Yikes!

Three days in

Today the 3rd day of retreat (should that be in "quotes"? since I'm not really sequestered?). It's a good thing the last post is here–so easy to lose track of all the threads. Like the quilt patches. Reading & studying The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry and getting the gist of how one might apply this information. Would like to do a building model, for example, to see if I understand. It is so utterly cool that the Greeks were designing SPACE, not "buildings." Buildings house the space. That is so far out.

In-Town Retreat

Tomorrow, the new moon, in-town retreat begins. It will go from new moon to new moon–a lunation. This lunation in the Celtic tree calendar is the month of the reed, ngetal, the Celtic translation. See Nancy Passmore's Lunar Calendar for a description and get yourself one!
Retreat theme: SIMPLY NOT IGNORING. Aspirations: revitalize drawing & painting fluency; restore the connection to meditation; engage the aesthetic life; discover how The Art of War, African American quilts, improvisation, dynamic symmetry, Greek architecture affect understanding space>pictorial space; practice writing, another fluency practice.


Already dynamic symmetry (see works by Jay Hambidge from early 1900s) is influencing the quilt patch project. Above the Tents of Armageddon square is supplemented with another small rectangle in the proportion of the "rectangle of the whirling squares." The diagram of the rectangle (above) is from The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry by Hambidge.

The smaller rectangles of cloth are from another supply of fabric that has been around the studio for years. Here they are:


A question: will all the fabric patterns one collects & really likes work together? Stay tuned.

The Fire Fades

'40s Vintage

Cool old wallets. The brass one is engraved "Charge Plate," made to hold the metal predecessors of the plastic credit card. Love the clasp on the red change purse. What to use them for now? Charge Plate is lined in red–good for sewing needles. What about the smooth brown leather wallet? What new purpose?

Just How Many Possibilities Are There?

Ten patches made and a possible configuration arises on the ironing board. Hadn't thought of this possibility–large central diamonds. Further improvisations. Will see how it comes together.

Cover Design

Hallowe'en

Happy Hallowe'en! "Summer's end" (Samhain in Irish) and the beginning of the season of return–from now until the winter solstice. The image above is carved on a piece of Valentia slate on the site of Sean O'Connell's house in the village of Cill Rialaig in County Kerry, Ireland. Sean O'Connell was a famous Kerry seanachai.

Noelle Campbell Sharp continues her visionary restoration of Cill Rialaig as an artists' retreat. We were fortunate to spend time there twice; the first time in 2003 our retreat ended on Hallowe'en night with an astonishing display of the aurora borealis. We pulled chairs out into the cold darkness and watched with mouths open as sheets & veils of color rippled and dissolved across the deep indigo sky above Ballinskelligs Bay.

It's a mess of fallen leaves today–on the snow. This is a giant cottonwood leaf, rather a giant leaf from a cottonwood, well, the tree is also quite a giant. Not giant in the same way hardwoods in Ohio are giant. Liking the combination of green & purple. Speaking of giants, parked next to a Nissan Titan today. Do the Nissan people know the Titans were overthrown and sent to Tartarus, an underworld below Hades? Just curious.

Patches

First patches, hmm. Hand sewing, slow & steady. Listening to Art of War, the Denma Translation, recorded by Sounds True here in Boulder. Making patches called "Tents of Armageddon" and recall a painting using the same pattern.

This painting was part of an installation called Feast.

It is the ritual drink–amrita.
Love the way this simple horizontally bisected diamond pattern can look 3D–or flat.

Experiment

Lots of fabric to experiment with. Drawn to Tents of Armageddon pattern–triangles, back-to-back. Seems to be this simple, the block, & used in many traditional patterns, such as "windmill." Found the name of the block in one of Eli Leon's books (Who'd A Thought It? or Accidentally on Purpose) on African American quilting. Stunning improvisation, like Gee's Bend quilters. These books, important inspiration. The way of working with pattern elusive, how & when the quilter breaks her pattern, creates another rhythm sequence, a parallel way of reading the… no, not parallel, more simultaneous. Maybe. Hard to explain the excitement of the experience. First glance, so simple; then try drawing it, uh-uh-uh, not so simple.
These are the fabrics I have cut so far; will add two pale yellows, one with tiny black triangles patterned on it. Can I discover how these fit?

Time flies.

Forty-eight hours of snow and 3 more tulips to plant. Hopeless, somewhat, because of deer & squirrels.
Nonetheless, there is still time, the ground is not frozen. Two of the bulbs are the yellow variety. Which ones? There were yellow hyacinth bulbs for sale, too. The deer don't eat them. Everyone loves a tulip, I guess.

Returned

Continuing the weekly sketchbooks, though missed one entire week. Above is the cover of Week 2. Gouache works beautifully on covers & pages. Below random pages.

This one illustrates a concept and several percepts, something that fascinated me several weeks ago while thinking about ideas and what they mean to artists. A concept as a collection of percepts…

Weekly sketchbooks

An idea for a weekly sketch book. Make two 5.5 in square books today, the Paulus Berensohn design. The books have 24 pages, so three or four drawings a day to fill a book in a week.


To start, drawing acanthus flourishes copied from Girolamo Dai Libri, this week's find at Norlin. Something so appealing about rolling, curling acanthus leaves. Will also try adding color, gouache if the paper will tolerate it.

Inscriptions

Here's a quote from Tzonis & Giannisi's Classical Greek Architecture: the Construction of the Modern. (This is a stunning book.) On a drinking cup in a child's grave the following inscription:

"[I am] the famous drinking cup of Nestor. Whoever drinks from this cup, straightaway the desire of Aphrodite of the beautiful garland will seize him."

Aphrodite of the beautiful garland. Wow!

Add INSCRIPTIONS to stellae and knotted topo canvas, ideas that might be accumulating as "small, random events early in the process" of the next, possibly path-dependent project…

The Topo Experiments

A detail of the original piece in its burnt sienna phase. It's now white with primer again. Since doing the smaller piece below, an uncertain future opens for this larger two panel piece.

The smaller experimental piece (9 x 13 in) in raw umber; interesting & inconclusive. Pieces like this cause me to notice quotes like Atul Gawande's in the January 26th New Yorker: "With path-dependent processes, the outcome is unpredictable at the start. Small, often random events early in the process are 'remembered,' continuing to have influence later." (p.30) Though path-dependence is a name social scientists have for a pattern of evolution based on past experience, I'm not averse to taking the quote as received information, separate it from context, and apply it, almost as an oracular pronouncement, elsewhere.
But, Gawande continues: "…as you go along, the range of future possibilities gets narrower. It becomes more and more unlikely that you can simply shift from one path to another…" This part needs to be tested, right this moment it seems a dreadful long term pronouncement, if true. Holds up as generally true in the short term, say, in the course of a single painting or a series of works. Many artists radically change course from time to time–or so it seems. What about lifetime to lifetime?

Experiment

Wonder what would happen to tie up canvas as though to tie-dye, but just to set wrinkles? Threw some coins to get a random spread, tied up the canvas, got it wet, and let it dry–thought that might help to set wrinkles (results inconclusive). Later untie the strings and spread out the canvas. Hmmm, looks like a topo map. Priming the canvas flattens the "mountains" a bit. Give it two coats both sides. This takes a couple of days prep. Today rub on the pigment–burnt sienna–very interesting, but not quite the right color. Will re-prime tomorrow & use raw umber so the canvas will look like leather. Check back tomorrow and see.
Oh, a 100yd. roll of canvas arrived. Impossible to move as is (130lbs.) so RS builds a gizmo to roll canvas smoothly onto another roll. Look.

School Starts

Yes, tomorrow in the classroom. Introduce the visual autobiography. More work to do on mine, happily. It's like the "project genealogy" I started once—a tangled web of relationships lap, overlap.

Another panel card. Looks a bit like stone.

Random Research

CU has an extensive art & architecture library–and a bus stop practically at the door, nice when lugging art books. Spend time there when in between things, random research. Today, magazines. Draw pictures of carved conus shell disks from Mauritania and an Malipo-style embroidery motif from south west China. No patience for reading today, just looking and drawing.

Hovering project: make a stele, wood covered with canvas and painted. See in the notations on the sketchbook page a reference to a Peter Doig portrait: can I make a portrait of a place? What would it look like? A Miyazaki spirit? (Received "Spirited Away" as a Xmas gift.) The idea for the stele is a merging of the Earth Altar topo maps from [ARMY] and images of Riera i Aragó's stelae in the book of his work Reira i Aragó: Iconography found at the Trident (independent bookstore, Boulder CO). His work new to me, the bronze islands, the submarines, each in its own formal pool–beautiful. It was reading some text in this book, that I recognize pathos is often a key attribute in art that really moves me. No, it's a mix–of wonder, timelessness, and pathos. Had the idea some weeks ago to make a visual autobiography, a compilation of images that rile me in the best way. The document title is "Silent, Vivid, Blade-like," the closest description of what moves me in art. The first image is Cy Twombly's "Pan" and the second image is Cy Twombly's "Vengeance of Achilles." Even without the title and the literary reference, this one causes a gasp, the image itself seems to carry the outrageous desecration, even though the "image" is utterly symbolic, or perhaps because the image is utterly symbolic. These two are followed by two Cy Twombly sculptures and a Cycladic figure (visibly timeless). More on this project as it develops.

While I'm waiting to re-engage [ARMY], as the season to turns I'm experimenting with panel cards again. This time trying gesso, absorbent ground, and gouache.
Two from this week.

[ARMY] Installation & Performance Anniversary

A year ago, [ARMY] opened at Naropa University's Nalanda Gallery in Boulder CO with the performance of Soldier Cry. Today the "soldiers" are in repose at Mountain Water. They await their next deployment, summer 2009. They'll be set out in this meadow in a grand diamond pattern.
Not able to upload the pdf of the next stage. Email me if you'd like it sent to you. Here is the cover photo.

Trepidation

A new blog, not like swimming: jump in or inch in…
Simply in already.
A few pictures. Ideas, artistic research threads to follow.