connection and disconnection

I’ve been thinking about being in the present moment and how this can be balanced with planning and doing. I’m finding that slowing down and bringing awareness to the things around me, the light as it changes throughout the day and the seasons helps me. In my daily life, I connect to students in the classroom and then disconnect every day when I go home. I connect to friends and family and then disconnect. Somehow, for me, the solitude is restorative and necessary to quiet my mind. It is necessary in and of itself and also because it allows me to slow down and be present to others.

Curling up and Opening out.

After months of burrowing in as much as possible to keep safe, we’re opening back out into the larger world. We unfurl ourselves and grow toward the light. Even so, we cycle through periods of curling up safe to rest and recover and then expanding ourselves to breathe and live and grow again.

things large and small

I was watching the artist Sarah Sze on Art 21. Her work is magnificent and delicate and also profound. In one of her sculptural installation pieces, she used torn bits of printed photographs distributed throughout the piece, in space. In the video she talked about how many photographs we have on this planet and how they have become like detritus. Some people have a great nostalgia for the old days when photographs were “special”(because so few people could afford to make them. ps: guess who those people were). I happen to believe that the people making photographic images these days come from broader, global backgrounds and that this is good, more informative and more democratic. I think we have to shift our expectation that the rare (elite) holds all the value, and realize that there are many things that are numerous, beautiful and essential - our microbes, tiny little nano particles of sand (watch Gary Greenburg’s talk on this) the insects in the air and the ground that we need and kill. One thing I love about Sze’s work is how she makes large beautiful works out of small, seemingly insignificant pieces. All that said, there certainly is a lot of stuff in this world. If we can find the beauty in the smaller things, maybe we can detox from needing so many larger, louder, landfilling new things?

a bottle a friend left at my house and some plants that other friends gave me more deliberately.

light, space and emptiness

I’ve been painting, using a lot of white, thinking about emptiness and quiet and peace, and light, always.

The curved shadow on the lower right is being cast by a vessel I made years ago. This vessel is empty.

a quiet space

Something I saw made me want to make this painting. Mostly it’s about the subtlety of whites. Then the page curved in an echo of the shape on the page. Yes, I do realize I sound like the quiet feather band on that very funny show set in Portland.

curving quiet whites on paper

Marks on Paper

Accidental and deliberate marks on paper

a stone and a shadow, small beauty

Intention without Tension

For several decades I've had a slight movement disorder in my right hand. It stems from overuse, I think, but overuse paired with some sort of genetic predisposition and also probably erroneous technique in writing and drawing from early on, way back when. When I was a child, my Dad told me I was holding the pencil too tight and I dismissed this remark as criticism. What did he know about drawing? Well, this leads me to the other part of this thing. The will/drive to control. This is part of my personality and it's not all bad. We need to exercise some control in this life or we are helpless flotsam, right? Anyway, years later I was diagnosed by a neurologist as having focal dystonia in my right hand. Aka "the yips". The mapping of the fingers in the brain apparently get all kind of smeared together. So for a while now, I've been slowly, patiently, gently learning to write and draw with my left hand. Every step of the way, trying to be  mindful not to hold the pencil in a death grip. I've been watching videos by Akiko Tsukamoto Trush, a pianist with focal dystonia and this is helping me make peace with this and come up with strategies I hope will help, at least a little. I've also been inspired by the artist Phil Hansen, and his TED talk "Embrace the Shake", and I'm finding the beauty of squiggly, eccentric mark making and seeing beauty in what is.

Lenses, Light, Seeing and Knowing

I think we get used to seeing things the way we've seen them before, and then we assume that that is how things are. A few moments in my life disrupted this for me. I remember the first time I wore eyeglasses to correct my nearsightedness. My Mom was driving me home from picking up my new glasses and I sat in the front seat mesmerized by the branches of the trees passing by through the car windshield on a winter day. I could see each and every tiny little branch and to me, this was spectacular. I’d had no idea that all of this was out there, available to be seen. I’ve never gotten over it.

In elementary school when they showed films, the teacher used to bring the projected image into focus, and I always found that moment of blurriness shifting into clarity, and back and forth for a second or two to be strange and compelling. As a little kid, I had the habit of standing on my head (while leaning against the couch) long enough so that my brain would begin to see the ceiling as the floor. I thought this was magical and occasionally terrifying.

Recently I read Laura Snyder’s book, The Eye of the Beholder. She writes about the Netherlands during the early modern era, and the work that was being done with lenses. She writes about scientists and artists and how profound the effect of these lenses, and being able to see things clearly, differently, was on these individuals but also on the culture at large. The idea that a person could see things for oneself that had previously been hidden had radical and revolutionary implications. One did not need to rely on an authority figure to reveal some hidden truth; one could go and observe closely, and find one’s own truth. Snyder posits that this was an important moment in the emerging modern era. Each individual had access to knowledge and therefore the right and perhaps obligation to study the world and come to thoughtful conclusions.

We are in a very strange time now. The idea of one perceivable, accepted reality has long been disputed by artists and creative thinkers, and as an artist I think it is fascinating and essential to question our accepted truths and to realize that perceptions of the world from different viewpoints may vary. But, this very open-mindedness has been taken up and transformed into something very different, something that seems to be aggressively opposed to curiosity and exploration. If we are to function as a civilized society we need to have methods of discovery and ways of agreeing on some crucial things.

I’m not entirely sure exactly how all of this informs the work I do, and to be honest, I often become less interested the more literal and concrete something becomes, but these ideas and also wonder and fascination are present when I am looking at the world. Curiosity is a better companion than fear.

the garden in winter, after a snowfall

I think this is the dried out seed pod of milkweed, which just grows up in my yard wherever it wants. I hope it gives food to the monarch butterflies.