Everyone's oddness

Yesterday evening I happened upon the below entry from Anne Truitt's wonderful, wonderful journal Daybook.  (I read the book for the first time the summer before my freshmen year of college and have perused it periodically ever since as it is a wealth of thoughtfulness about being an artist.)  I record this passage here because she writes what I experience as I move through my days between the studio and the home--so much of life and living for me is remarking on how amazing is this color against that one, in the context of a room or a person or a collection of everyday objects.  Just yesterday I took pictures of a bowl of shelled fava beans, (which will no doubt find there way here soon) not because the bowl of shelled fava beans was in and of itself so remarkable (though I might argue for the remarkble-ness of fava beans actually, tossed with garlic, olive oil and parmesan) but because my eye loved the settled repetition of their piled up shapes, as well as their pale green color.  Somehow those fava beans relate to painting for me.

From Anne Truitt's journal Daybook:

24 October
I opened my eyes a moment ago into the maple leaves outside my window.  Almost simultaneously with the act of identifying them as these particular leaves and thus placing myself, I saw them as paintings, an arrangement of values. 
The other afternoon when I was entertaining my daughter Mary in her bath, she asked me whether I thought artists were "just born that way."  I said I thought they might be.  "How?" she asked.  I said I didn't know, but that there was rarely a time when I wasn't half-consciously translating what was around me into terms of art, that as I stood at the door--for I was on my way out when this exchange took place--I had been absorbing her brown body against the white tub, the yellow top of the nail brush, the dark green shampoo bottle, Sam's blue towel, her orange towel, and could make a sculpture called Mary in the Tub if I ever chose to.  These elements arranged themselves into proportions of color, the weights of which gave me the meaning of what I was seeing.  Mary and I laughed, partly out of the pleasure of talking to one another and partly out of the wry recognition of everyone's oddness.

Summer collages

A couple of the collages I made at Hambidge....

Summer--finally...

  

It is 8:15 as I write.

I am still in my walking clothes.  Chris is making an omelette for us both--with broccoli from the garden.  Just-cut broccoli is a revelation; I didn't know it tasted that much better than broccoli in any other state of being!  We have no place to go but our studios today.

It is our summer--finally.  Grades are posted, classes are ended, so the business of full-time studio work can really begin.  Last week I returned from my third residency at the Hambidge Center for the Arts, a fitting beginning for summer.  I focused on small collages, and so I spent a lot of time sitting at the desk pictured above.  From my perch in Hambidge's light-filled Garden Cottage, I made a slew of collages which have helped me think through how to approach some bigger paintings I think, some bigger collages too--we'll see of course.   For now I can breathe deeply and relish this season's beginning.

Inspiration of Late: Rochelle Feinstein

Love the looks of her show, up now.

"Far from being fully accounted for

and catalogued, it deploys and poses problems in several dimensions.  In short, it is an 'open' situation, in movement.  A work in progress."
Umberto Eco, "The Poetics of the Open Work"

Inspiration of Late: Yifat Gat

In a lovely turn of events, Yifat contacted me through Facebook--to let me know of a post of my work on her blog.  I then came to know her enigmatic-while-being pointedly-precise images through her website.  Again, there are many more treasures than this one...

Inspiration of Late: Garima Saxena

Of late I've been having these moments of intense visual love!  I think the world is looking out for me--giving me amazingly inspiring things to see just when I need them most....
One of the biggest delights recently has been seeing the collage-marathon of Garima Saxena posted on her blog.  I love the frank willingness to try anything and to show us that really so much more is possible here than we thought.  I've just picked out six here; there are many, many more to see, and I urge you to go look now!

Teaching, teaching, teaching

Yesterday was the first day of crits for a Variable Topics in Drawing Project--a 300 level drawing class I teach at least once a year.  My students have worked on these mid to large sized collages for over a month at least, and they've done a wonderful job translating the still-life they set up into various interpretations of reality.  I asked them to think about how one might present multiple views of any given view of reality, and they embraced the challenge with gusto!

From the top: work by Marilyn Barr, Elizabeth Weiland, Sara Phillips, Scottie Bottenus, Ashley Jones and Ivana Beck.

Oh, I should say that these are all about 4'x5' in dimension.

Writing, writing, writing

Spring is arriving in North Carolina.  While fall is the spectacular season in Pennsylvania, spring is our dramatic time in central NC.  Nearly every tree is in bloom!
I continue to write, write, write--making progress day by day on my tenure dossier.  I do look forward to a more balanced studio schedule soon, but until then, I thankfully see this row of purple plum trees as I work.

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.