Collecting Owls as Totems, Andy Warhol, Silver Linings

The first silver threads were at ear level, like the distinguished silver linings of Mitt Romney’s sideburns. My hairdresser explained that gray hair has a different texture, so my blonde bob developed wings as the wisdom hair stuck out beneath other hair, fading into ash blonde.

I adopted Athena’s owl as my symbol and have various little owls around my house. The rule is they cannot be cute. They can be realistic, artistic renditions, or almost ancient, like reproduction pottery. They can be in a picture and fly over a snowy field like Harry Potter’s snowy owl or perch on a branch, eyes large and ears turned, a great horned owl.

The owl is a shift in totem from my goddess and Victoriana collections, which no longer fit. The young woman and the mother have left.

Andy Warhol in New York City

Andy Warhol wore silver, spiky wigs as his style signature, his mask. I lived in New York City in the ‘70s, and I regret I didn’t pay much attention to the world of the visual arts. I went to the theater, ballet, music, baseball, and the big art museums, but I didn’t hang around the galleries and lofts in Soho.

Andy Warhol was fascinating because he developed his mask to hide in plain sight. I passed him on Fifth Avenue. He was walking uptown, and I was going downtown. He was unmistakable, of course. I don’t remember what he wore, but I presume it was black pants and a black shirt. I remember the platinum hair and the nerdy glasses with transparent frames. He was a celebrity I could check off my list as if he were a rosy-breasted grosbeak or Stryker’s blue jay. I didn’t think of stopping him and asking if we could have coffee sometime or if I could visit The Factory.

I am getting old, if not wise, so I have adopted wisdom as my mask. I am not commercially or culturally attractive anymore, so wisdom works. There was a time when I was young and blonde in New York City, and that was enough. It was a surprise that I could work at such a surface level, but I could.

That was a time I didn’t need a name. Another time I lost my name was when I was so and so’s mom, a club I wanted to belong to, but I yearned for more.

Then that time passed, and I became myself.

Andy Warhol adopted his silver wig when he was young and losing hair, so he would not noticeably age because his hair was silver when he was young. He had access to good cosmeticians. He was impassive and had little to say in response to interviewers. His art was commercially successful, layered by being a surface response that was a simultaneous artistic statement, intellectually deeper. He was his best work of art, presenting a surface a passerby noted at a glance and looked past. Meanwhile, the famed, eccentric artist was busy creating and curating a legacy.

According to the Revolver Warhol Gallery, Warhol instructed the Factory staff to

decorate with “silver” coverings: mirrors, metallic paint, and aluminum foil. This transformation mirrored Warhol’s fascination with the metallic color as a symbol of the future, space exploration, and a nod to the glamorous past of the Hollywood silver screen. Silver represented a convergence of past and future, a theme that Warhol masterfully interwove into his art.

It is a challenge as we age to mix nostalgia with the future. The future no longer seems optimistic, as it did when I visited Tomorrowland at the New York World’s Fair. Now, the future is dystopian, like The Handmaid’s Tale or a sad novel about climate change.

Nostalgia seems sad, like buying a rocking chair for the porch.

Andy Warhol offers a lesson. One can construct a multi-layered experience, a reality of a different sort, with a silver lining. He was an artist who loved beautiful things and had a physical being he did not love. He was a queer man who was a practicing Catholic in a time when that was a difficult breach to straddle. He was many contradictions. He was complex. He was all about the surface. But he wasn’t.

Maybe he was wise. Maybe he was multi-layered instead of wise. Maybe we impute wisdom when someone is quiet.

I will keep looking for owls to decorate my house. Owls are quiet when they fly. Silence can be a strength.

Owls and totems can have brown wings, mottled wings, or white wings. Or silver wings in the moon’s light.