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.