"Tilt" in Progress

I've been chugging along on Tilt, and finished the curved shape, having decided to hook it in a random pattern. I'll be doing the square in concentric lines, following the outline until the lines of hooking meet in the center. The most unusual decision that I've made is to hook the green background vertically; it would naturally seem to ask for a horizontal patterning, to go along with the implication of land and sky, so I thought I'd confound that expectation. We'll see if it works....

A Hint of Winter's End

Today was one of those late winter days that point toward spring: the temperature was in the upper 30s, with a brisk wind that did not have the bitter edge of cold, but brought a smell of growth. As I walked on the snow, not needing snowshoes with the thinner layer, I felt its wetness underfoot. Snow is receding from boulders, revealing surfaces covered with mosses.




A sight I associate with maple sugaring season with its warm days and frosty nights is the circle of sunken snow surrounding tree trunks, their warmth pushing back the snow. Soon the ground will begin to show and form a brown skirt around each tree.




Small branches, seeds, pine needles, begin to sink into the snow, nestled into a perfectly shaped bed echoing each form. All these images of late winter, so heartening, will likely be hidden by coming snowstorms; winter is still far from over in northern Vermont.

Triangle and Curves

Triangle and Curves, 2010, egg tempera on panel, 14 x 22 inches

While working on this painting, I found myself uncertain about it; it felt like a very odd composition, with its combination of volume and flatness, red and green, and I wasn't at all sure that it would be somewhat successful in the end. But I found that as it neared completion, the painting began to satisfy me, especially after a second repainting of the green triangle. I was trying to have a textured surface on the green areas, next to the more smoothly painted reds. The jutting triangle seems to both lie on the red ground and float free of it. This work is full of metaphor, that I did not intend, as I was looking only at form, but I leave it to viewers to read into it what you prefer. I enjoy the intimation of narrative, a rich layer added to those of color, form, and design.

At the Met: Animals from Ancient Iran

Vessel terminating in the head of an Antelope, 7th century BCE, glazed ceramic, northwestern Iran

When I was in NYC in December, I took my camera to the Metropolitan Museum for the first time to photograph some of my favorite collections; see the posts on the Greek and Roman Study Collection, Chinese Porcelain, and Egyptian art. It was intensely pleasurable to form a deeper relationship with objects by photographing them; the close attention necessary to make a good photograph helped me to see each work more clearly; writing then aided in thinking about the art. Because of this I now carry my camera into the city and will try to gather images whenever I can.

Sometimes I walk through the galleries of ancient Near Eastern art on entering the museum; I was very taken, last weekend, with the sculpted forms of animals, refined and sensitive, on ancient Iranian vessels. I believe I was especially open to seeing the beauty of these pieces because I'd just read The Cave Painters by Gregory Curtis, recommended by fellow blogger Julia Moore. The work of the prehistoric painters, especially in the earliest known, Chauvet cave, is sophisticated in its understanding of animal form and movement, and is very beautiful. It is stunning to think that the paintings were made over 30,000 years ago.

Vessel with a handle in the form of a Ram, 8th-7th century BCE, Iran, ceramic and paint

The Iranian sculpture shows the same love and attention to each animal, described with subtle grace, that we see in cave paintings, or in ancient Egyptian art. In the three vessels, the bodies of the animals are inventively integrated with the large cup shapes. I also wanted to show these works because, these days, we too often hear about bad news coming out of Iran; it is good to be reminded that Persian culture is a rich and ancient one.

Rhyton terminating in the forepart of a Ram, mid-5th century BCE, silver, Iran

This vessel, which has a pouring hole at the front, is made of carefully worked precious silver. Although there are decorative elements on the ram––his horns, a bridle, a round shape on the shoulders––the feeling I come away with is of a wonderfully present, real creature, full of breath and life.

The Hours of Catherine of Cleves

The highlight of my art viewing while in the city was an exhibition at the Morgan Library: the remarkable illuminations from the Hours of Catherine of Cleves. This book is an exquisite small––7 1/2 x 5 1/8 inch––manuscript, made around 1440 by the Master of Catherine of Cleves; it consists of a series of prayers, with 157 miniatures included in its pages. You can see every one of these images online at the link above; the Morgan has been very generous in publishing each page online, with crisp and clear enlargements. The manuscript, which had been divided into two books, has been taken apart for rebinding in proper order in one volume, so we have the unique opportunity to see all the pages before they are again within the covers of a book.

It is a pure delight to see the miniatures (take a magnifying glass, or reading glasses); surrounding the central images of saints or stories are marvelously imaginative borders. The small images seem to distill and heighten our viewing experience, as we are drawn into their worlds. The dramatic pages above begin the manuscript; you can see Catherine in prayer on the left; the borders display, among other things, the coats of arms of her family. The depictions are refined and full of precise detail, while being fresh and lively at the same time. It is a magical combination.






The miniature of Saint Lawrence shows him holding a gridiron, the method of his martyrdom, surrounded by fishes and eels; this border is one of my very favorites in its almost wacky surprise, its combination of reality and pure invention. It is speculated that the artist chose fish because they are cooked on a griddle. Are we meant to be amused?






In another wonderful border, of mussel shells and a crab, the artist is pairing the saint with an illustration of his attributes: Saint Ambrose reconciled enemies; the crab and mussel are enemies, as crabs feed on mussels. The design of this page is striking, with another use of a subject we don't at all expect to see in a prayer book, or in any medieval art.








The deathbed scene above is full of mundane touches, of a doctor examining bodily fluid and a table full of the necessities of the sickroom. Below, we see the dying man's evil son rifling through his treasure chest. Alongside death is Purgatory, in the maw of a frightening animal. I imagine that the elegant flowery border indicates looking forward to souls being purged of their sins.




This last detail is of Saint Valentine, holding the sword of his martyrdom. He is surrounded by a lovely, graceful border of flowers and leaves, and at the bottom, the violence of nature, as two dragonflies attack a fly, another marvel of attentive descriptive imagery.

______________________

Illuminated manuscripts––European, Persian, and Indian––have long been some of my favorite art. A number of years ago, I even bought two pieces of parchment from a supplier, Talas in NYC, thinking I would try a small painting on it. Traditionally, pigment for manuscript painting is used with the white of an egg for binder, instead of the yolk as in egg tempera. As described in Daniel Thompson's The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting, the egg white is beaten till frothy and then allowed to stand, at which point it becomes fluid and can be thinned with water. After seeing this beautiful and inspiring show, I am again thinking of pulling out those pieces of parchment.

A New Rug Hooking Project: Tilt

With this work, which will be 12 x 10 inches in size, I am back to the theme of balance, as in the ruglets Swing, and Lean. A square is tilted, touching the curve beneath and 2 outside edges, giving the appearance of being ready to tumble, yet held steady by its tight placement. When I started doing color studies for this work, I used a green for the large curved form, but then switched it to the background because I didn't want the image to look too much like a big, grass covered hill.




Last week, I pot dyed the three colors, crowded them so that the dye reached the fabric unevenly and yielded a mottled surface; I believe this adds a lot of life to the surface of the finished work. I used a color called Violet for the curved shape; it gave me a lovely pinkish color, which I varied by dropping some Yellow on it. The square was dyed with Silver Gray, which looked quite purplish to me in the pot, so I added yellow here too, purple's complement, to dull the color. The green is Silver Gray Green. All the dyes I use are Cushing's Acid Dyes. I like the color relationships that emerged from the dyepots: a slightly darker square balanced in front of a lighter green, next to a lighter but more intense violet. It will be interesting to see how these colors sort themselves out spacially once the ruglet is hooked.

Mosses and Lichens Grow in Brooklyn, and on Fifth Avenue

I decided to slip away from Vermont for a couple of days, and go down to New York City, where there was some real winter; I wanted to visit with family and friends, and see some art, which I'll share in the next few days. The remnants of the big east coast snow storm were mounds of dirty snow at the edges of sidewalks, and icy snow decorating the north side of tree trunks. When I arrived in Brooklyn on Thursday afternoon, it was a lovely sunny day, so I went outdoors with my camera in search of my favorite small growing things: mosses and lichens.






The lichens created soft green surfaces on bark very different from the bark in Vermont woods. The center image above was taken from a flowering tree in my parents front yard, a cherry I think; it looks like an aeriel view of a densely forested landscape, tropical, with hidden ruins of a great civilization. I can't identify the other trees, but their patterns are beautiful.




When I stepped outside, I noticed moss growing on the low bricks lining the front path. I was so happy to see it, because I learned from Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer that many city mosses are sensitive to air pollution. These little plants looked very happy; the moisture from the snow had probably perked them up quite a bit.






These large stones make up part of the massive wall running alongside Central Park, on Fifth Avenue north of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As I was walking south to the museum, I saw hardy-looking mosses––as they must be to survive the air of busy Fifth Avenue––in the spaces between the stones, and soft green lichens on their surfaces. The greens decorated the solemn gray, a minimal palette on a geometric composition of line and rectangle.

Wild Turkeys

Here are the 4 tom (male) wild turkeys who made the tracks shown in a previous post. They seem to have made my front lawn, now sadly bare of snow, part of their daily ramble around the neighborhood. I first tried to take photos of them a few days ago, but as soon as they saw my shape at the window, they scooted off. Now they seem to be accustomed to me, so I was able to photograph them yesterday. They weren't even frightened off by Blinky the cat, who was outdoors; quite the contrary: Blinky slunk by them, seeming frightened by their large size. And they are grand birds, quite regal looking when upright, their feathers glowing with iridescent color. I once saw a male in full array––tail feathers spread, head bright blue, strutting for a mate––and it was quite a spectacle.

Karl Blossfeldt

Karl Blossfeldt, Saxifraga Wilkommniana (magnified 18 times), photogravure, 10 1/4 x 7 1/2, 1928

Karl Blossfeldt, Cucurbita, (magnified 3 times), photogravure, 10 1/4 x 7 1/2, 1928

These two stunning images, details of plant forms, are hanging above my desk and are vivid reminders of the power of clarity, simplicity, and intense observation; they are a wonderful antidote to the clutter of life and work around me. My framed works are photogravures from the book Art Forms in Nature (1928) by Karl Blossfeldt (1865 - 1932), a German professor of design in Berlin. The plain drama of these compositions––magnified plant parts, displayed on a plain ground, often symmetrical, seeming to be an abstraction from nature––appeal to our modern sensibility. The photographs were not made as art, but as teaching tools for Blossfeldt's course on plant modeling; forms from nature were seen as excellent sources of design ideas. Because actual plant material was so fragile, Blossfeldt found that making photographs––using a macro lens and enlarging the detail many times––was just as effective as a teaching tool.

When Art Forms in Nature was published, it received high praise from art critics and historians, establishing as art what the photographer had not considered as such. For us, I believe there's no question that whatever the initial motivation of their maker, these works provide a moving aesthetic experience. As we follow the changes of form, from large volumes to smaller, straight to curved, and notice the intricate details of surface, we enter a new world, once hidden: its tactile and visual pleasures enlarge us.

*The photographs below were taken from the book Karl Blossfeldt: Photography, which is no longer in print. The original photos were used for the illustrations and are all 30 x 24 cm, or approximately 11.8 x 9.4 inches. To see more of the images from Art Forms in Nature, use the link above.

Blossfeldt, Chrysanthemum carinatum (Painted Daisy), enlarged 20 times

Blossfeldt, Equisetum hyemale (Winter Horsetail), enlarged 30 times

Blossfeldt, Phacelia congesta (Blue Curls), enlarged 8 times

Blossfeldt, Papaver orientale (Oriental Poppy), enlarged 6 times

Blossfeldt, Trollius ledebourii (Globeflower), enlarged 12 times

Longer Days

An intense red bloom has risen jauntily above the mass of geranium leaves, signaling that the days have lengthened. More buds have formed, and are slowly enlarging and unfurling towards the late winter light. The days are still cold, but the increase in daylight hours is a joyful sign of the spring to come.

Pink Triangles

Pink Triangles, 12 x 12 inches, hand-dyed wool on linen

While working on and finishing Pink Triangles, there were two surprises. The first was a technical glitch: because of the direction of the hooking, with the central black shape being made up of parallel diagonal lines, the ruglet became a parallelogram instead of the square it was meant to be. When I had finished the edging, I did a bit of tugging on the two black corners, pulling them apart so as to stretch the shape into something that more resembled a square. The pushing out of the pink shapes was especially pronounced in the larger of the two triangles. I had originally planned to have that triangle on the bottom right, as shown below, but found that the balance of the piece now worked much better with it at top left: because we read from left to right, our eye also scans an artwork from upper left to lower right, giving that lower corner more visual weight, so the smaller triangle had enough weight for that corner, the larger one too much.

The other surprise this piece brought was in the content that I hadn't realized was part of the image. Because I was thinking primarily formally––about color and shape––in designing this piece, I was completely blind to the meaning of the pink triangle in history, having to be reminded of it by a friend: a pink triangle, point facing downwards, was the badge that homosexuals in the German concentration camps had to wear. Turned with the point up, it became a symbol for gay rights in the 1970s. So, where I was thinking of a feminist twist on abstraction, someone else could see a totally different history and meaning. This is a very vivid lesson in the impossibility of controlling the meaning of our work; the fluidity of ideas and understanding from one viewer to the next (for each person brings their own experiences to their looking) enriches every piece of art.

Winter Light: Green and Gray

It seems strange to me that I am in northern Vermont, enjoying what was a beautiful, bright and placid day, while in the mid Atlantic states there's a major snowstorm. The sun poured into the south facing rooms, warming me and my cat: me on the couch reading, Blinky on the kitchen floor next to the woodstove. The lawn has areas increasingly bare of snow. Oh, I wish some of that snow had made it up here!

Working on "Triangle and Curves"

After building up several layers of paint overall on Triangle and Curves, I decided to finish the left side of the painting first, with its large curves and dark canyon. I painted the interior dark many times over, lighter to darker and back again, and again, until I got the value and depth of color that looked convincing to me. An especially sticky problem was the line of light coming up from below that created a reflection on the red surface. I liked having this bright line: it showed that the vertical plane sank below the horizontal, giving an idea of unseen form. But it sure was difficult to get the right balance of value and color so that the thin strip of light made sense.

Another problem was the inside lip, a rounded form running along the curve. When I look at it now, the one on the left looks too wide, on the right a bit too narrow. Also, the curve on the left juts forward a bit too much; the curve should be more gentle. And I thought I had finished this section of the painting....




I've also begun to add layers of color to the right side of the painting, building a base of opaque light color on the sunlit areas which I can then glaze, for a rich effect, with darker tones.

The Gardening Season Begins

Soon after receiving my seed order last week, I planted onion seeds, red and yellow, in 6 and 8 inch round pots. The earlier they are started the larger they will be for transplanting. (I usually start leeks at the same time, but forgot to order them so will look around locally for some seeds.) I love the way onion seedlings grow: fine loops of green begin to poke up through the soil; as they grow taller, the end bearing the husk of the seed is freed from the soil and the loop unbends, slowly straightening, rising towards the light.

Turkeys in the Snow

Returning from my midday walk today, I noticed turkey tracks dancing up my neighbor's driveway, making elegant three-pronged marks on the thin coating of snow. Each time I see evidence of these big wild birds, or see the birds themselves, I feel happy; there's something amusing about them, the way they waddle and peck across fields and woods in their large groups. They are very wary of people, and will run or fly off when I approach, but cars don't frighten them at all; when I'm driving down the hill and they are in the middle of the road, they are in no hurry to get out of the way, almost letting the car nudge them: move, please. I suppose there's no species memory of trouble from a big metal box, while the smell of human means danger.

Reading Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett's trilogy––Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable––has been sitting on my shelf, unread, for a few years. The novels seemed daunting to me; I felt I had no way into the work, even though in the past I'd read the "difficult" modernist novels of Thomas Bernhard. But then, two weeks ago, I rented the filmed version of Waiting for Godot, a play I'd never seen; my innocence in regards to Beckett's work was a large hole in my cultural understanding. Godot was amazing: frustrating, involving, off-putting, nonsensical, brilliant, hilarious, serious and profound, and in the end, deeply human, with our uncertainties and silliness and meanness and need and love. With all its confusions and wordplay, it nevertheless left me feeling elevated.

So I was primed to begin reading Molloy, the first of the three novels. I'd already found a beautiful sentence––"To restore silence is the role of objects."––in the book when I randomly opened it, as I wrote in my post on my commonplace book. As I began reading I found more and more stunning writing, that made me stop, go back, reread, and read again. The book is now bristling with colorful little page markers, the color dependent on where I was reading the book at the time: pink for bed, blue for livingroom, yellow for kitchen table. Another beautiful sentence, intensely visual, making the landscape alive to feelings:

The road, hard and white, seared the tender pastures, rose and fell at the whim of hills and hollows.

As I read this book, I felt swept along by a flood of unrelenting words, while having to pay close attention to each sentence, or risk being tangled up in a messy thicket of verbiage. Attention is necessary in the reader, just as Beckett pays close attention:

My eyes caught a donkey's eyes, they fell to his little feet, their brave fastidious tread.

At last I began to think, that is to say to listen harder.

It seemed to me that all language was an excess of language.

Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen, no, nor even to conceive what such a thing means. Yet only then can you detect, beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is made.

The sky sinks in the morning, this fact has been insufficiently observed. It stoops, as if to get a better look. Unless it is the earth that lifts itself up, to be approved, before it sets out.

Within all this gorgeous language is the dilemma of personhood: what does it mean? can we preserve our selves intact, our bodies working? The character Moran found himself "dispossessed of self". And Molloy mused, in phrases achingly beautiful:

And that night there was no question of moon, nor any other light, but it was a night of listening, a night given to the faint soughing and sighing stirring at night in the little pleasure gardens, the shy sabbath of leaves and petals and the air that eddies there as it does not during the day, when there is more vigilance, and then something else that is not clear, being neither the air nor what it moves, perhaps the far unchanging noise the earth makes and which other noises cover, but not for long. For they do not account for that noise you hear when you really listen, when all seems hushed. And there was another noise, that of my life become the life of this garden as it rode the earth of deeps and wildernesses. Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be.

And the story itself must be questioned, nothing is fixed, all is fluid. At the last, Moran writes his report:

Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.