moon(s)

Yesterday morning, coming out of a crazed dream with family and rescues and grenades and deceptions a burning, smoky thought -- my very first waking thought of 2007 -- slammed me from sleep into the woken world. I can't really describe how foreign, how other, how outside of me this hazy thought was. In the next minute or two as the fog cleared, distinct, well organized, poetic ideas with words surfaced as I scribbled them with my pencil, still laying in the bed. And still, the feeling of being handed something, of something passing through me rather than me creating or welling something up was intense. Today, as I consider who I've been reading of late, and what they have had to say, and what of their work has left impressions on me, I can see clear influences. But what I jotted in ragged script on a bedside sheet of paper, eyes half closed, is beyond parroting or simply rewording what I read before sleep.

It is a working definition of art and the charge of an artist that really works for me today.

Preface enough.

"The artist must study the surfaces of their subject and recreate them. In that observation they must come to see or understand some of what lies below those surfaces, those skins, and they must make that too -- as they paint the orange peel, the face -- they must paint what is always struggling to rise to the surface. Indeed, the real subject is that struggle and the real challenge is to understand and capture the essence of that movement, that rising, that clawing to crack the shell."

I got up and spent the next couple hours painting a piece I'm having trouble titling. The trouble grows out of my uncertainty of what I was making -- as I was making it and still now after I've finished work on it. I can't tell if I've made three skies on three nights with three moons or one sky with one moon simultaneously rising out of the horizon and moving from new moon to the slightest waxing crescent. Though I'd never imagined making a painting like this until yesterday morning laying in bed, all the elements of it have been striking to me of late or have haunted my thoughts for years. The crescent moon has cut me with its beauty and fragile whisper of what's coming soon the last few months. The part of the moon that we can sense and see as a lighter spot in the sky as the moon reveals the bright exposed reflected part of itself has fascinated me for as long as I've been staring at the sky. Like a bra behind a gauzy blouse. Like the wonder of the moons underneath that, even. Similarly, I've seen shocking sunsets lately -- I've caught a few minutes of several in the past two or three weeks that made me want to pull the car over. In each case the sun was gone completely beyond the horizon and the sky was evenly, cleanly orange and the fracture of the mountaintops close by -- the naked, wintertime line between our piece of earth here and all that sky there has been impressive long after the stars are blazing. I'm seeing the world beneath the leaves of all these forests and old hills this year in a way I couldn't last year. And after the sun is gone, and the moon (if there is one) is up, I've been noting for many years that you can still find the horizon line in the dark. Black night is a different shade than black earth. The mountains are darker, even on a cloudy night where the stars and moon are obscured. There is always light in the heavens so that we can see a difference between what we're tied and weighted to, and what we will rise into. Dim, but light undeniable. The contrast, the line, runs angry and jagged through the divided night sky.

I took 99 pictures during the course of making this pretty crude, raw painting that pleases me even for its lack of beauty. Michael, the father of the family I live downstairs from, was kind enough to burn all the photos on a disk after his wife, Debbi was kind enough to loan me her sweet digital camera to snap pictures with. Thanks y'all. Here are a few shots in chronological order of the making.

chizlin

Been working on some carvings for the last couple of weeks. Some wood pieces (homemade chopsticks, mostly) and some stone.

I've really enjoyed making these chopsticks. I want them to be loose pairs. I'm not shooting for exact replication. I want them to just sort of belong together. Oddly and unintentionally, some of them seem to have a man / woman sort of feel to the pair. Interesting, interesting. From left to right the wood species are as follows: cherry, maple, bubinga, black walnut, maple. I finished all these with light coats of sesame oil which really brings out the color and grain patterns in all these beautiful woods, especially the cherry and bubinga.


Here are a couple shots of a bowl I've made out of green soapstone. It's for my mother. Actually, this is her Mother's Day 2006 present -- just a few days late. I really dig the way the finished / unfinished contrast came out. These pictures don't show that too well though. I finished this and the bowls below with beeswax. I heated the stones up in the oven after I carved and sanded them down (all the way to 600 grit wet / dry sandpaper) and then coated them with the beeswax. Really high shine -- made it hard to take the pictures (it was impossible with the flash). Nice luster.




These are a couple of 'bowls' that I've made out of a black soapstone. It was much harder stone than the green one with it's own challenges. These came from the same boulder which I broke into two large pieces. My original concepts for the bowls hasn't worked out. I wanted to incorporate some white stone with these. In the end I have -- with some strange, fragile crystal looking rock that's a real pain in the ass the sand and finish well. It's not my original plan though. I'm getting used to that with my work. Often I begin with an image or an idea and then as I learn about my materials and about my limitations with them I am forced to revise. These days I'm much more excited about that than frustrated. Indeed, the learning and adapting is a lot of the fun as I work out these physical puzzles and rocky paragraphs of stone and wood and paint.




This last pic is of a pendant I tried to make. In the end, I think it's a clumsy, crude thing to try and aspire to be called jewelry. I do love the texture of the rock though, and the way the light comes through the blue bands in the sediment layers was a complete and sweet surprise. So was the woman I was thinking of when I found the rock and made the thing. I'm going to call it a rough draft and maybe try another piece. It's the densest of the rock I've worked with and is taxing to shape with my dremel tools. Really prone to flake and chip out too. I reached beyond what the rock could stand at least three times and had to drastically alter the shape of the thing. Learned a lot though. Lots yet to get.

Light Work

Something wouldn't let me sleep Sunday morning. At 6:30 I was awake. The first conscious thought I remember on waking was the same as the last one I remember before sleep overtook me the night before: "In him was life and that life was the light of men. That light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it." The words of these lines kept tumbling about, pacing poetic the hallways of my foggy mind. I dimly wondered how I would make that picture. A response came to me as I lay there, eyes closed to the morning.

A few minutes later I was up, in my painting pants, making a three-song iTunes play list which I set on repeat for the morning's work. Then I set to stirring the paints with my sticks.

Using a high powered heat gun enables me to work fast, building layers quickly as I dry out a spread of paint in a few minutes. It literally boils the water (and other chemicals I don't want to think about absorbing into my skin and lungs) out of the paint on the paper -- it roasts and steams and fries and burns and bubbles up to bursting if I let the gun tarry. If I'm careful though, with a bit of patience I've been able to dry huge puddles and globs of paint quickly and preserve the smooth, wet texture and 'skin' of the paint.

I stopped between layers/coats to take pictures as I worked, and they follow below in sequence. The process, the steps, the layers themselves, are actually essential points of my response to the text. In them, and the completed piece, there is a story, and a way of telling it that details and reveals my understanding of the inspired words and the man he wrote of.

I join praise.

Dots and Trees

These are a few shots of some stuff I've been making at night. I sort of wallpapered my little studio with them and a heavy duty stapler yesterday. It feels like a nice space these days.

Sticky 1

Still haunted by Picasso's "Picador", obviously.
And I'm still working on very vertical pieces.
One of the things I search for in my meditations and my art responses are the essential lines and shapes of things, in this case, a man in an action.
Because I lack the schooling, skill and craft for complex, detailed replication or compilation, I really just go at the surfaces with the simplest plan or goal and some paint.
I've been listening to a lot of music while I 'work' too, especially Moby.
I'm working in an unfinished room of the basement I live in.
For the last few weeks I've been painting with three gallons of interior house paint: white, black, red.
Instead of brushes or my fingers I'm using the free stir sticks you get when you buy a gallon of paint. In this case I've whittled my own stick out of part of one of the stir sticks.
I'm painting on pieces of brown butcher paper duct taped to what was part of my bed frame.
I spent two nights thinking about what kind of stick man to put down.
This is who I found.