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
Mar/100
changing the windows
Now that the paintings are out of the studio, I have been taking time to clean and reorganize the space. Over the last ten years I had allowed the windows at the east end of the studio to stay dirty, because I liked being aware of the glass while including it in a number of paintings. But this seemed like a good time to start fresh. Two afternoons and a bucket of muddy water later, I am again admiring a clear view of the world outside. My precarious work on the roof reminded me of a small book of poems by Jerome Mazzaro called Changing the Windows. I picked it up at a used book store in Bloomington, Indiana in 1997 while visiting a few other young artists there with my friend Mark Green. Here is the poem from which the book draws its title:
CHANGING THE WINDOWS
When I am forced by circumstance and heat
to take the winter windows off the house
spotted like bass who will be stripped of lice,
I think of that old woman down the street
who got by the Depression renting rooms
to seven lonely bachelors in a row,
the last of whom fell from an open window
changing the screens one sunny afternoon.
Called Mother Witch by city columnists
who wrote how all the seven perished strangely,
each with an ample paid-up policy
made out to her, she didn’t snare one jurist
in all the headline months her trials ran–
through winter changed to summer as it must.
She sat reading a favorite Evening Post
as if no court could judge her for her sin.
Thinking, too, of her full-grown idiot son
who scavenged in our ashcans after that
feeding himself with cast-off bits of fat
until a court ruled he’d too lost his reason,
somehow I think of husbanded black widows
and savage birds who sometimes eat their young,
and wonder at the web this world becomes,
then scuttle off to unhinge all the windows.
A few of my recent paintings incorporated ideas of memorialization and the inevitable challenges of sentimentality and over-simplification. I include one more of Mazzaro’s poems, below, as a nod to his own efforts:
DEATH WAS A TRICK
Death was a trick I taught him as a pup
like fetching till he mastered both to race
my ordered stick back clamped between his jaws,
ignoring once too soon the whir of trucks
whose chirring crushed whole worlds of growing up
and set him broken in a makeshift box.
Across blind roadways he comes running yet,
small-terriered, black-footed, slow in death.
In the midst of the reorganization of the upstairs studio, I have been keeping busy in the shop. I’m working on another bench made from reclaimed lumber. This one is composed of African Mahogany that had dried with crazy twists and curves. I’ve been sorting through the deformed boards and dreaming up applications for the undulating surfaces.
bench top after glue-up to the "keel" support
bottom of bench seat showing the sag and twist of the matched boards
trimming the "keel" flush while beginning to scoop out the bench top
I was able to match two boards with similar curves to make a seat that shifts from being relatively flat to being sharply cleft along its length. I continue to carve, scrape, and sand out the top face in an effort to create a comfortable hollow. I have started to think of it as a kind of “aqueduct” design, as the form reminds me of terraced troughs used move water for mills, irrigation, etc.
Jan/100
Overdue
Catching up on some reading is one of the great pleasures of winter break. I’ve almost managed to consolidate my “open” books onto my bedside table, and although it is a little difficult to turn on the lamp, there is only a small pile of books still relegated to the floor nearby. It is a habit of mine to read a number of books simultaneously, but a clear favorite emerged in Andrew Lee March’s Landscape in the Thought of Su Shih (1036-1101), and I couldn’t put it aside until I was finished. It is actually his dissertation for the Doctor of Philosophy in Geography at the University of Washington in 1964, and I know that doesn’t sound like your typical page-turner. But it is an eloquent investigation of Su Shih’s creative practice and the way that the experience of the landscape was for him a means by which to mediate between his creative individuality and his sense of civic/social responsibility. This is some of what his reading committee had to say about the text:
“This is an unusual, and unusually valuable, dissertation. Its central theme, landscape, is clearly and demonstrably geographic, and Mr. March effectively relates his treatment to the relevant body of disciplinary literature and argument. But the dissertation also deals, at a high level of effectiveness and sophistication, with important concepts in literature and the arts, philosophy, and psychology, and rests as well on an understanding of Chinese intellectual history. The skill with which Mr. March has woven modern psychological concepts into his analysis may warrant particular mention; he has produced a genuinely new approach, not only to the study of landscape or to the thought of Su Shih as an important figure, but to a host of similar problems in what has been referred to elsewhere as “idealist analysis”, a matter common to many disciplines, including geography.”
The book has helped much of my thinking about the role of the garden in an urban setting, and the role of nature in contemporary life.
Another recent read was Ink Stone, a small book of poems by Jamie McKendrick. It was amusing to discover a book of poems while searching for information about ink stones. And although I did enjoy most of the poems, what has stayed in my mind are these two quotes, which McKendrick used as a preface:
“In China and Japan, the use of bottled ink is frowned upon and generally considered to be a concession to barbarians…The older the stone that is used to make an ink stone, the better it will perform. Because the geological formations in China are much older than those in Japan, the best stones came from China… The Japanese term for the best grades of slate used in the manufacture of ink stones is tankai. There are several grades of tankai just as there are grades of diamonds. The very best tankai was found under rivers. Today it can only be found in private collections and museums. Since China has a long history, all the stones of this quality have already been found.”
Steven L. Saitzyk, Art Hardware
So he vanish’d from my sight,
And I pluck’d a hollow reed,
And I made a rural pen,
And I stain’d the water clear
William Blake
As a preface to poetry this might be interpreted as an apology, a reluctant admission that all good poems, like the stones, have already been found. But McKendrick’s point is clarified by Blake’s “rural pen”– that humble means need not result in humble ends, and that one should not confuse the spirit with the flesh.
Jul/090
The Mooring of Starting Out
I’ve spent the last week or so building stretchers, stretching the canvases, and priming the new surfaces. It is a process that I now enjoy, but that was not the case when I was first learning how to do the work. It seemed like a waste of time when I wanted to get on with the activity of painting. Then one of my professors, Barbara Duval, explained to me that the time spent preparing the surface was valuable time for giving thought to what might happen on that surface. I put that into practice. These days the plot has thickened– my impulse for making the painting comes first, and I determine the dimensions/proportions to suit that vision. As I begin making the stock for the stretcher bars, I am already, in effect, making the painting.
Ten years ago my wife Christine was good enough to buy The Mooring of Starting Out, The First Five Books of Poetry by John Ashbery for me as a Christmas present. As I was scraping the ground across a large canvas this week, I found myself pondering the contradiction built into that title. I often find myself at odds with Ashbery’s work, but it is only because he refuses to do what I want him to do. I enjoy his work for the same reason. Our points of agreement are more often individual lines than complete poems. And so it was with this title, The Mooring of Starting Out. It felt appropriate to the work at hand, that I would stop painting in order to start painting. It is strange, and suitable.