Listening to the visual

I'm going on something of a computer fast (for a reason that I'll talk about later) till near the end of this month.... Feel free to leave me a note; I will answer eventually! I also have some new book news that I may be able to talk about soon.

I have a good many friends who are painters, and a number of them live in the space that looks as if it exists after photography and its transformations, after Modernism and its shocks; they participate in the return to figuration, narrative, and realism, but they aren't fully realist in the sense of someone like Jacob Collins or Juliette Aristides. I have an interest in the how and why of the return to realism among so many artists, especially since it parallels the return to meter and rhyme and forms in poetry. Lately I have looked at or listened to videos and podcasts about that resurgence; many of the video/audio pieces below fall into that category but not all. 

In poetry and fiction, we have a sense of the materials, the sound and sense of words--yes, we can be carried beyond the work in some way. We can be lost in sound or story for a time. But art in words is both guide dream and little black marks on the page or, read, aloud, "a mouthful of air"; as readers, we're busy translating and so are in two places at once. Paint can go very far, can become photo-realistic, can fool the eye. Where is the line, how much finish ought there to be, how much should the viewer be aware of the medium? Is some pleasure lost when we lose that sense of brushstrokes and layerings of paint? I suppose the contrast with writing is more the difference between limpidity and roughness or an aureate style.

I'm especially fond of the Suggested Donation series with Tony Curanaj and Ted Minoff, all with the recording engineering (and sometimes co-comments) of musician Jay Braun. I have not found one that is not an interesting listen. Great coming-of-age stories, great turning-of-the-wheel of art toward the future by harnessing tradition, metaphysical flourishes, practical discussion of skills. The psychology of art video is also intriguing.

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A short film by Alvaro Aro about Missouri artist Ali Cavanaugh. (Vimage Studios 2011.) Youtube. Watercolor on kaolin. People often ask me about how I have managed being a poet, novelist, and a mother of three--well, here's a modern-day painter of frescoes with a batch of lively children. Cavanaugh makes compromises, having to use fragments of time and also utilizing photographs of her models. (My version of this also involves bits of time. And concentration in what time I have.) The David Jon Kassan podcast also deals with this problem, as he took care of his son as a baby and has continued to be responsible for him. 

Burton Silverman. Suggested Donation. Episode 31. Ideas of the universal, painterly qualities to the work, self-indulgence in art, artists and family, curators and teachers who think arts started with Cezanne, work that is "halfway" between realism and Modernism, the illusion of self-expression as belonging to Modernism, annihilation of skills as important in Modernism, teachers' attempts to suppress his childhood skills, not becoming a slave to the past, transformation after WWI, declining roles of church and royalty, retrieval of the academic tradition, a type of cloying, retrogressive painting, "the more I know, the less I know," the importance of being unsure, the "itness" of things, etc. He talks about Modernism as exacerbating a feeling of public uncertainty--Modernism's paintings with a lack of story as bound to inhuman environments, corporate mentality, and inhuman environments, and more. Validation, patronage. Witnessing and recording history: illustrating seminal black protests in Alabama in the 60's. A little low in volume but well worth a listen.

Daniel Sprick. Suggested Donation. Episode 32. Daniel Sprick is widely considered one of the leading realist painters. His work is featured in numerous private and public collections including the Denver Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, and the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock.

David Kassan (KAS-san). Suggested Donation. Episode15. "Falling down the stairs and landing on your feet." Skills and weight in painting. (I really like the podcasts that try to grapple with what it is that takes a painting beyond realism to something more--the heft or freight of life, the energy of life.) Lots of interesting talk about contemporary painters outside North America, including various Israeli painters and Antonio López García. Discussion of the difficulties of being the at-home parent and trying to paint.

Exploring the Psychology of Creativity, 2017. "What is creativity? Can we develop it, or is it innate? Watch the conversation between Marc Mayer, Director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada, and Dr. Jordan Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, which took place March 9, 2017 at the National Gallery of Canada." Good conversation, in places closely related to Peterson's lectures on personality.

Suggested Donation: Jacob Collins. Podcast series. Episode 4. http://www.suggesteddonationpodcast.com/blog/2014/4/14/episode. Major figure in the return to realist art. Founder of the Water Street Atelier, Grand Central Academy, and Hudson River Fellowship. For more about Jacob Collins, see Adam Gopnik's "Life Studies" in the New Yorker. Clip from "Life Studies":  Jacob was always trying to strike a decent mean between affirmation of his secret faith that art had been going wrong since the eighteen-sixties and his desire not to get caught up in the reactionary grievance-keeping that disfigured much of the revivalist world he lived in. “You’ll outgrow wanting to draw the world as it is, searching for this beauty, this place where light and the body meet—that was the attitude of most of the art teachers I had,” he went on. “So I had to re-create a world in which I could do the kind of drawing I wanted to do. I wasn’t alone in this. There were quite a few of us trying, and, bit by bit, and book by book, and practice by practice, we tried to remake the world of atelier realism that had been discarded and abandoned.” Over time, he assembled a group of teachers and students and enthusiasts, all given over to the practice of classical drawing from life and plaster casts, and from that nucleus came this studio and then the Grand Central Academy.

Suggested Donation: Juliette Aristides. Podcast series. Episode 20. Instructor of Aristides Classical Atelier at the Gage Academy of Art. Lovely, literate, thoughtful discussion of life, beauty, skills, brokenness, what lasts, and the nature of a life of making art. This one is a real discussion, interesting back and forth, and Aristides is wonderfully able to form her thoughts in words. "Juliette Aristides is a monumental figure in the classical art community. Her . . . books on painting have been hugely influential to a generation of artists . . . ." Issues of investment of self in a time without proper response, the online world as a response to the debased environment, the classical atelier and the narrative arc of education, truth and art, art and the feeling that life matters, a context for work that lasts and has meaning, the ability to think and go deep (vs. online life), the personal encounter with paintings, art as backdrop for real life in earlier times, drawing as meditation and connection with life and self--as an antidote to the remoteness of current life with its online hours, physical beings needing physical connections to a physical world, etc.

Michael Klein. Suggested Donation, Episode 9. Interesting podcast with a painter from rural Minnesota who found his way to New York and Argentina. It reminds me a bit of Makoto Fujimura because he talks about being troubled by beauty and what it is for and resolves the issue some time after he becomes a Christian.

Odd Nerdrum: The Self-portrait. Nerdrum Pictures, 2015.

Odd Nerdrum. Time Water Recollection. Norwegian documentary, 1992. Strange and beautiful, with lots of images of Iceland and Nerdrum's home in Norway. The sub-titles end part-way through, but it's still wonderful to see.

Patricia Watwood, Part 1. Suggested Donation. Podcast series, Episode 3. "We talk about her solo show "Venus Apocalypse", education, influences and her perspective as a female artist."

Peter Trippi on Alma-Tadema. Suggested Donation, Episode 35. This year I saw the beautiful show at The Clark Institute he talks about at one point. His curated Alma-Tadema traveling show (in the Netherlands and Venice and London) sounds wonderful. 

Sharon Sprung. Suggested Donation. Episode 26. Great story about Sharon Sprung at 19 and Harvey Dinnerstein. She says Dinnerstein taught her what it meant to be an artist. A purist. "I'd never seen anybody so immersed in anything." Dan Green taught her skills. Quirky coming-of-age story, with lots of talk about older writers and a keen understanding of her own nature and particular demands. I'm still listening to this one... She's a character, quite stubborn and particular in her desires in how to work. And she's one of many examples of how an early death in the family forges a path in the arts. I find it fascinating that her mother threw away every image of her dead father to protect herself, and later Sharon Sprung became a maker of figurative images. Lots of good talk about teaching, too, and the importance of working from life. She's funny! A real character.

The Nerdrum School. Interview w/ Luke Hillestad (2013)

Two Autumns. London: BBC. I'm fond of Thomas Reidelsheimer's lovely Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time, a great documentary about Goldsworthy in the landscape. If you like that one, try this! Filmed in Scotland and Japan. If hobbits were less satisfied with home and good cooking went on adventures more often, I'm sure they could produce a visual artist like Andy Goldsworthy.

Vincent Desiderio. Suggested Donation, Episode 6. This one is quite good, particularly if you have an interest in art history. Very curious to look at the trajectory of Desiderio's own work. "Vincent Desiderio is one of the leading figurative painters of our time. His work is featured in collections including the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The Walker Art Center among many others. He is a senior critic at the New York Academy of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Vincent has a reputation as one of the leading intellects in figurative art, and he did not disappoint. We are honored to have him join us on Suggested Donation, at the Salmangundi Club in New York City for a fascinating conversation about his work and his deep love for art history, film and philosophy."

Year in Review. Episode 13, Suggested Donations. 2014. Tony Curanaj and Ted Minoff and Jay Braun talk about the podcast. Close attention to one of Tony Curanaj's paintings.

Art that says life matters

See this and more photographs of Juliette Aristides
at The Bay Area Classical Artist Atelier post
about a 2012 workshop with the artist.

This year, the affliction of perpetual curiosity has sent me to podcasts related to the return to classical realism (or whatever you wish to call it) in painting. Perhaps because I have a lot of friends who are painters, perhaps because I'm always aware of the parallel of "art renewal" to the return of forms, meter, and rhyme in poetry, perhaps because seeing paintings has often felt like experience to me, I have been fascinated by people groping their way out of the mainstream, well-supported world of Koons and Emin and Hirst and into the rich world of Titian and Rembrandt and Caravaggio. I like many of the podcasts--they're often, at least in part, coming-of-age stories, and those always have an in-built structure that appeals--but one of them stands out to me. 

I'm recommending Juliette Aristides' conversation with hosts Tony Curanaj and Edward Minoff at Suggested Donation. The chat might be fruitful for you--it's thoughtful, graceful in places (surprising in a podcast), clear on the collision between what's lasting and the technological transformation of the world, exploratory and metaphysical in its aims, and wonderfully deep-diving (to borrow Melville's word for the profound when it's captured in a net of words.)

Who is Juliette Aristides? "Juliette Aristides is a Seattle based painter who seeks to understand and convey the human spirit through art. Aristides is the founder and instructor of the Classical Atelier at the Gage Academy of Fine Art in Seattle, WA.  Juliette teaches workshops both nationally and internationally. Author of Classical Drawing Atelier, Classical Painting Atelier, Lessons in Classical Drawing, and Lessons in Classical Painting, published by Watson-Guptill, NY." --aristidesart.com

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Eventually I'll post a list of my favorite podcasts / videos about painters and visual artists. I try to listen to one every time I walk the treadmill, and that grows more frequent once winter comes to Cooperstown....

Curiouser and curiouser

The fabulous Miss Yo-Yo!

I've written seven pieces so far for a collaborative project that will result in a solo show in September, one that mixes visual arts (pen and ink, with colored inks) with poems and stories. Though I can't say anything much about it in public now--because we all love good surprises, and I can't spoil this one--I will be writing about it more privately in The Rollipoke, no. 3, for those of you who are subscribed.

It's one of the odder series of works I have committed to doing, and has certain challenges that are unusual. I was invited to do this work by Detroit-born painter Yolanda Sharpe (who also sings with Glimmerglass Opera and is the highly successful head of the SUNY-Oneonta art department, so she's formidable--see her work at yolandasharpe.com) and am finding it interesting and sometimes amusing.
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You Asked, no. 14: Spiring up from leaf litter: Mary Bullington and collage

Amid the rubble.
All images via Mary Boxley Bullington.

In response to a request to interview some of my painter friends, I have been interviewing Mary Boxley Bullington. As she, in turn, insisted on interviewing me, a part of the You asked series is composed of our questions to each other. Soon I'll post an index to our conversations, as well as some information about how to see more of Mary's work, and how to get in touch with her. (Note the close, with a reference back to an earlier post with the Tarot card of the Fool heading over the cliff.)

Youmans: I think of the floor of your collage studio as leaf litter--a compost composed of dropped fragments that is continually being stirred up and giving birth to something new. Can you talk about your materials and method, as well as your sense of having a call to be an artist?

Bullington: Years ago, my brother Andy, coming into a studio paved with my collage scraps, said, "You could make a whole series just using this stuff, and call it Floor Art." And I do! Here we go back into the idea of the materiality of my work, and how this affects the process of making it. But first, a definition: Collage = any work of art made primarily by cutting or tearing and adhering papers and/or textiles to a support, using the basic principles of design to create unity and surprise. (The word collage derives from the French word coller, to paste.) Collage is made out of 2-D material cut or torn, arranged, and pasted into place. It's a very forgiving technique in that you can cut out the bad and save the good, and also, a highly morphic way to work, because you're constantly moving bits and pieces around, sometimes completely changing appearances and structures as you do.

Lion collograph to make collage pieces.

For the last 20 years, one hallmark of my collages has been that I create virtually all the materials I use in them, by painting, drawing, and mono-printing rag paper that can be easily glued flat to a painting on another piece of paper or to a more rigid support. But this method of working evolved gradually. When I started out in the 1980s, I made my collages from sheets of commercially colored papers, especially a paper called Color-Aid whose surface is beautifully silkscreened in a solid color including every hue, tint, and shade in the design spectrum.

Lion early on, with human mask.

I began to shift away from using commercially colored papers in my collage-making after the summer of 1986, when I rewarded myself for passing my oral exams at Indiana University by buying gouache. I started painting abstract designs on paper and incorporating these paintings into my collages. After I moved from Bloomington to North Carolina in 1987, I stopped making collages for several years to concentrate on teaching writing at UNC-Greensboro and researching my dissertation in medieval lit. Then, one day, circa 1990, I got mad and pulled a large, very bad painting on paper of a naked lady out from under the bed, dismembering and rearranging her until she became a much smaller, much more compact and much more interesting figure of a man in a coat and tie. I called it "The King," because it featured only the shoulders and head, with a tragic face wreathed in a crown of flames. I recognized immediately that this collage was far superior to anything I'd ever done—and represented a new direction: I could not only fit painted papers into a design, but make the entire collage out of a single painting by cutting it up and reinventing it.

Lion, approximately stage three, on olive ground.

This became for me and is still a major modus operandi. I find the materials I create often inspire invention and help me generate new work. Ideas usually come either while I'm painting or drawing freely, or while I'm looking at a new painting on paper to see where I can take it—and whether cutting it up and collaging will add dimension and interest, or will just ruin it. And often, as you say, I get ideas when sorting through my scraps. (In addition to the floor, and small boxes and baskets of scraps, I have 4 waist-deep hampers in which I put my left-over cuttings.) Now and then I'll make up a game to play with myself using scraps: Mary, pick up 10 pieces off the floor and put them on top of that painting over there. Then I'll add a new rule: You have to tear the pieces, not cut them; you must throw them, not place them. You can't use any blue. Etc.

Lion's head

Trial and error is my mainstay. Making a collage is often a bit like going to the optometrist's office and trying different lenses: Is this one better? Or is this one better? Half the time I don't know! I'll spend all day— two or three days—laying out a collage, then come into the studio, look at it, and shake all the pieces off and start over. Not very efficient, this method! And there are all sorts of other inefficiencies. One of the problems with collage is that it has to lie flat until it's glued, so you don't see it in the perspective that you will when it's hanging on a wall. Not unusual to find, after glueing a collage down, that a whole section is wrong—or that it hasn't got enough "air." Ten days work down the drain. If I'm patient enough, sometimes I can cut it up and redo it on a fresh ground. But then there are also the lucky accidents! A fragment slips from its place to a much better place. A little abstract scrap falls over a face and I see she now has a wonderful scowl now that I would never have thought to put there. Once I photographed a newly finished abstract piece, and damn! when the image came up on the computer screen, I saw it was a lion—a wonderful, compact little lion. Been working on it for days and never saw that lion before, but there he was, by jiminy! Now I had to work to enable other people to see him! (And all the while, a little voice whispered in my ear, "But he will never sell!")

Standing His Ground. 2011-2015

To be a full time, fully committed artist, I think you have to be more than a little obsessive-compulsive--and a little crazy. Would a sane person commit all her time to and pin her economic life—now and future--on the whims of a market that may or may not care a fig about collaged lions? Or Nazis? Right now that's one of the things I'm working on—Nazis. And I find I'm channeling my favorite German Expressionists as I do. (But they will never sell!) How dare you take such folly seriously? How dare you do it full time? Wouldn't it be wiser to have another job to provide real income? Well, yes, it would. But I know from experience that if I hedge my bets, I will never be but so-good of an artist.

"Who Peynted the Lion?"

And then, on top of all this, there's always the possibility—the probability, really—that the work will fail. An artist has to be willing to make some stuff that's seriously BAD—I mean, god-awful. Not on purpose, mind you. Again, my brother Andy, a full-time musician, says it as well as anyone: "You're never going to do anything really good unless you are willing to stink up the room--completely stink it up!" So sometimes you work up a rage, and then you work in a rage. Very few artists talk about this, but it's true. Other times you work in terror. When I find myself going out on a limb and getting scared, I will start talking to myself: "Do I have any idea what I'm doing? NO!!!" "Okay, then, let’s do it some more!" Sometimes things go bust—you ruin something good, and it's really not retrievable. The best you can do for now is shove it into a drawer for a month—or for a year or two or three. Or you have to cut out the part or parts that might be usable and pitch the rest. And off and on, if you are growing as an artist, your eye will change—your taste will change. I have several photo files labeled "Work Destroyed for No Good Reason." Almost every time I troll through my photo folders, I find new images to put in the "Destroyed" albums. Very discouraging. But you can't let it defeat you. After all, you chose this life, didn't you? You knew you were crazy, didn't you? But the truth is, Marly, on some level, we didn't choose this life—it chose us. But we did choose against common sense to listen to the inner call—and to obey it.

That obedience—and the discipline to work in its traces—is part of the ethic of art-making. When I look back on the last 20 years or so, I realize I became a visual artist basically on a hunch—a pretty good hunch, maybe, and obviously a better hunch than becoming a medievalist turned out to be. Or being a poet, for that matter. Because, as you said, Marly, in your answer to my question about the Artist-as-Fool in The Book of the Red King, the Fool—that is, the Artist--knows he's found his true home when "he becomes fruitful." For that, I found myself willing to step heedlessly off the cliff into thin air.

The mess on Mary's studio floor.

You Asked, no. 7: Inviting the soul

Bullington-Youmans interview party, continued. In response to a request to interview some of my painter friends, I have been interviewing Mary Boxley Bullington. As she, in turn, insisted on interviewing me, a part of the You Asked series will be composed of our questions to each other.

Mary Boxley Bullington,
"Kells." (a.k.a., "Carpet Page.")
Acrylic and gesso on paper with collage,
31" x 22." 2015.
Available at The Art Store,
a gallery in Charleston, West Virginia

Youmans: 
In the comments, you said to Paul Digby, "I was bemoaning the slack time in my process to an older artist friend, who said, simply, 'You are not a robot.' This helped. But in the midst of summer or winter doldrums, I sometime wish I had a bot I could send into the studio--to clean it up, if nothing else!" Don't you think that time that often appears wasteful to others is essential to the making of art? If you agree, can you say why?

Bullington: 
I absolutely agree. Walt Whitman says, "I loaf and invite my soul, / I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass" (Song of Myself). Creating anything good requires down time as well as studio time or time at the typewriter. Down time is not, for me anyway, time in the grocery store or sorting and washing clothes; it is not lunching with friends. I also need real segments of time when I'm not creating and not doing anything that looks constructive. Not because I'm thinking up great ideas. I'm not. I'm just letting the well refill.

How? For me, that's mostly time I'm going to spend reading, or looking at pictures in books, and napping. I know I ought to walk more, especially in the woods around here, but I've gotten out of the habit, and in cold or hot weather, I just don't want to. It's important to spend some time every day or almost every day, even if it's only an hour, in the studio shuffling collage pieces around or using a paint brush at random. This is free play, and it's the only way I know to discover something new.

"Where is My Big Toe?"  Ink on card stock, 5" x 7"
"Doodling has its pleasures, and so does looking at doodling!"
-MBB, from private messaging
Click to look closer.

I also need, especially before I buckle down to work after a hiatus, to just plain loaf. I like to go to what Mama used to call "early attic" antique malls and browse. Don't have to buy anything, don't even have to be looking for anything. But the proximity to old things—china, furniture, dolls, tools, even bric-a-brac—inevitably brings memories of my family and my grandmother's house—her "cool room" where she kept pickles and jams--and her kitchen, but also her formal rooms, her elegant wall paper and curtains, the straw carpets she put down in summer, the waxing of the floors in the fall before putting the wool rugs back down. This doesn't trigger ideas for art per se. It just lets me remember things and times that went into making—ME. Sometimes these excursions make me sad, and I'll have to leave. But mostly these reveries fill me with gratitude for the people I've known so well and lost, and for the rich textures of my early life.

"Human Kind Among Others"  Ink on card stock, 5" x 7"

Art books also get their due. Over the years I've built up a decent art library—and I'm still always on the looking-out for more books. I can spend an hour just looking at pictures, sometimes analytically, often not so much. Photographs also help—or anything that I find I'm interested in. Last year, it was archaeology and the early history of man. More recently I've begun an immersion study of Hitler's rise. I'm reading William Shirer again. I went into an "antiquey" place thinking to find a new art book—and I found Rembrandt, and some other good stuff, but what do I buy? Seig Heil! An Illustrated History of Germany From Bismark to Hitler (1974) by Stefan Lorant, the man who basically invented photojournalism. I read a little Shirer, then I pore over the black and white photos, mostly unremarkable in quality, in Lorant's great big book.

Am I wasting time? Yep! But I think the key to the constructive wasting of time is to let myself "loaf at my ease," inviting my soul to wander and contemplate whatever the hell it wants. My favorite Dr. Seuss when I was a child was McElligot's Pool: "'Young Man,' laughed the farmer, 'You're sort of a Fool./ You'll never catch a fish/ In McElligot's Pool.'" And the boy who is fishing goes off on a riff that includes journeys down subterranean rivers from the Bahamas to the North Pole. I may or may not get a single picture out of the grim reading reading I'm doing right now, nor out of studying Lorant's Seig Heil, but I also know I ignore my natural inclinations and interests, however arbitrary, at my own artistic peril.

"Birds of a Feather" Ink on card stock, 5" x 7"
Click to catch the smallest birds....

The Book of the Phoenix, 1: 1-40: The Prophet Fed by a Raven

Clive Hicks-Jenkins has posted a piece I wrote for his big, beautiful monograph, a knockout book with chapters by Simon Callow, Andrew Green, Rex Harley, Kathy Koja, Anita Mills, Montserrat Prat, Jacqueline Thalmann, Damian Walford Davies, and me.

Lund Humphries monograph

This fragment from my chapter is channeling the modes and techniques of biblical poetry. It is a kind of reply to one of Clive's paintings, "The Prophet Fed by a Raven."

And if you want more Clive-and-Marly interaction, slide down one post in Artlog, and you'll find his response to a recent post, plus remarks from us both in the comment section. Growing up, God, Spirit, ruin, building a world, and more...

Journey's End

If you come here often, you probably know that I have a good many friends who are painters--not sure how that happened, but I enjoy it and get as much or more out of talking about the visual arts as I do from talking about writing. In fact, I'm going to meet up with a couple of painter friends for lunch today... I tend to be more interested in talking about arts other than my own in some ways, as I think about writing quite enough. And if you know those things about me, you may also know that I have collaborated a good bit with painters and other artists, especially with Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

Here's a poem I wrote about one of his early paintings, "Journey's End." It was written as a little gift for Clive, and it appears in The Foliate Head, the collection of my poems dedicated to him. In many of his inside/outside pictures, the foreground is a still life containing treasured, meaningful items, while in the background (often seen through open curtains, as in the stage, so important to Clive's history) a mysterious Welsh landscape appears. Items tend to repeat, much as we see actors in different plays. In this early picture, a sense of human presence on the stage of the world and a combining of still life with landscape already are important. The cup portrayed here belonged to his late father. The tower (Tretower) was the place to which Clive retreated for some years after breaking from his life in the theatre. The poem begins by musing over what seems missing--the strong narrative and bright, intense color of many of his later works. It glances at the painting, moves to consider story and imagines the painting as a kind of fount of possible stories related to his father and the father's death, and at last rests in the mystery of the picture.

Happy birthday, Clive! Slightly belated...

THE BLUE MARCHES

                  “. . . this early painterly approach to objects

                  can be seen in Journey’s End, the little still-life/landscape

                  painting of my dad’s tea mug standing in front

                  of Tretower Castle.”  –Clive Hicks-Jenkins

There’s nothing here bejeweled with twig and flower,

No wolfish fur that burns as if a kiln

Had been flung wide to let in sprays of salt,

And most of all, no story, wings, or saint.

Instead there is the seepage of a blue

Not twilight:  low, continual dim glow

Dispersed from borderlands beyond this world.

So here is landscape as the stillest life,

So here is still life hunkered in the grass,

Estranged from lamplit houses, grown outscale.

There’s nothing here but cup and keep and tree,

And tree resembles keep, and keep is tree

Truncated—cup is stump of leaning tree.

No teller yet, unless the tale be one

Older than the famed white book of Rhydderch,

Older than the red of Hergest, older

By far than these… Fetch me a magic fruit

So I can taste its glistening cells and gulp

The stubborn words that linger out of reach.

In blueing light, a father’s mug might be

The grail, might be Welsh cauldron, wombed with life,

Might over-brim with death-drink, colorless.

There’s nothing but a shadow in the cup!

Its clipper ship in sail is doldrum-glazed,

Forgets the fragrance of darjeeling seas.

The motte, a mound of good Welsh earth, was his,

As was the tower vacant to the sky,

The kingdom known as Powys long ago,

And all the rainy borderland of blue—

All things that flee and hide in borderlands

Between the earth and sky belonged to him.

But now he has passed through that realm of dreams

And left you wondering by hills of earth,

And long you’ll muse, and long you’ll meditate

And never understand the world you brushed

Across that sheet of paper:  world where tree

Is keep, and keep is tree, and cup can loom

As high as high Tretower or a tree.

                       —Journey’s End, 1999


Prior mentions of Journey's End--

Marly Youmans / The Palace at 2:00 a.m.: "Like a tower"

Mar 07, 2013

Journey's end. "Journey's End" with Tretower castle by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. You can find something I wrote about this piece here. Poem as tower. Unterecker, A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats (p. 107): By staring at any ...

http://thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/

Marly Youmans / The Palace at 2:00 a.m.: Clive at The ...

Sep 01, 2011

7. Both those little paintings show Tretower,. where Clive hid himself in a cold chrysalis. between his life in the theatre and his life as a painter. The larger one is "Journey's End,". showing Clive's father's mug in the foreground.

http://thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/

Portals and awakenings

Talking to Afghanistan, oil, 2013

The portals of Ashley Norwood Cooper

If you're in the Otsego area of New York and have an interest in the region, the arts, or visual narrative, please come to an opening honoring Ashley Norwood Cooper at the Wilbur Mansion this Friday, 5-8 p.m. This Community Arts Network of Oneonta event hails the start of a solo show that features paintings from Ashley's new deployment series.

An interesting departure from Ashley's prior handling of paint, the mode of the paintings implicitly contrasts the smoothness of our world of screens and flattened-out images with a dramatic, built-up surface.  These narrative pieces make ordinaryAmerican life strange--they are full of little portals (via held iPads and iPhones) to the other side of the world, and are themselves windows onto the daily duties and longings from the daily life of a mother and wife in middle-class America.

detail from Washing Dishes, oil, 2014
This one also involves portals and seeing across space--
see the figure (one of two) in the window across the way.
Also, the mother becomes an image reflected on the
surface of the kitchen window--rather like the iPad/iPod
portal surfaces in other paintings.

Made during Shelby Cooper's deployment to Afghanistan, the paintings suggest the simultaneous closeness and distance that afflicts all of us in an electronic landscape, but which is a particular, sometimes painful part of the life of a family with a soldier on the other side of the world. Painter and mother of three, Ashley Norwood Cooper has turned the difficult time of separation into art. Notice that these subjects--narrative images of the military, and in particular the military family at home--are simply not a part of the accepted vocabulary of American painting in our time. I'd love to see the paintings end up as a collection in some often-visited setting because they speak strongly of and to the world of soldiers and their families, and also

Coming Home, oil, 2013

because they are the work of a painter who is once again re-making the way she sees and apprehends our world through paint.

If you're in the area, please come!

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A recommendation from Ashley--

Here's an essay Ashley suggested to me this morning, relating to many things we both find of interest. Jordan Wolfson discusses a lot of issues that our little IAM satellite group has talked about: the lack of "a stable purpose" of art in our era; the lack of correlation between achievement and regard when the artist's place is often established by how well he or she can interact with market forces; "secularization and fragmentation" as leading to a landscape where it's hard to achieve a place. Wolfson grapples with the question of how the arts function in our time, their "use and utility." He examines art's effort to awaken us--to take "raw material and somehow charge it with presence," "consciousness becoming aware of itself." Here are a few clips of note:

On the one hand, a painting is a flat two-dimensional object, with its surface texture and color shapes. On the other hand, a painting offers the possibility of a three-dimensional experience, the illusion of moving into space and discovering form. Stability and instability. Fact and imagination. Actual and fictive. It is this twin role, and its simultaneity, that gives painting such power. Real and unreal. Real and more real. Painting, through the coexistence of two seemingly opposite experiences, interwoven into an actual unity, may provide the receptive adult the possibility of moving from an experience of fragmentation into an experience of wholeness and integration, not only within oneself but with the world at large.

Clement Greenberg got painting’s essence exactly wrong. It isn’t the stability of painting’s flatness—its “ineluctable flatness”; it is the inextricable unity of painting’s impossible flatness/fullness, stability/instability, stillness/movement. This is life.

Painting does have a necessary and ancient function; it isn’t to depict the world—it is to weave the world; or rather, it is to reveal and make visible the actual weave of the world, the weave that already exists.

I believe that what I am trying to describe here is actually an ancient way of looking at painting. Images carry power. It is only with the rise and development of our secular culture with its accompanying market economy that painting has found itself delegated to a luxury commodity that is devoid of any real use and value in our society beyond sophisticated decoration, investment and chic. This is not particularly the plight of painting—so much in our culture has been radically reduced to a flattened materialist, financial definition—the logical endpoint in the Story of Separation. But the act of painting carries much greater power than that. And we need to re-describe this activity, re-imagine it, in order to sharpen its power and focus; in order for painting to more fully participate and take its place in our global regeneration.

Read the whole thing here.

Wolfson is not alone in thinking about dead ends and regeneration, not just in painting but across the arts; it's something that a lot of us have been discussing. For one example, it's part of why Makoto Fujimura founded International Arts Movement "to promote conversation and meditations on culture, art, and humanity," and then Fujimura Institute, which describes itself as "defying fractured, fragmented modern perspectives, the Fujimura Institute encourages artists and thinkers to collaborate, cooperate and inspire their audiences to piece together a whole view of the world." It's why so many artists are turning away from what makes for worldly success in a blockbuster world and reaching back to old skills and tools in order to rethink and re-make an art for today.