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.