Aug 112017
 

Josh DormanJosh Dorman in his NYC studio

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I have placed there a little door opening on to the mysterious.
I have made stories.

—Odilon Redon

I  read Josh Dorman’s works like a Mary Ruefle essay. See how she writes about a revelation she had and the connections it revealed for her in her essay “Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World:”  “I was reading the dictionary, where I came upon the meaning of the word speculum: 1) an instrument inserted into a body passage for inspection; 2) an ancient mirror; 3) a medieval compendium of all knowledge; 4) a drawing showing the relative position of all the planets; and 5) a patch of color on the secondary wings of most ducks and some other birds.” Ruefle asserts, “there can be discoveries, connections… that explode the day and one’s heart and the long years that have led to the moment.”

Just so, artist Josh Dorman discovers a scrap, a tidbit, a piece of tinder, something recognizable (or not) and turns and turns it in his hand or mind appropriating it in his collage/multi-medium works, intuitively painting, drawing, layering, until it becomes more, becomes Other. The connections in his mind are revealed to him and/or us — or not; the lush, deep labyrinths open to some Home, or swallow us entirely blissfully lost.

Mary Kathryn Jablonski (MKJ): I’m very interested in how a piece begins for you. Do images you find suggest a narrative? Do you collect some images for use in collage based on the intrigue or beauty they hold for you alone? Do some images, which to the outsider might seem to have nothing in common, beg to be grouped with other images? I’m picturing files upon files named for various subjects in your studio, not unlike in collage artist Michael Oatman’s vast studio space! Tell us some of your sources. I’m most familiar with your paintings on antique maps, but you seem to be moving away from these a bit.

Camel CliffsCamel Cliffs – ink, acrylic, antique paper on panel, 12 x 14 inches, 2009

Josh Dorman (JD): I’m first struck by your mention of Oatman’s vast studio space. Picture my studio as more of a small cave packed with collections and piles of moldering detritus. Overflowing shelves filled with hundreds of antique books and yellowing paper: catalogs, diagrams, ledger books, topographical maps, player piano scrolls, but mostly textbooks. I use only printed materials from the pre-photography era: 1820s-1950s. They’re categorized by subject: Engineering, Biology, Botany, Architecture, Ornamentation, Cellular Structure, Human Anatomy, Geology, Geography, etc. It’s an obsession.

I still can’t resist when I stumble across a crusty tome at a yard sale. It’s not that the items are valuable, but that they contain images made by hand and knowledge that is outdated. Last summer I found a hardware catalog that’s eight inches thick, bound with rusty metal shackles. I’ve been mining images from it all year. It moves me that each hammer, hinge and screw was rendered and printed so carefully and beautifully by an artist whose name we’ll never know. I see it as part of my mission to give these drawings a new life.

Only once did I hire an assistant for a month to cut out collage bits from my books. Though those categorized clippings served me well, my process now is more organic, and I usually cut out images as I go. I have no set system for creating a painting (to be honest, I’m skeptical of art that arises out of preconception).

A piece for me can take several paths. As you mentioned, sometimes the beauty of an image can call out to me and I’ll build a painting around it. A good example of this is “A Knight Errant,” where the hardware bits I mentioned were the inspiration. In a clear case of pareidolia, I formed bodies around the faces I saw in the hardware. These then interacted with pieces cut from a 1790s Italian architecture book, and finally, reminding me of a childlike fantasy/delusion, I inserted a quixotic mounted rider.

Knight ErrantKnight Errant – ink, acrylic, antique paper on panel,
16 x 16 inches, 2014

I work in a subconscious state. A narrative may assert itself, but more often, multiple narratives and connections emerge. You guessed right when you asked about images that beg to be grouped together. It’s almost as if they’re whispering when the pages turn. It may come from my formalist training or it may be much deeper rooted, but I feel the need to connect forms from different areas of existence. A birdcage and a rib cage. A radiolarian and a diagram of a galaxy. Flower petals and fish scales. Tree branches, nerves, and an aerial map of a river. It’s obviously about shifting scale wildly from inch to inch within the painting. I think the reason I’m a visual artist is because it sounds absurdly simplistic to say in words that all things are connected.

As I write this, it occurs to me that most of my closest friends are poets and novelists, who can do this with words. I recently did a large commissioned version of “The Tower of Babel” for the writer Michael Chabon. He’s a “maximalist” novelist who takes dozens of tangent paths and generates stories within stories. I’m often inspired by writers: Italo Calvino, Richard Brautigan, and Li-Young Lee. I’m drawn to work that suggests rather than prescribes. I’d say the same about my art heroes: Klee, Redon, Turner, Pinkham Ryder, Brueghel.

BabelTower of Babel (for Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman) – ink, acrylic, antique paper on panel, 48 x 38 inches, 2016

MKJ: Oh, make no mistake, your studio still sounds a lot like Oatman’s in many ways, believe it or not, as does your sensibility regarding preserving the past. Although I cannot speak for him, I don’t think he’d mind me saying that. And his studio may have been vast, but that does not mean it was not also cave-like and jam-packed, sorted obsessively, floor to ceiling. I love what you’ve just said about these artists and writers, especially since you’ve included one of my favorite poets. I do see what you mean about generating stories within stories. Like Mary Ruefle, Li-Young Lee is a wonderful example of one who makes remarkable, unique associations. You’ve mentioned to me that you titled a solo exhibition of your work in London The Missing Pages of the Sea, a phrase found in the first few lines of his poem “Pillow,” which has superb examples of just such associations.

Li-Young Lee is also a perfect example of a poet for us to compare with you because often, like Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s, his poems circle back on themselves over and over as they are woven, or as they unravel in deep meditation, just as I feel your artwork does in some way. And his poems at times are inexorably linked. Labyrinthine, they form an intricate network of passages that could lead only to the next poem or story, with no other possible exit. Take a look at “Words for Worry” and “Little Father,” printed consecutively in Book of My Nights. I feel this sensation too in some of your works, both within them, and when seeing them together. Lee also judiciously and poignantly uses the Question in his poems, as I feel you do in your works, Josh, addressing both yourself and the viewer.

I imagine that once a work starts going for you it takes on a force of its own. Do you find this to be true — that what you had in mind for a piece or a group of images can end up being far from the direction in which the piece eventually leads you? Tell us about some of the detours your work has taken you on. In this way, what has the act of making art taught you or revealed to you? What would you be doing if you weren’t an artist?

JD: In the 90s, I would begin a painting by gluing down topographic maps and letting the swirling lines guide my drawing and collaging. More often now, my works (especially the larger panels) begin with a compositional sketch, and maps are only used tangentially. In fact, many recent panels begin with a base layer of player piano scroll paper. This provides a tone, a history, and beautiful perforations that generate a rhythmic structure. I then sketch forms quickly and lightly in charcoal and begin the layering of paint and collage. I work on five to 10 paintings simultaneously. Some emerge in a matter of days; others can take a year or more.

If any element of a painting happens too easily, I’m skeptical, and I usually destroy it. Part of the reason I use collage is to remove my hand from the process. For the same reason, you’ll see areas in most of my paintings where I’ve rested living plants or metal gears and wires, poured ink and allowed it to evaporate. These “stain/stencils” for me, feel like a natural phenomenon, outside of my self. I’m not saying that I give over to Dadaist chance in my work. I need composition and structure. But within that initial framework, it’s about endless improvisation.

Night ApparitionsNight Apparitions – ink, acrylic, antique paper on panel,
38 x 48 inches, 2017

Looking at one recent piece called “Night Apparitions” might illuminate a bit about my process. This might sound laughable, but I consider this a minimalist work for me, since I managed to pare it down to a reduced palette and space. It began with a ream of rice paper I purchased on a trip to Taiwan. In this case, I broke my own “rule” by using non-antique paper. Since the paper was lightly gridded or lined for calligraphy practice, I cut it into varying sized rectangles and soaked them in India ink of different densities. My initial sketch had two essential structures: the central mountain form and the halo surrounded by a dark border. I expected multiple mountainscapes and horizon lines to emerge, but in this case, the gradation of light to dark from the center kept insisting itself until the end. As soon as I’d add a new landscape element, I’d wipe it out with the light or dark. In recent years, I’ve been trying to avoid imagery (animal, vegetable, machine) that identifies as only one thing. So, each hovering entity is a conglomeration – a hybrid form. Only one (located at 11 o’clock) contains human-made forms, and there’s only a hint of architecture in the contour of the mountain. I’m always aware of the disconnection we humans imagine and reinforce between ourselves and other living things.

Here, I could go off on a lengthy tangent about the election, and the fear, anger and ultimate despair I felt while making this piece. That’s all in there, and that may be why the painting is so dark. But again, I’m not interested in artwork that illustrates or prescribes meaning. I’m interested in what each viewer will bring to the piece.

There are creatures that are buried under the pink haze or in the dark black. Things that aren’t visible to the viewer are still crucial to the evolution of a piece. Some detours and quirks — I can say that the seashell mountaintop came late to eliminate a silhouette effect. The “whole” birds also remained at the bottom, to ground the piece and further call the reality into question (birds should fly). In the end, as with most of my work, I suppose my goal is to generate a feeling of joyful apocalypse. My dreams do influence my work deeply, but I shy away from association with Surrealism, most of which I view as too pat and literal.

It’s a never-ending cycle, trying to understand the world, art, my own process. In the same way that I don’t like to interpret dreams, I also shun too much breakdown of my work. I need to know just enough to guide me, but not too much to remove the mystery. As Georges Braque said, “The only thing of value in art is that which cannot be explained.” As for your question about what I’d be doing if not this, I’ve always been fascinated by archaeology and I began college as a psychology major, but I quickly realized that it was not for me. Frankly, I can’t imagine doing anything else.

MKJ: I appreciate that you say you’ve been trying to avoid imagery that identifies as only one thing. I’ve always admired this quality in the written word as well: poetry whose lines slant in both directions, tying them to the previous or following line, which can happen with well-thought-out enjambment and punctuation (or lack thereof). And when you say you value things that aren’t visible to the viewer, which are still crucial to the evolution of a piece, I couldn’t agree more. Perhaps these are the most important aspects of a creative work.

Most viewers expect your collage pieces to be two-dimensional surfaces, yet in your new works you are exploring depth as well, carving pockets into panels and pouring in resin, at times in pools up to two inches deep with a watery shine difficult to reproduce in photographs. What inspired this sculptural necessity? Do you see it going further?

Welcome MachineWelcome to the Machine II – ink, acrylic, antique paper on panel, with resin, 12 x 12 inches, 2017

JD: The poured resin layering is yet another manifestation of my own rule-breaking. While I have never been drawn to making sculpture, I’m intrigued by creating illusions of depth, and in this case, tricking the viewer with a bit of tangible depth.

I’ve found in my artistic life that a medium or subject will present itself, and only years later will it find it’s proper home in the work. It was this way with the topographical maps, which lingered in my studio for five years before I dared draw on them, and it was this way with the clear resin, which I tried out twenty years ago and failed. I’ll admit that Fred Tomaselli, with his resin-embedded pills and leaves left me daunted. I admire his work, but I’m after something different. In fact, just as with collaging gorgeously rendered engravings, one runs the risk of gimmickry with resin. Pour this glossy stuff on a child’s drawing or a newspaper page and suddenly it looks luscious. I’m still experimenting with it, but it’s incredibly exciting. I’d fallen into a rut for a year or so, and creating these space pockets is reinvigorating me. It has reminded me that play is crucial. Ha! Perhaps, I can also credit Trump with causing me to seek new territory. I suspect many artists right now are on fire, making protest statements or constructing even richer worlds to escape to.

MKJ: Yes, at a time when we could all use, as Mary Ruefle says, some Sign of Order in the World, we’ll leave that struggle in the category of more things that aren’t visible to the viewer.

Your paintings are really multi-medium works that include collage, painting and drawing (and as we’ve said, now sculptural processes as well). How do these pieces differ in your mind from the black and white drawings that you make, which to me seem very fluid and in some mystical way reminiscent of William Blake.

WheelsWheels – graphite with antique collage elements, 10 x 20 inches, 2017

JD: The graphite drawings are almost a form of meditation for me. In making them, I eliminate all questions of medium, color, size, and layering. Even composition and subject matter disappear. I’d never encourage a drawing student to do this, but these horizontally oriented works emerge from the lower left and move eastward, with no sketch or outline. I love the traveling journey aspect of Chinese and Japanese scrolls. For me, it’s a mysterious process and not unlike a physical journey. I rub the pencil until shapes and images start to reveal themselves. They are not sketches for the paintings. They exist on their own.

MKJ: I am delighted to learn about this drawing process! And now I see them as even more riveting. I hope you do not find this in any way a diminishment of your collages/paintings, but the drawings may be your works I favor most. They are magical to me and unfold or reveal themselves, to this viewer at least, in perhaps the same mysterious ways in which they were created, which I find marvelous and complex.

Although it took place awhile ago now, I do want to mention that I also found your project for the Memory Bridge Foundation, which “maps” the internal geographies and memories of Alzheimer’s and dementia patients, moving and inspirational. Describe how this project has changed you. Tell us how memory plays a role in your work, if in fact you find that it does.

JD: The Memory Bridge project influenced me in ways I didn’t understand at the time. The obvious answer is that the old paper I use has it’s own memory: it’s physically from another time and place. The images I use were created in a world without the ubiquitous photograph, let alone computers and the thousands of images we’re barraged with daily. I’d like my work to feel like it’s not of this time and place.

When I was commissioned to create the Memory Bridge portraits, I listened and sketched as six people with dementia were interviewed. I could see bits of memory coming and going, interweaving with the present, imagination, and chaos. Later, back in my studio with my notes, while making a “portrait” of one particularly unreachable woman, I found myself in a mental state not unlike hers. It was disturbing and liberating. I sat on the floor with my canvas and piles of books and papers. I began reaching for images in a frenzy of free association, pasting them down and drawing on top. This state of unknowing is where I try to be now when I work.

Thelma Memory BridgeThelma, Memory Bridge portrait – ink, acrylic, antique paper on panel, 34 x 42 inches, 2006

We can never be certain that we are communicating on a common wavelength with anyone else. I trust in that lack of tangibility and certainty. If people ask me what my paintings are about, I stumble. I know they are not about nothing… I know, in fact, that they are utterly specific. But some people will embrace the ambiguity within the specificity, and others will reject the work, needing a concrete meaning and resolution I can’t provide.

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Josh Dorman was born in Baltimore, MD and lives and works in New York, NY. He received his MFA from Queens College, Flushing, NY and his BA from Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY. Josh has been the recipient of numerous residencies and fellowships including Yaddo, Art Omi, and the Millay Colony. He has been a visiting artist and lecturer at numerous institutions including most recently Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY and Mass Art Graduate MFA Program, Boston, MA. His work is held in numerous collections across the country and he has exhibited nationally and internationally. In 2014, a collaboration of seven animations he made with composer Anna Clyne, titled “The Violin,” was released on DVD. Currently, Josh is represented by Ryan Lee Gallery in New York City, Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Seattle, and John Martin Gallery in London.
http://www.joshdorman.net

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Mary Kathryn Jablonski
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A gallerist in Saratoga Springs for over 15 years, visual artist and poet Mary Kathryn Jablonski is now an administrative director in holistic healthcare. She is author of the chapbook To the Husband I Have Not Yet Met, and her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals including the Beloit Poetry Journal, Blueline, Home Planet News, Salmagundi, and Slipstream, among others. Her artwork has been widely exhibited throughout the Northeast and is held in private and public collections.

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Aug 092017
 

Ralph Angel

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1.

When I think of art I think of an uncluttered state of mind, which doesn’t last, of course, and so call it inspiration.

And inspiration, well, it comes and goes, doesn’t it.

Little sister, arranging
bottle caps. Little brother, back

and forth you run
from one side of the pier

to the other.

Oh young mother
pulling your thin dress

to yourself
tighter

and tighter.

When I think of the artist I think of an attentive state of mind. There is no criteria. No possibility for criticism.

It’s risky business. There’s no help anywhere. The intellect is useless. Whether looking outward or in, what one discovers can be neither predicted nor controlled.

Paying attention is making oneself present, no matter what’s happening.

Immediacy is inspired. Presence is inspired.

Children, without having to think about it, make immediacy and presence possible all the time. Children pay attention.

Children and artists see with their minds.

Thinking is a secondary experience. The critic’s pince-nez glasses is the greatest symbol of secondary experience.

For the artist, giving up thinking is called discipline. Giving up hope, giving up certainty, comparison and judgment is called discipline.

For the artist, wasting time, which the French perfected, is called discipline.

“Those who depend upon the intellect are the many,” wrote the minimalist painter, Agnes Martin. “Those who depend upon perception alone are the few.”

Agnes

Here comes perfection. xWhen I think of art I think of beauty. xI put
xxxxxxxmy arm around it. Around my mind, I mean.

You may as well give up judging what you’ve done. xThe day is
xxxxxxyoung, the grey sun stayed that way.

Here comes an iron shade, partly down. xTheir heads are gone.

Please don’t print the negative. xI love their shoes. xIt’s where the
xxxxxxlight is.

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2.

I am taking a walk in the city. I am enjoying a meal. Someone is running a bath. I have just spilled my cup of tea. The cat steps into a flower pot. A pencil rolls off the desk. I’m working! I’m working!

Two thousand five-hundred years ago, on her birth island of Lesbos, or in Sicily, the island of her exile, Sappho sang a lonely lyric:

for I would not be like these
toys

but may it happen to me
all

Artwork is not similar to something else. Artwork exists within itself, as tone, as mood, as state of being. All inspired artwork exists within itself. The insistence on art as reality when you’re doing art, or experiencing art.

messenger of spring
xxxxxxxxxxxxxnightingale with a voice of longing

sang Sappho,

and gold chickpeas are growing on the banks

xxxxxxxxxxxxxspangled is
the earth with her crowns

In response to an interviewer’s question, Sir Lawrence Olivier said: “I always thought that my job was to make people believe that the play was actually taking place.” Exactly. The insistence on art as reality when you’re doing art.

And is it not the same when you’re experiencing art? When Charles Simic experiences one of artist Joseph Cornell’s luminous, inexplicable boxes, the reality is clear.

Postage Stamp with a Pyramid

The lonely boy must play quietly because his parents are sleeping after lunch. He kneels on the floor between their beds pushing a matchbox, inside which he imagines himself sitting. The day is hot. In her sleep his mother has uncovered her breasts like the Sphinx. The car, for that’s what it is, is moving very slowly because its wheels are sinking in the deep sand. Ahead, nothing but wind, sky, and more sand.
xxxxxxxx“Shush,” says the father sternly to the desert wind.

In Cornell’s world, Charles Simic could see with his mind an essence of himself. Visceral, palpable, the whole narrative of a moment of a child driving a matchbox, of a child as voyeur among adults, of a child at home in a desert with “nothing but wind, sky, and more sand.”

Children and artists are happiest when they experience things in which they seem to be identified.

In solitude, children and artists can be happy for hours. And if they don’t recognize themselves in the artwork of others, they don’t return to it, they don’t remember it, it will never become part of them.

“An inspiration,” wrote Agnes Martin, “is a happy moment that takes us by surprise.”

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3.

It would take an epic psychological study to explain why we gravitate toward any given poem or story, or film, or painting, or song. Or why we make the kind of art objects we make. And that study, of course–like human history, so drenched in blood–would be flawed.

The filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock investigated the possibility of having his belly button removed because he found it annoying and especially unattractive.

He was a neighbor and frequent dinner guest at the home of a friend of mine when she was a young girl in London. And one night in particular, when Mr. Hitchcock arrived with a sack of bones, he scarred her to this very day. Different kinds of bones, actually, which he passed around the table. And he took note of each one, as each one was snapped, until he heard the sound of a human bone breaking in his mind’s eye for the scene he would shoot the next day.

Alfred Hitchcock feared above all, by his own admission, arrest.

I don’t know why or how some of Hitchcock’s films have so become a part of me.

A lovably shallow Cary Grant being subdued by feelings.

A quietly intimate and refined Tippi Hedren’s emotional insecurity exploding into outrageous catastrophe.

An aristocratic Ingrid Bergman shunned by society for love.

Or the voyeuristic James Stewart and me sitting in the dark spying on the lives of neighbors.

Or James Stewart and me following the otherworldly Kim Novak around, and falling in love with her, and with her descent into madness, and killing it.

I watched a recently restored copy of Vertigo, and, as I am prone to do after such way-cool experience, I got up the next morning and watched it again. And I carried it around with me for some time, I suppose. It was already inside me, like an homage. And so I stole the title.

Vertigo

Only one is a wanderer.
And when she was sad she’d go into the street to be with people.
Two together are always going somewhere. xThey lie down beneath
xxxxxxcypress,
next to a bird. xI imagine the sky. xIt fans her mountains
and waves. xShe’d left some small town
where they used to make tires.
Stories are made out of stairwells
and rope. xI’d been interrupting for years and didn’t
know it. xThis old park. xThe dark hatchery. xWorkers in jumpsuits
throw down their poison at dawn.
Not everyone can be described. xIt’s perfectly
natural. xIf she’s thinking about love
does she break down

the door of the bedroom. xOf course not. xNot publicly
speaking. xTo the left there’s a sofa. xWe all lived in rented rooms.
That’s how it goes with subject matter.
Nude figures in profile
floating among palm trees. xThe idea was touristy,
like a postcard. xI was given a small auditorium. xI watched over
rush hour. xI write down everything as I forget it,
especially at night.
I lock the door from the inside.

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4.

My studio is a mess:

Piles of papers. Piles of books, and open books, everywhere. Flowers, rocks, a toothpick dispenser in the shape of a crow. A turtle shell. Incense ash. An apple core alongside a stained demitasse. Flash drives and hand cream, pens and ink brushes, a gyroscope. Free weights of 10, 15, and 20 pounds. Boxes of discontinued Polaroid film. Eyeglasses, and glass tumblers, and blood-orange toffee. Cobwebs. Snorkeling gear.

And I like it, just writing it down. It serves no purpose, but keeps me real.

“All you have to do is write one true sentence,” a young Ernest Hemingway wrote one afternoon in a café in Paris trying to become a writer.

A thousand years ago, Sei Shōnagon, an empress of the 10th century court in Heian-kyo Japan, was given a pile of paper which she called “pillow.” A thousand years ago one of the first recorded journals, Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book, was listed by subtitle:

In spring, the dawn,” as in “when the slowly paling mountain rim is tinged with red, and wisps of faintly crimson-purple cloud float in the sky.”

Markets –”

Peaks –”

River pools –”

Things people despise –” as in “A crumbling earth wall. People who have a reputation for being exceptionally good-natured.”

Infuriating things –” as in “A guest arrives when you have something urgent to do, and stays talking for ages.” Or “to witness men getting noisy and boisterous in their cups, groping round inside their mouth with a finger or wiping their whiskers if they have them, and forcing the sake cup on others. ‘Go on, have another!’”

Rare things –” as in “A son-in-law who’s praised by his wife’s father. Likewise, a wife who’s loved by her mother-in-law.” “A pair of silver tweezers that can actually pull out hairs properly.” “A person who is without a single quirk.”

Refined and elegant things –”

Insects –”

I encountered Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book while researching a seminar, “The Art of the Journal,” that I thought to offer because I had yet to forgive myself for never journaling. But there they were, in many rooms, in the garage, even the Moleskines on this very desk, tens of notebooks of various sizes comprised almost entirely of what other people had said or written.

“You can always come back,” sang Bob Dylan, “but you can’t come back all the way.”

“Your shadow is—how should I put it? Faint.” wrote Haruki Murakami.

“Everything terribly,” wrote Guillame Apollinaire.

“In poker, it’s better to tell the truth. The others think you’re bluffing,” spoke Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless.

“Doing almost nothing,” Marina Abramovic said, “is the hardest performance, because your story’s gone.”

“I’m not going to get my Coca-Cola,” yelled Louise Bourgeois. “My make-up is wrong. I am afraid to be interrupted. I am afraid not to remember what I intended to do.”

“Let us take down the old notebooks,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “which we all have…and find…beautiful things.”

Among the pages of Joseph Cornell’s journals, tens of lists:

January 4, 1943

Into town late – bank – down to Lexington and 24th. Goldsmith’s – assortment, Mexican midgets, dancing bear, Hungarian cards, Bay of Naples litho. colored. Over to Madison Square for bus. A brief swirl of snow suddenly came covering everything with a fine coat and then letting up before the short bus ride to Twelfth Street. Unexpected illumination and evocation of the past in these circumstances with feeling about Madison Square, etc. Lunch with Pajarito and Matta. 2 hours. At Reading Room then to Motherwell’s. Penn Station 1:42. Interest in Savarin Restaurant seen through glass windows in waiting room, etc.

And the poet, James Schuyler, made the list into art:

Things to Do

Balance checkbook.
Rid lawn of onion grass.
“this patented device”
“this herbicide”
“Sir, We find none of these
killers truly satisfactory. Hand weed
for onion grass.” Give
old clothes away, “such as you
yourself would willingly wear.”
Impasses. Walk three miles
A day beginning tomorrow.
Alphabetize.
Purchase nose-hair shears.
Answer letters.
Elicit others.
Write Maxine.
Move to Maine.
Give up NoCal.
See more movies.
Practice long-distance dialing.
Ditto gymnastics:
The Beast with Two Bucks
and, The Fan.
Complain to laundry
Any laundry. Ask for borrowed books back.
Return
junk mail to sender
marked, Return to Sender.
Condole. Congratulate.
“…this sudden shock…”
“…this swift surprise…”
Send. Keep. Give. Destroy.
Brush rub polish burn
mend scratch foil evert
emulate surpass. Remember
“to write three-act play”
and lead “a full and active life.”

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5.

And music.

Always music in the other room.

And the songbirds there, too. The Beeptones, Slick and Trina, from Nicaragua, and Ella and Louie, from South Africa. And the gran canario, Cesar, a jazz-cat god, the Caruso of the household, belting out one aria after another.

Like waking up in the morning in a pensive, sour mood. “Lighten up, King Baby,” they’re singing, ever since the light came.

Today it’s Coltrane, A Love Supreme, replaying itself over and over and over again long into the afternoon. Long into evening.

Part I: Acknowledgment
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxfor John Coltrane

We spin
and we deny it.
We speed through space and
hold our ground. xWe stand firm.
We sprawl out
in the shadows of cobwebs
and swim to the surface
and toast again the staggering
stars and the planets
and our getting away from it all.
We’re nobody’s business—
and the truth,
the truth’s wooden-clock voice
actually lives here.

When the night sky
for example is spattered with paint
and the forest is reduced
to a few glowing windows
and a curlicue of smoke
above a train,
I was at once inside
our cabin after all, and frankly
sick of friends, though
not the close ones,
of people, maybe,
not you.

Like something in the body
reflecting streets and chance interiors
and yelling Silence,
Camera,
your heart, your
family, inappropriately,
your clothes
against my idiocy,
not you.

.
6.

Upon a mountain top in China, sculptor and performance artist Zhang Huan piled five naked bodies, his own included.

He recalled the ancient idiom: “There are always higher mountains behind a high mountain.”

“When we left the mountain,” he said, “it was still the same mountain. Without change. Life is full of limitations and failed attempts. We tried to make the mountain higher but our attempt was futile.”

In Canberra, Australia, Zhang Huan gathered a hundred sheep and a large number of naked volunteers.

In New York City, a few months after 9/11, Zhang dressed his naked body in a hundred-pound suit of beef. “In New York I see many bodybuilders who, for long periods of time, do training exercises beyond their bodies’ capabilities. They have every kind of vitamin or supplement imaginable…, oftentimes it’s more than their hearts can bear.”

Zhang Huan invited three calligraphers to write the story and the spirit of his family on his face. By evening his face was ink-black. Its features had disappeared entirely, and nobody could tell the color of his skin. He disappeared. As if he no longer had an identity.

The calligraphy told a well-known story, and its moral is that as long as a person is determined, there’s nothing that he or she cannot achieve. Other characters included predictions of one’s fate. For example, the symbolic meaning of the shape of a cheek bone and the location of a mole.

Zhang Haun hung on to the roots of a tree rubbed with dog food and flour, which the dogs devoured greedily.

*

The Belgrade-born performance artist, Marina Abramovic, said she “wanted attention to my work, but much of the attention I got was negative.”

“The photographs of me naked in Galleria Diagramma were especially scandalous.”

“What if instead of doing something to myself, I let the public decide what to do with me?”

“In black trousers and a black t-shirt, behind a table of many objects: a hammer, a saw, a feather, a fork, a bottle of perfume, a hat, an axe, a rose, a bell, scissors, needles, a pen, honey, a lamb bone, a carving knife, a mirror, a newspaper, a shawl, pins, lipstick, sugar, a Polaroid camera. Various other things. And a pistol, and one bullet lying next to it.”

“For the first three hours, not much happened…someone would hand me the rose, or drape the shawl over my shoulders, or kiss me.”

“Then, slowly at first, and then quickly…the women in the gallery would tell the men what to do to me, rather than do it themselves (although later on, when someone stuck a pin into me, one woman wiped the tears from my eyes).”

“After three hours, one man cut my shirt apart with the scissors and took it off. People manipulated me into various poses.”

“A guy took Polaroids of me and stuck them in my hand.”

“A couple people picked me up and carried me around. They put me on a table, spread my legs, stuck the knife in the table close to my crotch.”

“Someone stuck pins into me. Someone else slowly poured a glass of water over my head. Someone cut my neck with the knife and sucked the blood.”

“There was one man—a very small man—who just stood very close to me, breathing heavily.”

“After a while, he put the bullet in the pistol and put the pistol in my right hand.”

*

Holding You Sober Close to Me

The city’s
behind us. The water’s calm. There are many heads
above the water.

Show me a victim and I’ll show you
a bathroom–a man slathered
in honey, a carpet

of flies.

Orange blossoms
and salt. Even the creepy doorman
tastes the salt

in the air.

If a child’s brought in, well, that’s something
different. We don’t want
our animals

to suffer.
You’re the last person on earth
prepared for the death

of your parents.

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When I think of art I think of beauty.

It’s where the eye goes, autonomously, on its merry way. For children and artists the message is about happiness—all across the sand.

Beauty is writing itself, and I’m always one step behind. Where the throat is. And the tear.

“And to speak again of solitude,” wrote the poet Rainier Maria Rilke, “it becomes increasingly clear that this is fundamentally not something that we can choose or reject. We are solitary. How much better it is to realize that we are thus, to start directly from that very point….”

“For all the points upon which our eyes have been accustomed to rest will be taken away from us, there is no longer any nearness, and all distance is intimately far….”

“A [person] who was taken from his study, almost without preparation and transition, and placed upon the height of a great mountain range, would be bound to feel something similar: an uncertainty without parallel, an abandonment to the unutterable would almost annihilate him.”

Immediacy is inspired. Presence is inspired.

Being this close is everything. It’s a discipline, like a child at play.

You’re the Rub

Murmured in loneliness, round and round.
Let’s not go inside. The cliffs drop off, and the ocean’s
a friend–on the boardwalk
enough people alone
have died.
So relax, take your feet
off–nobody’s
missing. There are many parts
of the mind. On that old
open day we let out our long green grass. A night’s passed
and you expected it
to be there.
You’re the rub–the love
that loves the loves. I like especially the puddles
and your wire. I like your mud.
I like your part
of it.

—Ralph Angel

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Ralph Angel’s latest collection, Your Moon, was awarded the Green Rose Poetry Prize. Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006 received the PEN USA Poetry Award, and his Neither World won the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets. In addition to five books of poetry, he also has published an award-winning translation of the Federico García Lorca collection, Poema del cante jondo / Poem of the Deep Song.

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Jul 022017
 

John Hampshire photo by Elana GehanJohn Hampshire, photo by Elana Gehan

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Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that’s
embedded in the work.

— Chuck Close

John Hampshire employs and embodies labyrinths: he cloaks a mathematician inside an introvert, inside a college professor. He is best known for elaborate portrait drawings that disintegrate upon close inspection into paths of abstract lines that never overlap, a seeming chaos of doodles.

It could be argued that some writers, too, internalize within one body such a complex spirit, inquisitive and process-driven, constantly in motion, and their journals become great art, even when they feel like they are “not creating.” Biographer Diane Middlebrook reveals this phenomenon in the work of Sylvia Plath and refers to Plath’s journals as “the hand drawing the hand” (think M.C. Escher), claiming that, “Her writing itself enacts the process by which writing comes to be.”

So it is in the work of John Hampshire: the drawing enacts the process by which drawing comes to be. His drawings and paintings begin with what would seem random mark-making, only to evolve and congeal into recognizable imagery. We are left with the entire record before us, since Hampshire’s work gels at a distance, but dissolves when viewed up close. I’ve asked him a series of questions that led to these writings. We chose to remove the text of the questions, so that in the manner of his labyrinthine work, in the grand design, the hand alone could draw the hand.

— Mary Kathryn Jablonski

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In the mid-1990s I started drawing self-portraits, looking in the mirror, using pen and a language of mark-making and symbols to construct the images. These consisted of things like teardrops, arrows, molecular structures, etc. I wanted these things to remain legible or visible in the finished drawing, and so the idea of not crossing any lines developed out of this concern. Over time, as the drawings became more resolved or detailed, the interest in the symbols fell by the wayside but the structure of not crossing any lines became integral to the drawing process; creating impediments to slow down the process and keep me engaged, a circuitous route to making something. While this process formally started in my work in the mid 90s it is an activity that occurred in my notebooks and doodles in high school.

Self-portrait, acrylic on panel, 11x14, 2013Self-portrait, acrylic on panel, 11″ x 14″, 2013

It’s natural for me to paint the people around me. Most of my subjects tend to be people I know, some more casually, some more intensely, than others. I do occasionally work from images of people I do not know, but this is rare. My consciousness or awareness of these people, their natures, or my relationship to them may or may not influence the work. I can’t help but think that it does, but it is not something that I think about when I am working. Formal issues of color and mark and abstraction and representation are the things that I tend to think more consciously about when I’m working. That’s not to say that the results do not have qualities beyond these concerns.

Gina, acrylic on panel, 11x14, 2014Gina, acrylic on panel, 11″ x 14″, 2014

The labyrinth drawings typically are in black and white, as the introduction of color makes them much more complicated. The paintings vacillate between full bombastic colors or subdued earthy colors, or are completely restricted to grays. I usually aim for full color with the portrait paintings, but after doing several of those and needing relief, I resort to black and white.

Lauren, acrylic on panel, 11x14, 2015Lauren, acrylic on panel, 11″ x 14″, 2015

I started the paintings around the same time as the drawings, in the mid 90s, and the sensibilities that directed the drawings related very much to the sensibilities that directed the paintings. Painting is very much about physicality and layering and those are not things I was very successful at denying, hence the continuing of layering marks of color over one another. The paint marks themselves are more or less responsive to information derived from the subject matter that I’m looking at, whether a person in front of me, my reflection in the mirror, or a photograph. In all cases I am pulling vague and then subsequently more specific information from my interaction with the subject matter. My aim, in the drawings and paintings, is that the language of mark or line remain present and visible and that the process of the making of the drawing or painting is readily apparent or accessible to the viewer. The tension between both mark and image simultaneously asserting themselves is something I like to have in the work. I’m an abstract painter unwilling to let go of the primal desire for representation.

Inherent Strings attached, acrylic and string on panel, 11x14, 2015Inherent Strings attached, acrylic, string on panel, 11″ x 14″, 2015

The painting itself (or in some cases drawing) usually determines the degree of resolution that occurs in the work. I find that the recognizability of the human face allows for an immense amount of abstraction to occur while retaining the visual implication of a face. The degree of resolution that the painted image brings is determined by the painting and whether it’s working or not. I keep painting until I feel the work is resolved; sometimes this requires more and sometimes less resolution in an image.

The paintings more recently have also incorporated clear medium between layers of paint, physically separating the paint strokes from each other, and playing up the three-dimensional quality of painting. In some cases I’ve even incorporated string or other objects in the clear medium. This goes along with the nature of the way I handle paint in these works; less like manipulated liquid material. The marks retain themselves and their individual identities more like the tesserae used to make mosaics.

Labyrinth 308, ink on door, 32x80, 2014Labyrinth 308, ink on door, 32″ x 80″, 2014

Although I have made some very large portraits, most are somewhat conservative in scale, and it is the landscapes that tend to be more monumental. My interest is in the sublime power of nature, but more tangibly, I am interested in the dichotomy between the ephemeral qualities of weather or fire or clouds and the tangible physicality of the language of mark-making or lines that are used to build these images. While the portraits are typically of people I know based on photos I take, the landscape references are an amalgam of my own photos, appropriated imagery and imagined passages. The complexity of landscapes and weather, the deeper sense of space contrasting the surface of the drawing and the greater compositional possibilities are all attractive traits for me with the landscapes.

Labyrinth 338, ink on door, 24x80, 2015Labyrinth 338, ink on door, 24″ x 80″, 2015

Lately, particularly with the landscapes, I’ll start with some long lines that will break up the picture plane, which tends to be on prepared hollow core doors these days, and I’ll have very little, if any, anticipation of what particular image will develop. As I go along I start to select an image and start to build that, and then I’ll add other imagery to the drawing, working from both the photo references as well as imagination to put these disjointed images together. Intuition plays a major role in decision-making, and most thinking is retrospective rather than anticipatory with the work.

Labyrinth 311, ink on door, 32x80, 2015Labyrinth 311, ink on door, 32″ x 80″, 2015

I have always had an interest in math and physics, and I was a math minor in undergraduate school. I see a relationship between these pursuits and interests and those of my current work and working methods. There are simultaneous dichotomies in my work: abstraction versus representation; solid tangible marks describing soft ephemeral transitions of light in an atmosphere or form; abstract expressionist versus Renaissance ideas about pictorial space or depicting form; surface versus image. These dichotomies make me think of some of the juxtapositions or seeming incongruities in physics, such as those between the harmonious Einsteinian relativity and anti-intuition of quantum mechanics; or the duality of light, having qualities of both waves and particles.

The mystery of painting seems more alive than ever with its growing history, and physics is no different. The more we know, the more perplexing the universe seems: the simultaneity of Schrodinger’s cat in a box, being both alive and dead until you open the box. The abstraction of these ideas to a philosophical level seems easily transferred to image-making, color theory and optics. With painting, I’m not exactly sure when the box is open, or if it ever is. Things really remain undefined until the viewer experiences the work; even then ambiguities persist.

—John Hampshire

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John Hampshire is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at SUNY Adirondack and has had numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally. He is the recipient of many honors and awards, including most recently a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creativity, a NYFA fellowship grant, and a Purchase Award from the Hyde Museum. http://johnhampshire.weebly.com

John’s 2015 video interview with AHA! A House for the Arts can be seen on YouTube.

xMary Kathryn Jablonski
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A gallerist in Saratoga Springs for over 15 years, visual artist and poet Mary Kathryn Jablonski is now an administrative director in holistic healthcare. She is author of the chapbook To the Husband I Have Not Yet Met, and her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals including the Beloit Poetry Journal, Blueline, Home Planet News, Salmagundi, and Slipstream, among others. Her artwork has been widely exhibited throughout the Northeast and is held in private and public collections.

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Jun 102017
 

DeGroot 8. ZombieZombie – watercolor on paper, 24″ x 18″, 2015

 

As an artist I have been focusing on painting trees and their cast-off limbs, i.e. sticks, for many years.

Trees are completely individual. They are adapters and survivors; each one is unique, and I believe that is something most people don’t think about. We are taught to look at trees based on a stereotype; the image of a perfectly pruned tree is the one most people have in their heads, balanced and symmetrical. But in nature those rarely exist. Trees grow to survive, they adapt to their given environment, growing into strange shapes, producing oddly shaped limbs, becoming contortionists to get to sunlight, and bowing to the will of other larger trees. They grow in context to each other and their neighbors, adapting as best they can to the situation they find themselves in.

 

DeGroot 1. DowserDowser – watercolor on paper,  24″ x 18″, 2015

 

DeGroot 2. For FortunyFor Fortuny – watercolor on paper, 24″ x 18″, 2015

 

While my artwork has always been based on a traditional observation process, the final appearance of the objects in my paintings is grounded in contemporary ideas and concerns and by my own quirky interpretation of the objects’ personalities. These objects allow me to explore my interests in surrealism (especially the Chicago artists collective The Hairy Who) and abstraction along with pursuing the pure physical pleasure of painting.

 

DeGroot 3. La De DaLa De Da – watercolor on paper, 50″x 40″, 2016

 

DeGroot 7. White BirchWhite Birch – watercolor on paper, 24″ x 18″, 2015

 

My current pieces have developed from my compulsive observation of the trees in my “neighborhood” in upstate New York. I am always looking for new trees. I find my subjects by the side of the road or on hiking trails in nature preserves. Often I will ask for permission to cut down a tree on someone’s property after lusting after it for some time.

 

DeGroot 5. Menage A TroisMenage A Trois – watercolor on paper, 7′ x 4′, 2016

 

The last few trees (7′ long) that I have brought back to my studio have reminded me of Las Vegas show girls, adorned with cascading mushrooms, moss, and vines. They stand out in all their finery, in juxtaposition to the other plainer trees. Of course the irony is that these beautiful trees are dead and dying trees, and their finery is the work of decomposers set on reducing them to a rich addition to the earth beneath them.

 

DeGroot 6. ShowtimeShowtime – watercolor on paper, 7′ x 3 1/2′, 2017

Degroot 4. Showtime IIShowtime II –  watercolor on paper, 5′ x 3 1/2′ , 2017 

 

My paintings honor my subjects’ singular elegance and imagined personality, and I hope they can remind viewers to celebrate beauty in unexpected places.

—Katie DeGroot

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Katie DeGroot
Artist Katie DeGroot was born in Kandahar, Afghanistan and grew up in the arcadian suburbs of Boston, MA. As a teenager she moved to Chicago, IL during the famous Democratic National Convention riots of 1968. She attended New York University and Illinois State University before spending nearly 20 years in New York City. Katie now resides on her great-grandparents’ farm next to the Hudson River in Fort Edward, NY, where she raises beef cows and makes art. She is also currently the director of Skidmore College Summer Studio Art Program.

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May 052017
 

UndoingUndoing — acrylic and graphite pencil on paper, 20″ x 20″, 2012 (from Lachesis measure exhibit, 2012)

Bonnie Baker in studio 8
Bonnie Baker in her studio

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The work I make is connected to rural culture. I grew up in the farmlands of Southern Ontario at a time when big tobacco agribusiness was at its peak. The affected communities changed rapidly as small family farms adapted to industrialized agriculture. Transformation, for good or bad, made a permanent impression on me. I use the imagery of vacant highways, emptied landscapes, abstract cloudscapes, animal bones, twists of rope, and topographical lines to suggest frailty and uncertainty where once was tradition and stability.

The fact that I continue to work within the representational genre is a choice. I am fascinated by the representational element. There is much room for large and small space, for both intimacy and distance within the same work. I never feel constricted or boxed into a dead end by iconic objects or landscapes. Though physical objects appear defined, ideas surrounding them are limitless.

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From Geography of Bliss exhibit, 2016

Seal Island Bridge Split ViewSeal Island Bridge Road Camera Split View — graphite and mica on paper,
40″ x 60″, 2016

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Bridgetown 2011Bridgetown Road Camera Feb 2011 — graphite, charcoal and pastel on paper,
22″ x 30″, 2016

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Hubbards 2012Hubbards Road Camera Feb 2012 — graphite and wax crayon on paper,
22″ x 30″, 2016

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Road leads awayroad leads away — graphite on paper, 40″ x 60″, 2013

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My approach is governed by the Japanese concept called mujinzou, which loosely translated means inexhaustible supply. I may have an idea when I go to the studio, but many theories fail during investigation, which leads to new passages. I allow myself many failures, then explore the unintended consequences. Often the by-product of initial attempts contains profound meaning. I think navigating the passages can be more significant than the finalized state.

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from Lachesis measure exhibit, 2012

7. Infinity 500 pxInfinity — charcoal and wax crayon on paper, 36″ x 72″, 2012 

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FrayedFrayed — charcoal and crayon on Mylar, 36″ x 24″, 2011

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I begin by looking closely at a subject, methodically creating drawings of the same image over and over to understand my subject better. Once the image gains a life of its own, then I can look at it, think about it, and revise it. The revised drawing is now an expression of a new thought, rich in emotional expression and poetic aftermath. What is left behind by erasure or alterations is the debris marks recording the drawing’s history, exposing it to a richness and depth that happens by chance.

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From Boneyard series, ongoing

VertebraVertebrae — graphite on paper, 26″ x 31″,  2016
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Lamb's HipLamb’s Hip — graphite on paper, 24″ x 38″, 2016
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Right AntlerRight Antler — graphite on paper, 22″ x 30″, 2016

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I prefer the restraints imposed by charcoal and graphite sometimes mixed with organic elements, reserving colour for printmaking. Drawing in black, white, and grey intensifies focus without sentimentality, avoiding the temptation to appreciate only the meditative beauty of the subject.

In a similar way, my printmaking also records objects belonging to a rural environment and an ecology of transition. Using combinations of printmaking techniques, I am concerned less with the perfection of the editioned print, letting the image develop at the press as multiple variations often lead to play and exploration of a subject.

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From Archipelago suite, ongoing

ConfluenceConfluence — etching, 22″ x 30″, 2012
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ConvergenceConvergence — etching, 22″ x 30″, 2012
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IsthmusIsthmus — etching, 22″ x 30″, 2012
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I work full-time as an artist and this gives me a great deal of happiness. I am usually working in my head. I am thinking about projects as I walk, shop, and do household tasks. I make mental notes on changes to things I am working on. I cannot predict who or what will influence how I see or think about what I am working on, only that these experiences will subtly revise how I critically think then technically express themes in my work. The time spent in the studio is far less than the time spent thinking about, making notes on, and preparing for actually working. Working in the studio is my way of being alone, of being curious, of seeking clarity. It is often a confusing, uncomfortable and frustrating way to work, but if I persist long enough, new paths are uncovered.

—Bonnie Baker

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Bonnie Baker works at drawing and printmaking. Before moving to Nova Scotia, where she now lives, Bonnie studied glass blowing at Humber College in Ontario, lived in Whitehorse, Yukon, and travelled through Alaska. Bonnie has studied printmaking at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, at Women’s Studio Workshop, NY, and with master printmaker Cecil Day. In addition to drawing and printmaking, Bonnie worked with textiles from 1984 to 2007.

Community engagement is very much part of her practice. Among other projects, she has organized public events involving outdoor projection of text written collectively by several hundred strangers over a six-hour period; printmaking marathons using skateboards, roller blades, bicycles, and all things wheeled; exhibits on the open interpretation of the book form; and environmentally sensitive installations by several artists along a walking trail. She’s a founding member, active printmaker, and administrator of Elephant Grass Print Collective, a community-based printmaking studio in the fishing village of Parker’s Cove, Nova Scotia. Following her 2016 exhibit of drawings, Geography of Bliss, Bonnie is now focusing on a series of woodcuts and etchings that explore the crossover between her drawing and printmaking practices. Bonnie is a 2016 recipient of an Established Artist Award from Creative Arts Nova Scotia. https://bonniebakerstudio.com/

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Apr 052017
 

N5


1. THE FIRST TO RISE

I

miss my friend Robin. Robin Kilson. She was a black panther who was raped by the Black Panthers. And I met her when I was fairly young and she taught me a lot about betrayal, and betweenness, and belonging. And she died ten years ago and they say not to look into the face of what is sacred and to close your eyes or to avert your eyes or maybe just cover your eyes because then your eyes are still open and what you’re seeing is something beyond sight.

I think Robin talked so much about deprivation of belonging, and all of the places that she fought to belong in and arrived at only to realize she didn’t belong and she didn’t want to belong and I wonder if she feels that way now that she’s dead.

Does she feel a sense of belonging with the dead?

She’s not my relative. There’s no blood between us but she has felt like an ancestor ever since she passed away. More of an ancestor than my own ancestors, and there’s no reason for me to belong to her but I feel that I belong to her. And somewhere there’s a long thread that hasn’t been broken between the two of us.

Most of what we talked about were broken threads. Most of the time we spent together was holding threads to see if they would reach. She was a sixty year old quadriplegic African American Black Panther and I was a 19 year old lost child in the west and we would take these strings and somehow they tied together and the knots still hold but I know for her there were strings she tried to tie to people she thought were like her, other black panthers, other women, other afro-caribbeans, other people from Boston, other professors, other people in wheelchairs, other people with shaved heads.

I don’t think the strings that we always expect to connect are the ones that hold.

But the one that we tied, has held.

2. THE SECOND TO RISE

I must have been around nine probably when my blood grandmother said she had a very exciting day planned. And we packed a picnic together.

There were crickets in the summer. It was absurdly green in the South in June with noises of bugs and leaves and flowers bursting out and we were making fried chicken and ham sandwiches and Dr Pepper bottles and I knew we were going for a picnic that’s all I knew that we were going for a picnic and we got in her car and we drove and we got out and it was a beautiful place but it was a cemetery and a graveyard and I asked her why we were there and she seemed so happy. And so full of joy about the surprise that was awaiting me. And this adventure that we were on. And she said I can’t tell you, I can’t tell you, and we ran through the graves in her housedress and me in my brother’s clothes like a little boy and we reached a tulip poplar tree full of huge pink flowers falling all around and she pointed glowing at the ground and she pointed and pointed and pointed and she said, look look look, here’s your grave.

And I realized somewhere that day that she had bought my funeral plot. She had gone to the cemetery and bought me my grave. And that she hadn’t done this for anyone else. It was just for her and my grandfather. And she said, So that you’ll always be here. You’ll always have a place to belong.

And we ate our fried chicken and our Dr Pepper and its bottles on this beautiful green sloping blossom-filled path, where I had been given a place to decompose.

And I realized that was not where I belonged.

I think she wanted me to lay with my ancestors but the ancestors that I had were not her.

The thread that I tried to tie to her was not a thread that tied and held.

3. THE THIRD TO RISE

We have pipelines threading underground. The Black Snake pipeline. The Dakota Access Pipeline, the black snake of prophecy that is connecting the north to the south of this continent and is burrowing through the sacred and its eyes are open but it’s not seeing. The people who are destroying the earth and tunneling through the graves of the ancestors are not seeing. Their eyes are open and they are not seeing and I want to say, go to your grave, and lie there, and open your eyes in the darkness. Who will reach out to you? When you descend that far, whose string will follow you down?

There’s a sense that the pipeline doesn’t belong. It doesn’t belong in sacred space. It doesn’t belong. Oil doesn’t mix with water. Oil doesn’t belong in our water. Gas doesn’t belong in our water. It has its own grave. Which perhaps are dinosaurs. Perhaps bringing the fossil fuels from the earth is the most ancient grave robbery we’ve ever known.

All I know is that at night when it’s dark and my eyes are open I want to reach down farther than a drill, farther than any equipment could go, to the birthplaces and death places and sacred places that are under what we take for granted.

I was raised not believing in dinosaurs. My mother said that dinosaur bones were placed in the earth by god during the seven days of creation so that when they were found in the 19th century, in the 20th century, in the 21st century, they would test the faith of the nonbelievers. And it wasn’t until I was 20 that I learned that dinosaurs were real. The black snake of oil, of gas, of fossil fuel. A fossil is a body. Is a dead body of something that was once living. That people have chosen to exploit. My grandmother decided where I would be buried while I was still alive—even at nine that felt like a form of exploitation.

How—how do we see the dead?

4. THE FOURTH TO RISE

I was in Vienna working on a project that involved the archives of the anthropology department at the museum and there was a young anthropologist who had found some disturbing files. She was a woman, and the department was male dominated and they didn’t like her around. Interrupted their reality, I suppose. And they put her down in the vaults, which are underneath all of the beautiful Hapsburg plazas of Vienna. And she said, I’m afraid what I found is going to get me fired. And I’m afraid my supervisor will destroy them. And they have to be seen by someone who can see them. And I didn’t know what these were. She told me to bring my camera and told me I needed to see.

And I saw hair and fingernails and she explained they were from Jews collected for anthropological purposes a few days before they were murdered in the gas chambers. And each of the envelopes had a number. And each of the numbers corresponded to a name. And each of the hairs were different. Some were light, some were dark, some were straight, some were curly—there were fingernails of infants, there were fingernails of old men, everything numbered and I thought this is what I’m here to see, the remains of the dead something sacred, and she said, no there’s more. We must have to go down deeper. So we took the elevator and we went down for a long time. It was the longest elevator ride I’ve ever taken. And at the end of it were tunnels and more tunnels and at the sides of the tunnels were climate controlled—almost prison cells—but they called them archives and she opened the door with a key and there were banana boxes everywhere. As far as you could see down the metal industrial shelving cold—so cold—so far underground—banana boxes. Banana boxes from the 1930s, the 1920s, the 1950s, and then older boxes that were also fruit boxes that said—in languages from all over the world—bananas, oranges, and she looked at me and I knew I was supposed to see, I was seeing boxes of fruit but maybe if I closed my eyes I would see what she wanted me to and I did and it felt terrible down there. It felt terrible down there.

And she led me over to a box, and it was full of carefully marked femurs. And she said, this was a tribe in Niger. And we walked a little ways further and there was another row of shelves and there were orange boxes and there were newspapers and she just said, we’ll just unwrap the first newspaper. And there were finger bones and wrist bones—an assortment of tiny fragments and she said this was an aboriginal tribe in Australia and this, this continued through every continent. Another collection of fruit boxes filled with such strange fruit, and I asked her as I tried to breathe why the fruit boxes and she looked and me and she said, they so closely correspond to the size of human bones.

And I realized the orange is the hand. The fist. The black fist of Australia. Is the size of an orange on a ship brought back to a museum in Austria. And a banana is the length of the femur of a pygmy tribe in Africa, brought back by camel, by train, carried down stairs after stairs after stairs down into a cold basement in Vienna where they were fossils. And they were fossil fuels. They were fuel for hatred. They were a fuel for power. They were a fuel for control. A fuel for sadism over other people.

We don’t get to choose very often where the fossils of us remain. I don’t know how I feel about an afterlife. If Robin… The Robin I remember from the Black Panther photographs. The Robin I remember as she lay in bed dying still loudmouthed, still brave, still damaged, still full of threads.

Is she an ancestor fossil? I draw strength from her but I don’t desecrate, and I want the oil workers and the gas workers and the everyday people with their pipeline and their black snake to go down deeper. They don’t respect the fossils.

How far down do they need to go to learn respect?

And will it take their lives, as well as ours?

5. THE FIFTH TO RISE

In the middle of the United States there’s a town called Saint Louis. There’s the Saint Louis Arch, which would go by the name of a landmark. A landmark. A mark on the land that we all can agree upon perhaps when it’s erected, when it’s an arch that’s erected in a town like Saint Louis with the Mississippi River running below this arch that connects nothing with nothing to nothing. White is not connected to black. The segregation of Saint Louis is not affected by this landmark, arch, bridge from nowhere to nowhere.

It was 1992, I feel like it was before we recognized bombs as something that could land on us, here, there were stink bombs and smoke bombs for Fourth of July. Winter. New Years Eve. A holiday where a smoke bomb could be lit off against a white bank of snow or a dusky twilight early in the evening for children to be out. A flash of magenta or a flash of turquoise the gorgeous colors of smoke bombs from roadside fireworks stands. But in 1992, I only knew magenta and turquoise and saffron and cyan as the vivid colors coming from bombs that did not explode but only smoldered.

And so I was in Saint Louis with a young man my age who was very angry. And he was not interested in smoke but he was interested in bombs. And this young man had gotten me into his car and we had driven and driven and driven—I had no idea where he was taking me and then in front of us is this archway. And an archway is a gateway is a point in a journey where you’re crossing a threshold. But the threshold was so unclear. It didn’t cross the Mississippi, it didn’t cross, nothing was connecting, it wasn’t a bridge it didn’t make sense, and then we were in the elevator. The elevator at the Saint Louis Arch is a box that ascends a staircase it rocks the shape of the architecture the bend of the steel. The chamber is so small—it’s crypt-like—your knees are touching knees and you’re rocking as the car, a cube, is making a journey up an angle that is circular and there’s the roundness that doesn’t fit with the squareness and yet by god you’re going to the top.

By god, I went to the top. And this is where the bombs were not going to be smoke bombs but incendiary bombs, explosive bombs, bombs that would bring the arch down. The arch from nowhere to nowhere would explode in the name of this boy’s anger.

At the top of the arch it’s surprisingly narrow and you lie on your stomach at a strange angle that’s not standing up or not lying down, it’s suspended but you’re supported, it’s the angle of flight but gravity is still pushing you down onto this carpeted surface and there are windows and you look out on black Saint Louis and white Saint Louis and the Mississippi River and he says to me I’m going to blow it all up. And in that moment in that position in the arch from nowhere to nowhere, the gateway was the belief that I and everyone around me was going to die. It’s not a question. Might we die. Could we die. We’re in the process of dying. It’s—we are about to die. And since that threshold, that was crossed with no visible explosion, I have never since been human again. Not in a sense of being mortal and not in a sense of being immortal, but at that angle, suspended, between lying down and standing up, lying down and standing up. Lying down and standing up. In the space in between the two where you’re at an angle, traveling towards a destination that is no longer human.

6. THE SIXTH TO RISE

To escape this man, I got a bus going anywhere. I was in Nambé Pueblo, I was in Española, I was at a Greyhound station, it was blindingly bright and it was as far as my money would take me. Somebody—I don’t remember who—a woman, came up to me and she said you look like you need help. I’m not sure she used the word help. Then her husband was standing beside her. And I remember nothing about the word help. I just knew that I was to go with them. And when I arrived in their adobe there were ravens on the windows, one by one, each window I would look at and they, they said again this thing to me that was not help, it was not, you need our help, it was a word that I cannot remember. And they kept saying, you need, you need, and I was not lying down, I was not standing up. I was not human, I was not alive, I was not dead I was not mortal, I was not immortal, and they gave me peyote and I became a scorpion.

For five days I was a scorpion. I was not a scorpion but I was a scorpion. I was not a human who thought she was a scorpion. I was not a scorpion who thought she was a human. I was neither a scorpion nor a human. I was a human and I was a scorpion.

They told me my tail had the capacity to kill. I had never thought of myself as having the capacity to kill. I looked at myself and I was black and shiny and deadly. I had never been deadly before. For five days I was deadly. I walked. I walked outside. I walked the pueblo. I was not dead. I was not alive.

I was not human, I was not scorpion—I was deadly.

I asked them what I was supposed to do with this capacity to kill. What was I supposed to do with this capacity to cause pain? Was it justified as self-defense? Could I light this bomb of poison in the name of something like justice? Like revenge? Could it be a firework display of power to say, I can choose to make the living dead.

For five days I walked. I didn’t kill anyone.

7. THE SEVENTH TO RISE

Years later, I was working in northern Mexico, on the Tohono O’Odham. We were finding parts of women. They hardly seemed dead. They would have a leg with a shoe, and I would expect it to walk. The desert was full of bodies of women who were fossil fuels but they were desiccated and buried after they were exploited. There was no river of their blood coursing through a land of genocide, it was drying in their veins under the soil—sometimes I knew their names and sometimes… Sometimes there was no name.

I was walking in a forest in northern Europe, and there was a pile of ashes as high as I am tall. As wide as I am long. Grey. A kind of grey the sky will never turn. The kind of grey a rock will never be. Only a human incinerated will turn that color grey. It’s not forgettable.

How much have we forgotten in our landmarks? How many of us know the land on which we walk? The black snake pipeline. What does it really travel through?

Interstate 10. What does it truly travel past?

The Autobahn. Over whose ashes is it built?

8. THE EIGHTH TO RISE

I sleep at night but it’s not sleep, it’s something else. It’s not a human sleep because I don’t wake from it. All I know is there’s darkness, and I know I’m dead, and I’m lying down, I’m aware, I’m lying down and there’s darkness, and I’m dead and this lasts and it lasts and it lasts until the shapes of my room come back—the squares the circles, the angles, I sit up, I stand up, I’m upright. Upright is alive. I go outside into the desert so that I can feel the land and I feel like stomping. I feel like pounding. I feel like I should be on all appendages—scorpion legs. Human legs. Arms. Everything pounding, to let out what’s in the earth

Those who are sleeping are not quiet. Our ancestors who sleep—are they dead?

My grandfather sleeps in a green Naugahyde chair after dinner and we’re happy that he’s peaceful, we’re happy that he’s not angry, we’re happy that he’s fallen asleep after an insubstantial meal, and we go about our evening so delighted that he’s resting until we realize his chest isn’t moving, there’s nothing rising and falling, there’s no up, there’s no down—there’s just him at this angle, at this slanted angle suspended in a green Naugahyde easy chair and his heart has stopped and he’s here, but he’s not here.

9. THE NINTH TO RISE

For animals when they are fearing death, they have three choices. They can fight, they can take flight, or they can freeze. Those are the only three options. Those are the only three options for survival. Fight or flight or flee. And we who are not human who have not earned the title of human, those of us who are dead or have become something else—we have these choices, fight flight freeze, fight fight fight flight freeze, up down over, standing, lying, leaning.

And in the morning when the sun has come up, and I think it might be possible that I’m alive, and I stomp my feet on the desert floor—I want them to rise. I want all of them to rise. I want the trafficked women to rise. I want the genocided tribes to rise. I want the lynched to rise. I want the incinerated to rise.

Do I want them to fight? Do I want us to fight?

And I’m a scorpion again and I know I’m dead and I’m deadly and they’re dead and they’re deadly. And the living are dead and the dead are living and we’re in pain.

And I think, can this tail be used for justice? Is it possible? Can we protect and not protest? Can we have our tail and not be forced to use it? And some mornings as it turns to autumn and the fog rises from the Bosque and for a minute I think, yes, we’re rising—I can’t tell who fought back and who did not. Who froze and who fled. Who fought and who fled. Who fled then fought then froze. Who froze then fled then fought. There’s too many. There are too many. They go on. And on. And the deeper the soil and the deeper the rock the deeper they’ve climbed out and we stand and we look at each other and we say, we want justice, what do we do now?

—Quintan Ana Wikswo

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Quintan Ana Wikswo is the author of The Hope Of Floating Has Carried Us This Far (Coffee House Press), a collection of photographs and stories, and a forthcoming novel with photographs, A Long Curving Scar Where The Heart Should Be (Stalking Horse Press, 2017). Other work appears in magazines such as Tin House, Guernica, Conjunctions, the Kenyon Review, and Gulf Coast, and in anthologies, artist books, and exhibition catalogues. Her projects have received multiple solo museum shows in New York City and Germany, including the Berlin Jewish Museum, F.A.C.T. (UK) and are presented in galleries such as Ronald Feldman Gallery (NYC) as well as in museum and public collections throughout the United States and Europe including the Brooklyn Museum, the Jewish Museum Munich, and People for the American Way.

This Polaroid series created during a ritual walk for Thanksgiving Day, along the Jornado del Muerto (Journey of the Dead Man) desert of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro: the genocidal road of the Spanish conquistadors, the site of the explosion of Trinity (the plutonium infusion fission nuclear bomb), and the American Indian Wars against the Apache and other Native Nations. The bones depicted in these photographs are of the skulls of cows left chained to fence posts. Thanks to the Creative Capital fellowship and the Theo Westenberger Estate. These images are part of a multidisciplinary collaboration in progress with Matt Contos and Andrea Clearfield.

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Feb 012017
 

Jugando con Candela 2016 oil on canvas 40 x 30 in 500pxJugando con Candela, 2016 — oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in.

Ramon Alejandro

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A few short months ago, Rikki Ducornet introduced me to the paintings of the Cuban-born artist Ramón Alejandro. Awe and delight. Then she introduced me to the man, and we’ve been corresponding ever since. Awe and delight squared. Ramón Alejandro is an inspiration and an avatar. When he lived in Paris, he was written about but no less than Roland Barthes, who admired his robotic giants and specifically referred to his aimiability  — “son amabilité (ce qui fait qu’on l’aime)”. He’s genuine, wise, prolific and warm. The paintings are gorgeous, outsized, sun-drenched. He makes me think of the line from Don Quixote: “There might giants.” And the giantish “sons of God” in the Old Testament. A world under the sign of the imagination, more alive than life itself.

But to give you the flavour of the man, here is a bit from an email he wrote to me before Christmas. We were talking about the roots of his art, his cheerful and migratory life (he lives in Miami now). This is how all artists should be.

It helped me to be radical in my choice that one of my father’s usual phrases was that when one was no good for anything one could always become an artist. He was also born into a family that raised cattle for milk and cheese and apple trees for cider in Asturias in northern Spain. The mountains did not permit planting many crops in such a hilly landscape and the pieces of land were too small for those who had a whole lot of children to feed. Most young people had to go to America to make a living. He was a real disciple of Diogenes the Great without knowing anything about the Cynic school of philosophers or any other philosophy, but he had managed to make one for himself out of his life experience. I chose the wisdom of Aristippus of Cyrene also before knowing anything about his existence. Generally, all the arts, and pleasure itself by the way, are a real scandal for most of those who were brought up outside city limits. I was kind of lucky that my grandfather on my mother’s side was a marvelous copyist of ancient paintings in the Prado Museum in Madrid. He failed to be a good painter himself, but art and literature was all that counted for him in life. He was my inspiration though — or maybe just because — he was never able to earn his life decently, and when he and his wife became old, by the time I knew him the short time of my first 13 years, had to be materially taken care of by the husbands of his two daughters. I love all mythologies, religions, musics, paintings, poetries and philosophies but do not believe in any of them. I think that deep inside I don’t even believe in Reality or in the different ways of conceiving it. All of them have been my movies and TV since I was a child. And lately I have had the feeling I will be including more and more divinities in my paintings.

The paintings we’re featuring on NC this month are brand new, and they are part of a show of Ramón’s work currently up at the Latin Art Core gallery in Miami.

dg

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La Guanabana 2003 oil on canvas 20 x 24 in 500pxLa Guanabana, 2003 — oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in.

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Aprendiz de Brujo 2015 oil on canvas 24 x 24 in 500pxAprendiz de Brujo, 2015 — oil on canvas, 24 x 24 in.

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Virgen de Medianoche 2015 oil on canvas 24 x 18 in 500pxVirgen de Medianoche, 2015 —— oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in.

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Demonio del Mediodia 2015 oil on canvas 24 x 18 in 500pxDemonio del Mediodia, 2015 — oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in.

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Detras de la Cruz esta el demonio 2016 oil on canvas 40 x 30 in 500pxDetras de la Cruz esta el demonio, 2016 — oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in.

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xEl universo esta iluminado por las llamas del Infierno 2016 oil on canvas 40 x 30 in 500pxEl universo esta iluminado por las llamas del Infierno, 2016 — oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in.

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Combustion Espontanea 2016 oil on canvas 40 x 30 in 500pxCombustion Espontanea, 2016 — oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in.

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Energy flows in both opposite directions 2016 oil on canvas 24 x 24 in 500pxEnergy flows in both opposite directions, 2016 — oil on canvas. 24 x 24 in.

——Ramón Alejandro

Latin Art Core expoCurrent show at Latin Art Core gallery, Miami.

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José Ramón Alejandro is a Cuban painter and writer. Since the late 1960s, his work has appeared in one-man shows in private galleries in Paris, Geneva, and Miami, as part of exhibitions in Israel and cities across Europe, and in exhibits of limited edition books illustrated by artists of note. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Bibliothèque Municipale d’Angers in France, the San Diego Art Museum, and the Miami-Dade Public Library all include his works in their permanent collections.
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Alejandro left Havana in the 1960s to live in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Paris, where he stayed for thirty years. In 1995, he moved to Miami. There he founded Editions Deleatur, a publisher focusing on Cuban writers within Cuba and abroad. Alejandro and his work are the subject of the essay collection Ramón Alejandro (L’Atelier des Brisants, 2006).

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Jan 012017
 

mark-reamey

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Slide film provides an amazing experience. Slides come to life in front of any kind of brightness, creating little lightboxes – readymade, modern stereographs. Their tiny size commands curiosity and an inherent intimacy. They can be handheld, and they glow with brilliance and sharpness. Slides convince you. It’s enough to make you believe they are miniature versions of what happened.

I believe every photograph is a memory, an exact moment of time and space. By combining photographs, I am conflating accounts, adding them together and forming new stories. Domestic interiors are overrun with something unexpected, something other. The incredibly banal shifts into the transcendent, and so on. I’m interested in how the present influences the past, and I’m investigating why we selectively remember or forget. I’m fascinated that our history is constantly changing, that something so seemingly concrete can slip away. I welcome the surreal, psychedelic and uncanny.

I investigate how to construct images and depict pictorial space. I engage the public through the use of multiple slide projectors, kinetic machines, double-sided projection screens, custom-made viewing boxes and lenses. I create a sense of depth that flutters like paintings, in and out, between conceivable and awfully flat. I’m interested in this kind of visual ambling and how it differs from the source material of photographs. Unlike paintings, photographs are captured at once, coming to be immediately – the relic of an instant.   — Mark Reamy

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Notes on images: Images 1.–14. Digital photographs of two 35mm slides on a light table, 20″ x 30″. Image 15. Digital photograph of six 35mm slides on light table, 20″ x 30″. Image 16. TOP: Wooden structure housing 3D-printed component, which holds a magnifying glass, two slides, light, diffusing screen and battery. Just hit the switch on the side, the light comes on, and you can see the image inside the cube box. BOTTOM: The view inside. 12″ x 12″ x 8″.

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mark-reamy-portfolio-page-001-croppedImage 1. Canada (2014)

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mark-reamy-portfolio-page-002-croppedImage 2. State Route (2014)

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mark-reamy-portfolio-page-003-croppedImage 3. Wave (2015)

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mark-reamy-portfolio-page-004-croppedImage 4. Michigan (2016)

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mark-reamy-portfolio-page-005-croppedImage 5. Neighbors (2016)

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mark-reamy-portfolio-page-006-croppedImage 6. Parking Lot (2016)

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mark-reamy-portfolio-page-007-croppedImage 7. Window (2015)

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mark-reamy-portfolio-page-008-croppedImage 8. Corner Lot (2016)

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mark-reamy-portfolio-page-009-croppedImage 9. Development (2015)
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mark-reamy-portfolio-page-010-croppedImage 10. Thoroughfare (2015)

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mark-reamy-portfolio-page-011-croppedImage 11. Canal (2016)

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mark-reamy-portfolio-page-012-croppedImage 12. Strip Mall (2014)

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mark-reamy-portfolio-page-013-croppedImage 13. Resort (2015)

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mark-reamy-portfolio-page-014-croppedImage 14. Mountainside (2015)

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mark-reamy-portfolio-page-015-croppedImage 15. Beach Day (2016)

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mark-reamy-portfolio-page-016Image 16. Light Cubes (2016)

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Hailing from the Midwest, Mark Reamy received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2010. Since graduating, he balances freelance commercial work with his studio practice. Whether it’s rebranding local companies, illustrating a children’s book for Jay-Z and Beyonce Knowles, or exhibiting an eight-foot disco ball, Reamy engages his audience within a collaborative, curious, and contemplative spirit.

After an artist residency tour of the United States throughout 2015, Reamy received the Staff Artist Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center, where he will reside throughout 2016. He will also be an artist-in-residence at the Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art in South Korea in 2017.

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Dec 022016
 

hallucineMovement Is The Antechamber Of Hallucination 32” x 40” 28.3.2016

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The daughter of glow-worms painting portraits of mysterious females and the reindeer’s ghostly double, all perfectly cracked like glass, like an intrusion, like a flight into the obscurity of uncharted whispering. A slight touch on the shoulder, the movement of an affair between invasion and emanation, the pitch of bone against bone, faces merging in the moisture of a single word chosen among all the others. A vampire word…

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Clarity is often a flower burning a table out of a corpse, an immoral sense of having secretive codes, acknowledgements of a tentative gambling, a mere walk in the park. The spores of wild animals, the crawling of your flesh, light growing on water. Words like landmines.

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The glow between living and ceasing to live, emulates the long-legged cascade in her whispering circuitry, the gaze of rain is corrupted film, caught in the act, disguised by pleasure purring in gradually brightening passwords. The catapult of an unfinished sentence, turned to provoke, to stroke and latent in state, the light separates your body from its own darkness.

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The ancient horned flower of your psyche attracts the devoted milking machines, the aboriginal veins of a fabric that propels your footsteps as determined as her threads slipping into light, vanishing in the blink of an eye.

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navigateAnd still the navigators 38’ x 38” 27.6.2016

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Dark and greedy, the always secret and ever vanishing body of torrential mirroring.

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Dark gravitational assignations seduced into amulets the color of glass, evolving in sequential chiaroscuro, tempting blood where (in the Manor of Sighs) the barbarian sign language seizes the images of your being in the rich, antiquarian lucidity of your extinction. Your face, or the features of night in the fever of graceful spirits that still come to drink the liquid of life out of your hands, the pendulum… An evening of theater runs ahead…

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Trapping belladonna between the lines, between her legs, between phases, to embrace the blindness of your murmuring, pushing out between her lips, the lost hermeticism of albino checkmates.

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Black pyramid of erratic nights, sphinx crystal for abnormal motion, language absorbed by light hibernating in darkness, invisible shield, hormones of endless fusion and refusing to chalk the edges of bodily words taking root. On a street corner in another country, where the wheels of dance herald small but irreplaceable transgressing devices, shedding deceptions buzzing with veiled faces. You are sleeping with the enemy, unafraid and glorious.

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An intimacy of longing dwells in us like words that have no meaning, but animal cries, torn linen, a loving defiance…

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sirensSirens In The Evening House… 40″ x 66” 5.1.2016

Sirens In The Evening House… 40″ x 66” 5.1.2016*

One superb maneuver is the moon under your skin that pivots on the bones of a spider’s web, when it shines in the eyes of the animals that come close to you for light.

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Bright calipers of the alloy-laden arch, light-birthing heaviness, a fire between the air and the water, the arc of the dive into disappearance. Desire is not beautiful, but an invisible flame, a knife thrust into the heart, a moment of oblivion. The figure is translated, disfigured and set spinning into the tall and languid codes of light, violent codes, aching darkness of codes deceiving stature… who is dismantled. Words pulled out of lead. Breath of crystal. The rain of deer in the plateau of whispers…

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A bright spirit made of wolves, a throat in the fountain of analogies.

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Neither life nor death, but the same descent, the same loping, transfiguring, moving across the edges highlighted in ivory as bright as sunlight clutching at animal optics, scavenging, sight-shaping all the female phantoms in a row, crawling with antlers through the moth-memory of an escape hatch bigger than the either and the or… where the bell-veil toys with the heretic and his contraries, introducing a vow worthy of destruction, sealed with a kiss.

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Highly unreasonable notations raise pinnacles outside of the hour, narrate plumes, positions of sleep. The air spirals and sudden sparks. Your body of the orchid feast, thief of the mask. Night hood. “Teach me how to kill, and I will teach you how to love…” Only the wail of silence, in acrobat, even yourself hieroglyphing in lunar light.

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The slow movement of her hand, the reflections cast by night, travelling by déjà vu.

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The visual works I make are photo-based digital collages created in Photoshop, using printed media scanned into the computer, then using many layers, cloning, erasures. This allows taking the essence of collage quite beyond cut and paste. It becomes a much more fluid conjuration of matter, transforming the everyday into a magical space, where anything is possible. The sizes of the images are always approximate. Although, usually larger, depending upon whim. Since these live on the computer, they are subject to change.

—J. Karl Bogartte

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J. Karl Bogartte, born September 8, 1944, of Dutch and Irish descent, is both an artist and poet, schooled in anthropology, photography and various esoteric traditions. He has been an active participant in international surrealism for more than 50 years, and cofounder of La Belle Inutile Éditions.  He presently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Bogartte, is both an artist and poet, having published eight books of poetic writings: The Mirror held Up In Darkness, The Wolf House, Secret Games, Luminous Weapons, Primal Numbers, A Curious Night For A Double Eclipse, Auré, The Spindle’s Arc, and Antibodies: A Surrealist Novella.  Long aligned with international surrealism, Bogartte is also a cofounder of La Belle Inutile Éditions. His work has appeared in the following anthologies:  ANALOGON #65, Melpomene, Hydrolith #1 and #2, La vertèbre et le rossignol #4, Peculiar Mormyrid #2, Paraphilia,  and The Fiend online journal.

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Apr 142014
 

Download5

Numéro Cinq has a thing for hybrid art, for cross-genre art, for parody and mixed form, more Menippean satire and art made out of books and in that vein we offer here encaustic paintings by the Boulder, Colorado, artist Marco Montanari along with poems by Elaine Handley from Saratoga Springs, New York. The poems and the paintings combine; the paintings inspired the poems. They are ekphrastic and hybrid. Ekphrasis is the Greek rhetorical device of inserting the description of a work of art into a text as a way of creating meaning (by analogy or parallel). Coincidentally, the standard classical example of ekphrasis is Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad (also Hesiod’s description of the shield of Hercules). It’s a device with an ancient tradition, never abandoned. For example, here’s a stanza from W. H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles.”

She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.

And so it’s delightfully literal that Handley and Montanari have chosen warriors and shields as their central motif, adding to an ancient tradition that in this instance they have reanimated with more recent wars and warriors. Gorgeous, sad, dignified, violent images and words, given yet another twist by the poet’s particularly female point of view.

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4 My Father’s Helping HandMy Father’s Helping Hand – I. Encaustic paint on board with gold, bronze washes and dustings, 21×42 inches, 2013

Out of Hand

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Their fluttery needs, their choking
insistence, too powerful for words,
gestures of desire, insatiable.

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The fingers more nimble than the brain,
they take flight or become nests on a lap:
their instincts all their own
to seize a pen write a poem
cradle an egg pluck a weed
brush back hair stir a cake,
slap a cheek smash a plate
tear a hole poke an eye
mend a sock button a shirt
clutch grab snatch grip
trace the boundaries of a kiss
hang dumbly from the wrists.

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Like mouths they are always
hungry, and sometimes the palms
are lonely as the sky, fingers as fast
and nervous as moths.

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Hers
neatly folded, quiet,
like the still wings
of a shot bird.

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6 Dark Merging to light IDark Merging to Light – I. Encaustic paint on board with gold, bronze washes and dustings, 30×36 inches, 2012.

Rapprochment

When war ends ghosts rise up
to blossom white against
the world gone black,
color like hope, bled out.

How can we stand such times
and live? What we have destroyed blinding
as bright snow. Self‐righteousness
hatching into responsibility; guilt
flies around like wild birds.

More hauntings will come from those
who were there, who ate the landscape
and try to live with its poison in their craws.

Like snow, death covers everyone,
everything with its sameness. Grief,
white breath in cold air, last words
and all expectations stilled
with your heartbeat.
But annihilation is another matter.

Can light emanate from darkest deeds
the way opposites love each other:
now we speak of the pearly cell
of peace. The arithmetic
of possibility. Its labyrinth.

War ending:
door closing or opening
darkness light,
the grayness of promise.

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7 Entering a Contrary Moon IEntering a Contrary Moon – Phase I.  Encaustic paint on board with gold, bronze washes and dustings, 17×25 inches, 2011.

Entering a Contrary Moon

Enter the contrary moon.
See how it tumbles,
bright scrape in the sky
turning and turning
its measured dervish way.
Its silvered light
milk we drink.
Its circles
what we are made of,
how we live.

To be contrary is to be truest
to ourselves, all clash and remedy:
harlot, saint, demon, beggar.
What you are Sunday is not
what you are Tuesday. Impulses
flick like leaves in wind;
what you see gets clouded
and then emerges
bright and clean again.

Let the moon tumble
in its wanton way
and let us live our contrary lives
confused and laughing
at how we contradict
the alchemy of light and dark,
belief and action, thinking
we confound the ellipse of life,
but we cannot, no more
than the gold stain
of moon can erase
its corona from the sky.

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8 Open CircleMaiden, Mother, Matriarch of the Spiritual Warrior Woman – I. Encaustic paint on board with gold, bronze washes and dustings, 28×31 inches.

Open Circle

After every war
someone’s got to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.
From “The End and The Beginning” by Wislawa Symborska

Women have done it for generations,
for centuries, in fact, throughout all time.
Quietly, they set about making repairs.
First they must solder together
what has been broken
in themselves. Hard to do
and clumsy. Sometimes they give
up and make do. Jagged fragments
float in the bloodstream,
lodging close to the skin.

Next, they have to cauterize time.
When he returns it must be as if
no one has changed, feelings have not
clotted, he is the beloved returning.
She still knows him even though
he is now a stranger.

And so they colonize; it is not
spoken of, this new life
as aliens, exiles living
in the wreckage of the familiar.

He is looking for the secret passage
from war to the present, from war to her.
She sees his shadow from the mouth
of the cave, but to look back means
losing him forever, and who
will she see him with?

It is the bottom of the morning
in their lives, scarred compatriots,
lonelier than they have ever been,
subsisting on memories and dreams
they wrote each other, what fed them before.

She has tried to tidy up, she knows things now
she didn’t know before about cost.
They have children who feel amputated
and are yet whole. They live like ghosts.
The truth is not hers to utter,
but there is no one else to say it.

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9 Dismantled-to-the-Blood-MoonDismantled to the Blood Moon – I. Encaustic paint on board with gold, bronze washes and dustings, 23×27 inches, 2013.

Securing the Perimeter

I

Once I loved a man
who secured only
his own perimeter,
heart razor-wired shut
wandering eye on patrol.

I waited for him, hoping to dismantle
what ticked inside him
trying to navigate
the concussion of his moods,
to ignore his dereliction
of duty.

What did I know of war,
but what I tasted
on his lips?

II

If you don’t tell it, maybe you didn’t see it.
If you don’t tell it, maybe you didn’t feel it.
If you don’t tell it, maybe you didn’t do it.
If you don’t tell it, maybe you can forget.

Maybe the war will stop some day
festering in your gut, marching
to the flat knock of your heart.

III

Who counts the bodies
after war is over?
How long does friendly
fire last? Who listens
to children crying in their beds
missing fathers
already home?

IV

He wears memories like skin
so close we are heartbeats
away from the flash.

V

The dead should not sit at table with us;
They have their own places to be.
We might then stop feeding the children
annihilation with every meal. And no, dear, no
wine for me, the color of blood.

VI

He lives in no woman’s land, a boundary
between dying and dying. Between the war
torn raggedness of us now and what we planned.

VII

Were Adam and Eve this lonely?

Did they make love in the light
Of the blood moon?
Did she lie awake listening to
his breathing, patrolling the shadowlands
of his dreams?

Did Adam stalk the perimeter
of the garden while Eve watched,
brushing away the scorpions
crawling toward her
in the unforgiving sun?

—Images by Marco Montanari; Poems by Elaine Handley

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Born in 1952, Marco Montanari was raised in Buffalo N.Y. His art education includes a minor in Fine Arts at Erie Community College and classes at the State University of N.Y., as well as ongoing study in sculpture, life drawing and painting throughout the years. In 1993, while living in Saratoga Springs N.Y., Marco developed a process of sculpting wax on a wood lathe and then painting the sculpted surfaces with paraffin wax. These sculptures were designed as luminaries with the painted surfaces glowing when lit. In 2000 Marco began to experiment with translating these techniques into encaustic painting. He developed his alternative to traditional encaustic and as a result has produced a distinctive body of work that has been exhibited throughout the country. In 2003 Marco and wife, Kathy Zilbermann, relocated to Boulder Colorado where he is currently working exclusively in encaustic painting.

Elaine Handley is Professor of Writing and Literature at SUNY Empire State College.  She has published poetry and fiction in a variety of magazines and anthologies, and has won the Adirondack Center for Writing Best Book of Poetry Award, with writing partners Marilyn McCabe and Mary Sanders Shartle, in 2005  2006 and 2010. Their latest book of poetry Tear of the Clouds was released by Ra Press in 2011. Handley’s most recent chapbook of poetry is Letters to My Migraine and she is completing a novel, Deep River, about race relations during the Civil War.

 

Mar 102014
 

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Bianca Stone is an amazing poet/comic creator/illustrator/hybrid/amalgam artist who, yes, changes the weather a bit because she goes where she pleases, much like Anne Carson, with whom she collaborated on the book Antigonick (New Direction, 2012), Carson’s translation of Antigone. Stone has a new book just out, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books, 2014), and she has great genes, being the granddaughter of the of the poet Ruth Stone. We have today an interview between NC’s own amalgamated poet/artist Nance Van Winckel and Bianca Stone, delightful and knowing. Note especially Stone’s analogy between drawing and the poem on the page.

And when I draw—poof! There’s suddenly a physical thing there, that can talk, that can move. And I take advantage of that. The body itself, the air around the body, the expression on the face—these things can work just like a poem. Speaking, but not saying everything.

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NANCE VAN WINCKEL: In some of your comics the text can seem suggestive of a state of mind, a thinking-feeling condition. I’m thinking of, for example, “It’s like there’s a house in my skull with a woman waiting for someone to resurrect and take her outside.) The artwork itself, however, often gives this more “lyric” text a kind of narrative context: a physical space, characters, and situation. Can you comment on your own sense of how narrative and lyric impulses combine for you—in process and/or technique?

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BIANCA STONE: I’ve always had a great love of narrative. But I prefer also to allow surrealism in to complicate the narrative. I think that’s just how our minds work. In my poetry comics it’s the perfect space to explore the two. You have the push and pull of the visual image (which is so much more immediate than words), and perhaps work against the literal. And against abstraction.

That line you mentioned, for example—how could I possibly draw that without wrecking the imagination of it? I don’t want to draw it. I want to imagine it; more importantly, I want the reader to imagine it. So I draw something that lies beside it, so to speak, like another line of the poem. So that it moves forward, avoiding the didactic, the static.

NVW: Regarding the Practicing Vigilance Series in Notnostrums.

“No coins left in heaven/ you say every day/ to the coin-operated wind.”

In this series I especially like how you get at one’s impulse to “speak,” to give voice to inner turmoil, “someone’s lipstick burning in your skull.” The bats in this series fly like bits of language into the urban brew-ha-ha. Many of your poem comics seem to be haunted by what I’d call “incomplete linguistic transactions.”

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BS: I love that you imagined that the bat was bit of language. Because isn’t language, in a way, an image? Especially a poem—which uses the page like a canvas, and appreciates white space, the shape and sound of words, the drop at the end of a line. It’s beautiful for the eye (or perhaps hideous to the eye).

And when I draw—poof! There’s suddenly a physical thing there, that can talk, that can move. And I take advantage of that. The body itself, the air around the body, the expression on the face—these things can work just like a poem. Speaking, but not saying everything.

And often I’ll use poems for a drawing that perhaps need a little more. That aren’t done enough to be on their own. I’ll be using a poem, and take a line out because suddenly, while it’s all alone on the page, I realize it’s not strong enough. Thus, it often creates the non sequitur method that you find in more experimental comics and poetry. But also that method resists the narrative and allows more for music.

Some day soon I’ll be making a comic that’s much more narrative…that’s more a prose poem.

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NVW: You say that in your poetry comics you “want to use the image as another element of form in poetry.” Could you talk a bit more about this text & image “gestalt?”

BS: Again, one is constantly resisting “illustration, ” in its traditional definition. You don’t want to draw what’s being said, because that’s redundant.

It’s damned abstract to talk about, frankly. An image as a line in poetry—it doesn’t make entire sense! But I believe it.

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NVW: Regarding Antigonick, your collaboration with Anne Carson, is it true you didn’t even see her written text until after you’d done the illustrations? But of course you no doubt knew the play. Did you come away from this project with any new understandings about the collaboration process?

BS: Not entirely true! What I did see (read, spend hours with) was Anne’s text. I had it beside me while I did the art. I worked from it, as I do with all my poetry comics.

However, Anne and Robert Currie didn’t show me the hand-written text until I was finished. And then Currie magically came up with a method to put the images and text together.

Collaboration is hard. Very hard. You make endless false starts, and you spend a lot of time alone, weeping internally, worrying about everything. But then you come together and put things together like a couple of curious, eager architects. You step back and you have this one giant product. And you’re so proud. Your ego isn’t too wrapped up in it, because you all did it together.

It’s something that you do with people you trust artistically, and emotionally. And it makes you a better, more humble person.

NVW: I loved the poem “Elegy with Judy Garland (and Refrigerator).” I so admire how the language synchs with the music and the graphics. The intermix of drawing and film, of music and voice-over make for one of the better poetry videos I’ve seen. Does the poem come first, and then the animation take shape around that? And is poetry video a main direction for your work these days?

BS: I’ve always loved making videos. Ever since I was a teenager and had a massive VHS camcorder. The past few years I’ve been doing it again, and it’s really something I’ll keep doing.

It takes a long time. But the main things to remember are:

1. Use a good, finished poem.

2. Make a high-quality recording of it. (Read it well. Read it slowly.)

3. As I preach in my poetry comics, avoid “telling” the poem. Let the poem speak for itself. Use ghosts of subjects in your poem, but not verbatim.

Then comes all the hard work of figuring out the visuals. I’ve developed a kind of stop-animation process with my drawings, which is time consuming and bizarre. The process itself is a kind of performance piece (drawing free-style with a camera blocking half my view; trying not to move the paper or my camera.)

Thinking of the video-making process as part of it will slow you down, and help you make a better video.

A lot of poem videos are kind of awkward…it’s important to pick the right tone (music, sounds, title font, footage).

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NVW: I know you’re the granddaughter of Ruth Stone, a poet who’s near and dear to my heart, and I know too that you’re running the foundation to make her Vermont house a writer’s retreat and artist space. Could you talk a bit about how her life and/or her poetry have influenced your own? In your video, “Because You Love You Come Apart,” I could swear the first voice is Ruth’s.

BS: YES, the first voice is grandma’s voice, with me pantomiming it. She was an amazing reader.

Well, how to begin with this….grandma’s poetry is the most important poetry to me in the world. Her voice, her words, her love, is why I’m a poet.

I’ve written a lot about it. But to kind of sum-up, I spent my childhood with her (living with her in Binghamton while she was teaching there, traveling to readings, spending summers with her in Goshen, VT). We wrote together all the time, read her poems out loud; created together. I was raised by a single mother, so we spent a lot of our life dependent on my grandmother. My whole maternal family really revolved around her.

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Since her house in Vermont has always been a haven for her writing, and for students, poets, artists (and of course my mother and aunts), I’ve always dreamed of making it into a writer’s retreat. Sadly, the house needs about 500,000 worth of renovation (it’s also a historical landmark, so that price includes the parameters of restoring such a house). People tell me to tear it down, and I just want to scream! I wouldn’t dream of it! I’ve been toiling away with whoever will help, raising as much money as we can, trying to save it. All her writing and books and my family’s history is in there, getting eaten by mice and consumed by the elements. This summer I’ll be up there full-time. I’m going to get married there!

Honestly, anyone who can, please donate here at the Ruth Stone Foundation site and read more about what we’re doing.

weddingWedding

NVW: I know you have a new book, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, just out with Tin House/Octopus Books. Does it include visual art? Or did visual art—your own or others—inspire the poems in the book?

BS: I did the cover. (Which, I at first said I wouldn’t do, because art sometimes trumps words.) But besides that, it’s all about my poems. However, you’ll notice in the book that several poems are also poetry-comics and/or poem-videos out in the world.

I’ve been looking forward to my first book for a long, long time. I was patient in the end, waiting until I had it right. Now I’m thrilled with the whole trajectory of my poetry. I just wish grandma were here to see it.

—Nance Van Winckel & Bianca Stone
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Bianca Stone grew up in Vermont, and graduated with an MFA from NYU’s Creative Writing Program. She is the author of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books, 2014), several poetry and poetry comic chapbooks, and is also the illustrator of Antigonick, (a collaboration with Anne Carson). Her poems have appeared in magazines such as American Poetry ReviewTin House, and Crazyhorse. She lives in Brooklyn.
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Nance Van Winckel is the author of six collections of poems, including After A Spell, winner of the 1999 Washington State Governor’s Award for Poetry, and the recently released Pacific Walkers (U. of Washington Press, 2013). She is the recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Recent poems appear in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Crazyhorse, Field, andGettysburg Review. She is also the author of three collections of short fiction and a recent recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship. Her stories have been published in AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, The Sun, and Kenyon ReviewBoneland, her fourth collection of fiction, is forthcoming in October from U. of Oklahoma Press. Nance’s photo-collage work has appeared in Handsome Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Em, Dark Sky, Diode, Ilk, and Western Humanities Review. New visual work and an essay on poetry and photography are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest and excerpts from a collage novel are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review OnlineClick this link to see a collection of Nance Van Winckel’s mash-ups of poetry and photography, which she calls photoems. She is Professor Emerita in Eastern Washington University’s graduate creative writing program, as well as a faculty member of Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA program. She lives near Spokane, Washington with her husband, the artist Rik Nelson. Her personal web page is here.
Jan 112014
 

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Katie DeGroot is an old friend who lives in a farmhouse on the picturesque banks of the Hudson River just outside of Fort Edward, NY. Her son Niles was in day care with my boys. Her husband Jon and I used to ski together while the three boys practiced mayhem on more dangerous slopes. Like most artists I know, she has a quiet, obsessive side that drives her to long solitary hours in the studio relentlessly putting shapes and colours on paper or canvas. In this case, the shapes come notionally from nature, those rotted, knobby logs you see off the trail, festooned with things growing upon their morbidity. Strange symmetries. But she takes the logs out of nature and puts them up on a white ground, often in tandem (parallel constructions), with the images running off the page, and the moss, lichens and fungi elaborated in fantastic profusion.

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It’s funny, but as an artist I hate to even say I use watercolors because it’s the medium so much bad art is made with. It’s what your mother uses to paint with in her art class. I only started using watercolors because I had them and I was waiting for the oil paint to dry on a group of paintings. I have never learned the “correct” way to use them. I think of it as fast drying paint that can give you the most amazing color and translucency. You really only have one chance to make the artwork, the watercolor demands that you work quickly and then walk away. If you push too hard, or second guess your first take on the painting, the result is often an overworked failure. I edit a lot.

I have worked from nature for many years. Recently found objects such as sticks and logs have become a starting point for my studio investigation. Where these objects lead me in my artwork has to do with my interests in surrealism and abstraction, as well as my own quirky interpretation of the objects’ personality.

—Katie DeGroot

PanoramaNatural Attraction,  watercolor on paper, 45″x 60″  (2012)
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Big Diva, watercolor on paper, 45″x72″ (2013)
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Untitled (Nonquitt), watercolor on paper, 24″ x 18″ (2013)
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Untitled (Grey), watercolor, 24″x 18″ (2013)
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Dumbo, watercolor on paper, 24″x 18″ (2011)
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Mr. Smiley, watercolor on paper, 24″x 18″ (2011)
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Family Relations, watercolor on paper, 24″x 18″ (2013)
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SPACE—Katie DeGroot
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Katie DeGroot attended New York University and Illinois State University before living and working as an artist in New York City for nearly twenty years. Katie now resides and works in a studio on her great grandparents farm next to the Hudson River in Fort Edward, NY. Katie has exhibited her artwork regionally and nationally. Currently she is exhibiting work in the 2013 Mohawk-Hudson exhibition at The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, NY, and the Albany Airport Gallery. This fall she had a solo show at Gallery Gris in Hudson, NY. She is currently the Director of the Skidmore College Summer Studio Art Program.

Dec 122013
 

Great post up at Jacobin today by Sam Gindin on, among other things, the lack of politically effective art today.

Part of the problem is a lack of ambition in both politics and art—the left seeming, especially since the 1990s, unable to proffer sufficiently ambitious radical projects:

The primary focus on protest carried with it an inclination to ignore and in some cases even scoff at seriously considering what it would take to fundamentally challenge capitalism and eventually replace it. Unable to think big, these protests have increasingly been unable to even win small. Unable to act more ambitiously, they are largely limited to defensively protesting the latest specific attack on our lives.

Gindin bemoans the lack of progress since the potential watershed of 1968. Drawing on Brecht’s confrontation of fatalism, Gindin suggests good activist art must re-embrace the somewhat abandoned Marxist critique of capitalism. Without it, an artist falls into disillusionment as easily as your average neoliberal young thinker-consumer. Gindin is not reinventing the wheel, here, but placing an important emphasis on the problem of fatalism, of falling into the neoliberal fallacy that capitalism is the only possibility:

It would be a shame if art, taking fatalism as a fixed reality, was reduced to consoling us in our despondency.  On the other hand, it would be naïve to expect too much from art. Though the years since Berger issued his challenge have confirmed that the soul-destroying world that capitalism more and more offers us is a fundamental barrier to human development, art itself cannot overcome this situation. Art can move us emotionally and intellectually, but however valuable it can be in this regard it cannot on its own transform the power relations of society. Such a radical change demands the development of radical political institutions and practices. Addressing this means that artists have to step out beyond their studios and workplaces to act in the world as directly political people.

Activist art must become both grounded in everyday life and embrace the incertitude of “possibility and experimentation” (Gindin’s words—I would suggest Keats’ negative capability). Until then, Gindin says, art will remain a “shill for the status quo.”

Read the rest at Jacobin Magazine.

—Tom Faure

Nov 162013
 

Self Portrait as a Dead Man, 2011, oil on board, 16 x 13.5 in., collection of the artistSelf Portrait as a Dead Man, 2011, oil on board, 16 x 13.5 in., collection of the artist.

I am always alert to what artists have to say about their work. They are thoughtful, patient people who spend a lot of time by themselves working with their hands (something that always promotes a kind of detachment — you think with your hands and the rest is a kind of meditation). I first met Stephen May 25 years ago when I was writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick the first time. Stephen, despite the title of the painting above, is manifestly not dead (see the photo below), but still alive, painting and asseverating. When Stephen writes, he writes with passion and a style that rises here and there to the aphoristic; when he paints, his work shimmers with a kind of classic beauty. Herewith a sample of both, painting and text — the measure of the man and artist.

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Stephen May

This is about how inadequate logic, reason, passion, intelligence and imagination are in art. It’s about how reasonable it is to accept that. It’s about how misleading and misguided the word creativity is. This essay is not meant as a spiritual work, but it necessarily enters territory that sounds spiritual.

I want to make good paintings. Sometimes when I’m painting something good happens. I remember not the first time it happened, but the first time I realized what was happening. The words that came into my head were, “Oh, all I have to do is tell the truth!” or “Oh, all I have to do is put down what I see!” (It was a long time ago).

In the late 1800’s a critic named Albert Aurier reviewed an international exhibition of contemporary art in Brussels that included the work of Van Gogh. He singled out Van Gogh as a leader and praised his work in terms of its form, the way he used colour. Van Gogh wrote letters to friends in response. In one of them he wrote, “Aurier’s article would encourage me if I dared to let myself go, and venture even further, dropping reality and making a kind of music of tones with colour, like some Monticellis. But it is so dear to me, this truth, trying to make it true, after all I think, I think, that I would still rather be a shoemaker than a musician in colours.”

Van Gogh loved truth. He is not famous because he cut off his ear. He is famous because his paintings are good. His paintings are good because of his relationship with truth.

What is truth anyway?

I’ve painted good paintings and bad paintings, which is to say beautiful paintings and banal paintings. I’ve reflected on both experiences. I want to understand what it was that seemed right with me when the paintings were beautiful and what seemed wrong with me when they were banal. My experience has brought me to an understanding of the way my art relates to my life and how what is good in art, what is meant by good art, relates to what is good in life in general.

Beauty is just a word. There are many claims on it. Something is happening, though, in the art of Bach, Tolstoy, or Manet, for example, that is unpredictable and mysteriously complex. I use the word beauty to serve that phenomenon.

Artists sometimes say beauty is truth, and people sometimes say God is truth or truth is God. I tend to say those things now. When John Keats and Emily Dickinson equated beauty with truth, and when Gandhi and Simone Weil said truth is God, I don’t think they were using the words as a slogan for an intellectual position. I believe the words occurred to them the same way they occurred to me. And they occurred to me as a revelation but only after many experiences of the difference between true and false, beauty and banality. It is reasonable to be skeptical about the expression beauty is truth, but, ironically, skepticism led me to the expression.

Simone Weil describes prayer as paying attention. I thought I stopped praying when I was a teenager, but now I think perhaps I’ve continued to pray all along.

Painting is an act. Painting is living. The problems of painting — the problem of whether to paint or not, how to paint, what to paint — are the same problems we all face in just being human. They are the problems we have figuring out what to do with our lives, figuring out what’s possible. A person acts, and we find out what’s possible.

L & A's Garden with Neighbour's House, 2010, oil on board, 24 x 24 in, private collection.

L & A’s Garden with Neighbour’s House, 2010, oil on board, 24 x 24 in, private collection.

Shakespeare wrote plays.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

So Shakespeare is possible. How did he do that? We want some explanation for his power and the continued effect it has on us. The only thing we can see and hear is the form, so we look for the secret there. Did Shakespeare have a secret formula? Did Bach and Beethoven? Did Manet and Monet? Did Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?

What allows some people to leave us better off than we would have been without them? Those who do that sort of work are, invariably, un-secretive, and the infinite variety of the forms their actions (art) take suggests that there is something very un-formulaic at the root of their work. The root of whatever it takes to do something good outside the art world might be the same as within it.

Our ego lives behind our eyes and the world pumps it up to blind us. Our bitter disillusionment (those lines of Macbeth’s) steals upon us concealed behind the blind of illusions created for us, within our ego, behind our eyes.

A beautiful painting is never simple. It’s never just some canvas with colours on it, never just the image, what it may or may not symbolize, never just an artist’s diary or an artist’s taste and opinions, and never just a reflection of the artist’s culture either. We all tend to be distracted by the specifics of our lives, our passions, etc. Socrates is supposed to have said the only true wisdom is knowing you know nothingAnd Einstein once said there are only two ways to look at the world. Either nothing is a miracle or everything is a miracle.

I need to use the word truth. Like the word God, it is a metaphor. I don’t think you can say God without imagining something like lord or father, something understandable. But if you use metaphor it moves mystery in the direction of non-mystery, and you undermine the significance, you undermine the psychic weight of mystery. You undermine the useful purpose of the word.

The thing about being human that makes me need to use the word truth is the hardest thing to put into words and the thing that if I could put it into words, might be the best use I could ever make of words. I am. I know I am because I experience. I know something else exists because I experience it. It’s a circular knowledge. There is no proving anything about myself, no proving anything about what I experience. One defines the other. There is no going outside that circle to see what’s outside it or to look back and see what that I really is, or what experience really is. It’s not even worth saying I know I experience as I can’t define either of the words I or experience other than in terms of the other. All our acts are acts of faith. Lived experience is normally so consistent it allows for a deep faith in nature and science, but as the Buddhists say, all is illusion.

I could ignore Socrates’ or Buddhist wisdom. I could ignore Keats’ revelation (my own) and call what happens within that circle knowledge. But it would be the first selfish act, the first subjective act that sanctions all subsequent selfish acts. It would be the end of wisdom. It would be the end of loving truth. It would be the end of true love. It would be the beginning of cowboys-and-indians. It would be the beginning of the presumption of knowledge and the sanctioning of all acts of relative good. It would be the end of goodness and love. It would be the end of beautiful action. It would be the end of beauty in my life. I wouldn’t paint anymore, or at least I hope I wouldn’t.

Truth is beauty is God. But I can only say that in the sense that I accept that all three words reflect an understanding that we really don’t know anything, that reason is limited. Beauty is mystical. It can’t be made un-mystical by social science or neuroscience (and yet it accepts those sciences). It accepts everything without judgment or fear or contempt. It isn’t fragile so requires no soldiers to protect it, nor rites to keep it holy.

We’re simply invited to fall on our knees. All our assorted lives and deaths lose all their gravity, they melt into air. We’re released from grasping, striving and collecting. Our fists are opened. We accept the ants on the kitchen counter, the dandelions in the lawn, our own nature, too. Poetry begins where separation between what’s solid and what’s mysterious melts away.

In Grace and Gravity, Simone Weil gives us an apt analogy. She describes a space normally filled up with our self, a space filled up with logic, reason, passion, intelligence and imagination. It’s only if we can remove our self from that space that there will be room for beauty or truth or God to arrive (she used the word grace). When we fill up the space again, there’s no longer any room for beauty. Reason and passion etc. are all manifestations of self love and they leave no room for beauty.

The mystical root of beauty and wisdom is in loving truth. Buddhist wisdom, Christian wisdom, and the wisdom of great art begin there. To love truth means knowing you know nothing. It means only accepting and accepting and accepting. It means being without agenda or prejudice. It means being without pride.

Egocentric taste is what is in the eye of the beholder. That’s not what I mean by beauty. I am not strictly speaking a religious man, but there’s no separation for me now between art and religion, painting and prayer, beauty and truth/God. If you consider aesthetics as philosophy of art, then for me aesthetics and ethics have merged.

View through the Studio Window, 2013, oil on canvas, 36 x 54 in., collection of the artist

View through the Studio Window, 2013, oil on canvas, 36 x 54 in., collection of the artist

I don’t know

A beautiful painting is not a representation of something you think is beautiful. If you see an image of an attractive and healthy young man or woman, or a sympathetic portrait of a beloved personality, a saint for instance, or an image of some idyllic setting, a place you’d like to be in, you have to be extremely wary. All of us involved in art have to make ourselves aware of the seductive power of imagery. What goes for art often fails to be more than expressions of taste or pandering to taste. Art very often fails to be more than seduction or manipulation.

You see, hear and taste, you feel beauty. How much do we miss though? Two people might be smiling at you, while one wishes you well and the other wishes you ill. Those smiles might look the same but they are different. It is a dangerous misconception that beauty is what something looks like. Beauty is what something is. Ugly, distorted, or plain things reveal themselves to be golden. Glittery things disappoint.

My struggle to come to terms with experience is the same as anyone else’s. We’re raised on illusions and comforted by them.  My moments of disillusionment were unpleasant and life changing. We’re all taught by experience (or should be) the danger of mistaking illusion for truth. Some people wear blinkers their whole lives, loving escapism. Some people get cynical and don intellectual armour. Some love truth.

An old commandment, “Thou shalt make no graven image”, doesn’t make much sense to us at first glance. But if we make images of God from imagination, in words or pictures, and then love those images, it is really ourselves that we love. We create God in our image. We get what we want. We enter the brothel of illustration.

This isn’t new, nor will it ever grow old. It is in establishing whatever relationship is possible with truth that we begin to be beautiful, that our actions begin to be beautiful and the results of our actions, the traces we leave in our wake begin to be beautiful. Without that relationship all form is normal, banal. Within that relationship any form is beautiful.

In the pursuits of science, philosophy, theology, art, and in our everyday lives, truth is beautiful. Artists are prone to getting distracted from this no less than others. When I was young I liked art class best. When it came time to choose a career all I wanted was to play for a living, as opposed to work, so I chose art. It wasn’t too long though before I realized the only worthwhile thing an artist can do is love truth. I believe it’s the same for any career. I wonder what it does to a person’s soul if his career is ugly (spin doctors, etc.). In loving truth, the apparent incompatibility between our pursuits, between science and religion for instance, disappears.

I’m not suggesting we forsake intelligence, but beauty is not a strictly intellectual pursuit. You don’t need to be Plato to be beautiful. Being smart can just as easily get in the way. Maybe you need to be smart to realize that or to be able to put it into words (maybe it’s stupid to try to put it into words). A beautiful intellectual argument would be one free of rhetoric in the sense of persuasion. The rhetoric of persuasion is banal. That banality is an invitation for realities much worse than simply banal. We are attracted to intelligence for its own sake, to rhetoric and sophistry. But is leaves no room for love of truth. The rhetoric of persuasion is dangerous. It’s a truly ugly idea that if you’re better at persuasion than anyone else in the room, you win and truth is yours. Intelligence is for safe guarding ourselves against cleverness, distinguishing the difference between truth and rhetoric.

View from Jenn's House, 2007, oil on board, 28 x 31 in., private collection

View from Jenn’s House, 2007, oil on board, 28 x 31 in., private collection

Elements of art

We can’t talk about art without talking about form. Art always takes a form, but the form that art takes isn’t what matters in art. The derogatory term academic art is reserved for art where form matters too much. It matters too much if you’re searching for new forms just as much as if you’re trying to conserve old forms. There is something more crucial than innovation. The painters Manet and Picasso are famous for breaking old forms and inventing new ones. That’s the orthodox story of western art. Really though they are famous because they are good, just like Van Gogh. Rembrandt was no breaker of form. All four of them are good in that they take form out of the precinct of words. Those who find refuge in form, the progressive and conservative alike never escape history, never escape their own time. Oscar Wilde asks us to be kind to fashion because it dies so young. I can’t muster much sympathy.

Manet’s contemporaries were offended by his lack of respect for what they considered to be the serious concerns of art. Things don’t change much. We get so caught up in our moment. Manet’s early paintings were designed as signposts, as if to say, “If you want to understand what I’m doing, just look at Velazquez (for example).” Manet’s painting, far from merely being a precursor to the triumphant art that followed, actually makes most subsequent painting look like window dressing and doodles, just as it made most of the painting of his contemporaries look like huge bags of brownish wind.

Sometimes when a person associates himself with the word realism it is meant to reveal their desire to dismantle false hierarchies. It is meant to express a willingness to accept all that is seen even though it may undermine the romantic/idealist notion that we are individually or collectively somehow the figurative center of the universe. It is meant as an acceptance of the fact that we are not the purpose or goal of existence. There have been many painters willing to put us in our place but none who have done it with such gentle humour, intelligence and kind sympathy as Manet.

Manet understood as well as anyone the potential of looking at something and painting a picture of it. He was reported to have said that a painter can say all he needs to say with fruit or flowers or even clouds. We can be moved generation after generation by paintings of nothing in particular, a glass of water, an empty field…by music without words. Manet’s perfect advice to artists: “If it’s there, it’s there. If not, start over.”

Chardin painted a picture of a brioche. He said you use colours but you paint with feeling. There’s a long list of great painters who looked at things and painted pictures of them, a long list of great paintings done that way. If sophistication prevents anyone from doing it today, there’s something wrong with sophistication. Van Gogh stuck candles to his hat so that he could see what he was doing when he painted outside at night. The French artist Marcel Duchamp called that stupid painting. The question of futility is empty. We are and so we do things. We can draw a moustache on the Mona Lisa or we can paint The Night Café, one or the other. The sublime and the ridiculous are Siamese twins. It’s a bit of good fortune if you don’t mind looking ridiculous.

We can’t talk about art without talking about media. There are practical advantages and disadvantages with respect to each medium, degrees of suppleness, degrees of ease of dissemination, etc. Ultimately though, we are the message. It is ourselves who are being delivered. We must tend to ourselves first. Our instinctual egoism is embodied in any new form and delivered by any new medium as naturally as in and by the old ones. That the delivery is increasingly more efficient is no great comfort.

A new medium is not necessarily a better medium. As a medium or technology becomes more complex, McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message” becomes truer. Love and empathy disappear within the complexity. We need to be careful that the increasingly complex media we adopt don’t cause this we that’s being delivered to become we-the-machine.

Painting most likely persists as a medium because of its infinite suppleness. It always bends to the force of the person who paints and makes it impossible for that person to hide. Anything that is good about them is plain to see. It’s almost as simple and obvious as singing or dancing. Less machine means less machine. It’s for those who love a person.

Hummel Figurine, 2011, oil on canvas, 56 x 57 in., private collection

Hummel Figurine, 2011, oil on canvas, 56 x 57 in., private collection

We can’t talk about art without talking about content (or substance). The word content is an acceptable word to stand for what matters in art. Whenever something gets formed (by humans or otherwise) all the causes, the obvious and the mysterious, of its being formed are contained within it. Content might be a word that denotes the limits of our understanding of what is there in the form, the limits of our ability to read it, to perceive it, as in, content is what I see, or content is what I know. Content might also be a word to denote all that is contained in form, independent of our ability to perceive it. When we form something we could define content as what we meant by forming it, or we could define content as what we are, as the force that determines the form. We don’t know what we are. We say intellectual content without knowing exactly what a thought is, what consciousness is.

If it’s true that the universe is in a grain of sand, that the content of a grain of sand is the universe, what then distinguishes a beautiful man-made form from a plain or ugly one, or nature from art? If content is what matters, what is the content in Bach’s form that distinguishes it from all other form in his time or before or since? What constitutes its value to us, if all sound, every sound, any sound holds truth in it? I would say that art is a human affair. A communion occurs. The origins of Bach’s music are mysterious. Bach willingly collects us within this mystery. It’s a kindness, a generosity on his part. When the sun shines, or the rain falls, or the volcano erupts, we can’t be sure it’s a kindness. A grain of sand isn’t kind.

We seek knowledge. We seem to be offered it but beauty takes it away again. We are stripped of the urge to be assertive. Maybe the beautiful thing about beauty is that no one knows how to do it, that no one ever has or ever will. We only know little pieces of a puzzle that keeps expanding in unimaginable dimensions beyond our potential and when we look again at that piece of the puzzle we thought we knew, that we so carefully and assuredly put in its place, it’s no longer what we knew it to be. I don’t know why Bach is so good. I don’t know how he so consistently avoids failing when it’s so easy to fail. I borrowed a Maria Callas CD from the library of her first recording when she was in her early twenties. The person who wrote the commentary for the CD ended with, “Listen to it on your knees.” It’s of crucial significance when one of us fails to fail.

There is a potential for art beyond metaphor. It would be better if people would understand that the value of art comes not from the nature of it being about something crucial and important, but from the nature of it actually being something crucial and important. Its value is not as illustration or documentation or story or metaphor, but as the embodiment of what is valuable. Imagery and symbols come naturally to painting which makes it particularly susceptible to this perceived limitation. 20th century painters abandoned the image to declare an understood kinship to music’s intrinsic abstract qualities. The same is true in modern dance and literature when they abandoned plot. There are no formal safeguards against failing to be beautiful, no formulas, but one understands the motivation.

I’m beginning to get angry at images. They seem to have an innate tyranny to mislead. When you see, when you feel with your eyes it happens in colour patches, in light and dark shapes. We respond to it in all the ways we respond to it ever since we’ve been human, by backing away, by approaching, in fear, in wonderment. But culture turns images into symbols that have meaning. The tyranny of the image is that it distractw one from realizing that the paintings aren’t symbols first, they are art first. They are embodiments of the painter, hopefully embodiments of feeling. For every painter who feels as Rembrandt feels, there are 100,000 painters whose symbols are the same as Rembrandt’s. For every painter who feels as Tom Thomson feels (in his plein-air sketches), there are 100000 painters whose symbols are the same as Thomson’s. This is the tyranny of the image.

Vegetable Garden and Phlox, 2010, oil on board, 26 x 26 in., private collection

Vegetable Garden and Phlox, 2010, oil on board, 26 x 26 in., private collection

Critical thinking

My best paintings were done by putting dark paint where it looked darkish, light paint where it looked lightish, like some glorified, faulty camera with two eyes instead of one and self-awareness instead of none. Cézanne said of Monet that he was “only an eyeyet what an eye!” I love Monet’s late paintings of the Japanese footbridge, when his eyes were ruined by cataracts and the operations to fix them.

I want so much to trust somebody. All I have is my eyes, ears and time to find out who I can trust, to discriminate between who might care and who might be looking out for themselves first. I think much of what is admired in the world is admired for being great examples of people overpowering other people. It’s taken it as a license to do the same. Hell is other people.

I’m searching for something and am compelled to walk away when it doesn’t appear to be present. If I can separate the good from the not so good, the difference between them becomes much clearer. The success of this phenomenon might be why there are long line-ups to get into the Musée D’Orsay every day.

There is an idea in vogue right now of artist as critical thinker. There is a relationship between art and philosophy, but they aren’t identical. Matisse said if you decide to be a painter you must cut out your tongue, you give up the right to express yourself by any means other than painting. He didn’t cut out his tongue though, and his art didn’t suffer. It’s good to hear it from the horse’s mouth. It would be even better if the horse could be as articulate as the horse experts. One tries.

Marcel Duchamp was a competent painter with interesting ideas. He stopped painting. He eventually ended his involvement with the art world altogether. He probably noticed the difference. Faithless action is impossible for a sincere person to sustain. Dadaism as it is manifested in his art—great art by function of its influence on later artists—reflects a strange cynicism with respect to the possibility of a person doing anything beautiful. Goodness saves each one of us at every turn. Disillusionment is with ideology. To abandon the cynicism that accompanies disillusionment means abandoning ideology. Icons are ideas. Marcel Duchamp has become an icon of iconoclasm. He’s his own mistake. When you destroy something, unless you arrange otherwise, the vacuum will be filled up again with normal things.

You can’t make anti-art. If you make it, it’s art. If you persist after realizing that, then you kind of need to accept that you’re the type of person who likes a joke at another’s expense. Duchamp kept attempting to present an art without value, anti-art, suggesting that the value we place on art is false. Every time he made something though, he realized he failed. The thing became art. By having been done, it inevitably participated in the phenomenon that is art and was valued as such. He realized that the only way this wouldn’t happen was if a thing remained un-done, un-made, that the idea remained unrealized. An unrealized idea, though, isn’t anti-art, but rather the absence of art.

The term conceptual art is a classic oxymoron. Conceptualism was still born. Art-as-idea has evolved from an absurdity to a concept of art reduced once again to illustration and documentation. Research, the collection of facts, has replaced perception, replaced feeling. Duchamp’s cynical act of pointing at a urinal and calling it art has spawned the current fashion of pointing. The art in this situation is not what is pointed at but rather the act of pointing and the implicit declaration. It is more vapid than the more traditional and self-centered pointing at yourself, drawing attention to yourself when you have nothing to offer, no beautiful intentions.

Duchamp was the first artist to gain a history book kind of success because he had nothing good to offer. The root of his powerful influence on today’s art world lies in the hope he gives to so many artists with ambitions for a similar kind of success, who, despite reasonable intelligence, like Duchamp have nothing good to offer. It is a telling fact to consider that some of the greatest paintings ever made were painted by Monet with his coke-bottle glasses in his garden in Giverny years after Duchamp pointed at a urinal. The history of what matters is more like a pulse than a march.

It’s in the nature of institutions to be conservative. Institutions must hold on to the ideas of themselves to exist. As we are in the era of art-as-idea, there is institutionalized sanctioning of cleverness within the contemporary art world that looks suspiciously like the 19th century Academy. It’s what happens when ideas replace feeling. There is a work of conceptual art that consist of a panel that has the words on it (in French) “Art is useless. Go home.” Without beauty, without feeling this is more or less true.

All artists, great and small, make things that aren’t beautiful. Sometimes some of them make things that are. A thing shouldn’t be held sacred just because Leonardo painted it or Mozart composed it. We’re allowed to walk away from art, even great art, if we find we can’t trust it.

Making beautiful things is beyond me. If it was just a matter of sincerity or intelligence or skill the world would be full of beautiful art. If it happens for me I’m never sure where it came from, or why it happened. It has many of the characteristics of accident. I realize I’m not controlling things. Simone Weil talks about waiting for God. All I can do is wait and hope for the beautiful thing to happen.

There was hope the industrial and technological revolutions would give us the opportunity to become our best selves but we sit in cars at drive-thrus and in chairs staring at screens and allow the means to become the end, the medium to become the message. We never seem to be up to our dreams, our utopias. We always imagine things that need us to be better than we are: Camelot, Star Trek, socialism, democracy. Occasionally a person saves us though, for a while, by disappearing, by being disinterested, by being selfless.

Watermelon Rinds in a Bowl, 2012, oil on board, 19.75 x 20 in., collection of the artist

Watermelon Rinds in a Bowl, 2012, oil on board, 19.75 x 20 in., collection of the artist

I have my moments

William Blake wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, man would see everything as it is, infinite.”

As the best musicians listen, so the best painters look.

I’ve been trying to figure out the word tactile with an artist friend of mine. It’s one of those words, like beauty, used to denote something crucial in art but difficult to define. My daughter is a performance artist, a dancer. She uses the word presence in a way that I think might stand for a manifestation of the same crucial quality of art. When you stand in front of a painting, often you read the image as a few symbols and that’s all that’s there. You run into the end of the art quickly and moving up close to it or remaining with it for hours is fruitless. If a work is tactile, if a work has presence, you are rewarded by any kind of closeness.

When artists look, when that word means something, they can’t avoid seeing themselves there, present in their art action. Our undeniable and mysterious presence is inseparable from our experience (what we’re seeing when we’re painting) and our action (painting). It is one thing and it is the connection. As E.M. Forster said, “Only connect.” The eternal and universal miracle of realness is what connects us. When I paint a picture, if I’m looking, I am the man in the cave scratching on the wall. I see myself living and already being gone.

When I started out as a painter I emulated my heroes in a superficial way. Eventually I realized their paintings all had something in common that couldn’t be attributed to style or technique. The mechanics of painting never change much. We all use our hands and eyes and some painting supplies. Most artists are happy to share their methods. My method is pretty simple. I put green or red where I see green or red, dark or light where I see dark or light and make lots of corrections as I go. The results are predictably ordinary much of the time. The alchemy that occasionally happens has something to do with looking and feeling. Occasionally an image results that wasn’t imagined. A painting becomes that mysterious truth that is infinitely close and at an infinite distance.

Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso, and Lucien Freud all lived in the era of the photograph. The unimagined image is, as are we, embedded in a miracle.

What it feels like when I’m painting is that I’ve gotten into a very small boat by myself and pushed off land out into a vast ocean where there are no fixed points to navigate by and everything’s constantly changing. I’m searching for an island in the middle of that ocean where there’s a spring with regenerative waters. It is only by being quiet that I can see and feel the subtle signs, the quality of the air and light, the push of the currents on the boat in order to sense where the island lies. The clumsiness of a large boat and the distraction of ideas would blind me. I wouldn’t be able to find the island.

I very often fail to find it anyways and return with nothing more than a documentation of facts I encountered on the way (stupid paintings). I can’t take anyone with me and I can only bring a small amount of water back. The only proof that island exists is the water I taste and bring back for others to taste. The water does what it does for those it works on. My responsibility is just to get into the boat and push off away from land and try to be quiet.

But for the water on that island I’d have no reason to get into the boat. I get to taste it too. All I know is how I am different as a result. Once you’ve made a good painting, a beautiful painting you’re driven to do it again. All arguments against beauty carry no weight against experience of it.

My most recent good painting happened this way. I was fearless, which isn’t normal. Usually I’m lucky if I become fearless along the way. Maybe I was fearless because I began by destroying a painting I’d been struggling with for years. I scraped and sanded something mediocre. I had no clue what the new painting would end up being. I didn’t think much about composition, the kinds of marks that I’d make, or the image that would result. I set the easel up facing a window I’ve painted countless times, something handy, and then the painting just sort of fell on to the canvas. I was in a wonderfully submissive state of acceptance of everything. I felt weightless. The ultimate form the painting would take wasn’t my concern. It felt like everything that I did, or might do, would be OK. There were no weighty decisions that were mine to make.

The Oxford dictionary defines grace as (in Christian belief) the unmerited favour of God; a divine saving and strengthening influence. It defines nirvana as perfect bliss and release from karma, attained by the extinction of individuality.

I don’t like to talk about technique. I feel like it would be misleading to talk about technique after realizing that I can make something beautiful with just a fat charcoal stick on a plain piece of paper. Though inferior tools and materials and clumsy and inefficient technique can frustrate an attempt, ultimately we can’t be saved by what colours we have on our palette or what brushes we use.

I have a number of techniques in my bag of tricks, all of them impatient. There are many painting techniques I don’t know, the patient and careful ones. Sometimes I find myself hopping from one technique to another in a short space of time during one painting session. I do that, not because I’m searching for the right one for that particular situation but because I’m trying to trigger the escape from technique. Things aren’t going well. I’m mired in knowledge and I want to get out.

In my bag of tricks there’s only one that matters. It’s not a secret and it’s supremely simple. Stop looking for your voice. Stop trying to distinguish yourself. Give up.

View from Everetts, 2011, oil on board, 12.75 x 21 in. private collection

View from Everetts, 2011, oil on board, 12.75 x 21 in., private collection

It’s simple

There is no substitute for feeling in art. Logic, reason, passion, intelligence, imagination, skill, maybe even what we call talent, are all realities of self. There is no beauty without their surrender. Feeling may not be all that’s required to be an artist, but it’s all that required to be beautiful. If you want art to be worth something, you need to know that it’s only beauty that saves the world, grace our reconciliation with gravity, love our relief from futility.

There’s a relationship between creation and destruction and a point at which the two seem to become one. Or perhaps neither exists except as different perspectives on change. In the fearless state of art, things are constantly being “created” and “destroyed,” constantly changing. Sometimes very good art will be perceived as irreverent and destructive, punk. It wasn’t their intention, but Manet and Van Gogh probably seemed like punks at the time. We trust them now. How do you distinguish between the good people and bad people when both ignore the laws? The question can make a conservative soul feel uncomfortable, mistrustful, angry and at sea. Beauty is found in realizing that we’ve never been anywhere other than at sea.

Great creators realize they are merely instruments. We place them on a pedestals and aspire to be there ourselves. Leonard Cohen once said something to the effect that he didn’t write his songs but he’s really glad we think he did. What’s rare is the understanding that none of us are creators. There are countless artists with Rembrandt’s or Manet’s skill but the skill is almost always wasted on inventions and opinion, on presumptions of knowledge. We’re all guilty of such waste. Rembrandt often was. Rubens was especially.

Their ability to find detachment for short periods of time doesn’t make saints of my painting heroes. Humans are clever, aggressive, territorial animals and are driven for the most part by biochemistry and overpowering social and survival instincts. Selfless detachment is difficult to maintain in the everyday world. I feel like I get to take little vacations from myself. Tolstoy said, “The one thing necessary, in life as in art, is to tell the truth.” In life, though we’re all aware of the risks of telling the truth.

The art history books are filled with art that flatters our species, magnificent follies, conceits of the intellect and imagination…pyramids and urinals, but there is no better reason for making art than being able to do for people what beauty does for people. On a number of occasions I’ve ended up weeping at the experience of beauty. I ask myself why I’m crying. It seems to be from some deep and unexpected sense of relief. I feel delivered from banality, from the sense that no-one cares, or from the sense that people’s concerns are exclusively worldly. It ends some kind of loneliness. It is redemption from narrowness and subjectivity.

Thomas Mann’s novel Death in Venice is a cautionary tale about confusing two types of beauty. At the end of the story he points us in the right direction. Attractiveness-type beauty leaves one with an ache to possess the object, the form. Truth-type beauty is only ever joyful. Whoever owns the object or form is irrelevant as beauty is not the form itself but what is manifested in it. In the experience of beauty, it is yours. It takes possession of you, it breaks your armour, and you expand into it. You participate in the artist’s expansiveness. It is unrestrictedly generous.

I want to do this, I want to make beautiful paintings, but I realize you can’t get there from here. You can’t try and make one. Striving to be great doesn’t help. You just need to do your job and hope for the best. Sometimes, strangely enough in telling yourself you’re going to make a bad work on purpose you can trick yourself into avoiding pretentiousness. The best thing an artist can be is nothing in particular; the best thing an artist can do is disappear. What’s left is infinite.

There’s a category in the thesaurus: artlessness. Under it you find ingenuousness, simpleness, naivety, innocence, unguardedness, unpretentiousness, sincerity, trustfullness, openness… reminds me of that lovely Shaker song.

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest Prospero the usurped Duke/magician has, in his daughter, one gift to bestow. This gift is “plain and holy innocence”. Prospero’s one great fear is that this gift won’t be received with respect. It is a gift that when respected “will outstrip all praise”, a gift that if held at an impossible distance by disrespect will issue nothing but “barren hate, sour-eyed disdain and discord”. Plain and holy innocence is the sine qua non of good art. With The Tempest Shakespeare passes the torch, and includes instructions.

Though we often reject critics and scholars as popes of culture, they often do what they do out of love and they’ve likely seen things we haven’t yet. But to love something does not necessarily mean you have insight into what makes it possible. Northrop Frye seemed to think that what enabled great art and made it special and valuable was what he called imagination. He also confessed to being unable to write a work of fiction.

I think most people assume that a work of art is a product of imagination, that Bach and Shakespeare had great imaginations. This idea implies that the work of art is generated within. Imagination is but a useful tool. But there’s a force to which it must surrender. It can provide situations but must surrender those situations to the infinite which the imagination can never be. Imagination gives us pictures of where we want to be, mythological gardens, things to strive for. We’re never up to our progressive ideas, our dreams. Everywhere we go, there we are. Without beauty life is nasty, brutish and probably too long.

I’ve condemned imagination’s role in the search for beauty. Perhaps others have a broader understanding of the word. Perhaps I should use the word fancy. Yet the root of imagination is the word image. It’s what our minds are limited to. Cézanne said, “I should like to astonish Paris with an apple.” As with Chardin’s and Manet’s, his paintings of apples continue to be astonishing. It doesn’t take much imagination to put an apple in front of you and paint a picture if it. Simone Weill wrote in Gravity and Grace, “The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.”

We need to acknowledge that our understanding is limited, yet our condition is a consciousness of limitlessness. In loving truth we have to accept paradox. If you acknowledge that agenda, prejudice, preconception and conceit are facts of life and therefore facts of art and then decide that your conceit is an art without agenda, prejudice, preconception and conceit, that’s quite the paradox…sophisticated innocence. No wonder it’s so normal to fail.

Apples in Glass Bowl, 2008,  oil on canvas, 43 x 56 in., private collection

Apples in Glass Bowl, 2008, oil on canvas, 43 x 56 in., private collection

All you need is love

We’re proud of artists like Picasso. Some are even proud of people like Napoleon, all that strutting and fretting we do. The history of humans is the history of the failure of ideas. In studying history we hear the haunting refrain “never again,” “never again,” “never again.” The critical stance we adopt with respect to what we perceive as wrong is born of the conceit that we know better, the same conceit that gets us in to trouble in the first place.

The ambition to be beautiful is really an anti-ambition. It is the ambition to de-create the self, using Simone Weil’s expression.

In his play Antigone, Sophocles warns us to beware of hubris and to always hold the gods in awe. John Keats tells us in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” all we need to know on earth is that beauty is truth. The hardest thing an artist can do, the hardest thing a person can do, is act without self-interest. Once you have come to know that beauty is truth, you realize that any step away from beauty is the greatest danger we face. Perhaps this is what Dostoevsky meant when he said that beauty saves the world.

The last lines of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch describe the selfless character Dorothea:

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The absence of beauty in a person is the root of callous indifference. The presence of beauty is the proof of love. The presence of it in what we’ve done is the great value of art.

Nobody can be good all the time, but if I can be good while I’m painting, at least that’s something, a few shining moments.

 —Stephen May

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Stephen May’s canvases have been collected by prestigious corporate and private collectors for over three decades and are included in the public collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the New Brunswick Museum, the New Brunswick Art Bank, the University of New Brunswick, l’Université de Moncton, the New Brunswick Department of Supply and Services and the Department of External Affairs. The Beaverbrook Art Gallery presented a solo exhibition of May’s work entitled Embodiments in 2006 and the following year he won the Miller Brittain Award for Excellence in Visual Art. May graduated from the fine arts program of Mount Allison University in 1983.  He lives in Fredericton.

Nov 082013
 

Rik NelsonRik Nelson

Almost every night my husband brings me home a fish. It’s been our ritual for a decade. A kind of seal on the day’s end. With the presentation of a fish, the workday endeth. Each fish gets a number on its back. Last night’s fish was #1362. That’s the total completed so far. Usually Rik’s fish are of the bright and colorful variety—made from repurposed materials like cookie tins and bottlecaps. They hang cheerfully, as these do, in various galleries and museum shops (e.g. The American Folk Art Museum shop) around the U.S.

In a spirit similar to that of Neo-Dadaist Jasper Johns’ variations of flags, targets, and maps of the U.S., Rik uses the fish to play traditional fine art/folk art expectations against consumer culture, setting up a natural/man-made dialectic from “trash.” After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Rik began work on a new group of sad-but-also-beautiful fish he calls CRUDE (The Oil Spill Series).

Nance Van Winckel

For us in the Inland Northwest, oil spills are tragic, yet distant catastrophes (even the Valdez spill in Alaska). It’s one thing for it to happen There and to empathize, but what if it happened Here? To our own waterways, beaches, flora, fauna, and economy? Translate such a catastrophe to our local fish, right in our own front yard. Might that be more of an eye-opener, have more impact on awareness and influence consumer practices? Don’t know, but I resolved to try to find out by taking my repertoire of fish forms and mutating them into a “school” of deconstructed/reconstructed oil-spill-despoiled flotsam. This effort has pushed my bas-relief fish forms to more sculptural representations. I’m continuing to expand this body of work until I have enough to offer it up for a show, a show entitled Crude.

—Rik Nelson

1080-1090-1110-comboBrown Trout Triumvirate

910-smallfrySmall Fry

King Salmon -1King Salmon

Smallfry Mashup-croppedSmall Fry Mashup

950-walleyeWalleye

Small Chinook in FlamesSmall Chinook in Flames

Rainbow TroutRainbow Trout

Rainbow and SmallfryRainbow Trout and Small Fry

930-bulltroutBull Trout

960-MonPetiteMon Petite

970-largemouthLargemouth Bass

920-redbulltroutRedbull Trout

990-KissinCousinsKissin’ Cousins

—Rik Nelson

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Rik Nelson Rik Nelson makes art out of cast-off consumer objects, recycled remnants and cultural detritus, and the art reanimates the natural world threatened by the very detritus he mines for his work. His work is shown and sold at: the Crow Valley Gallery, Orcas Island, WA; the Ohio Craft Museum, Columbus, OH; the New Morning Gallery, Asheville, NC; and the American Folk Art Musuem, New York, NY. As you can tell from the introduction, he is married to NC Contributing Editor Nance Van Winckel.

Nov 012013
 

Tim Deverell

Tim Deverell grew up on the flat geographical abstraction of the Canadian Prairies, spent many years studying and evolving in the urban abstraction of New York and now lives in Toronto, a city that, if anything, is an abstraction or an abstraction, a sign of its own absence (but very busy nonetheless). Deverell’s influences are a set of party invitations to painterly Modernism and Abstract Expressionism with a nod back even farther to Heironymus Bosch and James Ensor who composed proto-abstract paintings of multitudes of human scenes, figures or faces. Hence Deverell’s use of collage, cut up bits of magazine image and sketch applied as paint or instead of paint — that’s one compositional theme. In the interview he talks of influences, of a structure and destruction of structure, the two always in some ironic tension with one another, and about obsession which has its effect in the detailed recursiveness of the work.

Deverell has a new show opening in Toronto November 2 (details below). If you happen to be lucky enough to be around, go take a look.

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Tim Deverell: Paintings 2000 to 2013 is an exhibition of Deverell’s paintings, his first solo show since 1999, at the yumart gallery in Toronto, November 2-23, 2013. Location: yumart is located on the 2nd floor of 101 Spadina Avenue, south of Adelaide on the east side of Spadina. Gallery Hours: Wednesday to Saturday, noon to 6:00 p.m. Phone: 647-447-9274. Gallerist: Yvonne Whelan.

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01 Berkeley #4 gouache copy

Berkeley #4, gouache, 16″ X 12″, Tim Deverell, 2012

Y.M. Whelan: Donald Brackett wrote about your work in Toronto Life Magazine as being a ‘portrait of urban life as it plunges into the next millennium’ with images that ‘build into a storm of little symbols, graphic designs and geometric forms and give way to a feeling that you’re looking at 21st century hieroglyphics’. Do you actually reference or draw upon the urban landscape as source material, and if so, would you say your work is abstraction?

Tim Deverell: The paintings are abstract. The city is abstract. I wander and get lost in the city as I search and find my way in the painting. The cityscape is continually reinvented, as is the painting.

02 Clusters and Squares

Clusters and Squares, acrylic on canvas, 12″ X 24″, Tim Deverell, 2012

YMW: After a recent visit to your studio, I noticed that you have two distinct yet complementary bodies of work: paintings composed of tiny figures, heads, texts etc., and paintings that are composed of pure colour and light. Do you see these as two separate styles? How are they related to each other?

TD: They both depend on multiplicity and a cross-fertilization. The one is in the other, opposite equals striving to be one body.

03 Fieldnotes collage

Field Notes, collage and acrylic on wood, 12″ X 12″, Tim Deverell, 2013

YMW:  Can you tell me some of your major influences throughout your art practice?  Have they changed over the years as your work has developed?

TD:  Two very different artists have been key influences from the start of my art-making: James Ensor and Piet Mondrian. Influences are to be absorbed then shaken off, but I feel a strong affinity with the work of Mark Tobey, H. Bosch, Arshile Gorky and Wols — a German artist of the Tachisme movement. Also, Sally Drummond, an American painter who also uses a built up saturation of tiny marks. From the Canadian prairie I continue to look at the work of Agnes Martin and Art McKay. Having made paintings for over fifty years, I prefer being influenced by what lies outside the art world, such as the urban environment that I soak up through long walks where I observe the human element and bustle.

04 Niagara collage

Niagara, collage and gouache on paper, 24″ X 18″, Tim Deverell, 2013

YMW: Your work is highly detailed. Can you describe your technique or process of making art and what kind of time-line is involved? Do you work on several paintings at once?

TD: Thinking about technique can get in the way. There is a certain randomness in how I choose imagery and colour; it’s not predetermined. I often start with a grid and broad washes of colour which will slowly become obliterated as I continue working. They act as a structure or discipline to destroy. The tools and materials are simple – palette knife, brush, pen, pigments, collage elements from diverse sources and canvas. I have an innate need to saturate the surface in a search for a space my mind roam in. The infinite variety of the visual is seductive. I work on one large painting for an average of two months companioned by small pieces – collages and gouaches. Drawing is a constant, though I don’t make studies or drawings for paintings.

06 Red dots

Red Dots, oil and collage on canvas, 42″ X 40″, Tim Deverell, 2013

05 Red dots detail

Red Dots (detail), oil and collage on canvas, Detail of 42″ X 40″ painting, Tim Deverell, 2013

YMW: This one might be too personal: what informed your decision to leave New York City after so long? Do you regret your decision?

TD: There was no rational decision to leave Manhattan, just a usual upheaval of human relationships, confusion of personal and artistic direction and an unrealistic idea of what life would be like in Canada. Regrets? Deep, for over ten years. I did return to New York for a year, but something had changed, either in me or the place. Toronto is in the Now. It’s hard to describe the grip a big city can have on one. I feel New York as a place that formed me as a painter. The art world at that time was a place of incredible flux. You protect yourself in a big place by creating a smaller world, as I did with three close artist friends who were from Saskatchewan.

08 Snapshot

Snapshots, oil, acrylic, and collage on canvas, 48″  X 36″, Tim Deverell, 2013

07 Snapshot detail

Snapshots (detail), oil, acrylic, and collage on canvas, detail of 48″ X 36″ painting, Tim Deverell, 2013

YMW: Where do you see your work going from here?

TD: I let the work tell me where to go. I am increasingly involved with balancing collage elements and paint. I have countless images to pluck from shoeboxes full of fragments of my own drawings and printed material such as magazines, encylopedia and dictionaries.  The challenge is in bringing the collage elements into the painting and having them work as paint.

All I know is that I will continue to make paintings in my usual obsessive way.

10 Swim Alone

Swim Alone, acrylic and collage on canvas, 48″  X  48″, Tim Deverell, 2013

09 Swim alone detail

Swim Alone (detail), oil, acrylic, and collage on canvas, detail of 48″ X 48″ painting, Tim Deverell, 2013

— Tim Deverell & Y. M. Whelan

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Tim Deverell was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1939. His father worked as a journalist, his mother as a nurse. He first studied art with Ernest Lindner at Saskatoon Technical Collegiate. He went on to work at the Regina College School of Art with painters Ken Lochhead, Art McKay and Roy Kiyooka. At age eighteen, he travelled to New York City where he lived for the next seventeen years. Deverell studied at the Art Students League with Theodoros Stamos, George Grosz and Charles Alston during a period when painting was a dominant force in the New York art world.  At age 21, Deverell had his first solo show at the Kornblee Gallery on Madison Avenue and a follow-up show the next year. During the late 1960s and early ’70s, he was a member of  the 55 Mercer Street Gallery in Soho and exhibited there many times in solo and group shows. During the New York years, he made extended trips to Europe, and India.

Returning to Canada in 1976, Deverell settled first in Vancouver, then in Toronto, where he has lived since, with frequent forays to Mexico and Berkeley, California.  Since his return to Canada, he has exhibited at the Bau-Xi Gallery in Vancouver, the Mendel Gallery in Saskatoon, the National Gallery of Canada, and had solo shows in six different Toronto galleries.

Tim Deverell: Paintings 2000 to 2013 is an exhibition of Deverell’s paintings, his first solo show since 1999, at the yumart gallery in Toronto, November 2- 23, 2013.

 

Jun 142013
 

Anne Francey

“Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.”

Charles Baudelaire

 

Anne Francey considers her artwork the visual equivalent of a diary, where spontaneous jottings of all kinds of events sketch the fabric of life. She often uses nature as a point of departure, freely oscillating between representation and abstraction in order to reveal a deeper meaning. Born in Switzerland, Anne is bilingual, speaking French as fluently as English. Adept at the artistic language of metaphor as well, Anne welcomes the unpredictable and revels in moments when she has control of what’s being shown and what’s being hidden. I met Anne in the years I worked in an art gallery at Skidmore College, where she teaches part time; or before that – at a regional arts center in downtown Saratoga Springs, through which Anne exhibited and received grants to conduct marvelous, progressive art workshops for children. Many have long admired her love of nature, commitment to her craft, thirst for knowledge, and involvement with the community and next generation. These forces recently fused with profound strength, when her daughter, Suleika Jaouad, developed leukemia. Her response, in part, when at times she could do nothing else at all, was a daily painting project titled Cariatide de Papier.                                                                                               

— Mary Kathryn Jablonski

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A propos de “Cariatide de Papier”

C’est  d’un journal de bord personnel, voire intime, qu’il s’agit. Chaque semaine, une nouvelle image aquarelle sur papier format carré. Assemblés, ces jours en carré forment colonne, cariatide légère porteuse d’une période lourde de 36 semaines de temps difficiles.

Chez les anciens Grecs, la cariatide était une statue de pierre porteuse d’une masse architecturale. Sur l’espace  du mur qui sépare et rapproche ciel et terre, cette Cariatide de Papier  composée de  36 carrés sur lesquels s’inscrivent en couleurs l’oiseau dans tous ses états et l’éléphant forcé hors de sa force,  réfléchit à  l’équilibre précaire entre l’endurance et la fragilité de l’être humain face à sa propre mortalité.

D’où vient la force quand la gravité nous lâche, quand ce qui nous soutient nous est enlevé ? Quand l’oiseau tombe et l’éléphant perd pied ? Quand l’éléphant ne pèse que plume et l’oiseau en oublie sa légèreté?

—Anne Francey

 

Cariatide de papier

It began as a diary. Each week, I would paint my days on a square piece of watercolor paper, reflecting on events in my life that were both too personal and too large to evoke with words.

Now assembled, these squares form a column, a light caryatid bearer of a period laden with thirty-six difficult weeks.

In Ancient Greece, a Caryatid was a sculpted female figure that supported an architectural mass, the entablature of a temple.

Placed on a wall, a space that separates and connects sky and earth, this “Cariatide de Papier” reflects on the precarious equilibrium between human endurance and fragility when facing mortality. It is composed of thirty-six colorful squares portraying all kinds of birds in different states of mind, and various elephants whose force is being challenged.

Where does strength come from when gravity lets go of us, when what supports us is taken away from us?

When birds fall and elephants loose their footing?

When an elephant is no heavier than a feather and a bird forgets its lightness?

—Anne Francey

§

 Complete Work, Floor to Ceiling

Francey-CariatideColumn3-floor&ceiling

space

 Detail Images

Francey-CariatideDetail1

space

 Francey-CariatideDetail2

space

Francey-CariatideDetail3

space

Francey-CariatideDetail4

  —Anne Francey

See also:

From NY Times Blog – Life Interrupted, A Family Gets Cancer – Video of Anne & her family.

Daughter Suleika Jaouad’s NY Times Blog – Life Interrupted.

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Anne Francey was born in Switzerland where she studied painting at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, before moving to New York where she received an MFA from Hunter College. She now lives in Saratoga Springs, NY, where she has her art studio, teaches, and has been involved in creating community ceramic murals throughout the capital region. In addition to drawing and painting, she developed an interest in ceramics during her travels in Tunisia, and has incorporated the ceramic mediums into her practice.

 

 

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Jun 042013
 

Leon Rooke

Leon Rooke has always been an inspiration and a muse. He has written some of the most delightful short stories I have ever read. Also those truly amazing novels Shakespeare’s Dog and A Good Baby, which, if you haven’t read them, you have to read (I have written an essay on the latter, which you can find in my book Attack of the Copula Spiders). And then, late in life, as if he hasn’t done enough damage already, he takes up painting and turns out passionate, sensual, witty canvasses that exude desire, subversion, irony, and an acute adoration and attentiveness to the feminine — unapologetic, insouciant, even scabrous. Oh, Leon! A man who follows the electric current of creativity wherever it leads. A model for us all.

dg

DSC00857 Beale Street Memphis, 2013  (oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in.)

SPACE
DSC00903The Manicurist, 2012 (oil on canvas, 30 x 20 in.)

SPACE

DSC00909Beach Girls 1, 2013 (acrylic on canvas, 8 x 10 in.)

SPACE

DSC00938Sirens, 2013 (oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in.)

SPACE

DSC00948Brideshead Revisted, 2012  (acrylic on canvas, 60 x 36 in.)

SPACE

DSC00949Red Hair District, 2013 (oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in.)

SPACE

DSC00961Untitled (Holland), 2013 (oil on canvas, 12 x 16 in.)

SPACE

DSC00975The Magistrate, 2013 (acrylic on canvas, 48 X 60 in.)

—Leon Rooke

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Leon Rooke exhibits his paintings at the Fran Hill Gallery in Toronto. He has published more than 30 books, including novels, short story collections, plays, anthologies, and “oddities,” and more than three hundred short stories. Rooke’s many awards include the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction (for Shakespeare’s Dog, 1985), the Periodical Association of Canada Award for the English-Language Paperback Novel of the Year (for Fat Woman, 1982), a Pushcart Prize (1988), the North Carolina Award for Literature (1990), and the Canada/Australia Literary Prize in 1981, for his body of work. Also the W. O. Mitchell Literary Award, for his writing and his mentoring, and the ReLit Short Fiction Award. Rooke has taught at more than a dozen Canadian and U.S. universities. He lives in Toronto.

Mar 162013
 

China Marks & H L Hix

When the artist China Marks, who specializes in amazing drawings she does with a sewing machine, offered to interview the poet H. L. Hix for Numéro Cinq, I had no idea the interview would turn into a conversation, a mutual interview, and that the conversation would metamorphose into this wonderfully intelligent, cross-genre meditation on the foundations and process of art whatever form the art takes. Not only that but the conversation takes as its starting point an essay by the poet Julie Larios published on these pages, so that NC is part of the conversation, that is, as a catalyst and locus where artists and idea come together (across continents, across disciplines, you can hear the cultural tectonic plates colliding in the background). If we were on the Left Bank, NC would be a cafe and China Marks and H. L. Hix would be leaning across a marble-topped  table sipping absinthe and talking intensely (and you would be listening, you, dear NC reader, at the next table). This conversation is packed with quotation, quotable lines, self-reflection — but China and Harvey are old friends, too, and that comes through, intense, intelligent conversation between friends. They take, as their starting point, a phrase from Richard Wilbur — confounders of category — which they both read in Julie Larios’s essay on riddles; and this conversation is all about confounding categories, crossing boundaries, connecting things that are not connected except in the minds of the artists, about play and the dramatic tensions inherent in confounded categories. A delight in every exchange — though my favourite is the bit about versos, the backs of works of art, especially the backs of China Marks’s sewn drawings.

dg

China Marks: Numéro Cinq recently published an essay by Julie Larios on the riddle.[1]  It was full of things that made me think of my own work and to a certain extent yours as well; for instance, “to describe something by describing something else.” And “you turn the reader’s gaze to something clear, physical and believable in order to understand something deep, emotional, and invisible.” She quoted Richard Wilbur as calling riddles “the confounders of category.”

I think that we are both confounders of categories.

H. L. Hix: I too enjoyed the Larios essay, especially her way of seeing riddles as “mak[ing] us rethink our assumptions.”  I certainly want to be — I try to be — a confounder of categories.  Wilbur’s term makes me think of Gilbert Ryle’s philosophical term “category mistake,” which consists in treating something from one category as if it belonged to another category, the way we do when we speak of ideas as things.  Ryle uses the concept of a category mistake to identify as one purpose for philosophy “the replacement of category-habits by category-disciplines.”  I appreciate Ryle’s aim there, but it seems naïve, in that it takes for granted the neutrality of categories, as if they were things in the world rather than human constructions.  (In other words, it seems to me to make a category mistake!)

That’s why I want to be a confounder of categories: because I take it that many category-habits are received, or (to put it less mildly) imposed on us.  For instance, the pervasive description of persons as consumers is a category mistake, but it doesn’t happen accidentally because of an indifferent category habit: it’s one that Walmart wants us to make, pressures us to make, and benefits from our making.  It leads to such individual stupidities as thinking that my purchasing something will increase my worth as a person, and to such collective stupidities as the belief that growth is the highest economic aim.  So I don’t just want to discipline categories, I want to confound them.  I want to be engaged — in my art, and in other aspects of my life — in an active, ongoing process of resisting received or imposed categories, and creating new ones.

CM:  I don’t think you have to try to confound categories, you do it naturally, the way you range over a vast array of subject matter and verse forms, wear so many hats, hang out with visual artists, remain open to possibilities of all kinds.  For myself, I can’t remember a time when one thing didn’t connect willy-nilly with something else entirely different and then branch off in several directions.  As no one else seemed to notice, I never said anything about what I saw/sensed. By now I am used to it, no, more than that; I understand that categorizations are constructs and if not perceived as such, are impediments to speculative play.

HH: Many people regard play of any sort as a form of irresponsibility: children are permitted to play, the view goes, but adults should not be.  But what you’ve just said points up the flaw (or one of the flaws!) in that conception.  Thinking of play as irresponsible neglects the fact that coherence depends on association.  If I can’t connect one thing with another — and that includes connecting apparently dissimilar things with one another — then I can’t test my view in one area against my view in another.  I can’t preclude self-contradiction.  In other words, if I don’t get to play, to speculate, then I can’t be responsible.  To me, that is one of the ways in which poetry and visual art have both private and civic value: they facilitate the associations that enhance coherence and diminish self-contradiction.  They are forms of imaginative caprice that constrain logical and empirical caprice.

But “playful” isn’t the only term I would use to describe your work; I would describe it also as “dramatic,” meaning that it seems to me to depict situations of tension and conflict, just as a stage play or film or novel would.  Is there a connection between the importance you place on process in making your work, and the centrality of drama in the work that results?

CM: I do think that what I make is inherently dramatic.  I’ve even called my drawings “little dramas.”  I consider my role as an artist that of an entertainer.  I want my drawings to compel and amuse, to make eyes widen and jaws drop. During the process of making a drawing, I am in the audience as well as on stage, often surprised, sometimes thrilled at what I see, or so bored and restless or unhappy that I make drastic changes, until my own jaw drops….

HH: We started by noting similarities in our work, but maybe this is one difference.  I’m inclined to think of my work in contrast to entertainment, after the manner of George Oppen’s journal note that “entertainment ameliorates human life; art means to make human life possible.”

CM: Definitions of art and its functions are just definitions. People will always write about art and decide what it really is or should be.  In the meantime, I make art that among other things, entertains.  So what?

HH: Point taken.  It’s true that defining art is not your project, or mine, nor was it Oppen’s.  But I doubt that either of us makes our art without some working conception of art, even if our practice tests or resists that conception as much as it enacts it.  We’re not defining words right now, but we couldn’t be using them without an operative conception of their meanings.  I think we’re agreed that definition is a distraction, though, in this context, one that leads away from, rather than into, the shared intensity — the confounding of categories — that motivates this conversation.  So let me try to reframe things in a way that I think does look toward, rather than away from, that shared intensity.

I’ve known you for give or take fifteen years now, long enough to have seen transitions from sculpture to painting and from paintings to sewn drawings; and long enough to have seen your sewn drawings expand to include books.  I’m reminded of Louise Glück’s assertion that “An aspect of relentless intelligence is that it finds no resting place.”  How does it happen, or why is it important to you, that your work finds no resting place?  What makes your intelligence so relentless?

CM: My art has changed even more in the forty years or so since I graduated from art school.  I don’t feel responsible for the changes.  I just showed up in my studio every day possible and worked as hard as I could.  Did my art morph and change because I had a relentless intellect?  I think that I simply gave myself over to process very early in my life as an artist and went where it took me.  Process is more than making a single sculpture or drawing. The process of becoming an artist takes most of a lifetime and has affected not just my studio practices but also where I live, what I eat and how I exercise, what I read, who my friends are, the music I listen to, my marital status, even the way I look.

I started out as a sculptor, but always drew for its own sake as well.  A series of works on paper begun in 1992 took on a life of its own and since then, except for two installations in the 90’s, the last to describe a world parallel to our own, accessible only through my art, I have mostly drawn; except of course in the mid-90’s, when my drawings grew so big that I moved onto canvas for two years, which led to my being hired to teach painting at the Kansas City Art Institute, where I met you…

On Dec. 6, 2000, my drawings told me that they had to be sewn, and not by hand: I would have to buy a sewing machine and learn to generate and control a sewn line.  It might as well have been the voice of God.  I did as I was told, and it turned out to be the most demanding and compelling thing that I have ever done. I knew that I would be making sewn drawings for the rest of my life, and because their potential was infinite, however much time I had, it wouldn’t be enough.

In 2007, Esther Smith, a book artist who loved my sewn drawings, persuaded me to make a little sewn book, which was such a revelation that I resolved to make at least one book a year for the rest of my life. In the spring of 2009, walking my dog after a rainstorm, I found a big black broken umbrella printed with words, and without having any idea of what I would do with it, carried it home. This somehow led to my making my first two text-based books later in the year.  I am still making books, but since the fall of 2010, my drawings have also been full of words, and that has changed everything.

People who’ve known my work over many years say that it all looks like my art; the hybrid forms, the seductive line, the visual wit, my interest in patterns, my appropriation of found objects and images, the narrative drive, the idiosyncracy and flamboyance.  But that isn’t anything I have to try to do, that’s just what I’m like.

HH: Your remarks that “I just showed up in my studio every day possible and worked as hard as I could” and “that’s just what I’m like” remind me of an answer Rauschenberg once gave in an interview, when he was asked whether he planned his pieces.  He said, “No, I have discipline.  I work every day and I never know what I’m doing….”  The end of his answer was like the end of yours: “you’re just doing something.  You’re doing what no one can stop you from doing.”

When I look at any of your pieces — I have “Lovely, Dark, and Deep” called up on my computer screen right now — I get the feeling (and would get this feeling even if I weren’t in the middle of conversing with you like this) that you are doing what no one can stop you from doing, or, in the words you just used a moment ago, that your drawings told you what to do, and you did as you were told.

Lovely Dark and Deep by China MarksLovely, Dark, and Deep, 2011

CM: All I ever know is what to do next, even if I have to un-do it the next day or a month later.  But I have to do it.

HH: That sense of necessity in the process — just doing what you have to do — raises for me a question about necessity in the result.  I have seen the backs of some of your sewn drawings.  Each verso has its own integrity and beauty, a complement to that of the recto.  Which makes me think of the pedimental sculptures from the Parthenon, painstakingly finished on the back, even though they were made to be positioned in such a way that the back would never be visible.  Accident?  Design?  Is this result (the beauty of your versos) a necessity?

CM: The difference between my versos and the parts of ancient sculptures that were finished even though those parts would never be seen, is that my versos thrive in the dark, neglected and unheeded until they’re photographed at the end. I don’t make them. They happen because sewing machines stitch on the back as well as the front. They are entirely uncalculated, all their power and coherence transmitted from what is occuring on the other side. Mirror-image twins.

HH: You speak of your work with a kind of animism that out of context I might regard skeptically, but that in regard to art I am inclined to embrace, namely that those versos “thrive,” that they are able to “transmit” their power and coherence without being seen.  But what I am most fascinated by in your response is the observation that the versos are “entirely uncalculated,” rather than your making them happen.  Their power and coherence result directly from your process, but either indirectly or not at all from your intention.

CM: Yes, the power and coherence of my versos result directly from my process, which contains the time it takes to make a particular drawing, my intentions, the workings of my sewing machines, my threads and fabrics, my tools, artifical and natural light, my doing and undoing stitches, the weather, the music I listen to, whether I swam in the morning, what I ate and read that day and the last, etc. etc. The process is much wiser and goofier than I am. By the time I finish a drawing, it is breathing on its own and full of all kinds of things I could never have imagined, including its verso.  I make my drawings and books in order to see them.  I couldn’t possibly think them up.

verso Bear's Dream by China MarksDetail, verso, Bear’s Dream, 2011

HH: I wish we were geographically close enough that I could have you in every semester to speak with my writing students.  What you’ve just said in relation to your visual art studio practice applies also to a writing practice.  But it seems to be, for many people, a very difficult step to take.  I mean your conceiving, and maintaining in your creative process, a distinction between making and intention.  I find that many aspiring poets believe that making must fulfill an intention that is already complete prior to its enactment, but that assumes that one is oneself the locus of wisdom, and the source of wisdom, in the enterprise.

To think up something first, and then employ the medium as a means to make the already-thought-up thing could make sense only if the smarts are in the person rather than in the medium.  But I hear you observing something with which I concur: more wisdom is to be found in one’s medium and in one’s process than in oneself.  That shift is radical, and, I believe, all-too-rarely made: from thinking that through one’s art or writing one shows the world to others, to thinking that one’s art or writing might show the world to oneself.  When we talk about the importance of process, I take that as at least one thing we mean.

CM: One thought casting back to the beginning of our conversation and a question for you, but they’re related, so I’ll start with the thought. You’ve said that you don’t believe in inspiration. I didn’t look this up, but doesn’t that come from Inspiritus, being possessed of the gods in the form of a divine wind or breath?  If we become instruments of our process, about which so much remains stubbornly ineffable, is that much different? There were various ritual practices to summon the gods, standing inside a circle drawn in the dirt at the new moon, bathing and putting on new clothing, fasting, and so forth. Most visual artists and writers need particular conditions in order to work.  Only in daylight, only at night, five no. 2 pencils sharpened to a point, a particular word processing program, coffee or scotch, after a run, with a favored brush, whatever it takes to make us ready to give ourselves over to the process.

I think that I have it easier than you, because I start by selecting a hundred or more scraps of patterned fabric, backed with fusible adhesive, from thousands so prepared, and go from there.  But how do you start?  With an idea or a phrase?  Do you write in your head for a while before you let yourself write it down? Is it always the same way?  That’s my question.  Where do your poems come from?  And how?

HH: It may be that some of the affinity I perceive between your drawings and my poems derives from affinity between your process and mine.  I do have rituals — I write early in the morning, I wear as a talisman a ring given me by the poet William Meredith, I write with an elegant fountain pen Kate gave me — but the content of the rituals is (as your comment suggests) not as important as the fact of the rituals.  I don’t think one need believe in the real existence of something invoked (such as gods or divine winds), to find efficacy in the act of invoking.  In fact it may be better if one does not so believe, as Simone Weil implies when she calls it “a method of purification” to pray, “not only in secret as far as men are concerned, but with the thought that God does not exist.”

But it’s the collecting I’m focused on here as an element of process we share.  You say you start with scraps of patterned fabric you’ve prepared.  I start with scraps, too, only in my case it’s scraps of language.  For me, the writing of a poem is not an act of self-expression but an act of listening.  A poem, for me, is not the externalizing of an idea or feeling that was inside me prior to the poem, but the derivation of a linguistic construct implicit in a fragment of language, as one derives a theorem from premises in mathematics.  It’s not that I show others in my poems what I happen to feel or think, but that my poems show me what I ought to feel or think.  As with a mathematical theorem, it is their necessity, not their accidental connection to me, that matters.

CM: Could you talk a little about how that necessity operates in your poem “What Creature In What Darkness”?

What Creature In What Darkness

So accustomed to light have we grown (evolved, really,
it’s not you and me only, not decision exactly)
that we forget the lives, species, entire biotas
underground, in caves or tunnels no light tastes, ever.
Which doesn’t mean they don’t inhabit us, or that we
share with them no (actual, not merely potential) traits.
In water the whale, in air the hummingbird:
to these totems I arch elements of identity.
Underground, who knows what sister life-form waits.
I have my library of unconscious states

that I claim awareness of, and accept,
though clearly that’s contradiction and self-deception.
What creature inhabiting what damp darkness
will show me what I might morph into, might have been
all this time?  Does it glow?  What best describes its limbs?
What sounds in what notation by what lurching has it scrawled?
Does it have limbs?  Does it crawl?  Or is it sessile,
gasping then lisping what vagrant spores and molds it may?
Or just patient, able to trace but waiting instead, curled?
This is my preferred world, the shadow world

that does not — need not — speak, will not be spoken to.
All this flailing at communication — I’m flailing now
just shows I haven’t learned, may never learn, to abide.
Who realizes the desperate still wants the needful.
Wait, the subterranean advises.  Wait, wait.
Because only by waiting may one hear the gritty
shifting of Patience itself.  Even that’s misleading, though:
the one who waits despises Because.
When she who is here with me is here with me, with me
beneath this city there is another city,

ruins not restored, not even preserved, but hosting
a less demonstrative but equally insistent
other estimation.  When she is here with me,
she is the other city, host to (or sum of)
secret othernesses and nethernesses.
We need not think of lives as woven by a loom
to think of them as interwoven, and need not pretend
they watch us, or care, to make of them second chances,
alternatives, opportunities to assume
other orientations to the textured vacuum.

HH: In an important sense, you are the source of this poem.  Maybe you’ll remember a studio visit Kate and I made a couple of years ago to see what you were working on.  During that visit you gave me an exhibition catalog of work by a painter friend of yours, Thomas Lyon Mills.  His work stayed in my head, so when I began the “Show and Tell” project on my blog — the project in which poets respond to images by artists, and in which your own work appears — I looked him up and asked him to participate.  This poem derives from his participation.

“What Creature In What Darkness” is one of a sequence of poems, all of which come from that “Show and Tell” project.  Each poem in the sequence takes the form of a “glosa,” so in fulfillment of that received form the last line of each stanza is quoted: the last lines of the first two stanzas come from the artist statement of the particular artist in question, and the last lines of the last two stanzas come from the poem the poet made in response to the artist’s work.

“What Creature In What Darkness” derives from the pairing of the artist Thomas Lyon Mills with the poet Evie Shockley.  So the lines “I have my library of unconscious states” and “This is my preferred world, the shadow world” both are quoted directly from Mills’s artist statement, in which he describes his (amazing) process, which centers on research in underground catacombs in Rome.  The lines “beneath this city there is another city” and “other orientations to the textured vacuum” come from the poem Shockley wrote in response to Mills’s work.  “What Creature In What Darkness” tries then to listen to what words and images follow inevitably from their words and images.

To put this another way, those lines borrowed from Thomas Lyon Mills and Evie Shockley perform the role your selected scraps of patterned fabric play.

CM: Haven’t you sometimes also used borrowed language more directly as found objects, as in Chromatic, where you appropriated early 20th century vernacular speech to great effect?

HH: Appropriated language definitely is important in Chromatic.  Almost all my poetry starts with found language.  Introspection and perceptual observation follow, but the found language almost invariably offers the starting point.  That found language might be “intellectual,” derived from things I read: that happens, for instance, in the first sequence in Chromatic, “Remarks on Color,” which draws on two sources, Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour and Mondrian’s Natural Reality and Abstract Reality.  But the found language might also come from other sources, and you’re right about my interest in vernacular speech.  I assume you’re referring to “Eighteen Maniacs,” the second sequence in Chromatic.  Here’s one of the shorter of those poems.

hix poem2

One reviewer mistakenly identified these poems as operating in “blackface,” trying to mimic African-American dialect.  But I’m after a much broader attention to dialect and vernacular.  So the sequence does include usages drawn from (or based on) African-American vernaculars, especially the rich language that grew up around jazz.  (The sequence itself is a kind of abbreviated history of jazz, as signalled by the title: “eighteen maniacs” was one way Duke Ellington referred to his band.  Each piece in the sequence revolves around one jazz musician.  In “Black Coffee,” all the words in the left-hand column come from Sarah Vaughan: titles of her songs, etc.)  But “Eighteen Maniacs” includes other vernaculars as well, such as the regional dialects I heard growing up in small towns in the South.  The “seem like” in the last sentences here is not peculiar to African-American vernacular, but shows up in many regional and ethnic dialects, often enough that in linguistics it has a name, “sibilant deletion.”

CM: Was it always words for you, even as a boy?  I ask because I remember a crucial time in my own life, when I was about 19, when I gave up on words and embraced image-making.

HH: Even though I was a late-comer to poetry per se, and even though I wouldn’t have known it at the time, it was always words for me.  I drew a lot as a boy, birds in grade school when I was obsessed with birds, cars in high school when I was obsessed with cars.  But even though I grew up in a household (and in school districts) that didn’t introduce me to poetry, I can see in looking back how the household’s preoccupation with language nurtured my own.  My father, a journalist, made his living with words; there was always popular music playing, so the lyrics of songs performed by Johnny Cash (my Father’s favorite) and Andy Williams (my Mother’s) and the Carpenters (my older sister’s) and Olivia Newton-John (my younger sister’s) were in my head; it was a religious household, so I listened to a thousand alliterative Baptist sermons and memorized a boatload of Bible verses in Sunday School; and so on.

Consequently, when at last I was exposed to poetry, as a college undergraduate, I was “primed” for it by all that intense attention to other language uses.  I’d been socialized, without being aware of it in these terms, into the sense that language mattered, indeed (this especially from the religious context, in which language, in the form of prayer, is the vehicle through which one speaks to God, and also, in the form of scripture, the vehicle through which God speaks) that language is a matter of life and death.

It’s interesting to me, in the context of this question, though, that words have become quite active and prominent in your recent drawings.  Which in one way may not be so surprising: I would want to modify the self-description you give in asking this question. Yes, you gave up on words in the sense that you went for a long time not producing words as part of your work, but it seems to me that — at least for as long as I have known you — you have been very actively receiving words as one aspect of the preparation for your work.  Your omnivorous (and category-confounding) attention, your relentless intelligence, includes intense attention to words.

CM: I was a great, omnivorous reader as a child and adolescent, and I’ve written all my life, long letters back in the days when people wrote letters, accounts of dreams, descriptions of acute psychological states, journals, richly detailed assessments of arts-in-the-schools for my job at the NYC Board of Education, stories and poems, especially when I was in love. I also talked a blue streak. My late friend Stanley Landsman once predicted that if after we died, all the words we’d spoken were heaped in a pile in front of us, my pile would be twice as big anybody else’s.

But my facility with words is what made me distrust them. They could mean almost anything, while during my adolescence and early adulthood, most of what mattered was worldess and sensory, sexual, instinctive, uncanny.  In those days, I used words to “pass” as not-crazy, till I couldn’t any more.

But when I started making text-based books in 2009 after a chance encounter with a dead umbrella printed with words, it was just part of my process.  And it turned out that I had a lot to say, more than I can fit in my drawings.  So I’ve begun to collaborate with letterpress printers. The first project, a little poem of mine, four verses with six lines in each, printed as a pamplet, is already in the works. A broadside comes next, and I already have the text for it.

HH: It seems like we’re making a connection here between process and paying attention.  We’ve talked about the importance process has for us, about its centrality to our practice, but how does that play out in a particular work, such as “The Language of Flowers”?  How does process amount to paying attention?

 

The Language of Flowers by China MarksThe Language of Flowers, 2012

 

CM: One must be fully present to make process-directed work, expanding one’s attention to take in the work at hand, but also to a lot of other things that might be relevant to the process…

When I visited Gerry Trilling in Kansas City in 2010, I bought two vintage scarves at an “antiques” mart in the river bottoms.  I really wanted them and I could afford to buy them, but I had no idea of what to do with them. I rarely do.  Almost two years had passed before it occurred to me to try to create a space inside the borders of the Liz Claiborne scarf and then to construct two eccentric, flamboyant figures to occupy that space.  I don’t remember deciding that one figure should be static and the other dynamic.  I concentrated on keeping as much of the original print as possible and altering as little as possible what I imported. As these fellows came to life, it occurred to me that it must be so strange for them: they’d changed from scraps of printed fabrics to beings — nothing was as it was!  Which is how the text began.

But as I refined the drawing, they seemed more and more like Renaissance courtiers in a walled garden, which is how the text ended. It’s probably just as applicable to our time. It’s pleasant enough, but the world as we know it is gone. Guard yourself.

HH: That’s it, though.  This image has in spades one of the forms of dramatic tension I experience — see and feel — in all your work.  One the one hand, it emphasizes features that make it entertaining: a bright palette, playful figuration, dynamic composition, a “busy” surface, and so on.  But on the other hand, this entertaining, even delightful, image is terrifying.  This drawing, like your other drawings, is the world: I as a viewer recognize the figures as figures, etc.  But it’s not the world given to us by Hollywood romantic comedies or tv sitcoms.  The world as we know it is gone, replaced by the world of the drawing.

CM: I don’t think that anything I make really stands outside our world, or rather, the various overlapping and interpenetrating worlds that comprise out present reality.  Things out there, murders, starvation, genocide, the coarsening and brutalization of whole populations, natural disasters and extinctions, are terrifying, not The Language of Flowers.

HH: And yet you spoke earlier of a world parallel to our own, accessible only through your work.  That seems an important complement to what we’re discussing here.  That tension/paradox is one way I would try to speak of the importance your work has for me.  I contend that one can’t know this world by knowing only this world.  (The facts, in other words, are not enough.)  To take the most obvious kind of example, our capacity for ethical judgments depends on our imagining other worlds.  To say that women and members of ethnic minorities ought to have the same rights as males of the privileged ethnic group is to imagine a world parallel to our own, and the “ought to” imputes to the imagined parallel world a “reality,” a force, greater than that of the “real world,” the world as we know it.

So I’d repeat your words, “The world as we know it is gone. Guard yourself.”  And add: gird yourself.

CM: And yet somehow, every glance into the abyss sends us back to our work with fresh vigor, I to my drawings, you to your poems.  Don’t you have a poem or part of a poem about that?  It would make a nice end to this.

HH: Maybe they’re all about that, but here’s one I’ll re-title for this context.

Another Glance Into the Abyss

But that my having fallen came first,
I had not known to call falling

this feeling of following grainy shades
into gray, waving for want of wings,

or fog this silent summoning,
a city sunk whole under a sea.

Who would watch waves must lean into wind.
They wind up lean who long want rain.

If not for waiting, why have we mouths?
If not for failing to fly, why fingers?

— China Marks & H. L. Hix

————————

H. L. Hix lives in the mountain west, where he marvels at how late in the summer it is before hummingbirds arrive at 7,200 feet, at how hardy pocket gophers are, and at the fact that he can survive at an altitude at which cockroaches cannot.  He and his partner, the poet Kate Northrop, live in an 1880s railroad house, and their studio space is converted from what was once a barn.  His recent books include a “selected poems,” First Fire, Then Birds: Obsessionals 1985-2010 (Etruscan Press, 2010); a translation, made with the author, of Eugenijus Ališanka’s from unwritten histories (Host Publications, 2011); an essay collection, Lines of Inquiry (Etruscan Press, 2011); and an anthology, Made Priceless (Serving House Books, 2012).  His website is www.hlhix.com.

China Marks was born and educated in Kansas City, MO, earning a BFA in Sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute. A Fulbright-Hayes fellowship took her Katmandu, Nepal, where she spent sixteen months constructing a major installation out of local materials. On her return to the United States, she was awarded a graduate fellowship by the Danforth Foundation. In 1976, having received an MFA in Sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis, China moved east to make art. She has received numerous grants and awards, including three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a Mid-Atlantic Arts fellowship, two George Sugarman Foundation grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, most recently in 2011, when she was also named a Gregory Millard Fellow. Since 1999 China Marks has lived and worked in Long Island City, a block and a half from the East River. Her work is shown in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe. She is represented by the J. Cacciola Gallery in New York. Her drawings will be shown there in May as part of a group show.

—————

 

 

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Who Am I? What the Lowly Riddle Reveals,” November, 2012
Mar 132013
 

Apothecary detail

 

Apothecary

Text and image, ink and blood, alchemy and chemistry, narrative and whimsy are some of the vectors shaping Paul Forte‘s vision in the Apothecary (which in its invocation of magical potions and dark arts shares a motif with Paul McQuade’s short story “Hadean” also in this issue). Ten bottles on a shelf, filled with ink (the most magical and potent solution of all when you think about it), bits of story from old books glued to the front, lined up like an apothecary’s display. Transmutation of the word into ink and back again.

One bottle and the full shelf are shown above. Detail images below, including the full text of the excerpt pages glued to the bottles.

dg

Paul Forte

Notes on a hybrid artwork: Apothecary

Spirit and Soul should be added to the body and taken away (Solve et Coagula).[1]

—Lambsprinck De Lapide Philosophico[2]

 

Apothecary is a hybrid artwork based on a simple idea: fill a series of ten bottles with black ink and then “label” each bottle with a small facsimile of a chapter page from an old novel.  Apothecary uses ten identical lab bottles, each approximately 3 inches in diameter by seven inches high and filled with about a half a liter of ink.  The bottles rest on a narrow wood shelf.  The pages used to make the labels were selected from scores of old books; the first page of ten chapters in a book was removed and collated with other book pages with the same chapter number.  Selection of the final chapter pages used as labels were made with two structural constraints: 1) each numbered chapter (one to ten) had to have a chapter heading, or a brief synopsis of that chapter, and 2) the text on each page had to end with a complete sentence.

The strength of Apothecary, its vision or experimental significance, rests with the notion that the work is a series of potential stories — symbolized by ink in labeled bottles — stories yet to be written, and conversely that it is also a work of radical de-mediation, where writing or text is reduced to a series of chapter fragments that label a (traditional) literary medium: ink.  These perspectives suggest an intermediate or indeterminate condition, but the work’s suspension between the possibility of writing on the one hand, and the display of a substance used to materialize it on the other, gives Apothecary its vitality as a hybrid artwork.

It’s interesting to note that the labels or reduced copies of the chapter pages play on the idea of concentration. The metaphorical reduction of writing to the material substance of ink is intended to induce the viewer-reader to reflect upon or focus on the work and thereby better appreciate the symbolic nature of the contents of the bottles: an elemental concentration; a material essence, a medium.  The cognitive value of Apothecary has less to do with the formidable challenge it presents to making sense of a puzzling group of found texts, and more to do with how it encourages one to re-think the relationship between ideas and materials.

—Paul Forte

 

 

Pouring Apothecary 1

Pouring Apothecary 2

Pouring Apothecary 3

no. 1 flat_edited-1

no. 2 flat_edited-1

no. 3 flat_edited-1

no. 4 flat

no. 5 flat

no. 6 flat

no. 7 flat

no. 8 flat

no9 flat

no. 10 flat

  — Paul Forte

——————————————

Primarily a visual artist, Paul Forte also writes essays and poetry.  Forte’s career as an artist began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970’s.  Influenced primarily by conceptual art, Forte has employed a variety of media over the years to realize ideas, including making and self-publishing artist’s books and related objects.  Forte’s work continues to explore the subjective and aesthetic dimensions of conceptual approaches to art making, an approach that he terms “cognitivist.”

Paul Forte has exhibited at The San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, California (1975,1976, 1983); A Space Gallery, Toronto, Canada (1978); 80 Langton Street Gallery, San Francisco, California (1981); The Center for the Visual Arts, Oakland, California (1986); The Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut (1991); the Kim Foster Gallery, New York City (1998); Hera Gallery, Wakefield, Rhode Island (2001, 2003), Francis Naumann Fine Art, New York City (2007 & 2008), and The Wattis Institute, San Francisco, California (2011).  Forte’s work is included in the Sol Lewitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut; The Museum of Modern Art, New York City (artist’s books); and The Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, among others. Forte has lectured on his work at Hera Gallery in Wakefield, Rhode Island; The University of Rhode Island (Honors Program); The Rhode Island School of Design; Brown University (Honors Program); Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York; The California College of the Arts, Oakland, California; and The University of California at Berkeley.  Paul Forte is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Fellowship (1978), and a Pollack-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (1990).  A resident of Rhode Island since 1987, Forte lives in Wakefield with his long time partner, Laura Beauvais.

Paul Forte’s web site is at pauljforte.com.

————

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Alchemical texts are notoriously difficult to decipher, due to the subjective nature of the formulas and procedures used by the alchemists. Be that as it may I offer the following interpretation of the above injunction: Spirit (symbolized by the common mineral, salt) and Soul (symbolized by the only liquid metal, mercury) should be combined and heated in a retort (the body) to produce an amalgam. If this process resulted in a “peacock’s tail” (an iridescent residue) then the adept was a step closer to realizing the venerated “philosopher’s stone.”
  2. I don’t have access to the specific source of the quote that I use in my text, the manuscript Lambsprinck De Lapide Philosophico, Frankfort, 1625. This is one of hundreds of entries in The Hermetic Museum, a sourcebook on alchemy and mysticism edited by Alexander Roob (Taschen books, 1997).
Mar 102013
 

tc3Artist photo by Jesse Matulis

04

 

Letterpress printing is a form of relief printing. A reversed, raised surface (text, traditionally set letter by painstaking letter, locked into a frame) is inked and rolled or pressed against paper to form a right-reading impression. As an art form it is like the mystery Mary Oliver captures in her poem “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field.”

 it was beautiful
and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings –
five feet apart – and the grabbing
thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys
of the snow –

Enter Terry Conrad. What he loves about letterpress is its history and that it’s so “malleable.” His work in all arenas mirrors a commitment to transforming, reusing, envisioning new possibilities from and for the world around him. With a brilliant young mind, educated at Alfred University, the Cranbrook Academy of Art and numerous residencies here and abroad, Conrad is open like an expanse of field covered in new fallen snow. He seems to be constantly watching, like the owl, manipulating ideas, turning the press of his creative mind. His energy is contagious, the results of it, at once engaging and beautiful. We spoke recently in his home/studio, a historic firehouse in Round Lake, NY, that (in between teaching gigs at Skidmore College and Siena College) he is in the process of converting.

— Mary Kathryn Jablonski

 

TC – These small sculptures are titled Manipulatives and they’re made from wood and paper. The maple box works as a stage that brings them back to a standing pose where they are stored, then they come out of the box, the box flips, and this becomes a place they can almost “dance.” In an exhibit when they hold a pose for a long time, they retain that memory, so when they go back into the box there’s a bit of history. They’re little objects with a lifeline. That becomes the beauty of them – and the tragedy.

03

MKJ – The papers look like prints. Tell me about this.

08

TC – Yes, my wife is a preschool teacher, and I’m influenced by what she does in the classroom. I work a lot with scrap and recycled materials. I make ink from walnuts, for example. The papers here in the Manipulatives are printed woodblocks and silkscreens. The “feet” that hold them are molded or cast paper and other recycled materials, some plaster and wood.

I’ve also been making these Do-It-Yourself printing presses out of, well, basically “garbage” stacked up. I’ll show you images of this press and some prints I made with it that were in response to works by Jean Eschmann, a bookbinder from the 30’s, in the permanent collection at Cranbrook [Academy of Art]. My response to his elaborate, decorative covers were these time-based printing presses made from stacked, repurposed, found objects. I did a similar project in Detroit titled Borrowed Press, because it ended up being made from items borrowed from the gallery and surrounding companies. In this case, there is an image of the press and an edition of five prints.

05

MKJ – So the press becomes a piece of sculpture during the exhibit as you’re making the prints! How long do you leave the print beneath the constructed press?

TC – Well, it depends on the conditions of the space. It was warm when I was at Cranbrook, so they printed fairly quickly, as opposed to Detroit, where it was much cooler. In my studio it can take up to five days or more when it’s very cold here. A wonderful thing is that the prints are deeply embossed because they happen so slowly; there’s this kind of alchemy that happens.

MKJ – I can see that. Are you using litho inks? They look almost like leather, and there’s a sheen; it looks like you spray the surface in the end to stop the alchemy.

TC – Yes, well, there are many recycled items pieced together to make these prints, beginning with the “plate,” which can be any number of metal pieces, including cans, cut and pieced together. The edge of which is rolled with ink (litho or the walnut I mentioned), and this makes an outline, but other areas are the oxidized cans and metals printing. I’ve been experimenting with copper because the pipes that go inside the “chamber” of the press can be encouraged to oxidize more quickly (say, with vinegar) and give interesting results too.

07.

06

MKJ – I never dreamed of a printing press that looked like this. And when you and I first spoke about letterpress, you also said you were drawn to it because of the history held in each individual letter. I had never really stopped to consider that before either.

TC – Yes, like the Manipulatives, they [the letters] fall into these different “dances” [words, texts]. I was always afraid of words, but to me now, what’s so exciting … it seems obvious… A letter can be part of ten, well more, publications! Taking apart and physically rearranging words, I love the fact that the letters have had other “lives.” Like my DIY presses; they have had and will go back to having different functions, but for now are acting as printing presses. Letterpress type is fascinating historically, even if artists are pretty much the only ones who use it now, it has had other lives.

MKJ – I tend to be a traditionalist, and I think that for the reasons we’re discussing, digital processes and polymer plates for letterpress printing just don’t excite me the same way that traditional letterpress does. Removing the lead [or wooden] type, for me, removes the physical, meditative process that I love about all printmaking. Is this true for you as well?

TC – I too am interested in the tangible qualities of letterpress, but I also have a lot of friends who are designers and I love to see what they come up with, so I have to say that although the processes are different, I find them equally fascinating.

MKJ – Well put. Another catch-22 is that the deep impressions made in the letterpress process that are so compelling and tactile are a contemporary phenomenon. These were never made with lead type because the type itself is fairly soft and would suffer under such pressure, damaging the integrity of the letters. The modern plates can withstand more force. I do love soft paper and dark shadows. They make my fingers ache!

TC – I’m a sucker for it too. It does make the work a tactile object; that’s for sure.

MKJ – It’s great to be speaking with someone who is so open-minded. As poet obsessed with revision, I wanted to believe they called it relief printing because once a poem was set in letterpress type and printed, there was no way I could edit it anymore, and what a “relief” that was, pun intended! No turning on the MAC and talking out a comma or changing a line break, then changing them both back the next day. (I guess I was in denial about the fact that it was also called “moveable type.”) Anyhow, I think it’s wonderful that we’re seeing the same thing differently.

TC – Yes, the stories I write also often talk about something that has multiple functions, whether by accident, or… we should read those next. There are five prints plus a title page in my letterpress series, which I made with hand set lead type. They’re all individual stories, but they are a little “family” in Landscape, Architecture, Waste and Food.

01

MKJ – [I think I know the answer to this but ask] Is there a specific sequence left to right in which these are to be presented when you show them in a gallery?

TC – [Smiling] I hope it changes every time. I love to be a viewer as much as possible. I don’t claim to know everything about the work and it’s really great when I can learn things about it.

MKJ – What font are they set in?

TC – Baskerville.

MKJ – Gorgeous. Their restraint makes them quite moving; the voice, authentic. And although the stories are set in specific places, they certainly have universal appeal.

02

02

—Images by Terry Conrad in interview with Mary Kathryn Jablonski

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Terry Conrad is a lecturer in the Art Department at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, and a lecturer in Creative Arts at Siena College, Loudonville. Recent residencies include Penland in North Carolina; Frans Masereel Centrum in Kasterlee, Belgium; and the Vermont Studio Center. He has shown his work regionally and nationally at the International Print Center in New York, Art Chicago, and the Albany Airport. Conrad received a BFA from Alfred University and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Mary Kathryn Jablonski is a gallerist in Saratoga Springs, a visual artist and a poet, author of the chapbook To the Husband I Have Not Yet Met (APD Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals including Salmagundi, Slipstream, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Blueline. Her artwork has been widely exhibited throughout the Northeast and is held in private and public collections.

Jablonski

Feb 092013
 

Deborah Zlotsky

Start looking at these painting thinking in terms of accident, depth and drips, not the usual sorts of things one thinks about experiencing art. Think of them as works that begin with a chance conception, a moment of perception, a hunch that grows and accretes by, yes, reflecting the subterranean structures of the artist’s mind (must be, right?). Deborah  Zlotsky‘s paintings have a monumental quality, an architectural quality (I like that phrase from geology “accreted terrane”). At first glance they work by creating a drama of thrusting bulky forms and receding spaces, composed of flat planes and angles, lighter colours and darker colours. But peer closer and the flat surfaces resolve into a textured density of drips, lines, drools (okay, maybe there is a better word but I like it) and craters. These do not show up so well in a digital reproduction on your computer screen or Ipad. So trust me. Here is a link to a lovely and really informative video interview with Deborah Zlotsky which gives you a better look at some of this detailing. The interview was filmed during a 2011 show at the Kathryn Markel Gallery in New York. And here is a very intelligent essay by Viktor Witkowski on Deborah Zlotsky’s paintings, tracking the context for the accidental in art back through Paul Klee to the early Modernist German Romantics and painters like Kaspar Friedrich. And here, below, are the artist’s own words, in response to an email I sent her about the paintings; it was so good I just copied the whole thing here.

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Brief note about the work.   Yes, painting and writing are similar, though of course I am fluent in a visual language only, when it comes to being creative. I can think of ideas for novels and films (to the annoyance of my husband!), but never the fleshing out, the creating of nuances and connections and tensions. I can do this fleshing out with painting however. When I paint, I do it for the same reason I read a good novel—to find out what happens, to see how crazy and screwed up things get, but also how some sort of balance or idea prevails. When I begin a painting, I start with something both accidental and familiar—a few colors, a few shapes. I might have a tiny idea, a faint memory of the way sunlight moved through my grandmother’s apartment or a notion about the sensory lushness of a flower’s complexity or a pile of laundry. These initial colors and shapes start a process of discovering unintended proximities and relationships, of finding logic and meaning in the unique situation that emerges. For me, beauty is bound up with accumulation and time and the realization of the necessity of change.  The first marks and shapes are catalysts for a process that requires me to constantly reevaluate what’s important so I can find out what the painting will be.

—Deborah Zlotsky

Be-all (oil on canvas, 60×48 inches. 2012)


Waiting room oil on canvas, 60x48 inches. 2011Can the devil speak true? (oil on canvas, 36×36 inches. 2012)

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It happened but not to you oil on canvas, 60x48 inches. 2011Derring-do (oil on canvas, 60x48inches. 2012)

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Everything must go (oil on canvas, 60×48 inches. 2012)

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Insofar (oil on canvas, 60×48 inches. 2012)

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Derring-do oil on canvas, 60x48 inches. 2012It happened but not to you (oil on canvas, 60×48 inches. 2012)

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Everything must go oil on canvas, 60x48 inches. 2012Not so happy, yet happier (oil on canvas, 60×48 inches. 2012)


Be-all oil on canvas, 60x48 inches. 2012)Waiting Room (oil on canvas, 60×48 inches. 2012)

Waiting Room (oil on canvas, 60×48 inches. 2012).—Deborah Zlotsky

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Deborah Zlotsky is a 2012 recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in painting. She is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in New York. In 2010, she exhibited her work at Pierogi Gallery as the “Artist of the Week” and, in 2006, her work was included in Twice Drawn, a contemporary drawing exhibit curated by Ian Berry at the Tang Museum. Zlotsky’s drawings are in the curated flat files of Pierogi Gallery and The Boston Drawing Project at Joseph Carroll and Sons Gallery, as well as the online-curated registry at The Drawing Center. Her work has been exhibited in shows across the country and is in the collections of Nordstrom, Progressive Insurance, Rutgers University, the Waldorf Astoria, the New York Palace Hotel and the Albany Institute of History and Art, among other private and public collections. Over the past 10 years, Zlotsky has received residency fellowships at Yaddo, VCCA, Ox-Bow, Millay Colony for the Arts, Ragdale Foundation, the Weir Farm Art Center and the Kimmel-Harding-Nelson Center for the Arts. Zlotsky received a BA in Art History from Yale University and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Connecticut.

Jan 112013
 

Gina Occhiogrosso

Every writer/artist knows that you throw away more than you finish, that the material thrown away is often very good but only a step along the way to a larger vision, or it doesn’t quite fit in the organic structure of the finished product. Gina Occhiogrosso has turned her steps along the way into a larger proliferating work called, with charming irony, the Someday Project. The steps along the way thus become art and the immense collection of drawings, sketches, cartoons and paintings has become a protean mega-project that, on exhibit, covers walls and rooms with a kind of madcap informality. Lovely the way the pictures in the photo below climb up the wall and slop over onto the ceiling. No frames, no hanging self-important masterworks, just paper tacked to the wall, filling the wall, creating a meta-image, a mirror of, yes, the artist’s mind.

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The above image is from a complete installation of a project titled Someday. The whole project began in 2007, and is now at around 500 drawings. Each drawing is 8.5 x 11 inches. The drawings began on cheap copy paper paper, but as people visited my studio, they convinced me to treat the drawings with a little more importance and use better paper such as watercolor paper, bristol, or Yupo (polyurethane). Someday is only part of what I do as an artist, but this project helps me work things out when I simply need to move the larger work forward, or when I need to work something out, personally. Themes include, but are not limited to, feminism, the economy, the fragile landscape, and relationships. Some works are cartoony, some are pure experiments in abstraction. This particular slide shows a specific exhibition at The Arts Center of the Capital Region, where I sat in the gallery and worked a few hours each week for the run of the show.
—Gina Occhiogrosso

  Gina Occhiogrosso art

Gina Occhiogrosso art

Gina Occhiogrosso art

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Gina Occhiogrosso art

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Gina Occhiogrosso art

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—Gina Occhiogrosso

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Gina Occhiogrosso’s national exhibition experience includes group shows at Brenda Taylor Gallery and Lana Santorelli Gallery in NYC, MIA Miami International Airport Gallery, Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY. She was recently featured in a three-person show titled Flux at The Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, NY. She has had several one-person shows at such places as Nicole Fiacco Gallery, Hudson, NY, Saratoga Arts Council Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, NY, Amrose Sable Gallery, Albany, NY, Lake George Project for the Arts, and Yates Gallery at Siena College. Her work may be viewed in the Pierogi Flat Files, in Brooklyn, NY, and through registries such as The Drawing Center and Nurture Art. In 2010 she was included in the project, The Other End of the Line, a project developed by artist Francis Cape and created for The High Line in Chelsea, NY. Her video was included in a mobile home trailer (stationed at the beginning of the High Line at Gansevoort Plaza), which contained an exhibition of work by numerous artists and was curated by Ian Berry, curator for The Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College.

Feb 212012
 

Gladys Swan recently showed her chops on NC with a gorgeous short story called “The Orange Bird” about a the process of learning to paint, to become an artist. The story is deftly comic and yet magical and limns the mysterious underground processes by which the work itself can transform the craftsman into an artist. So it seemed only fitting that we should also look at some of Gladys Swan’s paintings. These are mostly oils on paper 22′ by 30′ or small oils on canvas or linen, 8′ x 10′. Also one water color. The painting “Movements of Horses and Men” is in the 33rd annual exhibit of Paper in Particular, at Columbia College in Columbia, MO. Entries come from around the country and are judged by an outside judge. This is Gladys’s first national show. It opened February 8th.

A writer for most of her career, Gladys Swan has had a long love affair with the visual arts. She has done work in both ceramics and enjoys doing both figurative and abstract paintings. She was the first writer to be awarded a residency in painting at the Vermont Studio Center since its inception, and has returned a number of times to paint. She has also been a Guest Writer there. She has had individual shows at the Boone County Historical Society in Columbia, Missouri–“Imagined Landscapes,” and at Stephens College, “Paintings, Pottery, Poetry.” Several of her paintings have been published in or used as cover art for literary magazines, for three of her books, and for books by other writers.

Author photo by Gerik Parmele,  Columbia Daily Tribune.

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A Map of the InvisibleA Map of the Invisible

 

Movements of Horses and Men  jpgMovements of Horses and Men

 

Color StoryColor Story

 

Tree Spaces  1  jpgTree Spaces 1

 

Tree Spaces 2 Tree Spaces 2

—Gladys Swan

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Gladys Swan is both a writer and a visual artist.  She has published two novels, Carnival for the Gods in the Vintage Contemporaries Series, and Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices, nominated by LSU Press for the PEN Faulkner and PEN West awards. News from the Volcano, a novella and stories, set mostly in New Mexico, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award.  The Tiger’s Eye: New & Selected Stories is the most recent of her seven collections of short fiction and has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award.  Her stories have been selected for various anthologies, including Best of the West.  Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in the Sewanee Review, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review , Chelsea, Ohio Review, New Letters, Southwest Review, Hunger Mountain, Hotel Amerika, Numéro Cinq, and others.

May 112010
 

I recently started reading Steven Heighton’s essay collection, The Admen Move on Lhasa, after discovering his writing on Numero Cinq.  The title essay elegantly compares a work of art to a “living and visionary” city, in this case, Lhasa, Tibet.   He contrasts art (and Lhasa) with advertising and schlock (and modern, planned cities.)  There were many illuminating points which I will not be able to do justice to here.  The following are just a few quotes, the ones I underlined and double starred.

…art usually involves an invitation and solicits the entry and collaboration of the audience, while advertising usually implies a threat.  Or, to continue this meandering trip towards Lhasa: art invites you into the city along any available road, while advertising dictates where you enter.  And when.

Perhaps artists can begin to suspect they’ve created a memorable city, a god-haunted world or visionary town—some site worthy of a repeated pilgrimage—only when responses to the work are unpredictably  and ungovernably divergent, diverse, off the wall, missing the point that good artists do sometimes try to make but without ever quite succeeding—always seeming instead to convey something else.  Something impossible to signpost.

Schlock makes us understudies loitering in the wings of our own lives.

It’s not that art cannot be entertainment, the way schlock is, or is advertised to be, but rather that art, while entertaining us, also unsettles.  For whatever sedates us is shuffling us off towards the great sleep of death.  Art, on the other hand, is a persistent wake-up call, the setting off of a quiet siren in the heart.

This entire collection is filled with great essays, insightful, honest and so well-written.  I hate to be simple-minded and say, This is really good, go read it, but…This is a really good collection.  Go read it!

See also Heighton’s poem and novel excerpt on Numéro Cinq.