Winter Light: Through Windows

The short days and low sun of winter have their blessings: the sun rises luxuriously late, allowing me to enjoy the rich intensity of color emerging from the dark; and the sunlight pours into the house, reaching far into rooms untouched in summer. This change of light has encouraged me to take still life photographs during the past two winters, a time I am more focused inwards. I thought that this season I would begin with a transitional idea, of the winter landscape seen through windows. This bedroom window faces east, to the sunrise, and to the White Mountains of New Hampshire draped by clouds in the distance. This is a scene to encourage rising...




and walking to the window to observe the landscape more closely. A narrow band of moisture gathers beads of light, rivaling the luminous sky. My only regret about double glazed windows is the loss of Jack Frost on the old storms, those beautiful and varied patterns of ice that coated them. But now I can see out of the windows all winter, instead of looking through coats of frost.




A few days before that clear sunrise there had been snow; blown snow made a lacy pattern on windows that carried into the room. The sun picked out the edges of things, the lines of cobweb and string.




And from the kitchen window, the soft shimmer and glitter of snow, a gentleness framed by strict geometry, reminding me of nature/culture, inside/out, warm/cold and many other interesting contrasts and contradictions.


A couple of other Winter Light posts:
Winter Light: Teacups
Winter Light: Knobs and Handles
Winter Light: Rounds

***Note: I'll be away for a few days, to celebrate an early Hanukah with my family, and to see friends and art. See you next week.

A New Painting: "Gray Cross", With a Lesson Learned

Gray Cross, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 6 x 7 inches.

In between my last painting, which I wasn't happy with and you can see here, and this one, I rediscovered my love of Tantric painting, and it has changed the way I am approaching putting paint to surface. I had received the new book Tantra Song as a gift and spent many hours poring over the images, and then writing a blog post on them: "The Quiet Depth of Tantric Paintings". Just like the first time I saw these works, at the Drawing Center in 2004, I was inspired to try to somehow make them my own, copy them in some way. Back then they were what encouraged me to begin making small textiles for the wall, when all I'd done before were rugs for my house.




Last week, I wanted to actually paint those paintings; I wanted to possess them, to understand their making; I wanted to capture the deep calm, the quality of the essential, that I found in them. I took out a couple of pieces of parchment and sat there looking at them for a while, conscious that the Tantric artists took advantage of irregularities of surface. I tried to breath quietly, to become calm and quiet, to get close to the best of how I feel when I meditate. And I began to paint a blue circle, being as attentive to brush, the paint, the mark, as I could be. Then I felt the circle needed a companion square, so painted that. I approached the dark green rectangle with the same intense level of concentration, balancing it with a soft haze of red.




I then decided that I was going to paint on scraps of parchment left over from the stretching process; it would be like doing musical scales, practicing a little each day, reminding me of the feeling of quietly contemplating each shape.




After my little homages, I began this painting with a very different attitude. I felt that I'd become a little lazy, a little impatient, a little rushed. So now I slowed down, worked with smaller brushes, attempted to get more subtle shifts of form and color. None of this is for the sake of "realism" but in order to have a deeper relationship with each shape and each color that I paint. It is so that I pay attention.

A Walk in the Woods: The Artistry of Snow

The snow that fell on Thursday is still clinging to limb and twig. When I walked through the woods on Friday, the world was transformed: every dark branch was outlined in white, as though to emphasize its movement through space.




The snow was a thoughtful artist, adding a thick line here, a thinner one there, in order to balance the drawing in its lights and darks. And like all good art, it made me more aware, more alert to the shifts of overlapping lines, to their subtle changes in direction, to their relationships.




At times the style changed, from a more classical rendering of ordered space to an all-over pattern, like the work of Jackson Pollock or Milton Resnick.




Or there was an emphasis on graceful flowing lines, as beautiful and fresh and simple as any line drawing by Matisse.




Looking closer, I saw the crystalline snow delicately balanced on an arching branch, catching droplets of light,




and patches of white clung expressively to the only warm color left in the white and gray and brown woods.

The Quiet Depth of Tantric Paintings

How is it that paintings made by anonymous artists half a world away, as objects for meditation in a centuries old tradition, resonate so intensely in a contemporary mind, eye, and heart? Of course, one reason is that they look so modern; although they are copies of Hindu Tantric images dating back to the 17th century, they fit right in to modernist high art in its minimalist form. I first encountered these works at an exhibition at the Drawing Center in 2004 and was immediately enthralled.




Their simplicity, their modesty, their small size (most are around 12 inches in length), belied the power of their presence. So, when I received as a gift a new book on these works, Tantra Song, from my sister-in-law, the designer Sandy Chilewich, I couldn't have been happier. Thinking about these works in the past week has already profoundly influenced and inspired me; the anonymity of the artists, the fact that making the paintings is a religious practice, as is contemplating them, has reminded me that the quality of attention brought to the act of painting is of prime importance.




The collector of these quietly masterful works is the French writer Franck André Jamme, who has written marvelously poetic texts for the book. He explains that the images have been repeated through the centuries in northern India, that there are a certain number of them, that their "vocabulary...is somewhat similar to that of ragas in Indian classical music". It is rare that a new image emerges. Jamme states that "in such an ego-centered world as ours, I find this anonymity extraordinarily delightful and touching".




Jamme explains that there is no precise symbolism for all these images, although he offers a guide. Above is Shakti in the manifestation of Kali, The Black One, the goddess of time. The three spots, which appear on several paintings symbolize the three gunas: matter, energy, essence. Blue is consciousness, spirals and arrows are energy.




Although I know nothing about Tantrism, I can't help but think that the spiritual origins of these paintings carries a depth of meaning, mysterious but potent, that I feel in looking at them.




I see a tension in the red connected circles, pushing apart or being held together. Jamme calls this a "meditation of the possible and necessary balance of things". I don't see it as quite so calm. The little bit of red at the bottom of the page creates more jump in the image.






The paper used for the paintings is found and worn, but it seems clear that the artists were very conscious of the properties of each sheet – its colors, repairs, tears – and used them to balance the compositions. In the two paintings above you see again the three gunas.




Most of the Tantric images are very simple forms, revealing essences. Here there are multitudinous small arrows, "the endless dance of energy". It is like looking into a sparkling night sky and having a wondrous sense of the enormity of the universe and our tiny place within it.




Fire around the sacred principle, the Shiva Linga. As a secular Westerner the black form doesn't tell me a story, but it is a power; it has both a tremendous solid presence with its uneven paint, and is a deep deep void, containing the compressed energy and matter of a black hole. I love seeing how simple shapes, basic colors, are transformed in these small paintings into the essences of life and spirit. Looking at them, I become more still, I give more pure attention to the world inside of me and out.

Quarrying Granite

Much of the bedrock of Vermont is granite, an igneous rock formed from volcanic magma. There are granite outcrops around my land, granite boulders form the stone walls, and my house is built on granite ledge, with half the cellar taken up by its intrusion into the space. Not far from my home, in Barre, Vermont, are enormous veins of granite that have been quarried for 200 years. The Rock of Ages quarry is reputed to be the world's largest, and has been photographed by Edward Burtynsky, (click "quarries" then "Vermont") a great photographer of industrial sites. I made a trip with friends to see a nearby abandoned quarry last week, guided by the journalist and photographer Terry J. Allen; they thought I'd enjoy seeing the site and photographing there, and they certainly were right. It was thrilling.




I caught my breath as I got my first glimpse of the huge walls of granite, dropping to a still body of greenish water, the gray stone streaked with dramatic bands of black, possibly from mineral deposits. The complex interlocking angles of the stones make the whole thing look like a giant sculptural installation.




In other areas, red streaks, and rock walls topped by long-abandoned fences.




Upon our arrival in the area, the quarries had announced themselves in the village nearby: giant mounds of discarded stones are everywhere.




Trees grow up between these rocks and on top of them, the grays of stone and bark in subtle harmony.




Climbing past those rocky piles and across granite ground was when the drama of the black and gray walls unfolded. Here you can see the old ladders still in place that enabled the workers to climb from ledge to ledge.




And when I looked toward the west, there was a beautiful lake formed by water seeping into the abandoned quarry, the angled rocks looking like an architectural ruin.




Turning back toward the east, I could see the cranes of the working quarry, used to lift the blocks of granite.




There was a large array of discarded tools and equipment, which of course caught my eye, including an entire building filled with old machinery. The relationships of color and form were beautiful, and the huge size (the cables two or three inches thick) astounding.




I loved this group of enormous versions of simple bolts and screw eyes, bits of hardware we usually can hold in the palm of the hand. Here they were made for giant tasks, the heroic endeavor of cutting stone from the earth. It does seem heroic to me, thinking of the men, many from Italy, who worked these quarries a hundred years or more ago, when it was more difficult and dangerous. I see here some grandeur in our industrial past.

A New Textile: "Draped"

Draped, hand dyed wool on linen, 12 1/2 x 9 inches.

A couple of months ago I had a powerful visual experience upon opening my eyes after my brief meditation practice, which I describe in this blog post. I felt as though I was seeing clearly, deeply, and tenderly, and what my eye fell on was my terry cloth bathrobe. I did some thumbnail sketches of it and put them away in my folder of textile ideas; they came out last week. Most of my body of textiles uses flat shapes in homage to the tradition of reductive painting which I dearly love, but in this case, I wanted to have an illusion of form. It is simple, to be sure, and I used a black outline which pushes the image back towards flatness.




To dye the wool in a range of values and colors I dipped it into the dye pot; first I dipped the darker end into red, raising it up and down, up and down, putting a little more of the fabric in the pot with each dip. I then turned the length of fabric around (it was 12 inches wide by around 3 feet long) and dipped the other end into a yellow; this would ensure that the lighter value would be warmer in hue. I then added some darker red to the pot and immersed the end in that until the dye was taken up. Finally, I added a little more red and submerged the entire piece of fabric so that the yellow end would be a reddish hue and all the hues would be related. It sounds complicated, but it's not, and it's fun.




In this detail you can see the slight variations in color and how they make an illusion of folds. I hooked the black background, which I chose for drama, in a random pattern in order to have it read more as background behind the regular vertical rows of folds. I so enjoyed working with this little bit of illusionism that I've done more sketches for possible projects like it, balancing form and abstraction, somewhat like my painting, but much closer to the abstract end of the scale.

At the Met: Metalwork in the New Islamic Wing

Base for a Water Pipe with Poetry and Flowers; India, early 18th century; cast, engraved, inlaid with silver and brass.

The glory of pattern, refined, elegant, and complex, is the essence of so many of the metal objects in the new wing at the Met, the "New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia". The full round form of this water pipe base is so satisfying, inviting me to cup my hands around it, but it is the pattern that astounds.

Base for a Water Pipe, detail.

In columns that curve around the form, enhancing its bulbous grandeur, are marvelously wrought flowers and leaves and words (there is unfortunately no translation of the text).

Basin with Figural Imagery; probably Iran, early 14th century; brass, raised, engraved, and inlaid with silver and gold.

Looking at this work, I am in awe of the detailed craftsmanship, the intense quality of attention that had to be called up in order to complete these complex tasks. The pillowed curves of the rim of this basin are perfectly matched, and create a sensuous rhythm around its edge.

Basin, detail.

Every curve has a figure or animal at its center. Each line, each shape, whether flower or fruit or figure, is beautifully wrought, inviting close looking.

Dragon Handled Jug with Inscription; present day Afghanistan, late 15th - early 16th century; brass, cast and turned, engraved, and inlaid with silver, gold, and black organic compound.

This wonderful jug has repeated medallions of twining gold and silver lines which repeat its rounded shape.

Dragon Handled Jug, detail.

The inscription around the neck is an invocation to 'Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammud.

Inkwell with Floral and Animal Imagery; Iran, 16th century; brass, lid cast, body worked, engraved and chased, inlaid with silver.

There are delightful animals cavorting amid flowers and foliage on this charming small object. Who wouldn't be pleased to be writing if they could dip their ink into this lively and perfect little world.

Helmets; from the left: Helmet with the Name of Sultan Ya'qub; Iran, 15th century; iron, silver.
Helmet; Turkey, early 17th century; copper, embossed, engraved, stippled, and gilded.
Helmet; Turkey, late 16th century; steel, forged and engraved.

Lastly, some accoutrements of war, or of military parades, because they too are gorgeously shaped objects. I am showing them together because I am fascinated by the variety of form, topped with an ending sphere (click on the image to see them enlarged). Each piece is a sculptural object, a variation on a theme; each is inventive and graceful. I am looking forward to exploring more of this new installation, and discovering new treasures.


The previous post on the new Islamic wing:
At the Met: Ceramics in the New Islamic Wing

A Walk in the Woods: In the Distance and Close at Hand

There are some newly expansive views on my woods walk: my neighbor has done some logging. In an area that was once covered with young trees, obscuring the surrounding hills, now I can see them ringing my town, and peer far off to the White Mountains of New Hampshire.




It's made me think of the changes this landscape has gone through, from heavily wooded to almost cleared at the beginning of the 20th century. I have read that Vermont, in the late 19th century, was only thirty percent wooded to seventy percent cleared and now it's the opposite; much of that clearing was done slowly, acre by acre, with hand labor along with oxen or horses. Now, that hard fought cleared land is mostly back to woods, and stone walls that once fenced in pastures and fields wind between trees. I enjoy the feeling of my body moving from enclosed space to an expansive one, and back again.




There is much to see in the wide open world, but what I love about my walks in the woods are the small things that I have to keep my eyes alert to see. A few days ago I passed this tree stump, less than two feet high, that jumped out at me as a magical sprite, horned, long-nosed, ready to jump about at the touch of a magic wand.




Looking even closer, I found a small broken branch, 5/8 of an inch at its narrow point, that held some beautiful red fungus, a red jelly, that because it is in its winter state of dryness confused me into thinking it was a lichen. When I saw it on the ground I was only aware of a mass of deep red; it wasn't until I saw it through the macro lens that I noticed its complex folds, like masses of brain tissue. The world has small treasures along with its grand dramas.

A New Painting: "Three Cylinders", with Thoughts on Light and Touch

Three Cylinders, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 6 1/4 x 7 1/4 inches.

I have spent a few days with this painting, looking at it in different locations, alongside other work, and still have the feeling that I had when I just finished it: I don't care for it. There are a couple of reasons, which I'll try to make clear. You may wonder why I even bother to show work on this blog that I don't think is successful; I do so because I find it helpful to my own thinking to articulate what is bothering me, and the discussion that sometimes follows with my readers, here and on Facebook, is often elucidating.




This image immediately offered a challenge in how to balance the abstract and realist elements. Most of my images are closely cropped so that there is nothing to place them in a real space; sometimes there's a bit of flat blue for a background sky which usually isn't problematic. Here, there's a space at right that might read too realistically as sky and green earth, so I tried painting the entire shape blue, thinking it would seem more abstract, which is where I'd like the painting to be. But that didn't work; the composition needed a horizontal to balance all the verticals. So then I tried mixing a blue that was more an idea of blue, without the light that a sky would have. You see the result of that above. That didn't work either.

Fra Angelico, The Apostle Saint James the Greater Freeing the Magician Hermogenes, ca late 1420s; tempera and gold on panel; 10 x 8 7/8 inches.

I believe that the reason it didn't work for me is that I was mixing two different ideas of light; the blue was a conceptual color, color simplified. In the early Renaissance, as in Fra Angelico's paintings, color is beautifully conceived, but the rendering of light uses only value: lighter and darker red, blue, etc.

Camille Pissarro, L'Hermitage a Pointoise, 59 x 79 inches, 1867

While when we get to the Impressionists, we see warm and cool colors used to render sparkling light effects, for a more naturalistic sense of landscape. For many years, I've attempted to convey a vivid quality of light, more in line with Impressionist color, along with a sense of solid form. So...my attempt at a conceptual sky did not mesh with the naturalistic light of the cylinders; one or the other would have to change, so I changed the sky. I wanted to keep the fresh light in the cylinders since it is part of the tension between real and abstract that I love. But I remain uneasy in the relationships of cylinders to background. (and oh! my painting looks dead next to the Pissaro and the Fra Angelico.)




The other thing that makes me uncomfortable is the way I handled the paint. My brush marks are labored, without life, clunky. I had one of those hard times that occur from time to time, when I feel as though I can't paint: every mark is a struggle, I keep getting spots of dust lifting the paint, it looks clumsy instead of graceful. I always hope there's a sense of magic in a painting, even for me who made it, as though it transcends the nuts and bolts of its making; this painting does not come close to succeeding in that. Feel free to differ, or agree...