Sky/Water

Westmoreland Park, 12/29/09. 5:29 pm

Charles Burchfield affects vision

The first painter I fell head over heels in love with was Charles Burchfield (1893-1967).  His palette makes me swoon.

As a teenager I spent countless afternoons at the public library with a now out-of-print copy of a book filled with MANY reproductions of his paintings.  I can’t help but think that looking at his work has changed the way I see nature, and the way I look at paintings.  The man himself is interesting- a one time wallpaper designer turned full-time painter.  Friends with Edward Hopper.  An avid sketcher, doodler, journal writer… his work includes drawings and watercolors of architectural scenes and landscapes.  My favorite works are the transcendental landscapes- the brilliant, emotionally evocative nature scenes, swirling with abstract symbologies representing various kinds of ecstatic energies. Whenever I show his work to students I often hear the word “psychedelic,” which is somehow to be expected.  Not to invoke a cheese-ball phrase, but I suspect that Burchfield was just high on life. His work is inspired in part by on what Burchfield called “the healthy glamour of everyday life.”   The way that he portrays the everyday nature around him shows a deep openness to seeing on a different level: a visceral, emotional level.  If seeing is a large part of the artistic process for visual artists, then honing and shaping the way one sees is a skill and a discipline to be intentionally shaped, especially if we are not born with any extra special visionary powers.  I know I am not the only person to suspect that his work is almost shamanistic in its transportive effect.   It’s enough to say that his work has permanently changed the way I see everything.

Currently, in a show at the Hammer at UCLA, called “Heatwaves in a Swamp,” selected paintings, drawings, and letters have been mounted by curator/artist Robert Gober.  Sadly, I won’ be able to attend the show, but have enjoyed the catalog.  I’m glad Burchfield is once again getting some well-deserved attention as his work appears relevant  to contemporary issues.  Like Georgia O’Keeffe’s early watercolors, the renewed interest in his work is well-timed.  That said- to me- his work is now and always will be pure magic.

Charles Burchfield, The Insect Chorus, 1917. If you are lucky enough to be in LA... go see his work right now! NOW!

In-between time, distractions, and the subtle

My birthday was a few weeks ago.  Birthdays seem to be an opportunity to feel a little more introspective, as inevitably, time is marked, reflections on the past year are made, collected.  Three topics I’m contemplating:

1. starting new work

2. the power of a subtle practice

3. silence and distraction

STARTING NEW WORK It’s been several months since finishing and showing my last, most recent body of work.  And since then I have been experimenting in the studio, reading and researching several subjects, and generally just using a lot of Arches hot press paper.  I have no major revelations I need to share here – rather- I’d like to acknowledge of the power of endings and beginnings.  Taking stock of what is working and what is not.  The fearfulness and joy when everything needs to be reinvented and redefined.  As a Sagittarius, as an artist, this is a well-known part of the creative cycle.  It’s the time when one could possibly feel the most vulnerable, yet, if you frame it just right- it is extraordinarily exhilarating.  I think of  this time as the part of the process when I am trying to find the right question(s) to ask.  It’s a good time to read, to look around a lot, to walk and think.  Or swim and think.  Metaphorically, I am opening all the doors.  All of the windows too.  I’m making lists, charting connections.  I’m finding humility in so many stacks of drawings and paintings that do not ask the right question, and gaining small sips of comfort from the one or two that begin to take on the complexity, the beauty, and the emotional tone of what I am compelled to explore.  I do not have the right question yet, but I have utter faith that it is in the process of articulating itself to me.  Here it comes…

a beginning, a sketch that might be something more.

THE POWER OF A SUBTLE PRACTICE: Sometimes I think I could write a book on what yoga has given me, but I’m not a yogini in the true sense.  I will always be a novice.  I feel like I use yoga too much for self gain to be a true yogini.  I’m far from being an expert- as I’m certainly stiff and inflexible most of the time.  Regardless- the most exciting recent discovery I have made is in part due to the fabulous classes I have been attending the past few years at a local studio.  What I have experienced there is the slowest, deepest, most subtle postures I have ever been led through.  When I first began doing yoga as a 20-something it was mostly about fitness, getting in shape, that sort of thing.  But the classes I have had the pleasure of attending these past few years have offered me a look into something very different from the exterior-centric, uber-bendy yoga of so many trendy, mirrored studios.  There are no mirrors in this yoga studio, which initially was odd to me, and now I see as a truly brilliant way to retrain focus, or redirect focus to an internal place.  It’s enough to say that every class has brought me to a place of subtle noticing.  Strength, grace, flexibility- all of these things can happen with time, I believe, I hope.  But a greater gift has been the gift of slowness.  I have MILES and mile to go- and training myself to be more patient is a big part of it.  Again, it’s a beginning.

SILENCE AND DISTRACTION: A year or so ago I decided to have more silence in my life.  I made a few decisions.  I stopped using a Walkman or an iPod on walks, and frankly now it is hard to even imagine wanting to have one.  There is enough noise in my mind without adding another layer of sound.  It’s not always fun to be without the distraction of music, but I’m convinced there must be some reward to just listening to your own thoughts.  When I swim laps, I listen to the water move around my head.  The air as it comes in, and out, bubbling and popping around me.  I watch the figure designating my lane number. (“5″ is my favorite.)  And when I work in the studio, I am trying to work without music.  This has been the most challenging vow to uphold- and I have not been very successful.  Most of the time I come back to listening to music, to propel myself, to measure time.  And perhaps that is what is significant: without music I completely lose track of time.  It’s happened several times that many minutes slip away without my noticing that the music has stopped.  I’ll look up from whatever I’m working on, and find that it’s quiet.  Then I see that I am hovering around a sense of boredom or maybe it is better described as a sense of uneasiness- the fear of being without distraction.  And it feels like a test.  So my goal for this coming year is to hold on to that silence just a little longer.  Just a little bit longer.  I’ll report back next birthday.

Moon, Bird, More Cold

12.1.09- I opened my window and saw

In memory of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

When my grandmother was alive, she would call me every Thanksgiving morning and ask if I was watching the parade, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, that is.  And I’d say, “of course!”  She loved the parade.  Loved it.

As a child, there was something magical about watching this live event simultaneously with the whole country alongside all of those people on the streets of that far away big city- a city I always wanted to go to, (especially after seeing Manhattan and Annie Hall.)  As a teenager I’d watch the parade mostly to make fun it, yet secretly wonder how incredible it would be to BE THERE.  In NEW YORK.  The BIG APPLE. Since that time I have spent time in Manhattan.  I know it’s a magical place, but a very different place from the streets festooned with giant Snoopys and Garfields.  A much more complicated place, less full of syncopation.

But the parade has never really changed.  It has remained true to itself- all of these years.  It’s one of those spectacles that is shamelessly commercial, gaudy, and too long. yet, despite its flaws, watching the parade for my family has been a yearly event.  As an adult, I grew into sort of half-watching it, as I’d cook and get ready for the day, always thinking of how my grandma would react to this float or that song, even while the minor celebrities that guest host the event have become more and more distant from my frame of reference.  And the musical numbers have seemed more dated, and less quaint, or even worse- they seem as if they are trying too hard- with skimpy outfits and risqué camera angles.

But despite these cracks in the surface, the parade is what it is.  A pinnacle of all that is hokey and American.  That’s why I am going to miss it this year.  And that is why my grandmother enjoyed it.

You see, my household never “switched to digital.”  We really have not missed getting several crappy broadcast channels… until this week.  I don’t want television badly enough to pay for cable.  It seems to huge an investment for several hours of programming that I’ll watch in my pajamas while roasting yams. But it feels wrong to let this week go by without acknowledging why this ritual was special for us, for me and my grandma.

So, in my grandmother’s honor, I’ll list all the sights I suspect I’ll be missing:

• high school marching bands from states I’ve never been to
• huge inflatable cartoon characters held by small platoons of bundled up folks waving
• scripted casual banter between minor stars who look cold
• several floats that reference toys that can be currently purchased, followed by Toys R Us commercials
• sneak peaks from current “Broadway Musicals” featuring tap dancing and singing by people wearing outfits that look as if they offer no warmth, you see their breath emerging in shot white bursts
• shots of the crowd looking excited and cold, bored?  waiting?
• shots from above showing the parade route, narrating the route to the television audience as if every one watching has some kind of intimate knowledge of the streets of Manhattan
• talk from the main hosts about what they’ll be dong this fine day
• inEVITABLY some kind of children’s choir featuring several hundred youngsters from around the country wearing brightly colored sweatshirts all with the same logo, lip syncing to some kind of feel-good, pre-recorded pop song, many of the kids look tired, or hyper, or pink and just JAZZED UP
• a float with the Sesame Street gang, looking a little older, making you feel even older, surrounded by lots of new muppets and multi-cultural kids
• the Radio City Rockettes.  Yes.  There are still Rockettes.  Weird, huh?
• more banter about the weather
• and boatloads of other mediocre, dated, mainstream, capitalist, cornball sights that fail to reckon with the complex identity of contemporary America

So you can see why I will miss this fine tradition.  I really will.  But not enough to bother leaving my living room to watch it.  I know what I’ll be missing.

Heron Sightings Return with the increasing Darkness and a slice of poem by Nerval

Respect the spirit that moves in beasts:
Every flower a ghost that opens to Nature,
Every alloy harbors the secrets of love;
“Everything is sentient,” & everything can change you,…

- from Gilded Verse, part of The Chimeras, a series of poems by Gerard de Nerval

The Heron is back. Cold and fog prevail.

 

Silence.

When 911 happened, I was in the second week of being a professor at a small college on the north coast of California.  I was teaching drawing and digital imaging.  On that morning, I was not sure if I was supposed to come in to teach, so I did.  I remember saying to my first class of the day that it just did not feel right to be there, talking about things like line and gesture drawing.  I told my students they were welcome to work in the classroom, but that I could not get it together.  I had to hang back a little, and wait and see what was really happening.  I did not know what to think.

The beach was strangely quiet those next few days post-911.  No air traffic meant a deeper kind of silence than we knew could be possible. I remembered something Leighton Pierce told me when I was studying at University of Iowa- that there is no more true silence in this world.  Electronic devices, planes, and cars have made it nearly impossible to ever record anything in the field with a true empty quiet in the background.  Naturalists bemoan this challenging dilemma- this noise pollution that is unrelenting and completely ubiquitous.  When you record on sound for video or film, you often take a small recording, like 3 minutes is best, but 30 seconds will do, of something they call room tone.  Room tone is the sound of a space when nothing is happening: no one’s moving, nothing is being shuffled around.  There is no speaking, or action per se.  Sometimes a room tone is warm and enveloping.  Other times, back in the editing room, you’d playback the sample and the room tone would sound harsh, shrill almost, and quite tinny.  The silence of spaces shrink and fill to fit the limitations of the architecture of a structure.  And it’s almost as if the world outside has a room tone of it’s own, a shifting patter that resonates and shimmers. I wonder how to delineate the invisible markers that shape the sound of a space, enclosed only by clouds and air.  Today is similarly quiet.

Where we lived

Carrots and Lovers

What part of the brain interprets visual phenomena in imaginative ways?

R.I.P. fair park chicken

Back in June, I started seeing this white chicken at the trail head of the Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge. If you have never been to this park before, it’s one of those great places in Portland where you can go from busy neighborhood street to quiet tree-packed path in seconds.  If you begin walking at the parking lot and keep walking for 10 minutes or so, you’ll end up at a path that follows the edge of the Willamette, a path heavily trafficked by bike commuters, joggers, people with dogs and kids, and solitary wanderers.  So it was a real surprise to see a chicken grazing just 20 yards from the parking lot.  I was sure the chicken had been “taken for a ride in the country” as they say.  Left to fend for itself.

The first time I saw it, the chicken was in the deep shadows between the street entrance and parking lot, and the footpath leading from the street.  A little, sunken, semi-private area: a narrow valley several feet below street level.  I did a double take the first time I saw it, then felt completely bemused.  Was the chicken a sign of the whole backyard breeder/urban homesteader craze gone awry?  The bird was picking around in the brush for bugs.  The vegetation at that particular part of the trail head gets very dry in the sunny months, but at that time, in early summer, the pickings were green and lush.  I’d even seen several school groups recently doing restoration projects in that area of the park: planting native plants here, plucking non-natives there.  Picking up trash.  The result being that his somewhat landscaped entryway to the wetlands had been looking more and more put-together.  So when I saw the white chicken with the big tufts at its toes, I could barely believe it.  It looked so out of place- like a house cat on a fence-less lawn, shrinking from the freedom.  But maybe that was just me projecting?  Actually the chicken seemed pretty calm.  Not scared of strangers but certainly not overly friendly.  It had found a place rich with greens and full of shade.

Chicken-sightings grew into a regular part of my walks through the area.  Entering the park, I’d take a quick look to the left to check the brush from the path-side.  And every time, every walk, all summer, regardless of the time of day, I’d see the white chicken pecking around, seemingly oblivious to the foot and car traffic.

But as the weeks passed and got warmer and warmer, my concern turned into worry.  A part of me grew quite concerned for its welfare.  How would it get clean water?  Would it get hot? Or cold?  Or maybe lonely.  Maybe there is some kind of strange grooming ritual it’d miss out on back at the coop and it would grow surly and unkempt- feathers protruding from odd places and long long claws so long it could not walk anymore without getting caught.

One day during the heat wave in late July, I headed out to see if it was around.  I had visions of it dead in the bushes, little red tongue hanging from its yellow beak, parted.  I found a groundskeeper watering some of the trees and asked him if he had seen the chicken, or if he even knew about it.  He did know about it. I said, “Do you think it’s ok out here?  I mean- without food and water?”  He replied that the chicken is always just hanging around, eating bugs, and that it seemed fine.  The landscaper sounded like he knew what he was talking about- so I dropped it, for the moment, and vowed to check on the bird as often as I could.  I presumed that any kind of animal control type service would automatically put it to sleep.  So I guessed that non-interference was the best path.  (Now I am not so sure.)

Keeping an eye on the chicken became a preoccupation.  I even roped my husband and neighborhood friends into looking for the chicken when they passed by.  My husband snapped a photo of it with his phone.  The photo is the last I have seen of the chicken.  It disappeared a few weeks ago.

I don’t know what ended up happening to it.  I have recently seen several cats lounging around the area where the chicken used to be. And this makes me further question my response to the whole scenario.

Perhaps I should have called Animal Control?  Or maybe the Humane Society?  What kept me from calling these types pf places was a perhaps misinformed and ill-founded hope that somehow the chicken could adapt to being free after being domesticated.  As if it was a creature in a Disney cartoon, finally released after a long captivity, ready to take on the world on its own terms. Some kind of messed up human-centric vision of freedom versus captivity.  As a high school student I used to work with a woman who rehabilitated raptors.  My job was sometimes to skin the salvaged roadkill to feed to the wounded birds.  The birds would then ravenously eat the deer bits from a bucket.  A gnarly job, yet really captivating when the birds became healthy enough to be free again. Sadly, though, the bird at Oaks Bottom was no wounded raptor.  Doubtful it had any genetically programmed behavior that could kick in and make it understand how to live without human help.

Maybe the chicken died of natural causes. If so, my dear chicken friend, rest in peace.

Or maybe someone else found it and brought it back to their backyard coop and rehabilitated him.  That is my naive hope.  My ill-founded, naive hope.