As a young artist, Cavat ran in the same creative circles as her friends Willem and Elaine De Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and James Baldwin. As a New Yorker, she endured the urban grind with gal pal Billie Holiday and her beloved puppy Greta, gifted to her by bebop virtuoso Charlie Parker. As a voracious explorer, she lived in Haiti, France, Greece, Italy, and England - modeling for René Magritte and illustrating science fiction books to make ends meet. By the time she arrived on the shores of Santa Barbara with daughters Karina and Nika in 1963, she had lived a life most male artists could only fantasize about, and one rarely afforded to their female counterparts.
Offered a teaching position at UC Santa Barbara, she settled into a 120-year-old converted barn in Hope Ranch and hosted artists the world over as she churned out expressions in acrylics, clay, metal, marble, and collage from her sun-filled studio. It was the light in Santa Barbara, she would remark time and again, that anchored her to the town until her death in 2020; the birthplace of a catalogue of work that will be cherished for generations to come. In her touching essay, daughter Nika Cavat describes the outsized life and times of a woman who worshiped at the altar of art and - with heart wide open - drank deeply from the river of life.
Finding ripe avocados proved elusive. Our trees were like frilly ladies at a party, abundant with hunter green leaves, branchy arms touching, their fruit-truths secreted deep underneath. The best way to find avocados required a low crouch, and then a scoot under the arc of leaves as though hiding under a tablecloth. Presenting my mother with avocados momentarily won me her attention. She delighted in what the land could gift us: Meyer lemons, purple passionfruit, Japanese persimmons, and our Haas avocados. But her favorite was the pomegranate tree. She began anticipating its fruit as soon as the small flowers bloomed and slowly turned into fiery red globes, eventually splitting open to reveal their ruby gems. Painting these pomegranates at every stage, she extracted from them metaphors of womanhood and community.
While she delighted in hosting dinner parties and attending art openings, my mother had little patience for almost all else. Her singular focus lay in the creation, discussion, and teaching of art. As a child, I’d wander about the house calling after her, though I knew where the most likely place would be to find her: in her studio filled with photos ripped from magazines, paintings in various stages of completion, or still-lifes of bottles and food. She reluctantly tore herself away from her work to set me up with colored pencils and paper. While she continued painting, I drew dragons. Occasionally, she asked me to weigh in on a pear she was grappling with on her easel, addressing me as though I could grasp the intricacies of composition, texture, and color. When I was too ill to attend school, my mother took me with her to UCSB, where she taught art. Feverish, I lay in her office, gazing through the window as she tended to her students, occasionally taking their brushes to demonstrate how to render an object. Winning her attention was, at that age, a true victory.
Her creative gift became apparent while still in her teens. She transformed whatever she could get her hands on - wood, clay, paint, or metal - into jewelry, seascapes, and human bodies. She was also a very striking woman, with shoulder-length auburn hair, full, pouty lips, alabaster skin, and a sensuality that stopped men in their tracks. The humble Jewish household in Brooklyn into which she was born quickly became too small for her. She yearned for a much bigger and more complex world, eager to devour whatever it might offer. Intrigued by voodoo music she and her friends had discovered at dance parties in 1940s Greenwich Village, my mother then ventured alone to Haiti in search of the music’s origins.
Traveling provided the best inspiration for her. In mid- 1950s France, she found fresh breads, lavender fields, wine bottles to draw. In Algiers, she sketched the nomadic Bedouin families. As very young children, my sister, Karina and I traveled with our parents all over Europe, camping out of a red VW bus. Decades later, with close friend Elaine De Kooning, my mother visited Petra, Jordan, home to ancient cave dwellers. When she and her friend, Susie Weintraub, decided to drive through the Basque region of Spain to visit the Bilbao Museum, a coup d’etat erupted as the Basque paramilitary fought with the government. For three days, they were incommunicado, and when I finally reached her, my mother dismissed my tears as “overly dramatic”. As I grew older, my consideration of her as a woman and an artist matured. This trip, like so many others, would become a fanciful story she would tell around the dinner table. Although the chiaroscuro light and deep silences of cathedrals, churches, and other places of worship fascinated her, my mother never adhered to any religious faith. For her, painting in the studio was the closest she could get to divinity. There, she communed with the deities of fruit, of the human figure, and the humbler objects of daily life. It was there I could always find her, listening to jazz, the wood stove crackling as she whispered in a coded language with her paint and brushes. Come sit, she’d say half to herself, what do you think?
