A crumb of dust

George Herbert, who left us gold...
"To be a window, through thy grace."
St. Andrew's, Bemerton, Wiltshire.

Ash Wednesday.

Flakes of snow falling out of the ash-light.

As I am dust, and to dust I will return, I started off the day properly with tea (needed to moisturize that dust in the meantime!) and a rich, metaphysical poem from the marvelous Anglican poet-saint, George Herbert (1593-1633), writing of "a crumb of dust." Some poems are touchstones that tell the gold a poem can be--how large and bold and beautiful. This is one.


The Temper (I)

How should I praise thee, Lord! How should my rhymes
     Gladly engrave thy love in steel,
     If what my soul doth feel sometimes,
          My soul might ever feel!

Although there were some forty heav'ns, or more,
     Sometimes I peer above them all;
     Sometimes I hardly reach a score;
          Sometimes to hell I fall.

O rack me not to such a vast extent;
     Those distances belong to thee:
     The world's too little for thy tent,
           A grave too big for me.

 Wilt thou meet arms with man, that thou dost stretch
      A crumb of dust from heav'n to hell?
      Will great God measure with a wretch?
           Shall he thy stature spell?

 O let me, when thy roof my soul hath hid,
      O let me roost and nestle there:
      Then of a sinner thou art rid,
           And I of hope and fear.

 Yet take thy way; for sure thy way is best:
      Stretch or contract me thy poor debtor:
      This is but tuning of my breast,
           To make the music better.

 Whether I fly with angels, fall with dust,
      Thy hands made both, and I am there;
      Thy power and love, my love and trust,
           Make one place ev'rywhere.

Glimmer and shine--

Recognize these, anyone? I am a fan of stained glass and the poetry of Henry Vaughan (and especially his marvelous "The World"), and so I'm excited to see that Clive Hicks-Jenkins has started working on a window commission and is using images some images he made for my poetry collection The Foliate Head and upcoming novel, Glimmerglass. And the way he is handling the text points back to the lettering on Thaliad, The Foliate Head, and Glimmerglass. I love to think that the books we worked on together will be a secret subtext to the window...

Glass for Good Friday: Ken Carder

Here are my pictorial musings about the glasswork of Ken Carder, who came to glass by a path through painting and sculpture. Ken Carder developed a method of glassmaking that unites the two traditions into something new, using stencils and "painting" fine ground colored glass over sculptural castings. Pictures were taken at North Carolina Glass 2012 (October 28, 2012 - February 1, 2013, Western Carolina University) with my tiny digital camera. I love these small shows where one can discover new artists, and where the gallery allows you to record a visit with diary-like photographic notes. 

Alas, I did not record all three titles, but this one is "OH NOVEMBER," 2011,
glass and metal 30" x 12" x 9"

Ken Carder: "Over the past 30 years or so I have done my best to develop a method of using instinct rather than formula in my approach. This leads to less predictable outcomes and much greater room for original invention."

Quotes drawn from North Carolina Glass 2012: In Celebration of 50 Years of Studio Glass in America, a catalogue

for The Fine Art Museum at Western Carolina University

Take a look at this one.

See more work and a biography at the Asheville Art Museum site.

Ken Carder: "I think of my entire body of work as an ongoing theatre piece that runs 

parallel to the world I inhabit. The characters and sets sometimes reflect my world but need 

not adhere to any particular rules or fall victim to any constrictions of logic."

Glass for Palm Sunday

Robert Stephan is a glassman born in California but now resident in Western North Carolina--a great place for arts and traditional crafts. The pieces shown below were part of a show at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina Glass 2012 (the pictures snapped with my little pocket Canon.) In graduate school, he worked with Kent Ipsen; earlier he taught himself the basics of how to work with hot glass "with a furnace I constructed out of an old 55-gallon steel drum." His sculptures are in collections at the Corning Museum of Glass, the Mint Museum, the Chrysler Museum, and others.

At the Blue Spiral 1 gallery site, his work is described this way: "Robert Stephan’s glass sculptures illustrate the infinite possibilities that light, transparency, and iridescence can be used to create vivid color and subtle texture. Stephan’s glass encompasses a variety of techniques including the application of high-tech optical filter coatings. These are added to the surfaces and/or interiors of his blown, carved and laminated glass sculptures. The coatings produce color shifts where one color is reflected and another transmitted."

I thought Robert Stephan a good choice for the day because of his stance toward his art. In the catalogue to the show, he describes his goals: "It's my desire to involve the viewer in exploring the interior/exterior design. I see the chromatics and configurations as a reflection of a redeemed creation with its order and vibrant energy, from God who thought it good to give beauty to humanity."

Abundance, creation, art--

Detail of "Spectral Reflections" by Robert Stephan,
from "North Carolina Glass: In Celebration of 50 Years of Studio Glass in America"
The Fine Art Museum, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, North Carolina

I've been reading portions of saints Athanasius, Augustine, and Maximus the Confessor--have found much of it interesting, very different from our own day. The early church was a bit too busy with persecution and heresy to focus on art, though Augustine has wonderful things to say about the act of creation by God and about gifts and the perception of the beautiful.

The lovely thing that he says about the nature of creation is that it comes from God's abundance. Once creation exists, it needs--human beings need--to move closer to the fount of things, to "the Fountain of Life" in order to be filled with light and "given perfection, splendour, and bliss." To draw close to the light and fragrance and beauty of the creator is to "cry out in joy, confessing your glory, like a man exultant at a feast." A greater abundance gives rise to our abundance.

And isn't that what we feel about art--the best of our art, if it is not some dreary, tweedling thing of pretension and faux intellection and rejection of beauty--that it comes from a great spill of feeling, a waterfall of light that flashes right through us? Creation is a gift, born in abundance and the desire to make.