Category: Art

The Poem Tree

Rescued from the dusty basement, cleaned up and in my drawing studio.

Poem Tree.JPG #287 Poem Tree 4

#287 Poem Tree 1.jpg

There’s a history to this. In 2009 I began to hang poem cards on a dead tree on E. Passyunk, in South Philly, not far from where I lived. At first, I would find them missing, or torn on the street the next day, but I kept going back with new ones, and strings on can tabs, and ribbons, and decorated the poem cards with glitter, colored them with crayons. After a time, they were left alone. People began to notice, to stop sometimes to read the poems.
In the spring, the city uprooted the dead tree and planted a new one, a living tree. This piece is my memorial to the original poem tree. I wrote a chap book of poems: The Poem Tree.  The words to the first poem in the chap book are what you see hanging on the branches. Those large leaves are American Chestnut, from Morris Park–trees that will die soon, long before reaching their climax growth–as all American Chestnuts do since the blight. So in a way–this is also a poem about the loss of The American Chestnut, a tree that was once the Queen of the Eastern Woodlands.

The Dead Tree (a poem)

The tree
is

DEAD
it is
a dead tree
that
has died &
is

NOT ALIVE
now

just dead

I hang some leaves on the dead tree
with fine copper wire
& some aluminum can tabs
& some red plastic rings from my Spirit Stick
& a green ribbon & a single pigeon feather
from my Spirit Stick
(like a bird has come to pay respects & left a
card)

I think the tree feels better
even though it’s dead

I know I would

View portfolio here ART BY WILLARD
For photos on this blog:CLICK HERE, and scroll down.

Every End a Beginning, Every Beginning an End

New habits for a new Place.
This morning, shower, coffee, breakfast. Read a chapter in a novel Read poems in Lauren Hilger’s Lady Be Good… which became scattered fragments from last night’s dreams and flickering images of old movies.
Meditation.
#294 Meditation Box

This is my meditation box. I made it,  September, 2014. Today, against the wall, it provided a perfect visual focus.

In the beginning of important things–in the beginning of love, in the beginning of the day, in the beginning of any work, there is a moment when we understand more perfectly than we understand again until all is finished. W.B. Yeats

View portfolio here ART BY WILLARD
For photos on this blog:CLICK HERE, and scroll down.

I didn’t turn on the computer till noon, and have not yet checked news or FB.

#65 (revisted)

#65.JPG61x61cm. Acrylic, paint can lid, twigs, scrap wood frame, street dirt etc. An early Recyclation.
This had been hanging in the dark in the basement gathering dust for 4 years. I had set it out on the porch, waiting to pack it for the move, & came within a couple of blinks of trashing it.

I hung it on the wall in my new place, and it doesn’t look so bad.

View portfolio here ART BY WILLARD
For photos on this blog:CLICK HERE, and scroll down.

Modality of the Visible

I sat outside A-Space for almost 4 hours. Maybe three people stopped to more than glance at my art. I thought about that post on the time one needs to see, to actually see, a work of art.

More specifically, I was thinking about Joyce’s “ineluctable modality of the visible.”

Who cares, right? but there I was, sitting in the sun, what else did I have to waste my time on?

The visible became words for Joyce. What I was thinking about, was the visible in art that remains in the ‘modality of the visible.”

This is what I do, what I seek out, what I work for in my art–the power of the visible to grasp the attention of the eye, to guide and to reward exploration that has no need to become symbol, message, exhortation or story. Useless.

There I was, useless. Old man trembling in my own private thoughts and anxieties. With my useless art, refusing to allow any meaning beyond the visible to be pried lose from the visible. A vision quest, of no use to the world.