This is a favorite of mine, a gift from my sister a few years ago. Gao draws astounding forms from black ink and paper, pulling image from abstraction and bleeding ink in a way that reminds me of Joseph Beuys’ early watercolors. Also, though, I return again and again to his writing about his own work process, the cultivation of a state of mind that invites wonders to emerge from the tip of the brush. Curiously, this great painter also won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000. Gao lived through ugly times in China, and he’s skeptical of art world ”revolutions” and post-historical jargon. He’s also suspicious of the conceptual tone of much of contemporary art. Gao’s paintings are proof enough that the tactile mysticism of the brush that has thousand-year-old roots in China is alive and well, even amidst a generation that strives to forget it. (Click below for more, including short quotes from the book.)
Each Wednesday (Woden’s Day) night this Spring, when possible, I would go over to the studio and make prints. I had several etched plates lying about, each of them suggestive of image, while not quite readable without interpretation. The ways in which an intaglio plate can be inked, and stroked into art, are infinite. Each of these shuffling images is a “reading” of the same etched printing plate. You can see the traces of a common origin, if you care to pause and look for a moment. If this is no interest, if this kind of transformation isn’t your cup of tea, well, then, by all means, you’d best move along and not waste any more of your time here. I like this kind of thing, though, and if you do, too, don’t be shy about leaving a comment. A moment’s attention means a lot to me, in a busy world.
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“Old Tongue is a piece of nearly-abstract visual music that rushes forward repeatedly, then pauses, breathless. A tiny screen invites one to focus close, and the attentive viewer is rewarded, as rhythm, shape, color, and glimpsed imagery meld in a cinema that is both intricate and intimate. Old Tongue was shot primarily on the Antrim Coast, in Connemara, and in the Poisoned Glen in the summer of 2009. Spirits seem to merge with the vivid present, and even familiar imagery seems somehow unreal.”
(Video installation for “Letters & Speechlessness” at ArtWorks, Letterkenney, Ireland, July 3-30, 2010, 7 minute loop, tiny video, 2010)
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I love the feeling that I’m coming to an understanding of something that’s very complex, that’s too intricate and layered to put into words. Like jazz harmony this afternoon, when it began, as it sometimes does, to get out of my brain and into my fingers . Like all the rest of it, too, all of it, on a good day. Rewards of aging, reward for decades of dogged rumination and attentive daily experience. The moment passes, though, and I keep muddling along with really only brief, occasional moments of clarity.
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Several notable curiosities came out of last fall’s “Time and Attention” show, and not everything got included in the gallery exhibition. Here’s a sort of image poem that tells of the emergence of life and form on Earth. Interpretive dance, perhaps. This should give you a decent sense of what it was like back then for those ambitious little critters. Millions of years are compressed into a couple of minutes, so bear with me if I missed anything important.
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Here’s one still image from a movie called Old Tongue, part of “Letters and Speechlessness” at ArtWorks in Letterkenny, Ireland. This is the first time I’ve worked through the material I shot last summer, and again and again, I wonder where did THAT come from. With much of the best material, startling things emerge, things that I have no memory of shooting. The movie seems to know more about the places I visited than I do. Perhaps this has more to do with the hands-on mysteries of making and forming than with the intervention of ghosts and faeries, but perhaps not.
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Once again, we did short animations in my courses at UC Denver. Here’s a selection of strange, intense, and/or accomplished moments from this crop of “Intro to Art” students at UC Denver. I’ve been meaning to trim out a few low points, but I haven’t yet, and it’ll only take you about 4 minutes to watch ‘em all. Go here to see them.
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I’m not sure what age I was when I had my lemonade stand – let’s call it eight years old or so. I don’t know if it even lasted an hour, but in any case, I nailed legs onto a board to make a table, mixed up a pitcher of lemonade, set out a few cups, and set up shop. Here’s the odd thing: I set this all up in the woods, maybe 40 feet from the back lawn, with not even a nearby trail. There was a patch of skunk cabbage nearby. I don’t think I even told anyone I was in business out there. No customers, of course. Did I expect any? I have no idea what my motivation was, but I do also remember coming across the abandoned stand again some weeks later. The aged lemonade tasted kind of like beer to my pre-adolescent palate. Maybe that was the beginning of my beer-making experiments around the same age: Inspired by accounts of stills, rum-running, and Prohibition-era outlawry in The Salt Book and the Foxfire books, I had apples and water (among other things) fermenting in jars behind the books on my shelf. These concoctions, as you might expect, were interesting to taste, like the lemonade, but not especially tasty.
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Edges soften or harden depending on the light source. Months merge to quick glimpses in the shadow of memory.Flashes are given sequence, and from the mind's turbulent puddle, we conjure up a stream.
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\Welcome to Waldemar Pure &\\
\\Applied Research.
Please stay with your assigned group.
E.W.
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Far from Home
An itinerant mechanic wanders an unfamiliar planet.
For all the art talk and theory, an artist, regardless of their specific beliefs and cosmology, knows that when it goes well, the moment of making is a moment of grace, some kind of gift, a treasure and a privilege. This experience is as old as art is, although a lot of contemporary art talk belittles it. We, as artists, the kind that I mean, are not just content providers for... a luxury market, a network of institutions, a sophisticated discourse, and a social scene. We are, at our best, much more than that. What, then? I don't know, still. I just have a thread that I need to follow.
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I’m not sure what age I was when I had my lemonade stand – let’s call it eight years old or so. I don’t know if it even lasted an hour, but in any case, I nailed legs onto a board to make a table, mixed up a pitcher of lemonade, set out a few cups, and set up shop. Here’s the odd thing: I set this all up in the woods, maybe 40 feet from the back lawn, with not even a nearby trail. There was a patch of skunk cabbage nearby. I don’t think I even told anyone I was in business out there. No customers, of course. Did I expect any? I have no idea what my motivation was, but I do also remember coming across the abandoned stand again some weeks later. The aged lemonade tasted kind of like beer to my pre-adolescent palate. Maybe that was the beginning of my beer-making experiments around the same age: Inspired by accounts of stills, rum-running, and Prohibition-era outlawry in The Salt Book and the Foxfire books, I had apples and water (among other things) fermenting in jars behind the books on my shelf. These concoctions, as you might expect, were interesting to taste, like the lemonade, but not especially tasty.
