Category: art

Craft Talk

With Andrew Wyeth.

The less there is in a subject, the more I can pour into it. And I have a strong feeling that the more objects you use, the less there is in a picture. It’s not that I doubt the object. I doubt the way I paint it. If it becomes about the object, forget it. What matters is what seeps unconsciously from the object. The fleeting character of shadow, the sadness of fall. It is important to forget about what you are doing, then art may happen. Sometimes.

***

Adapted from interviews with the artist, whose “Wind from the Sea” moved me this morning.

Before Sky

When a bird

How often I wish I could tell you about this exquisite bird in such a manner that you might know her, too. She was here before me, before the shattering. Bird is an inadequate word in this context, but I use it because it approximates a reference to a creature with a beak and feathers. She was much larger than I am but bowed her magnificent neck to meet me at eye level. I wanted to look into those eyes endlessly. This seemed like an indulgent and selfish response to such an offering, so instead I started numbering her feathers. I recognized that this was likely an impossible task, especially for someone of my limited intelligence who lacked training and had neither tools or methods beyond the steadfast attention that had long been a symptom of what my elders gravely suggested was a somewhat outsized and possibly obscene capacity for devotion. One, two, three. . . I was at 13,426 when abruptly interrupted. An official voice demanded to know, What are you doing? but I would not turn my head from those undulating wisps. I meant to keep my count. Other things were shouted but I ignored them, meaning to hang on.

That is not, the voice insisted, real. I heard a click of metal. 

What followed was not feathers, but sky. What ghosted through it has no pulse, no blood, no song. There is no after here and nothing to save by the counting. Only this continuance. I am rearranged inside it, but I cannot tell you how. I thought the words would appear at the end of that count and if it did not end that I would live inside the action of keeping it––forever, with no need for language beyond what was passing between the count and that vision in pieces. Now what. 

Dream Melt

From the last ice age.

the imagination is where it rains paint onto frescoes
of figures to crowd the divine comedy clubs where we
come and go every evening, no ID, no cover at the door

carrying our huddled masses of memory on backs
crunching shells of peanuts and empires on the floor
the strobe light pulsars keeping time with unborn stars

first wears the crown––it is the chicken or the egg,
but who can say is on the mic now, to proclaim
in a language unknown to whomever has ears

no tears need translation and what is the time?
it is lost and what is the point? only a moment
and where did it begin? in the beginning

was the word and the word rained down where
we gathered here to catch it back to the mouths
of us speaking all at once in the land where

the constant rain is coming
from the vision at the bottom
of the iceberg where it

melts

Reflections in Water

And the telling, slant.

My favorite detail about Perseus other than his winged horse has to do with the delicacy with which he handled that severed Gorgon head, taking care not to scratch or rough the head by grainy sands, how he thought to place it on a bed of leaves, then sea plants, how this act birthed coral. 

I am reminded by Calvino, who in an age for questioning the fate of books, considered a related question of weight, and made a case for lightness. Only the reflected image allows for the presentation of what may be revealed only indirectly.

I am reminded by Moses, pleading let me see your face to God on the mountain, and God like, no but here is my backside and no doubt the frisson of such an encounter with the hind-parts of divinity is the highest achievement of any art.

How else does a winged horse emerge from Gorgon blood? By what other arrangement but such delicacy can the stomp of a single hoof draw water from stone and invite muses to drink? Where they gather to admire the horse, its beautiful wings.

Always wings, always the mountaintop. The nearness to sky, to flight. The weight of being is weight enough. Only the image––or better, song––can pulse across space, soaring.

I hope so. Let us not, before it comes, be crushed the accumulated weight of the dust of ourselves rubbled in the making and unmaking empires, those heaviest of forms.

***

Notes while reading the opening of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Molt

From one utterance to the next.

They were symbols, sure, but don’t ask of what.
It was a restless practice of experimentation––
over time.

Here is an art seeded across generations,
its braided roots the scales of a skin
shedding itself unto a new body.

Plaything

Playtime with cephalopod.

They were infamously difficult to study, known to refuse the crude foodstuffs offered by scientists as offensive to their refined tastes.  For example, they would have nothing to do with frozen shrimp. These members of the phylum Mollusca were likely not what Plato had in mind when he observed that if we are the playthings of the gods, then play is the most serious thing we do. Such considerations simply were not made. To do so would be to a blasphemy of unspeakable genus. The custom, when it came to describing the creatures one preferred to dissociate from was to declare them to be incapable of thought––an interesting and even artful collection of cells and systems, patterns and even grace, but not cognition. 

It was reasoned that for these non-thinking others that were surely quite unlike ourselves, there could be no fear of death beyond instinct and therefore neither mourning nor inclination to register captivity as tragic. After all, how could a creature incapable of foresight lament the possibility that it may not return to the known world?

Among our kind, certain unknowns often register as their own justifications. We have within us a tremendous capacity to decorate our blind spots in manners suggestive of insight. 

Then an octopus was observed to gather stones at the mouth of the den that it entered, presumably to prevent the entrance of potential intruders. Foresight? Perhaps. Some scientists conceded.

Later, the scientists observed the difficult creatures in play, bouncing objects, juggling, manipulating out of curiosity––us?

The creatures were indeed capable of a great deal, but surely not that. It was declared. Studies continued.

***

Inspired by this morning’s encounter with and excerpt of David Toomey’s work in LitHub “On the Uncanny Way Octopuses Play.”