W.S. Merwin in coversation with Michael Silverblatt

Michael Silverblatt: I have a final question.  It would once have been impossible for a poet to easily accept the invitation to be a country's poet laureate, this country's poet laureate.  It certainly once would not have been possible for you.  What makes it possible now?
W.S. Merwin: When I was invited to do it the terms of it were--we talked about that--and I was asked whether there was a theme that I would want to have to string the whole thing on, and I said, yes, if I accept to do it that will be one of the main reasons why I would do that, and the theme would be something I want to talk about.  My words won't change anyone's behavior but the connection between the human imagination, which I think is the one really distinctive thing that humanity has, not intelligence or language--both of which are dubious in different ways, but imagination--the thing that allows us to sit here in the Palomar Hotel in Los Angeles and be distressed about the homeless people and Darfur and the whales dying of starvation in the Pacific and elated by a little girl getting a prize for playing Mozart in China when she's seven years old.  Other animals have this quality but it's not primal in their lives.  It's not the center, and it's what makes us.  Each one of us is here in our imaginations seeing the world a little bit differently.  I think this is our great talent.  It's the source of compassion and it's the source of our respect for the rest of life and for our, oh I would say more than that, our gratitude for it, our love of the rest of life.  And if we don't have that, we are in every sense deprived.  We're narrowed down to little selfish blobs destroying the world around us and in so doing destroying ourselves.

Meghan Brady

I just discovered these paintings by Meghan Brady--love their unexpected use of color, shape, movement, composition.  They are jarringly right, like proof that walking around akimbo all day is really the way to walk.
The top image is Untitled (yellow), oil on canvas, 40.5"x30", 2010 while the bottom image is called Jackrabbit, oil on canvas, 18"x14", 2010.  You can see more at her website.

Notes from Artist Statements: 2001

2001

•In painting, I am interested in the body’s immobility.  But I look to a bodily stasis whose cause is rooted in reverie or fascination.

•The whole body apparently turns toward the place of fascination, or what I call the longed-for object, and then remains there, transfixed and longing.

The perceived vastness justifies the longing but never explicates it, and so longing continues. 

I am human, and I want something palpable, and I want to make images, so first I image the body’s stillness. 

Secondly I imagine what is seen.  A sort of explosion.  A clearing space.  A never ending area.  Maybe the place at the top of a great height.  That which should not go together goes together.

My paintings move alongside these experiences.

Notes from Artist Statements: 2000

•“Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible.”   Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

•The world is stranger than we know.

•A kind of landscape appears, an odd order.  The paintings are a personal grace, moments when all the flickering observings deign to coalesce, before scattering and mutating once again.

•“The human imagination is spatial and it is constantly constructing an architectonic whole from landscapes remembered or imagined; it progresses from what is closest to what is farther away, winding layers or strands around a single axis, which begins where the feet touch the ground.” Czeslaw Milosz, Where I Am

Notes from Artist Statements: 1999

February 1999

•“These fragments are the disjecta membra (scattered parts) of an elusive, coveted and vaguely scented knowledge.”  Guido Ceronetti, The Science of the Body

•My work habits suggest nailing down, when really I am more interested in what is left elusive.

•“strange speech”

•I realize I am attracted to the notion of strange speech because so often what arrives as the material for my making is garbled and clipped.  A bit of.  A nuance.  A moment.  The forms are usually made before they are known—almost always in fact.  And so in effect, I work in the dark.  The struggle comes in the fight between wanting to name them and letting them be long enough so that I may eventually observe a glimpse of what these things really ARE. 

Today I tracked down all the artist statements of mine I could find.  My gathering is in response to the fact that I begin writing for tenure this semester...a long, long process of combing through and compiling ALL I have done as an artist and teacher over the last five years.  For now I am focused on writing my "creative" activities statement--the statement all about what I make and why.  A useful way to begin seemed to be a stab at reading through everything I've written about my work since graduate school, and I must say the activity was gratifying.  I realize that despite the change in appearance, my work has consistently grappled with the same themes and ideas, over and over and in different ways, for the last eleven years at least.  

Above I post sections pulled from a first year graduate statement.  The "struggle" remains the same; the quest for "strange speech" is constant. 

New Slow Year

I lazily enjoy my final week of winter break, as on the 11th I return to teaching.  And so the days are full of syllabi writing, walking along the frozen, cracking ground of North Carolina winter, kimchee making (my husband is on roll and these jars are truly lovely--I will post pics soon as they are infinitely aesthetic and worthy of contemplation by any painter) and reading--The Cookbook Collector, Water for Elephants, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and waiting at my bedside...The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

I am not one to make resolutions, but this year, this spring, I am hoping to preserve stillness in my life--somehow, somehow?!  How?!!  Over the last year I've become attuned and quite clear on what non-stillness feels like in my head and in my body.  Stillness feels infinitely better, is infinitely better in terms of quality of living/being.  A good friend sent me a chapter from Scott Russell Sanders book Conservationist Manifesto.  The chapter is called Stillness, and it is perfectly prefaced by this quote by Blaise Pascal:
I have concluded that the whole misfortune of men comes from a single thing, and that is their inability to remain at rest in a room. 

Why do I feel compelled to write of stillness on this blog--a studio blog?  For me the ability to "hear myself"--which is another way of naming what I mean when I think of holding onto stillness--has long been linked to who I am as an artist.  In the days when I was a voracious journal-writer, I often noted the change internally when I was away from my journal of the moment--I couldn't hear myself very well.  I knew the difference between really hearing myself, and not hearing myself, and I knew that not hearing myself impacted the joy and connection I held for making things.  I still make things whether I hear myself or not, but when I settle enough to sense the inside cadences of my mind, I open out into the knowledge that what I do has legs extending further, deeper down into those questions asked by men and women for all of time--who are we?  Why do we function as we do?  Why do we tingle with such wrenching human poignance?

Drawing/Cooking/Santa

He wanted to meet in the real world

the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld.  He did not know where to seek it or how but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him.  They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place.  They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. 
from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

When I read this passage I felt I'd read an exacting description of my relationship to the images I seek to make. 

Final/From Representation to Abstraction

I had a particularly strong beginning drawing class this semester.  They moved swiftly through all the usual drawings, finishing what is typically the final drawing a couple weeks early.  So we got to try out some higher level thinking for the last project.  They grappled with the potentially unwieldy and unlimited possibilities of turning facets of representation into abstraction.  From deeply rendered drawings of cork screws and car engines, tea kettles and chopsticks they made lovely and highly individual abstract charcoal drawings.  I was so pleased yesterday when I saw them all gathered together on the wall.

Andrew Masullo

I love these funny paintings at Feature right now.  I am reminded of how insular good abstract paintings are, how strange they can feel when encountered in the course of a day, today--and how grateful I am for the way they collide with my typical pace.  These make me come to a screeching halt so I can just look, because these are what I want to look at right now.

Facebook doesn't do this, nor email or my blog...or any other blog for that matter.

Our woodstove makes me stop--with its emanating heat pulling me/all of us in.

Other things that still:

Alexander's little hands reaching for me as he wakes--and their warmth

baking

sketchbook work

raking leaves

folding laundry

soup making

singing old hymms

walking Benny

abstract painting/alexander's hands/baking/sketchbook work/leaf raking/folding laundry/soup making/old hymms/walking benny