Monday, July 25, 2011

Within an ephemeral present,

we return through memory to things, places, and events in the past in order to find purpose and direction in our lives.  Meaningful time is elliptical time.

From Vigen Guroian's The Fragrance of God

As I wash my six-year-old son's infant clothes in preparation for the infant son I have yet to meet, I slide back and forth between this present moment of expectation and the first moments of Alexander's life so long/but so short ago.

Such a collision of living and remembering yield the sort of snippets of color and pattern and shape and visceral experience I gather in the studio--fragmented panoplies that start and stop, compress and expand into orders all their own.  Abstraction is the longed-for underbelly of this life I live and love--the longed-for unseen I try to eke out amidst the adamant/fluid present. 

3 comments:

Ellen Campbell said...
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Ellen Campbell said...

Dad and I too feel as if we are living in some sort of nether land...not a bad place to be--waiting, anticipating, expecting...

Melissa Dunn said...

Your description of abstraction is so beautiful, Barbara, especially juxtaposed to bringing a new life into the world.