmichael, a slender Texan with white hair and beard, carries himself quietly around the seven-and-a-half acres that he and Lucianne acquired from the parcelized remains of the old Delacroix Plantation. In those early days, both were still ensconced in their former lives with the Orleans Parish Public Schools - he as a grant writer, she as principal of the French Quarter's McDonogh 15 during its heyday as one of the district's best schools.

Lucianne Carmichael slips almost soundlessly into the main house where she and her husband have lived since they finished building it from bits and pieces of recycled material in 1977. At the time, Lucianne would bring groups of her students in to spend a day among the oaks and pecan trees and the migratory birds that pass through the land on their southward journey.

"What amazed us most were the effects on those children, especially troubled children who in a classroom had been a lot of difficulty," Lucianne, a native of Canada, says, herself as slight as her husband with a careful, serious face and a ponderous, pause-laden manner of speaking. "Out here in this environment, they became happy, normal-seeming children."

After writing a book about her experience at McDonogh 15, Lucianne retired in 1985, and then turned her energies toward pottery. Joe was doing work in wood and metal, and the two eventually began hosting holiday season sales of their work on the property. Those evolved into larger annual sales, and the main house grew into two more buildings: a studio where they could work and a space for exhibitions and sales.

For a time, A Studio in the Woods operated as a gallery, though neither of the Carmichaels was happy with its commercial direction. "The environment became short-changed," Lucianne says. "We weren't really allowing the environment itself to do the work, and by that time, it was clearer and clearer to us that we wanted to offer this place as a source of creative energy for people who could use it well."

So they retrenched, closed the gallery and reinvented the studio as a non-profit center. All the while, they had been lending out space to friends and acquaintances so they could come and work. Informal residencies of that sort had been going for years with potters, artisans, novelists and the like dropping in - sometimes for a day to work on a chapter, others lingering for months. They decided to formalize those residencies, and the Deep South's only artists' retreat was born.

Inside the former gallery building, Michael White sets down his clarinet and walks around the pond's edge in deep discussion with two visiting collaborators. Sheba, a large black German shepherd who is among the studio's small menagerie of adopted pets - many are abandoned by their owners at the end of this remote road - has found a patch of winter sun and scratches her back against the spindly privet saplings that regularly invade the small clearing. Lucianne warms her hands around a mug of herbal tea and ponders the future changes that are imminent for the studio.

First, there are the artists' cottages planned for the other side of the pond - small, energy-efficient spaces made from recycled materials of a piece with the existing buildings. Then there is the pavilion, a performance space integrated with the trees that the Carmichaels will not part with at any cost. The expansions are being designed now by a group of students at the Tulane School of Architecture and will be finished by the end of spring.

Then there are the residencies, which will begin anew in spring as the Carmichaels again share their home and working space with strangers who have applied to be there. "It's a very delicate dance, and we're learning more every day," Lucianne says of the arrangement.

But if privacy is to be the cost, Lucianne and Joe are willing - or feel compelled - to pay it. "Our lives are so pressured, so over programmed, so bombarded with exterior stimuli that human beings don't have the chance for that kind of solitude, that kind of internal exploration," Lucianne says. "And what is the essence of being human? It's being able to pay attention both inwardly and outwardly."

The cool, airy room again falls into silence but for the tympanic persistence of a grandfather clock. The musicians have returned to the studio, and as the afternoon light descends through a mottled canvas of apple green-yellow leaves, a restive clarity seems to fall over Lucianne. It spills out in soft, tiny gestures in her, and in turn she sees it always in others' faces when they arrive to this patch of woods at the edge of the city. It's a change that might be fleeting, but it's inescapable while they are here. "I don't know all the reasons why this happens to people," she says after a long moment of reflection, "but it does happen."

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