Category: My 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
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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
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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.

#646 Gates of Unknowing

68.5 x 56 cm. Watercolor, ink, burned Buddhist paper.
Artists learn early that art won’t save us. Not that it ‘can’t,’ but that it won’t. A refusal. No different for the few who find ways to manipulate the capitalist machine to grant them false compensation in money, though that may make it easier to hide from the truth.
I’ve been thinking about this as I’ve worked on my last few pieces. No more than our children can save us, I thought. I feel, even as I work, the increasing distance, this alien thing, this work of my hand and eye–how it absorbs something of the power of the sacred, a power that is not, and never was, my own. And never will be. Like our children–we want them to live, to shine with that life that will never be ours,  even as they abandon us to death.

#646 Gates of Unknowing.JPG

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