Detail of work in progress...

Joy is a Table

Collaborative work with Cabell Cox for the New City Arts "Feast" Group Exhibit: newcityarts.org/the-event/feast-a-new-city-arts-group-show/

* Joy is a Table, 8x10, gouache and ink on paper

Brief C-ville review: newcityarts.org/2010/resurrection/

Expanded anthology of the show: newcityarts.org/2010/the-feast-book-an-anthology/

Niche

Piece for the Haven art auction.

http://www.thehavenatfirstandmarket.org/

* Niche, 24x26, acrylic on canvas

WriterHouse Exhibit

Through the end of September, recent work will be on exhibit at WriterHouse, 508 Dale Ave., Charlottesville, VA. For regular hours and contact information, visit writerhouse.org.

* New York and the Heat, 1933 (7½x9)

The Life of a Gesture

June 2010 exhibit at The Garage, N. 1st Ave., Charlottesville, VA (thegarage-cville.com).

I recently came across a brittle album of small black and white photographs from my grandmother’s youth.  Many of the prints, from the early 20th c., were marred, unmarked, and jumbled, others out of focus and under or overexposed — all of this rendering identities and locations uncertain.  I was struck by the beauty of the glaring white spots, obscuring what otherwise might have been captured — a sign of the early technology and the amateur use of it, yet so appropriately like the aporias of memory and history.  This reservoir of forgotten images, and its spotty testimony, conceals as much as it reveals.  Barring passage while directing the way, the impassable path back — through our memory, through another’s memory, which we inherit — is somehow bridged repeatedly, in our bodies, our postures, our speech, our predilections, our humor.  This leap, in fact so common, takes place imperceptibly — or rather, is undetected despite its conspicuousness (and it’s the most obvious we often least discern).

Several years ago I read Milan Kundera's Immortality, which is largely about a hand wave, a repeatable gesture that takes on a life of its own.  It brought to mind my grandmother's distinctive wave: a flapping of the wrist from the elbow, up and down, fingers limply pointing straight forward — laughable, not elegant like the characters' in Immortality.  This unmistakable motion, belonging to whomever before her and taken up now by others, signaled for me the relevance of the peculiar form of "immortality" Kundera explores.  He suggests the repeatability of a gesture, having an essence of its own, calls into question the inimitability of the human: “Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. We could put that in the form of an aphorism: many people, few gestures.” 

But isn't it like language itself, or isn't it in fact language itself (if everything is writing, as Derrida says, if writing is more primordial than speech, if the gesture is already a mark, an incision — like Picasso drawing Centaurs in the air)?  Every such repetition (like every borrowed word) is an interpretation, an event — which is to say: novel (and in each particular birth: unrepeatable).  Even if the gesture lives (and it does), it is not by the rote programming of the great “computer” — and it doesn’t displace the person through numerical reduction.  Rather, the life of a gesture shows us, if we’ll look for it, that we are not ourselves by ourselves, that we are not even our own.  As a translation of Montale reads, “Clarity is the care of things that are obscure”* — and I take this as an apology for this time with these images.

*“Bring me the sunflower to transplant here,” trans. Edwin Morgan. 
All pieces: gouache and ink on paper.

Hagiography (I) (6x6)

* To Dwell in Breadth (Airport Oak) (8½x10½)   

* Notes on Your Birth (4½: Says the Lord’s Prayer) (3½x4)

 

Paying Down the Cow  (8x10½)

* Personal Record, Presidents of the United States (8x10)

* Monday: to Grant a Future? (6x10)

* The Great Thaw (8½x11)

           

 

Yard of Roses (10x10)

* Blooms (4x5)

Hagiography (II) (4x7)

Felt Pretty Elegant This Morning (6½x9)

How I Love to See These Days Add Up (4x5)

Bouquet of the Unattainable (II) (5x7)

Chesapeake (I) (8½x11)

 

* Last Estuary (4x4)

* Exterior Domestic (8x8)

Beatrice Called (Dear Ellie) (4x5)

* Chesapeake (II) (2½x3)

Personal Record, The Palais Royal (5½x9)

* The Life of a Gesture (8x11)

* Germination Table (8x9)

New work from the exhibit which begins tomorrow at The Garage in Charlottesville, VA. For details:

http://www.newcityarts.org/2010/the-life-of-a-gesture/.

* Wrote Mother (On Not Surviving Winter)

(Gouache and ink on paper, 8x10)

Immortal Bird

(Gouache and ink on paper, 6x10)

These are two recent pieces are about 8 1/2 by 9 1/2 on thin, almost translucent, hand-made paper. 

Among the found photos -

Here's Elvere in college, in the late 1920s. Below are pages from one of her albums - first, her family home; then, childhood school photos; and last, with friends from college.

I've been developing a series of prints around the theme "The Life of a Gesture," including the two below. About the process, it's amazingly unsuccessful at times. Many of the pieces fail because the images are erased when wetted or hidden by the paint seeping through - this is something that's difficult to control. I've now been experimenting with minimal paint applications and glosses, so as not to lose as many lines before they dry. These two prints involve more collage than painting. Rather than working with old photographs directly, these are only suggestive of the physical forms that are present in some of the other pieces. 

* Willow (8x10)

* Bouquet of the Unattainable (I)  (10x10)  

New work, new medium

After going to a friend's exhibit of small prints this summer, I began experimenting along the same lines. It's a kind of "printmaking," but is basically mixed-media collage involving photography, drawing, laser (or other) printing, etc. on paper which is then soaked, dyed, and left to dry. It's quite different from painting in general, and from my larger-scale work--although, I had recently been working on canvas and board, laid flat, applying paint and gloss-medium mixes by pouring and manipulating with the end of the brush. Here are a few initial images. I'm planning to finish a show for June, at the Garage (www.thegarage-cville.com).

This image and the first are from photographs of the vultures that hang out in a great, dead oak tree near our home. Sometimes there are more than thirty there at one time. They've been a fascination for my family and, over the years, we have taken a lot of photographs of them and their almost cliche perch.

I still haven't landed on my next theme. I'm leaning toward a simple collection showing beloved trees. Below is another near our home.

The three pieces below are based on borrowed images lying around in notebooks from a few earlier series related to birds. These are among my first remotely successful prints. Initially I was just using photos from others, hoping only to get the paint to drive through the paper without completely obscuring the existing composition.

The two prints below begin with my grandmother's photos from the 1920s. I recently happened upon a gorgeous album from her childhood and early adulthood. Many of the prints are full of gaping and glaring spots - a sign of the early technology and her amateur use of it, but so appropriately like memory.

The City in Which I Love You

These paintings, though new, have been gestating for some time. Several years ago I started a few sketches along these lines. This was when I was living in Vancouver, on the corner of 1st and Commercial, the ground from which the images here grow. If this city (this city within a city) marks the horizon of my imagination — the convergence of mountains and water, steel and concrete and glass — it is falling in love there which transforms the place, for me, into something deeply playful and serious and worth remembering in as many ways as possible. This points to, generally, one of my primary joys in, or desires for, painting itself: the need to take note, to “tarry with” a place, to know and remember it — not only as it is but as it is for me. Painting is so much a practice of attention and memory, even if imaginative and expressive. What motivates this work, more specifically, is the enduring impact of a conversion, of starting life anew because of love. Themes from Song of Songs — of union and separation, heedlessness, pursuit, risk, the relationship between human and divine love, the absolute singularity and beauty of the beloved — were woven into my thinking during the painting process and, I hope also, into the work itself.

About the titles, they’re mainly borrowed. I don’t usually title my pieces — I mean, not in advance, and then only descriptively. But to my surprise, names came first this time. It seems appropriate to me that these are gathered inscriptions, gleaned—from other people’s thoughts and words — since so often, especially every time I pack up and move (I suppose moving, finding and carrying home, is a recurring thread in my work), I realize that nearly everything I have has been given to me. My home is full of things I have only received, things that were carefully chosen for me by someone else (and this is one sign we can’t think of our lives as our own). So often when I’m working, using some item unthoughtfully, meaning intrudes and I remember who gave it to me and on what occasion, and this makes daily life porous and fills it with gratitude. But we live in a posture of forgetting places and people, even, or especially, when surrounded by them. I suppose this series, then, is an offering of not forgetting. For Stephen.

The voice of my beloved: listen!

bounding over the mountains

toward me, across the hills.

And he calls to me:

Hurry, my love, my friend,

and come away!*

---

* Song of Songs 2:8, 10. Translation by Ariel Bloch and Chana Bloch. (Title borrowed from Li-Young Lee’s poem in his book of poems by the same name.)

* On the Inskirts, 24x36

* Kingdom of Fragile, 30x40

* When You Go (or You Come Too), 14,18

* S.R.O. Crow, 14x18

* One of Many Ways of Gray, 14x18

This Audience of Cancelled Faces, 20x24

Every Separation is a Link, 24x24

* Peace Beneath the City, 20x24

* Come Away to the Skies, My Beloved (or Raise High Your Joys), 24x36

* Birds on Lines #3, 10x12

* How Long Will We Stay this Season? 8x16

* The City in Which I Love You (or Chinatown), 24x24