Turnings and Findings

1.

I dreamt that I took apart my grandfather's bed, the great 200+ year old four-poster in which I sleep, and put it out by the street in front of my childhood home. 

Our house was the lodge or gatehouse for a great estate built in the roaring 20's in Toronto, buttermilk coloured limestone and half-timbered on the upper story. It was surrounded by a limestone wall with wrought iron gratings and great heavy wrought iron gates, in front of which I set the bed parts, right by the road. Though I left them lying there, they were intended somehow to be a display, an installation,  but someone took it all away. I went to tell my father, (it had been his father's bed), and we went out to look. I found 2 of the posts returned inside the wall next to where we always had a little vegetable garden. I did not feel very disturbed by any of this. When we went back out to the street, we found that someone had also returned the headboard, which was lying upside down on the ground in the rain, and the remaining 2 posts. But they had crudely cut up the posts as if they had wanted to use them for something else but it hadn't worked out. I thought to myself, no problem, I know I can put this back together again.

Pieces of the Game, wood, hair, fur, circa 1999. various dimensions.

2.

Last night on a walk I discovered a number of old poster beds by the side of the road, offered free to any who wanted them.... offered by different people, in front of several houses. It seemed the universe wanted me to notice them, wanted me to have bedposts. So I got my car and I took them, though I have no place for them in the house or garage. Or my studio. Many years ago I was given a chair and sofa with turned mahogany legs, and they spoke to me in the same way. Gradually they stopped being furniture and became something else. All my life there have been threads of things that appear and disappear, compelling me to act without a plan...or discovering the plan as I am acting on some mysterious whim.

more blog on dream constructions:  Properties of Association

Tracking Sign

I am exploring a new neighbourhood.

Any time I am out of my comfort zone I have a blankness in my brain. All the chatter turns to white noise. I don't know why my brain does this, a kind of emptying out, preparing to receive.

I know people who see conspiracy in everything. Or God in every system, the devil in the details. In the city it is easy to see what one is looking for. Most of life it is sheer accident  what one sees, what one notices; the deer running down a driveway, a friend on a busy street corner..

An avatar, a savior.

A warning.

Like the Khabbalah the math is everywhere, ones and zeros combining and separating.

When I work on my boxes, this is what I am doing; looking for signs. They are each a story I haven't told yet, but one that exists somewhere. They all have a truth that is immutable, even if words can be arranged and rearranged, exchanged and refined to tell it.

sometimes I think of painting as if I am tracking a wild animal...

Where to Put your Feet When your Head is Occupied Elsewhere

I am working on something I know nothing about. It's thrilling like a spy novel.
I wanted to write about words, about language. About defining things. There are patterns, hidden affinities, meanings I sense and am longing to explore. But there is a barrier between seeing and naming that I cannot cross. I keep trying.

I need to let my body take over. My head is so tired it hurts. It's been holding too much in, juggling and sorting, holding the reins too tight. And my heart... well it usually leads, galloping ahead and falling all over itself like an overexcited puppy, bound for hurt and disappointment. Somewhere in between my body holds it's muscle memories quietly and deeply.

 My hand is like a dancer who has rehearsed so much the music has taken over. I need to be abandonment.

I must suspend belief, judgement, taste.

What ever I think I am doing is bound to have other meanings, like a double agent. Nothing is what it seems. 

The intention that I nurture isn't always what I end up loving in the end.

There is code imprinted under my eyelids, if I can just get in there and learn to read it.

Previous blog about sketching:

Plans and Diagrams; Intention Manifest

More Lessons From The Dancing Master

Diagram B

For better or worse I am done with working on this piece. Imagining the layers that are there has been like playing chess in my head. The painting pleases me at first glance. I can't tell if I worked it to death, if the mystery has been scraped out of it yet. I'm such a worry wart. The joy is there, underneath.

Diagram B unfinished 1/29/12

This is one of those paintings that may never justify to time and materials spent, and yet..... I have dragged this piece kicking and screaming from wall to wall and I am only beginning to hear what it's been trying to tell me.... that there is something I want/ need to follow, some will o the wisp breath/touch of the ephemeral truth....

Diagram B unfinished 2/6/12

I keep hoping it will reveal more. I am addicted to adding and scraping. I had always hoped to film the process by which I uncover a painting, but the lengthy time I have needed for each canvas has mothballed that idea over and over. I am getting better at throwing out the jabs of colour and line, seeing what they have caught. When I start to go wrong I can usually save us from total chaos. I thought that perhaps being able to witness it again over my own shoulder might give me some idea of what it is I am doing. Understanding what it is that gives a painting that one little puff of a breath that sends it off breathing on it's own. Beginning is easy. Finishing wrenches me hand, heart and soul.

Lessons From The Dancing Master

Untitled Sketch from The Dancing Master Series

The question of Influence and Inspiration.


Three weeks after the intensity of New York, the false cheer of several fundraisers to aid the flood relief after Hurricane Irene, and the complications of multiple family birthday celebrations, I am back in my studio, facing my own work. There is no avoiding the issue of why I am an artist when all the introspective thought I allow here in this space comes galloping at me as I settle in at my work table.

I come from a very artistic family, with professional artists of many generations on both sides, cousins, siblings,nephews. Nearly exclusively they were or are working at the representational end of the realism/abstraction spectrum.
I have always known I was an artist, but I didn't really start painting until I was in my twenties, in my last semester of college, and after many drawing and printmaking classes. It took a while, and many frustrating classes before I realized I was most influenced by landscape, longer still to give up trying to paint en plein aire. 

I try to walk and hike in nature often. Only recently I have been bringing along the small camera I bought last year to take photos of work I saw in New York. The idea of recording things visually in photographs is very new and foreign to me. I have very few until recently, and there is a swath of nearly 2 decades of my life were there are virtually no photographs of me or my life at all. The  idea of actively seeking out and capturing the inspiration for my work seems even more foreign. For most of my career I have only known what I was interested in by looking at my paintings. 

Learning to Dance

Diagram X, ink and acrylic on paper, 9 x 11, 2011. 

John Playford published a collection of English country dance tunes in 1651 called The Dancing Master   and they haunt me whenever I am lucky enough to hear one. One of my current favorites, because I recently heard a stellar arrangement by the Ensemble Galilei is Woodycock. Others, such as The Black Nag  have also been played and rearranged for three and a half centuries by many musicians in many styles.

Dancing Master 9/11/11, ink and acrylic on paper, 10 x 11, 2011.

I think of little old dancing masters going from great house to great house, teaching children the complicated patterns of the English set dances. I think of the itinerant musicians, and the loneliness of those people who did not have a home, who lived apart, neither landowner nor servant, who lived on the pleasures and whims of others, and who made gaiety even if they did not feel it. Sometimes all one can do is dance a little while in the company of others. The music haunts, because it seems to me to suggest all of that.

Jig, acrylic, ink, conte crayon and water soluble crayon on paper, 16 x16, 2011

I think of pattern, the wonderful quarterings of those tunes, the divisions that take the tune into a more and more abstract region with each turn.... taking the simple line as far as possible into complication with, often, just one instrument. And I think of the twirling dancers swinging back and forth in space, making into three and four dimensions all the joys and complications of our brief turn on this swiftly rotating planet.

Alchemy: Earth, Metal, Water.

Bridges here in this part of New England are iconic, historic, symbolic and essential, and last week they were under siege. A huge portion of them did not survive; wooden covered, stone arched, delicate iron spans and serviceable concrete alike. And roadways, some originally Indian traveling paths that followed the rivers have been erased. Cornfields that were Indian fields before they were white settler's were scoured of their loam right down to the bedrock last polished by glaciers. The Deerfield Valley, food basket for hundreds of years, and with ancient historical boundaries, is carved into new land with new river beds.

The human toll here is huge too. A week after the hurricane there is a small community butted up against the Berkshire hills that is still isolated, people not yet accounted for. Houses and barns on the drive we are taking to Williamstown are undercut, with possessions strewn in the yards, or hanging in the trees along the now quiet creeks. You can tell it happened in an instant. I know it is much worse to the west of us, in the Catskills, and north in Vermont. I have been beaten into a dark silence with the magnitude of it.

Here in the hills one watches the sky. Live here very long and you begin to feel the land. There are still bits and pieces that have never been cut or shaped by man. There are little hollows that have different weather. I have Native American friends whose tribal lands these were. White friends whose families have farmed the same land since the 1600's. Knowledge runs very deep.

Delta

We are on our way to the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, a little marble gem of a place in Williamstown MA, to see work by El Anatsui, the Ghanian sculptor. I've known of his work since the Venice Biennale in 2007, when he draped the Palazzo Fortuny with a metal fabric that echoed the architecture, but this is the first time I have seen it first hand.

So many of the roads, the bridges we would usually take are closed, and so the trip takes 2 1/2 hours when normally it would take 1. It has become a pilgrimage, a prayer, this drive. We witness.

Delta, detail

El Anatsui has worked in many mediums; metal, clay, wood, but the 3 pieces we have come to see are recycled labels and caps of liquor bottles, fastened together with copper wire to form flexible metal blankets of extraordinary, mesmerizing beauty. They stun.

Intermittent Signals

His work speaks to me of shifting roads and rivers, hammered out in copper wire and old tin, fault lines running through continents and centuries, spilling and held back, defying it's materials to become molten movement, liquid time. El Anatsui himself speaks about change in his talks. He is adamant that the curators of shows of his work have the authority to manipulate the work to fit the space, to make it unique to the place in which it has come to rest. That seems an extraordinary and generous thing, to separate so completely from the work as to guarantee it has a life apart from it's creator.

Strips Of Earth's Skin

There is a subtext in these works, of colonialism and post colonialism and cultural appropriation . The very materials here are post consumer detritus from bottles imported from the west, originally, El Anatsui has said as a kind of currency to finance and perpetuate the slave trade. It strangely echoes the emotional-historical landscape I have just driven through, where the battle for White European supremacy over this land was really first begun, where time has layered the roads and even place names with a memory that runs as deep as the glacial rock below.