Autumn waves wash softly now
Upon the distant shores of future bliss
O all connecting ocean
I hear you call across the infinite
And thus I lay now
In this autumn grass hollow
Where the lapping foam
Sighs in warm distance
Hiding the breeze from my skin
Fae amphitheater for the cricket song
Marais La Mer
Singing the Hypnotic symphony that unites us
Déjà vu refuge
My bones warm so nicely in the penultimate autumnal heat
Winter’s inevitable rage but a premonition now
The tortured limbs of Cedar and Spruce splay against the azure
A testimony to the once and future fury
Of Sea Witch gales
Even now, sea breeze whispers in their branches all gently asway
Thusly she enchants
The salt licked wind but a vector of her spell
Like a cythe of memory wielded so deftly––Her sacred molten art
Yea, thy foundations must be strong and built of stone
And thy broad timbers hewn from a prince of trees that fell in the tempest
Thus do I Remember the house I will build one day
And the secret grains
Hidden in the heart of all things
Joinery of the master carver’s hands
I will inscribe the ancient connections upon furrow and prow
Woven lace talisman to salvage life’s love
To protect what will one day forever be
When eternal spring’s bloom resurrects what once was so sweetly yet again
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The hibernating Mage wanders underground now
Lost in the labyrinthine caverns of winter's grief
Each chamber like a dream recorded:
The sighing room of leather wombs,
The shimmer chambers shaped like dancing skirts
The shuttered basements where the moths flutter for the memory of the moon
And the cave of alchemy
Where he painted the sun upon the wall to remember warmth
In that place he gathered the spring blossoms come to soon
Vibrant blush upon the branches that danced
Capturing all that delicate snow
Until the bower beams shattered
Hung now like slaughtered doves
Dripping wet magic
Upon the Seeing Orbs
One for darkness and one for light
Frozen orbits of the infinite
Her silver chalice ever overflowing
Moistening the very marrow of the universe
Here he will await the true spring
Carving ancient wands from the branches
willing the shattered stones to meet with a kiss
In this secret healing place
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See how she dances for me
Like branches of embrace
Touching in the wind
I feel vapors of the sea breeze
O infinite and liquid desert that denies
Like kisses from afar
Swirling now about my inner eye
Tis’ Winter now at this incline
Chill wind to awaken the senses
The autumn leaves scattered long ago
The vermillion fever buds yet but a premonition
Now the dance must consume before hearth and fire
Entwining paths of embrace in the darkened folds of long nights
Close your eyes in this warm dark and you can see entire worlds
Dream time
Each night a pageant of imagining
…and the Mage all a merging
Gifts from some other place
Visitations
Of the Goddess breath of myth
While stars wheel above the slumbering
And pine bowers sway
In their moonlit way
Sometimes the dreams come from afar
South of the tropic
Where summer heat hath burrowed so fine
And the Goddess dances like the saltine seas
Each undulating curve
Like a wave
Enwraps
And impresses
Like jeweled toes in soft sands
Footprint tapestries of the swaying siren
A Calligraphy born of the desire to move
And the waving waters of the lagoon
That float the flesh as if in a dream
Lapping the slope and rippled curve
Waves upon waves
Underwater Undulations
Thusly wrap the sun so watery upon her forms
Like two branches brushing in a dream
And so I awake to make what art I can
To echo but a fraction of this bliss
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In late july
When the forest brims a thousand shades of green
And the river flows lazy to the sea
This tritone image was taken on the Alsea River in Orgeon, the summer of 07. When I took it I imagined nothing like this. I was a bright sunny day and the scene was bursting with every shade of green imaginable. Insect hum and the lazy flow of water made me want to set the tripod down and have a picnic. Now, two years later I revisit the negative and have created something suggested more by the possibility of the tonal range of the negative than my memory of the day. To see a more 'true to life' interpretation, go here. I'm not making any value judgement on either version, both have vibrance and vitality to me
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One of my favorite themes are meadow scenes which anthropomorphically incorporate Figurative imagery inspired by the Mythical idea of Female deities and Goddesses. The Shape of Flora and Fauna tessellate back and forth, commenting on the universal forms in nature. In this first piece, Starmate's Meadow, I've used metallic pigments to depict a white gold mist flowing over a field graced by silver and sable nymphs
Starmate's Meadow, 2008, Metalic Pigment, Sumi Ink and Acrylic on Washi Paper, 38" x 22"
This year I had the strange experience of meeting three people with birthdays just one day before mine. Since my birthday is the first day in virgo, all three of these people were just over the cusp in the last day of Leo. I'm not super fixated on horoscope lore, but pay attention and am often intrigued. I painted this image of a magical meadow for one of these friends, the very gifted photographer, Anne Marie Simard, whose own rich black and white images of patterns and nature inspires me quite often.
Starmate's Meadow Detail
Meadow Sylph, 2008, Acrylic and Ink on Paper, 40" x 25"
In Meadow Sylph, I've embraced the same theme while utilizing a much brighter pallet of color. This piece also includes something else that happened to me this year, Calligraphy! I'm just beginning to explore this but I'm enjoying the ability to add textual elements to the work in an aesthetic and organic way.
I'm very intrigued by Calligraphy, its history and how it feels when I do it in my art. I must admit it took me a little mental adjustemt to write directly on the artwork, but in truth, the entire calligraphy experience is possible because I'm treating each letter as gestural stroke rather than 'writing a letter'. I'm fairly certain this engages an entirely differn't part of my brain.
To give you a sense of the scale, that fallen tree across the stream is at least 5 feet in diameter.
There is a story about the these woods. They are in northern California and contain the 5 tallest trees in the world. Naturalists try to keep the location of the tallest trees hidden because people inadvertently destroy the forest around the tree to go see it. In the 1970's the Nixon administration relaxed logging rules ahead of the enactment of laws that were to go into effect protecting these lands. As a result, Timber companies logged Around the clock to get as much of the old growth forest as they could. They stopped at midnight on the last day they could work and were just 300 feet shy of what is now the tallest tree in the world.
When these trees fall over and die they cross each other on the forest floor and eventually rot into the earth. But that takes a long time, and in the mean time, the forest floor becomes very un-flat, with huge holes being formed by the voids in criss-crossed trees. So off trail hiking can be a challenge. You have to be very careful. Also cougars roam these lands. A few months after I visited, a cougar attacked an elderly couple on trail not very far from where I took this photo. The cougar grabbed the man's head and would not let go until the woman bashed it over the head with a log. Both people lived. In our modern insulated age, we often forget that the earth is wild. I always love the moments where I remember that.
Technical notes: This was taken at around 4pm on an overcast summer's day. The cloud cover was quite light and the sky was very bright. On the forest floor the light is almost all completely top down. The shadows on the underside of the roots of that fallen tree were very very dark. So I decided that I would not try to get any detail in the sky at all, just let it go white. And set my exposure to just give me a bit of detail in the shadows. I used color negative film, which has a latitude of over 8 stops, and that helped a lot. Still the film as it came back looked very blah. But after enough nursing of exposure and curve adjustments I started to get something I liked. In fact this image shows more than the human eye could fully realize had you been standing there. ( the human eye will shut down to protect itself from the harsh radiation in the sky, making the shadows go very dark. It's only when you step directly under the canopy of that root ball that you see any real detail.) (This technique is sort of a poor man's HDR. Because my film scanner does not make pixel perfect repeatable scans, I can not do HDR very effectively right now) The inclusion of the texture in this case, in addition to helping the antique atmosphere, brings detail back into the blown out white areas.
Initial Alchemy
Some times talking about art is zero sum game. Perhaps this is because artists often work in the proto linguistic languages of intuition, imagination and feeling. Thought they can be very articulate in there own way, these creations do not always have an analogue of words that make any sense. In other words this will be short blog entry. :)
Recipe for art:
Pen
Rock
Paper
Blossom
Grass
Paint
Glass
Ink
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