Jul/100
flora and fauna
wild carrot
I’ve been spending a lot of time over in Forest Park as I continue to study our region’s edible wild plants. We’ve managed to work in a few extra adventures, which included teaching Florence how to catch her first sunfish. I’m not yet certain how to talk about the plant study in relation to my art-making, but it is something that I am working to clarify. In the mean time I will pass along a poem by Louis MacNeice which I was fortunate to come across in the spring. I shared it with my Painting Elective class as a description of their own journey from an the objectivity of an existence “above” art-making to a place down in it– the immersion of experience.
Under the Mountain
Seen from above
The foam in the curving bay is a goose-quill
That feathers… unfeathers… itself.
Seen from above
The field is a flap and the haycocks buttons
To keep it flush with the earth.
Seen from above
The house is a silent gadget whose purpose
Was long since obsolete.
But when you get down
The breakers are cold scum and the wrack
sizzles with stinking life.
When you get down
The field is a failed or a worth-while crop, the source
Of back-ache if not heartache.
And when you get down
The house is a maelstrom of loves and hates where you–
Having got down– belong.
– Louis MacNeice, from Selected Poems of Louis MacNeice, Edited and with an introduction by Michael Longley
Jan/100
Show, don’t tell
On Monday I stopped in Forest Park between errands, and it was so beautiful that I went home for my camera. With the temperature hovering around twenty degrees and a stiff breeze, I had to alternate between warming my hand, warming the camera batteries, and trying to take photos without having the camera drop from my frozen fingers. I ended up with an expansion of my collection of “miniature landscapes” in which the act of looking down becomes a means by which to seek or to create a meditative space.
Nov/090
yellow and blue
yellow and blue
yellow on blue
blue on yellow
It is pretty bad when an entire season passes between posts, but I am pleased to return with one of the most striking aspects of autumn in St. Louis– the unlikely blue of the cloudless sky. And if you stand a yellow ginkgo tree in front of that blue, you are fortunate to observe what might very well be the most distinctive color contrast available to human vision. We have a 1993 Ford Explorer. It is my “occasional use” vehicle, perfect for hauling materials. It suffers from one of the most dated paint jobs available, and the color never made any sense to me until I came outside the other morning and saw it covered in leaves from our maple tree. Now I think of it as the most suitable of colors for St. Louis. Those two moments would have been enough for me, but I was blessed with one more when I returned home later in the day. Someone from the utility company had come by to mark the water lines on our street, and in a classic “not my job” gesture they had applied their blue spray paint to the shifting leaves instead of the asphalt. Standing there under the strange blue sky, next to my strange blue truck, looking down at the strange blue leaves, the looking felt like a good day’s work.
Aug/090
The great outdoors, indoors
photograph of sea shell "stone" with ink painting as context
When I am working in the studio I like to skip around between the many projects that are underway, and I always enjoy starting new ones. In between paintings last week I started working on some possible ways of resolving two bodies of work with which I have been unsatisfied. One is a collection of worm-eaten shells similar to those featured in a previous post. The other is a set of landscape paintings executed in ink on rice paper. The shells were objects without a home, and the paintings were homes without an object. These works in progress (I’ve posted two of them, above) are direct descendants of the photographs that I took in South Carolina this summer, with the significant change being the stage-like shift to a painted backdrop. I’ve been reworking the photographs digitally, and we will just have to wait to see where they go.