Donation for the Rockfish Wildlife Sanctuary art auction

For the Rockfish Wildlife Sanctuary art auction at City Space in Charlottesville, VA. 

*Vulture Sunning (V)

Gouache and ink on paper (12x12 framed)

Diptych for a friend's birthday

* Untitled 

Gouache and ink on paper (2014)

For The Haven art auction

* Red Crows, 2/10 (limited edition print)
Gouache and ink on paper

For the New City Arts Artist Exchange

This fall, I was part of a group of 17 local artists that each made 23 non-identical prints or individual works on paper for an art exchange. The pieces were collated and each participating artist got a complete set, leaving several extra sets for exhibition. Based on an earlier theme, this was one of my initial works for the exchange. Read more about the New City Arts Artist Exchange here.

Black Locust of My Heart

May 2012 Exhibit at NPR's WVTF/Studio-IQ gallery on Water St. in Charlottesville, VA. 

ARTIST STATEMENT - 

1       What can I say? There’s nothing to say about trees. That’s the point. More significantly, it seems there’s nothing to see about trees either. Not any more. We have seen trees. But as it happens, “the hardest thing of all to see is what is really there” (J. A. Baker).

2       Unable to find a major publisher for A River Runs Through It,
 Norman Maclean was told by way of explanation, "These stories have trees in them” — as if trees could ever lose our interest.

3       But nothing makes me feel my time like the corkscrew willow in the backyard with its short life. Now the shoot from the stump is nearly as tall as the sapling we planted. Nor does anything make me feel my time more than the weeping cherry beside the willow or the ground beneath its large canopy covered in a tiny forest of weeping cherries that will never grow. And nothing can make me know my time the way two barren hillsides do, now forested on both slopes.

4       You might say, “Ah, what an age it is / When to speak of trees is almost a crime / For it is a kind of silence about injustice!” (Bertolt Brecht). And you would be right.

5       On the other hand, as I round a familiar bend in the road, I meet the ghost of a beloved sycamore. The profile of its absence stands out like a phantom limb.  Anticipating the low crook in its trunk, its gentle tilt back toward the bank, it is not there. I never photographed or painted it, though I meant to. Where could I park my car?

6       The storms have taught us how quickly our horizons can be altered, how the vertical becomes horizontal. The sugar maple and the black locust are also gone.

7       Kandinsky famously claimed, “the inner element of the work is its content.” His non-objective Parisian canvases isolate and distill the graphic elements of form in order to compose an affective symphony for sight. Lauded and condemned for his immaterialism, it’s sometimes forgotten that he thought the principle of art was the principle of the cosmos. The reduction and abstraction of visual phenomena is not a matter of preference for geometry over biology but of attention to the way the visible mark — a line, for example — impacts us interiorly. If we bracket the objectness of the object for a moment, if we stop seeing things as this or that, according to use or convention, we might perceive inwardly — perhaps for the first time — the lilting vertical of the black locust in the open pasture with its loose shock of centric lines. “The world sounds.”

* Vulture Sunning (I)

* To Dwell in Breadth (Airport Oak) (IV)

* Hagiography (III)

The World Sounds (II)

* Hedgerow (II)

* Mondrian's Tree

* The World Sounds (I)

* To Dwell in Breadth (Airport Oak) (III)

* Ingleside Sugar Maple (I)

* Vulture Sunning (II)

Part I of a diptych, Black Locust of My Heart (I-II)

* Potomac (I)

All work: gouache, ink, pen and watercolor pencil on paper (2010-2012)

Framed: 16 x 20

Hanging the show with Maureen at WVTF...

 

Work in progress...

Prints drying

Selecting prints to frame

Framing in progress

One framed, many to go

For my May exhibit at WVTF, Charlottesville

2011 was something of a lost year. Only recently have I been able to revisit the work I began about two years ago, to complete it for a show in May at NPR's WVTF studio in Charlottesville. It's a series of small works on paper having to do with trees, with the way trees make us experience our time, with how we feel their lines and what they do to our horizons. On the whole, people have been wrinkling their noses when I mention my current subject matter, as if trees could some how ever become passé for artists. This situation brings to mind something I think I read in Edward Abbey, though I haven't come across the line since, something to the effect: Who says you can't love a rock? Nonsense, bullshit. We have all loved rocks. 

Hedgerow, 8x8

(Gouache and Ink on Kitakata Paper, 2012)

May 2011

For the month of May, some of my prints will be on exhibit at New Dominion Bookshop on the downtown mall (404 East Main Street, Charlottesville, VA). For information and hours: newdominionbookshop.com, 

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Charlottesville-VA/New-Dominion-Bookshop/173510849362530

Work at Clayborne

Selected recent works on paper on display at Clayborne Education (1140 E. High Street, Charlottesville, VA), with photography by Barrie Humphries (nancybarrier.blogspot.com). 

Lynx-Eyed Azadia, 4x4

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)