Tag: Art

#658

35.5 x 43cm Pen & ink, watercolor. (black & white W.I.P. below)
All about the tension between almost random lines and splatters, and a kind of geometric containment, with light and color resisting. Anarchy struggling with the State. Can abstraction be allegory?

#658.JPG
#658 WIP

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#657

#657Working on visual ‘ideas’ for a larger piece. Would you believe I’ve been working on the this for 3 days? It’s only 15x17cm, but pen & ink (with my beloved crow quill nib (Hunt No 2) is labor intensive, and I need lots of time between working sessions to observe and think about where it’s going.

I feel a contradiction, a painful tension between the increasingly abstract art I’ve been making, and my desire to make what I do register as resistance, as opposition to the fascist coup and all the horrors it’s begun to unleash.
But I can’t… I can’t work like that–come up with an idea to show what I’m thinking–something with an intelligible ‘message’.
The message, if there is one, is there. But it’s in the tensions between containment, ‘authority,’ and liberty of movement. It’s all visual. When I feel the need to SAY… I write a poem. And even there, it will be elsewhere… as the world we need to make to survive… is elsewhere. Do you understand this? Does this make sense?

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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

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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

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