Dan's North Fork Cover Artist Mym Tuma Paints Ope's Farmstand

This issue of Dan’s Papers North Fork features a beautiful painting of a farm stand full of pumpkins, mums, and other fall flowers – something you’ll see plenty of while driving on the North Fork this time of year – by Mym Tuma. Here, Tuma discusses her inspiration for the farmstand painting and what drives her as an artist.

A Conversation with Mym Tuma

What is the name of this weeks cover art, and what inspired its creation?

The energy of the East End colors during the harvest time inspired the creation of Ope’s Farmstand. It illuminates the cultivation of farmland since Lion Gardiner in 1640. People seeking a prosperous life like so many immigrants ever since landed here. We have the fertile soil, the exquisite light, creating the basics of sustenance, living surrounded by water. Settlers sailed on the spiraling waves and pounding surf that are primordial rhythms we hear on the seashore.

The coast itself produces forms of growth and curvature. I abstracted the glossy pumpkins and the round fibonacci patterns in the sunflowers. They are under the beach umbrellas implying comparison to the seashore. There is no shape older than the spiral and sphere — the roundness that I have so much theory about.

How was this piece created? Walk us through your creative process…

Ope’s Farmstand is the last drawing in a series of twenty collages that emerged when my startled kitty jumped from the car on a road trip. I started searching…

My book, Ope’s Dream is an allegory about the city vs. country contrast, with a mild environmental contrast for young children. Ope is a beloved house cat living with Nature Girl in a high rise when they leave the noisy city to set out on a road trip.

In my story they leave the city, and drive until the sun starts to rise – until they reach a little house in the middle of the woods. The trees grow tall in the clear air around it, and the wildflowers dot the grass where it sits. Ope smells the leaves, and hears the birds. He looks at Nature Girl, who says, “This is our new home, Ope. I told you about it when you were a kitten, a place where no smog chokes you and no buildings loom over you and no horns blow,” as in the city they once called home. This is the fulfillment of a wonderful dream here on the East End.

These are metaphors in my art and creative process. Life appeals to me here where I’ve painted for over thirty years. I stand with the silence of time. To quote T.S. Eliot, “Because I know that time is always time and place is always and only place … I rejoice. Consequently I create something upon which to rejoice. I have to bloom where I’m planted. Write poetry, produce exhibits, and publish books…”

What do you find most rewarding about being an artist? 

Some years ago I taught Studio Approach To Nature Study in Ellison Bay, Wisconsin, at The Clearing. I loved The Soil, page 18, “In the dawning of each new day we walk out into the wilderness of thought for a beginning of that new day. We walk out to where the wind sweeps the mind clean and the fragrance of that new day fills us with the breadth of life.”

I love nurturing seniors drawing murals  to “Spark” their imagination. At Independent Group Home Living Program, Inc. (IGHL), now I teach healing art therapy to kids of all ages who are intellectually disabled. I believe we are best to ourselves when we’re good to others and starting Healing Art Energy, Inc. with Barney Brunson, my husband, allowed me to be of service to the community and environment.

In my virtual studio laboratory, I raised garden snails before coming to the coast itself, which produces spirals in archetypal shells. I germinated seeds of many kinds of beans, different sizes of corn kernels to study and drew them in pastels. The fragile aspects of life like sprouted kernels are preserved in jars of alcohol, butterflies of all kinds, beetles and insects, bones and rocks, shells from the beaches became part of my philosophy. From that time emerged the studies for all of my paintings, and recently, in publishing this series of tissue paper collages that evolved on a adventurous road trip with my kitty.

What artistic accomplishments are you most proud of? 

When I started conceptualizing the sprouting seeds, I lived in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a tropical paradise, influenced by lush growth and fertile vegetation where the germination of the seedlings took place. My work absorbed the intimacy and directness, the hispanic sense of familiarity and respect for family, faithfulness so that became my substitute family overlaid with the pervasive fertility and growth of the focus of Nature prevailing there. That was then, now there are extreme weather events on other continents like Africa, the continent least able to cope with the negative impacts of climate change.

My sojourn to Australia followed that period, wrapping up my ten years with Georgia O’Keeffe. Writing my memoir, An Embryo Of Time (2018) is my achievement. It’s available in local libraries and a digital version is in the works.

If someone asks what motivates me to choose a subject — returning to it over and over — the answer is that a personal relationship to the natural world  and environment exists. In the same way I see the driving force of Rebirth in Nature — nourishing the interior life of my Spirit. Therefore, I do not argue with nature, I listen to it.