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

The Possibility of Crows

* A White Crow, 20x24, Acrylic on Canvas

I started painting crows after being asked to recall my first memory of beauty. Clouds of starlings shifting over Virginia’s dry, winter hills came to mind. But I was in Vancouver at the time and crows were on my horizon. Every morning tens of thousands of crows descend upon the city to scavenge. Every afternoon they lift in dark clouds and return to their suburban roosts. Crows tend to be considered ominous — a gathering is called a “murder.” Among birds, they strike me as most human: playful, dark, noisy, intelligent, strange, watchful, social, conditioned and co-evolving.

In one of his aphorisms, Franz Kafka says,

The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows.

If heaven means the impossibility of crows, perhaps Kafka means the impossibility of heaven — maybe in light of humanity. The world can feel this way, overwhelmingly: one always betrays the good. So we do things to remind ourselves of the possibility of the good, the possibility of heaven (that is, with crows: all in all). Hope. This is the reason for “The Possibility of Crows,” recollections of first beauty.

Birds on Lines #1, 24x24

* Red Crow, Cropped Woods, 30x40

* Two Crows in Red Grass, 12x12

* Crow on Twig, 12x12

* Stockbridge Crow, 12x24

* Birds of My Neighborhood, 14x18

Toy Birds, Cropped Woods, 24x36

* Nest, Green, 24x36

* Murder of Crows, 18x20

* White Toy Birds, 10x12

Birds on Lines #2, 24x24