Amy looks closer

Vanitas

2012-03-03T15:40:00.000-05:00

The last few minutes of lunch served at a cafe in a museum. There's no one left but us, and the staff, and tables to be bussed, things put back in place. Everyone is preparing to be somewhere else. Even though we're still here, we're done, thinking about our own particular next. It's the last gasp of the day's table flowers, in the long light that's particular to here, low because it's winter, but lit up green because it's never really winter. They look their best this way, in a way, as they bow and droop, they seem most alive just before we're done with them.

Sidewalk Stories

2012-02-27T08:02:00.002-05:00

Sunday at the Lake Worth Street Painting Festival, where the street turns into a chalk quilt and the paintings last as long as the sky allows. Four hundred artists this year, blue fingers and orange knees, and the most beautiful curbside crushes you will ever see.

Collections: Posted

2012-02-21T14:52:00.000-05:00

I've loved old postcards for a long time now, enough to start collecting them when I was ten, (the first one found in the desk in the living room, one sent to my Mom, of a New Jersey amusement park). Enough to fix some into my sketchbooks, enough to use them as backgrounds in my earliest shadowboxes. At first I loved the backs, with their old stamps and postmarks, the idea of being the latest in the chain of ownership, to have caught something first sent out in 1909 or 1914. There was never anything interesting scratched in old ink next to the names and addresses, just snips of vacation itineraries and "missing you". They were like paper airplanes, in a way, sent out into the air and caught, sent out and caught. I started collecting them later for the pictures, not for their nostalgia, necessarily, but for their distortions, the way they seem more like memory than document, the way they seem to take real places and make them stranger, taller, softer, higher, lonelier.

Before the internet, I wasn't exactly sure a place like this could actually exist. But it does. Though not as impossible in recent photographs, as it seems to be here.

Thirty Rockefeller Center seeming taller and narrower than it should, my favorite skyscraper to this day,

My college, long long before I wound up there,

Amusement park rides the way I think we want to remember them, like the glowing skeletons of benevolent dinosaurs left to spin us and toss us around.

The dark and quiet corners,

and Zombie Houses.

Later I fixed on night scenes, unlike any night scenes I had ever seen, with moons like spotlights, turning real places into stage sets:

and almost always, one boat, out there alone,

Fredo?

One house, out there, across the falls, (Would they hear you, if you were caught in the current, would the two lit windows be what your eyes fixed on, your last solid safe sight, before the water claimed you?)

Four, (or five, or six?) featureless people sailing the lake,

something like a painting by Albert Pinkham Ryder,

with all its heightened enigmatic night, its whys and wheres left completely up to you.

Passing by

2012-02-16T09:53:00.000-05:00

Two weekends, in the same state, but enough disparate images to make your head spin. We're lucky we can take it all in, this fun house of stuff, without falling over, since nothing links them together but our witnessing them. Our passing by. Our looking up or down or over or back. We had coffee across the street from The Garlic Festival. We sped past a theme park along a highway. We stopped at lights near painted ladies and a fiberglass horse and giant fish lure, a painted van, a mysterious sign on an empty building. Are we just used to this, being filled up with pictures, places, things, the lack of narrative making the narrative? I can't believe it's particular to now, I read that Cleopatra's city of Alexandria displayed elephants wearing gold embroidered slippers and a fifteen foot statue that stood up and poured milk. This can't be something new.

V-Day

2012-02-14T11:07:00.000-05:00

Okay. Honestly. Valentine's Day, not a huge fan. But not a hater, either. So I opt, today, to wear a black boat neck top, yes, but with red shoes.

Oliver, too, not a fan. He loves, but on his own terms. So we throw the love dust all over him, because we just can't help it.

Oliver thinks, why is this holiday all about them?

Good question, Oliver. We don't have an answer. There is no answer. Love just does what it does.

Sorry, sweetie.

Happy Valentines Day!

North Carolina Museum of Art

2012-02-11T21:31:00.002-05:00

Rembrandt has been to the North Carolina Museum of Art. It was our first time too. He left just before we got there. But it didn't matter - we were so knocked out by what we saw that by the end of our visit we almost had to leave. Inside its lightbox interior were things I had never seen before, things I had only heard about, and things I had seen photos of but had never seen for real. There was almost too much beautiful for one short winter day.

Roxy Paine, A skew

First, you see a stainless steel tree.

And inside, well, I'll be quiet now.

Stanton MacDonald Wright, Flight of the Butterfly No. 1

Robert Rauschenberg, Credit Blossom (Spread)

El Anatsui, Lines That Link Humanity

Egungun Masquerade Costume, Africa

Daisy Youngblood, Mother and Child

Ledelle Moe, Congregation

Peter Koellin, Madonna and Child Sheltering Supplicants under Her Cloak, c. 1470

Flemish kunstkamer, 17th century

Jaume Plensa, Doors of Jerusalem

Yes, I know. So much. Exactly.

Artspace

2012-02-07T12:32:00.000-05:00

This is my love-post to Artspace Raleigh. Because my first Two-Person show there was better than I had allowed myself to imagine. How often does that happen? Does that happen? I can say now, yes.

It does.

First, a peek down the hall of the upper floor, lined with artist's studios:

The monumental borrowed-clothing installation by Jarod Charzewski, downstairs in Gallery One:

And my work's two month home, Gallery Two:

where Director of Programs and Exhibitions, (and curatorial magician) Lia Newman and I and my mom Norma (taking photos just then), unwrapped and cut and untwisted the last four years of my life.

So that it could look like this:

and allow me to share the space with the intricately beautiful work of Barry Sparkman.

My stereoscope project made its debut:

And so did Red Collection:

and Symptomatic:

That's me under Climb, Cling and Drift Away,

my formidable mom, Norma, with Conjoined.

Barry Sparkman's mixed media work:

And a dream of an opening, filled with hundreds of visitors, and what I wanted to see so much-pointing and examining and leaning in close.

And there was dancing!

Thank you Artspace, Lia and Mary and Chelsea and Katie and Michelle and Paris, to the Artists-in-Residence that I had a chance to talk with, to the amazing David Dorfman Dance group, that set the place on fire, the people of the lovely city of Raleigh, who made First Friday so much fun, thank you all for everything, for an amazing week, an experience that has been life-changing. And special thank you to Laurie and Jim, who traveled to be there, on a very big night.

Amy Gross and Barry Sparkman

Microcosms/Macrocosms

Artspace, Raleigh

February 3rd - March 31st, 2012

Becoming real

2012-01-28T14:16:00.000-05:00

From this,

to this, virtually overnight.

My studio looks more like a set from Michel Gondry's Science of Sleep, a dream-scene of corrugated cardboard skyscrapers, though completely without his trademark whimsy.

(whimsical)

(Not whimsical. Not one bit).

The most amazing thing about all this finishing and tweaking and boxing and taping and folding and bubble-wrapping is that it actually is the very physical, very real end to a long period of imagining and hoping and magical thinking. Magical thinking because this show, my first Two Person, was always two years away, no matter what day it presently was. Even a few months ago it seemed that way. It was only recently that it became an actual time, a place, a wherewhatwhen. Which is really wonderful, despite the jumping stomach and the ear-splitting eagle-shrieks of packing tape, the realities of truck dimensions, the fears of forgetting something important or even what my work is about. Things that were floating around in air have come back down - I no longer feel like the party planner trying to figure out how to get all the balloons off the ceiling.

Maybe a show is really a version of the art making process itself, a very public tethering of personal thoughts onto something you can see and hold. Up until now, it's been a plan, a series of inventions designed to get those thoughts back down. Until now, it's both much better and far worse than I want it to be. And once it's in my hands, it is, well, what it is, with a life span. It'll be interesting finding out how that feels.

(Here's a little about the show, where I'm sharing the gallery with the amazing paintings of Barry Sparkman, on the site You R Here)

Microcosms/Macrocosms

Amy Gross and Barry Sparkman

Artspace, Raleigh

February 3rd - March 21, 2012

I'll see you soon!

Lake Worth

2012-01-24T12:20:00.000-05:00

We spent last Saturday in Lake Worth to see an exhibit I'm part of, Foundations, the inaugural
show at the re-opened Montgomery building. I'll post the reception later in the month, when it officially begins - in the meantime, I thought I'd share a little of the building, a tall ice cream cake of Art Deco. It's a beauty, built in the forties as a movie theatre, then reborn again and again as a seventies disco-(just imagine what that was like-I see lots of sherbert-colored glittered platform shoes), a pizza parlor, and three kinds of art museums. When I first moved here it was called the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, or PBICA for short, and I loved it. I had just moved from New York and I didn't know where or whether the art would be, and it turned out it was right there, Kiki Smith and Fred Tomaselli, right there. It was out of its element, though, and didn't last, north of Miami is art-careful, but it warmed me up just as I was starting to make my work again. The spark struck just at the right time.

This frieze runs the frame of the lobby, amazing plaster figures by sculptor Tom Otterness,

and inside, a sneak peek of a corner of the show:

and the room for children,

Lake Worth itself is a Florida city with that rarest of things: a downtown:

with more Deco, preserved and crayon colored,

all straight lines and acute angles against Florida's winter sky,

though still appropriately pink and mosaic tiled,

and seventies vintaged.

But it's a real town, lined with motorcycles and hostile to chain stores, with a barber shop instead of a salon-slash-nails-slash-spa,

and your choice of clipper cuts, including, it looks like, the Newt Gingrich, upper left. If you're so inclined.

In the Cassia Tree

2012-01-21T22:46:00.000-05:00

Speaking of trees, this is our Cassia, a young one, a baby, really. It sits in our front yard, tilting, growing out its haircuts so quickly that it seems to be laughing at our attempts at taming it, our feeble fumbling for curb appeal. But, see, if you don't tame your trees here, you get a letter in your mailbox. Cassia tree doesn't care. It does its own thing. Cassia tree loves life. It's kicking it old school. It's chillaxed. If it could talk, I know it would call me Dude.

So, if you come closer, Cassia won't mind.

Closer,

into its yellow and green.

You brush the pods aside and go in under,

where Poppa Dove is sitting, guarding his mate, and their eggs,

in her nest, built last year by two mockingbirds raising two very noisy babies. Mourning Doves do this, make another breed's nest their own. They moved in here last week, I think,

and are not that happy that we found them there, with our cameras and loud voices.

No, not happy at all.

We beg your forgiveness. We're going. Cassia tree is yours.

Up and into the green...

2012-01-13T21:15:00.000-05:00

Here, the most innocuous backyard trees are filled with enough life to fill up a small planet. I was up on a ladder photographing three of my objects in one of our two small trees, part of a project that mixes photographs and sculpture and glass domes and stereoscopes. (I promise, this will eventually make sense). I couldn't believe what was going on up there - fat white spiders mummifying their dinner victims, haunted house tangles of cobwebs, parades of ants and beetles, abandoned nests filled up like salad bowls with bits of feathers, paper, air fern, string and leaf skeletons, startled yellow warblers completely affronted by the unnaturally tall human invading the last of their hiding places. Branches tore up what passes for my up-do hairstyle, I found bits of leaves buried in my hair later that night. This is a very young, very small, very domesticated tree (maybe a black walnut? I'm not sure), unassuming, not particularly arresting (or shade offering) from below. But that slight change in perspective and it proves itself to be complex, complicated, and deeply generous, a sticky, scratchy, mossy Swiss Family Robinson home for the tinier things. My artificial objects, all mimicry, all acrylic yarn and paper and wire, products of the indoor studio, looked happier out here, up there, than anywhere else I've ever placed them.

Collections: Pursenality

2012-01-09T10:54:00.000-05:00

I was never much of a handbag girl, maybe because I grew up in a 1920's house. This really does make sense-1920's houses had small closets, tiny closets that did not foresee the future of 1970s middle class families with more than one week supply of clothes, or shoes, or handbags. My Mom had a normal number of purses for her time, but, crammed into tight spaces, they avalanched on top of her every time she searched for the one in the back. It was a constant source of amusement for the rest of us, that tumbling sound, the soft cry of dismay, and I swore, as a black-clad 80's teen, I wouldn't ever need anything more than a backpack, or something like the grey laundry bag that Ally Sheedy dragged around in The Breakfast Club.

But we change. We grow. Or, our closet space does. And somehow, that indispensable accessory, the thing that sends you into a phantom-limb panic when you don't feel its weight on your shoulder, becomes a symbol, a banner. I don't like status bags, I still don't get them, but the older ones tell a story-vintage gifts from Mom, from friends, anonymous hand-made pocketbooks found for two dollars, the beaded purse my mother carried with her on dates, and she saved, in a way, just for me, the daughter she couldn't have known she would have.

First Night

2012-01-01T10:58:00.003-05:00

Under the electric starfish, my town celebrates First Night, filling the streets up:

with thousands of people, and lights, including the moon,

with glowing mohawks,

and very tall puppets,

fiddlers,

and dancers,

things that twirl

and spin,

bikes that glow,

very tall trees,

and extra large poetry.

Then, at midnight, we drop the car. (it's real)

and the sky explodes-

They shoot ping pong balls out of cannons,

and the year begins again.

Hope you had a Happy New Year, Everyone!

A New Years Message from Oliver

2011-12-31T11:30:00.000-05:00

Transcribed verbatim:

Oliver's humans wish you all renewal, fresh starts, and exciting change this New Year. He's right, we really do believe in all of that. But if you have an ideal perch, (and we do too), we hope it remains the perfect spot in 2012. Happy New Year All!

Helen Frankenthaler

2011-12-27T17:10:00.000-05:00

Helen Frankenthaler died today-strange how I was looking at these wonderful photographs very early this morning - she's in her studio, in 1957, painting with her slippers, and with her hands.

Images found on I'm Not a Person in This Dream - I'm a Place

A little joy

2011-12-21T11:49:00.001-05:00

To all my friends, going through this hurried holiday week, I wish you happiness, warmth, fun, hope, and peace, from my doll house to your house.

Interior World

2011-12-15T12:53:00.001-05:00

I've been completely preoccupied with an upcoming show, my first two-person, at Artspace Raleigh, in February. So the outside world has receded. Actually, it's receded way into the distance, and the studio has ballooned, filled up with ticking time, straight pins, stained fingertips, hope, doubt, logistics, travel plans, spinning thoughts trying to merge together into intelligible stories. There's much less outside, day trips, no time for serendipity, chance, or accidents. Much less time for blogging, and reading my friends' blogs, which explains, though doesn't excuse, my recent absence from their beautiful, thoughtful worlds. The whole world, right now, is in this room. It feels small and large all at the same time, the way things seem when you're threading a needle.

Coffee table reading

2011-12-06T12:33:00.001-05:00

I sometimes daydream about having an extra room to call the library, with floor to ceiling bookshelves, with a ladder on tracks, with a long table in the center wired with reading lamps, with an overstuffed chair near the window, wait, no - with a window seat stuffed with pillows, with an antique card catalogue that still holds dog-eared typed up cards from a library renovated long ago, with...You get the idea. Books in my homes have always shared space in dining rooms, in bedrooms, in living rooms. They sprawl, they pile up, they topple. I haven't yet been able to say, in reply to an inquiry about the whereabouts of a family member, "he's in the Library" with a pretentious faux accent designed to prove that I really know how pretentious that sounds, (though secretly digging it). So coffee tables have always stood in for the library, and in a way, that's good - the books of the moment aren't tucked away neatly, and when finished, they make way for the newer ones, forming that towering stack of words and photographs and essays and articles and illustrations that tilt and topple and color in your internal life.

Studio Visit

2011-12-03T11:36:00.001-05:00

Working in my studio last night, I looked down, and discovered that Oliver had made a bed out of my fabric bin.

He's not a studio cat-he comes in only occasionally, to watch cars go past the window, or to steal a pompom, to beg for supper, or nurse his paws into a shopping bag full of brown fleece-(mother, mother, is that you? we imagine him saying). But this night he chose the bin of scraps, making a nest of felt, cotton swatches, black velvet, an embroidery of mushrooms and bees.

Every time I looked up from my work, he was expanding the boundaries of cuteness, testing the limits of what one poor human can absorb-

until he decided it would no longer do, and he was gone.

Petri Dish

2011-11-28T10:27:00.001-05:00

If art-making is a transformation of the invisible into the visible, then the petri dish is the perfect metaphor. Target Gallery in Alexandria, Virginia has assembled a small works exhibition with one stipulation-the pieces must fit the parameters of a petri dish. Two of my biotopes are taking part:

Amy Gross, Cultured Biotope, Parasol Mushrooms with Ears

Amy Gross, Cultured Biotope, Pomegranate and Crown of Thorns Blossoms

All the works in the show are here, on the Target Gallery blog,

and the show itself runs December 1st - 31st, (reception December 8th, from 6 to 8).

Target Gallery, in the Torpedo Factory Art Center

Humble Pie

2011-11-24T10:33:00.001-05:00

Stick me with apples and my Mom's New Settlement Cookbook, (the one so well-used that the spine has peeled away and the cover has fallen off, the one with the water stains, the one that also teaches you how to set the table), and I manage the only thing I can bake, apple pie for Thanksgiving dinner with my aunts and uncles and cousins.

Thank you that everyone who was there last year is still here.

Thank you for good company while I bake:

The crust is never even, I never flute the edges as artfully as I think I should. Food bloggers would cringe-it's never exactly magazine worthy. Like actual life. But it'll do fine.

(The best baker I know-right here)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Collections: Vintage jewelry

2011-11-21T09:54:00.001-05:00

I've never owned a piece of jewelry that had an ounce of worldly value. I'll never have any stories about trading in the family jewels to save the house. But ask me about my all-time favorite necklace and I'll describe the plastic Oreo cookie with a bite taken out of it, on a leather string, a reward for a good third grade report card. Or the egg with a chick peeping out from the cracks, strung on chord, or the hand painted driftwood mouse. I barely remember anything else, anything bought in a jewelry store.

So maybe that's why I love thrift store jewelry, second-hand, or third, or fourth. Things buried deep in yard sale bins, sealed up in baggies, in the back of the case near the cashier at Goodwill. It's almost as if you're adopting them, becoming part of their story. In one case, it's a story I know-the snake belt was my Mom's, her gift to me. The rest are anonymous, but make suggestions all the time, of seventies fondue parties, of a sweater-set teenager's high school graduation, braless young women in turtlenecks at a Women's Lib rally, long nailed fingers holding cigarettes at a Ladies Luncheon. Cliches, of course, as most suggestions are. Someday, maybe, someone will wear my own silver charm bracelet, read the charms, and make up a story of her own.

Coral Gables

2011-11-15T09:15:00.001-05:00

On Sunday my friend Amy and I drove south to Coral Gables in her new red car to see the play Red. And after a week of laboring on a piece consisting of thirty red fiber objects, it's been a decidedly red week, completed by a jarring sight, in the play, of artist Mark Rothko asleep in his studio with his arms immersed in a bucket of bright red paint, first mistaken as blood. After the play the world outside was mercifully green and yellow and blue. The rows of trees, ficus and banyans, form wonderful tunnels through all that low blue Miami light. The street I grew up on, on Long Island, was not nearly as dramatic or grand, but our maples were decades old and linked branches over the road this way. They weren't as large or embracing, but this is how I remember them, and I love the trees here as if I grew up under them.

The buildings are beautiful, iced like cakes...

with The Biltmore Hotel at the neighborhood's center, with all its Di Chirico angles and shadows,

its swimming-pool-blue tilework,

and twilight interior.

The chandeliers are like brooches, and the ceilings as intricate as if they were embroidered.

It's a mix of Italian and Moorish and Spanish architecture, collaged together with the "why not?" that Americans have always been so good at. It shouldn't make sense, though it does, because it's here. You can't quite place the hotel, each corner recalls someplace else, but it still manages to be recognizable as itself somehow, a South Florida design buffet. It fits my adopted state perfectly.

HESA Inprint

2011-11-11T10:19:00.001-05:00

I'm thrilled beyond thrilled to be part of HESA Inprint magazine's Botany issue, and in such good company. Sometimes a theme just calls out to you. HESA is a joint English and Finnish creation, a lovely orchestration of art and literature, and has a fascinating blog as well. Each month follows a topic, collects all kinds of creative work that fits the theme, and follows the variations-each as individual as you would imagine it could be.

To see their beautiful blog, and the issue: just click!

Symbiotic

2011-11-10T11:03:00.000-05:00

I've passed these trees many times on my way back home from places, and I love their gothic cloaked drama. They're frozen in what seems like a continuous Boo. But, really, they're just unfortunate to be set in a lot that no one pays much attention to-they're smothered by an invasive vine that doesn't belong here. An errant combination of man and nature's symbiosis rules this yard, so much so that now the trees are less of what they are than what they're covered in. Actors must feel this, when they're more of who they're pretending to be than they are themselves.

Symbiosis is such a factor of life that you could say it defines life-we are what we are joined to, physically and emotionally. Florida is like a visual symbiosis encyclopedia, and its effects are almost impossible to avoid-almost every walled community is framed by drainage canals gone jungle-dark thick tangles of life growing around and onto and into each other.

We don't have the kudzu of the deep South, but we have things like strangler figs, clutching palms as they grip and squeeze and choke.

So many things shoot out roots and climb-and faster than you would think possible.

And duckweed spreads,

until the water seems solid, and both are inseparable.

Friday night at Whitespace

2011-11-05T11:35:00.000-04:00

Last night was the first show of the season at Whitespace. One more reason I love living here is that art is often in places you wouldn't expect, down side roads and in warehouses and converted buildings. Elayne and Dr. Marvin Mordes live with their collection in a transformed dental laboratory, but share much of it with us, rearranging the pieces once a year. A section of the space, Whitebox, is devoted to exhibits, this month to Claudia Alvarez and Marty Kelly.

Claudia Alvarez

Work from their permanent collection:

Christian Boltanski

Richard Long (floor), and Doug Aitken (wall)

Erwin Wurm's The Artist Who Swallowed the World

Here's more about the Mordeses and their art, how they live with the work they collect, and eerily, one of the last photographs taken of my Dad, a year and a half ago, (the picture of the backs of people looking into Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung's newspaper video theater-my Dad is second from the left, my Mom is wearing the white jacket, and there's a little piece of my face between them). The art world is not a small world at all, but sometimes, it is.

Feathered Nest

2011-11-01T10:27:00.003-04:00

I'm a part of a lovely post by Marni Elyse Katz on The Inside Source, about feathers in people's homes. For me, they have been gifts that have literally, truly fallen from the sky. White ibis, sparrow hawks, blue jays, mourning doves, osprey, wood storks, blue herons, egrets and yes, turkey vultures, have contributed to my collection. And finding each one is still an exquisitely rare event.

The Ghosts of Halloween Past

2011-10-26T10:31:00.002-04:00

Halloween from days gone by. Well, a few years ago. Days long gone smelled like decaying maple leaves, meant parkas zipped up over home-made costumes, rain, orange and chocolate cupcakes, my mom pretending that something was climbing up the basement stairs behind me and my kitchen chair. Here, in my sub-tropical adulthood, or what has stood-in for adulthood, I've tried to make it as autumn as I can, despite all the bright sunlight. Sun has to go down some time.

Sunday along the St. Lucie

2011-10-24T14:22:00.000-04:00

In this part of Florida, the southeast, you have to go north to go South. Up Interstate 95, where the back ends of industrial parks and salvage yards trail off into open fields and where you see your first citrus groves, grazing horses, herds of cattle. We were driving only an hour north, but it's just about there that the landscape starts to look like Georgia. The slash pines are taller and darker and grow closer together, the cypress trees drip moss. We're going to Stuart, a town on the St. Lucie River, not quite, but almost at the peak of our t.v. news viewing area, and somehow, though not really, very far away.

We're here, ostensibly, for a Sunday afternoon jazz concert on the river, and for that combination of water and sky and sunlight and air that seems particular to weekend afternoons, and the wonderful ordinary of this added to beach chairs and a book, bare feet, a man dancing with his chocolate lab, a kayaker drifting, ospreys circling overhead, and little kids struggling against being carried along the pier by their mom or dad or grandpa. People there only because they want to be there, in all of this.

I love my own town but it's a place of planning and action and going and getting. Up here it's slower. Stucco and Spanish tile and Art Deco never took hold, the master planners on their newly built railroad cars passed through on their way to Miami and the clapboards and shutters and porches and tin roofs remained.

But it's still Florida. They still paint things in ice cream flavors.

and all roads lead to the water's edge.

P.S. (Happy Birthday, J.!)

Dining Room of Horror

2011-10-21T08:28:00.000-04:00

In the Dining Room of Horror, a nightmarish scene has been set. What terrors are lurking on the dining set from hell?

Ooh. Scary papier mache.

Do not fear. Horrifying skull is illuminated by battery-powered flicker candle so Dining Room of Horror does not catch on fire. Safety always.

Witness, if you dare, Tabby Cat of Doom considering Mortality.

Is it his own he ponders?

Is it Death itself that earns his ire?

Or is it.......

Youuuuuu!!!!!!!

No really. It's you. Run.

Tanked

2011-10-19T12:11:00.002-04:00

Not all that autumnal, though the orange suits the season, right? On the last afternoon before a cold front passes through Florida, I thought I would get tropical one more time. I don't dive or snorkel, I have oxygen issues, as in, if the air comes through a tube, I'm somewhere I don't want to be. But the next best thing, a very big aquarium in a seafood restaurant. Another shadowbox, in a way, a biosphere, some more amazing symbiosis:

Window Shopping

2011-10-17T08:28:00.000-04:00

As any devotee of Project Runway knows well, the shopping mall, according to Michael Kors, is a wretched hive of spandex and acetate villainy, the standard measure of the low brow and the common. Anything that sinks below the good taste limbo pole is banished there immediately-an amusing touch of irony, considering that my local mall contains not just a golden-hued Michael Kors ready-to-wear boutique, but a glut of his low priced Macy's wear. If any designer owed a debt to the institution, at least as a bankroll for his higher pursuits, it's the CFDA award winner. I'm not a big department store shopper, having turned to resale and thrift shops years ago. And maybe it's because my nearest mall is particularly snooty-though it does have plenty of kiosks filled with glittery hair accessories a few rhinestones short of tiaras, it is, for the most part, stocked with things I plain can't afford, and never will. It's a shrine to the unattainable, not to pleather and all things flammable. My Mom and I go there because it's like a bright shiny carousel-we don't ride the ride, but we love to look at the pretty whirling things. The colors! The lights! And it's been, lately, an amazing curiosity cabinet, the store windows like surreal full-size shadow boxes-

with backdrops made of hundreds of children's handmade butterflies,

Pink balls of yarn larger than poodles,

Ostrich eggs hatching retail,

Marigold paper precipitation,

Ice cream at Tiffany's,

Mysterious encounters,

Couples with eyes only for each other,

and time on their hands.

How much like the hands holding candelabras in Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast? Very much, even though their enchantment is basically a plea to buy. But if you don't buy, it can still enchant in its way. There's very little of this kind of stage craft in everyday life nowadays, so if the mall can manage to transport me on a rainy Saturday afternoon, well, take me away.

October?

2011-10-10T11:25:00.000-04:00

It's October, right? I'm trying to get into the mood. But it's hard to. It's going to be 90 degrees this week. They promised us a cool front by Friday, which means a high of 86. They're selling scarves and gloves in Target, but I can't imagine wearing them, I can't even touch anything that's been knit. I wasn't born here, so I get all wish-I-was-there, which turns into a nostalgia chowder of actual childhood memories - mushy pumpkins, rakes combing through brown grass, stuffing wet leaves down the back of my brother's shirt, and autumnal Martha Stewart - spiced cider, Wellington boots, elaborate table centerpieces made of wild pheasant feathers and hand-carved gourds. I don't know if I'm missing anything real, but who cares? Looking up at a cobalt blue sky through the acid yellow canopy of a Norway maple will always be October for me. A gently waving palm tree will never be. Though, to be honest, I think all that glorious marigold and firewood musked leaf turning glory actually took place in November.

Anyway, I need to get into the mood somehow. Maybe a bit of Halloween reconstruction, dollhouse style, from a year or two ago.

...and the year before that. Maybe it will work. I hope so. I'll let you know.

Mornings

2011-10-07T10:18:00.000-04:00

What would you miss most, if everything was taken away from you? I'm not talking about people you love, that's the first clear and obvious answer. What would you miss seeing, or being part of? I would miss morning, those first stabs of light, the theatrical glow right after, the shadows, the earliest suggestions of a day that could be ordinary or extraordinary, or even terrible. In the first minutes, it all points toward extraordinary.

Inheritance

2011-10-02T07:53:00.000-04:00

I was finishing two projects last week, one my own work, a sewn fiber piece that fits under a glass dome, and my Dad's paintings-turned-note cards, that I print for the Morikami Japanese Garden's gift shop. The first year he moved here he painted every week there, and he loved it deeply. He never intended the watercolors to be anything more than something he painted for himself. But after he died my Mom and I took them over to the Morikami for them to see, and they loved them too, and since then I've been printing them as cards.

So my studio was its usual pre-deadline mess, everything piled up together, cards everywhere, my objects everywhere, and I saw, for the first time, a connection between my Dad's paintings and my own work, something I had never really seen before. Our art isn't about the same thing, or made with the same materials, but I could see the heredity, the similarity in the way we balanced color, maybe the way we see what we see.

My Dad and I had approached nature from different directions. He was very traditional, a very direct interpreter of what he saw. The landscape was beautiful for him, an escape for someone who had grown up in the city, who commuted to work every day to the same city, whose personal art always came second to the commercial art he created to take care of his family. Nature was an ideal you lost yourself in, something you paid homage to. Nature, for me, is a metaphor I use as a stand-in for my anxieties, at its source something I love deeply and madly but make over into my own flawed image. He reflected, I make things up. My Dad melted in the country, and for me, my issues outside of it magnified when I was there. In a way, we both longed for it based on the old-fashioned idea that nature can help us define ourselves, our place in the world.

Symptomatic
Mixed media under glass dome, 2011

But in the beginning, painting outside was just something we all did together.

Sitting next to him all that time, under trees, in parks, on observation towers, in fields at the side of roads, I learned more about painting than anything I did in art school. School rearranged my thinking, which was invaluable, but only part of the process. This is where the love and the need to paint, to make art, came from.

This was the last time he painted outside, at the Society of the Four Arts Sculpture Garden. I didn't paint that day, I hadn't in a while. I took pictures of the strange leaves and flowers I would later remake and use in one of my objects. So, in a way, we were doing what we did, next to each other. And by this time, his painting was more abstract. More about what he felt, less about what he saw.

And I didn't see what we shared in our work back then. But I do now. And I'm so grateful for that.

Snail's Pace

2011-09-27T09:07:00.003-04:00

Late Saturday afternoon the snails are hard at work, doing what they do, crossing bridges of grass.

Following each other over there, where it should be better.

Scaling up this way, because they can.

Or disappearing to a cooler place, into the dim depths, the source of things. To find what they want there. The whole world, for them.

To me, it's just a container garden out in front of this supermarket.

Grow taller and wider, your head wearing clouds like a hat, your eyes able to see across miles to the ocean without craning your neck. Look down at me, making my way across the parking lot, (no ocean seen by me), doing what I have to do, and it must seem almost the same. And if you can think this, understand a little bit about scale, then that's the gift you've been given.

Peace

2011-09-23T21:36:00.002-04:00

They didn't grow up together. And they're separated in age by ten long years, eons of cat time, my Solomon an older gentleman who thoroughly ran his former house, made his own day, chose his own window sills and red blankets, executed lizard house-crashers and took on a confused raccoon that broke into his screened porch. Oliver was forced to tolerate a house guest turned permanent resident who devoured his left-overs, but discovered, as only a year-old can, that a slow motion old man with a pot belly was much more fun to leap and knaw on than a catnip mouse or feather on a stick. Even though he fought back, Solomon's outraged expression, his utter disgust, his effrontery at having to constantly fight off a delinquent teenager was worth any kind of effort Oliver could make. So, normally, it's like this here:

But then, what is to us a sudden thing, this:

On the daybed, they touched paws and went to sleep. Who can explain these things? I don't think I want to. It didn't completely transform the atmosphere, just this morning, Oliver thwacked Solomon's head against the refrigerator door. But to know they can, for a hour at least, touch paws and sleep, it speaks of mysteries, the unknowable, the unexpected, the small miracle of sudden, unexplainable, unpredictable peace.

Hallelujah.

Leaf Dance

2011-09-21T20:25:00.002-04:00

It's been that kind of week, where every minute seems staged for a particular purpose, everything scheduled. It ends with three deadlines. So there's been no time for anything that's not planned, for drifting. But I was standing for a few minutes on the back porch, taking a breath, and saw a small brown leaf suspended from a tree branch by one single spider web. It spun, just because the uneven breeze made it so.

It was such a small thing, I know. But for some reason, it almost broke my heart.

Eleanor

2011-09-15T10:55:00.000-04:00

I had looked for a dress form for a long time, in antique malls, in garage sales, flea markets, but never found the girl who was right for me. Too tattered, with shredded linen that looked like half-healed wounds, or too new, with prepubescent Kate Moss hips, (this would taunt me), or too expensive. Mainly, too expensive. There was one, tucked into the back of a beautifully staged stall at the Hillsboro Antique Mall, that was made up entirely of stiff hinged paper. A work of art. And as much as art.

Eleanor was half-hidden by the water-stained cardboard box she was stored in, out in the summer heat at the fairgrounds, in the territory staked out by the vendors who wouldn't pay the indoor fee. The man who tugged her free didn't seem to understand why I wanted her since I didn't sew. This seemed strange: he was selling old enamel bedpans and chairs without seats, so repurposing seemed to have been his thing. Eleanor was in pieces and dusty but, otherwise, lovely. She had child-bearing hips. She could be short or tall. She was twenty five dollars. She was mine.

At first, she went commando, draped in vintage necklaces.

But she started wanting belts, and the fluffy things that anthropologie was giving away with holiday gift wrap.

And she turned out to be perfect for new things too pretty to be put away.

She wore dresses,

and brooches made of sea shells and coral,

and homemade necklaces.

For some reason, everything fit her, though I swear she weighs more than I do. That's probably not true. But I don't begrudge her. She's my alter-ego, my fashion victim, my sister. My headless, armless, tweed covered sister.

Collections: Golden

2011-09-09T12:39:00.001-04:00

I collected Golden Books when I was a kid. I collected books in general, all gifts from grown ups, appearing magically in my blue bookshelf. Magically because I have no specific memories of their arrival - they were always there. My parents' house was filled with books, books with no pictures, books with pictures. I had all the latest Maurice Sendacks, and loved their Wild Things and Really Rosies and Oliver Hardy chefs. But the Golden Books were my preferred stash, foxed cardboard covers with their wipe-clean sheen, their peeling gilded spines lined up precisely. As an adult, memories of their vivid illustrations would occasionally materialize out the fog of routine - or, while drawing something for a job assignment, I would fish a picture up, and long to see the books again:

the elephant wrapped up special delivery,

the grief of lost mittens,

the value of a good story well-told, (and the stoic resignation of dead fish),

how to boil water, (that came in handy),

and what to do if you find a tiny man in your soup. You really should know.

It's no wonder I'm obsessed with scale. A house is worn as a dress,

and a girl is raised in a nest, fed by birds.

Just as I don't remember their coming, I don't remember their going, their giving away. But it was right, at the time, that they moved on to younger kids, as I moved on to Garth Williams, and E.B. White, and Judy Blume. But it's the earliest picture stories that formed me, that form us, that are the reason we stop, as adults, and stare at something, wondering why it intrigues us so.

Encased

2011-09-06T11:06:00.003-04:00

This was the last time for a while that my birthday landed on the Labor Day Weekend, so we jammed it full with all the things I love to do. One of those things was the monthly Antique Fair, and unlike the Giant Garage Sale, an event of infinite "yes", I had to promise myself "not to". Not to buy any more Frankoma, not to bring home another world globe, not to fixate on the lamp made from driftwood and mushroom coral. It was more of a place for looking, of clandestine photography. This month I fixated on things in cases, those flat black rectangles lined in wadded cotton, with their collages of tiny disparate things.

They're under glass not because they're fragile, but kept from our fingers because they're expensive, and easily pocketed. But I love the way they float in their own bubbles of time, when the pins were hipster, the rocket car was the ride of the future.

There was a yo yo too small to yo, a doll smaller than a doll's fork,

tintypes of people I'll never know anything about.

I would love to know how each of these things ended up together, pressed under glass like leaves, even if their stories are ordinary. It's the ordinary that I think I love the most, their trails long lost.

Everything ends up together in combinations we can never predict or plan, like the three dolls living in a matchbox, a matchbox brought home from Maxim's Chicago, one night, in someone's soft, dark pocket.

Sidewalk Stories

2011-09-01T16:49:00.003-04:00

So many stories on a sidewalk after it rains. A strip of cement that connects one house with another, swept bare most of the time, but after a storm it's imprinted with what remains after wind and water shift things around.

There's a leaf turned transparent as a scrap of tissue paper.

Another split directly in half, tossed like a torn photograph.

There's an orchid petal plucked loose and carried off, held to the ground by raindrops.

An insect, (some kind of wasp?) that didn't make it through,

and an anole that did, thriving in the heat and the wet, having descended from others that came here on ships, in crates, traveling over one hundred miles, from Cuba.

Snails that have their own version of time and distance, inching around puddles as deep and wide to them as ponds. Trying to get where they need to go before the next afternoon storm,

or after.

Collections: In bowls

2011-08-29T10:17:00.004-04:00

Taking a look at what ends up in household bowls is a bit like having your head examined, isn't it? The things you put under glass are things that need to be protected, but bowls are restless, fluid, transient. They hold what you pick up along the way, for as long as you need them. They hold the moment. They're your everyday life.

Around here, a bowl's main job is to hold beads too nice to store away. But they share space with feathers and needles and stones. The solo earring. An origami balloon. Sea glass. Buttons made on a marathon button making afternoon.That unnamed thing that fell from a tree,

and leaves that will be beautiful for no more than a day.

Among Us

2011-08-24T10:08:00.010-04:00

Here's the source of my preoccupation with mushrooms:

As a teenager, I had a potted plant in my bedroom, an umbrella tree that had been given to me as a gift. It grew so fast and was so vital in its way that it seemed more like a pet than a plant. It popped a new branch of leaves monthly, turned to follow the sunlight as it moved across the room. I polished it. I talked to it. I re-potted it. It grew from knee high to shoulder height in two years. I took this personally. I loved this thing.

But vacation time came, a two week long trip this time. I had found a water-stained paperback book from the 70's, Living with Houseplants, the cover featuring a semi-hippie couple in bell bottoms surrounded by spider plants suspended in macrame. In it the nice semi-hippie couple wrote that the best way to insure that my umbrella plant lived through my trip would be to wrap it up in plastic, water it profusely, and let the greenhouse effect do its work. So I did.

And when I came back, my umbrella plant was extremely alive. But not just the plant. Inside the pot, outside the pot, were over a hundred little mushrooms. White caps, long stems, sprouting from the wet dark potting soil, gazing up at me, all leaning slightly like a crowd at a concert. My first instinct was the recoil, the ewww, the revulsion that accompanies any kind of excess. But after that, fascination took over. The idea of this. That these mushrooms had been there all along, sharing my room for over three years, concealed, dormant, patient. Waiting for the odd chance that conditions would change and their time would come. Their time would come and they would have their chance to bust out in all their tiny white glory, to, simply, mushroom.

They wind up, in paper version, in my work all the time. Quite often I concentrate on them when the real experience of my embroidered objects is beneath them, or behind them, but I won't let them go. The idea of something underneath, undiscovered, of something lurking, waiting, choosing its time to surface is a very important metaphor for me. It has parallels in the way our minds work, our bodies function, our environment behaves. And mushrooms and fungus, well, they're beautiful.

And wonderfully strange.

I found all of these at the Orchid Society, in the dark places along the walking paths.

Settling into the hollow trunks of chopped down palms,

Cupping rainwater,

Living among us.

(click above)

The desk where I live...

2011-08-18T12:23:00.006-04:00

The studio is a kind of chicken and egg thing-it's sometimes hard to figure out how much of the development of your work is decided by the space you make it in. I've only had small spaces to work in so far, and I have always stayed relatively small. But I've been watching ants and turning over rocks and collecting dead bees for as long as I remember. I have no idea what I would do in a giant loft with floor to ceiling windows and splattered concrete floors. Would I hunker in a corner, lurk along the walls? Would I get all expansive, consider space larger than my desk top? I can't tell you how many times I've been told to work larger. I know they're probably right, but my concession to the artistic temperament thing has always been covert - I nod politely, concede that they may be right, like a good girl, and then go back home and do what I want.

This small space, this desktop, with its avalanching yarn balls and pliers clattering to the floor and boxes of beads upended by my errant elbows, is the center of my universe. It's tight, it's the pinpoint axis on which I try to balance what I know. The raw material comes from outside its orbit, but, once inside the circle of the light cast by my broken lamp, experiences try to sort themselves out. It's where I mull and stew and obsess over things, where I mix radio stories together with conversations I've had, diagnoses and arguments and pleasures and long passed memories. It's the same for anyone who sits at a desk, making something, artist or not, that solo space picked out of a larger one, the same way little kids stake out a small section of a huge room or a wide field of grass.

In the Company of Orchids

2011-08-16T10:41:00.005-04:00

My neighbor's orchids put me in the mood to go back to the American Orchid Society last Sunday, to see what my true orchiding neighbors had been doing since I went there the first time, years ago. I remembered a concrete circle and the beginnings of a garden, and a greenhouse, but not much more. Well, since then, it's filled out. To say the least.

It's filled up with trees that look like they're draped for a costume party,

and walks that circle and encircle

lily ponds

and deep shady places to stop and sit.

Here, outside the greenhouse, the orchids tower.

Inside the greenhouse is a conjured jungle.

In real life, in person, they seem more like strange inventions, hybrids of insect and flower,

Not cheeky, like the flowers down my street that thrive in relative neglect, but things you give your time to, your head and heart to.

The American Orchid Society

Curios

2011-08-13T11:51:00.002-04:00

They're things with no practical use. And they're usually small, easily trampled, creased, crushed or blown away. Things you come across, things you find when you're doing something else, that fit into your pocket. Objects with an entirely different plan, most of them never marketed to you, never designed to grab your attention. If and when you get them home you have to put them someplace that keeps them from the dog, the cat, the kids, the heavy handed, the vacuum cleaner. Some place that sets them apart. From yourself as well. From your hand, though not your gaze.

Bones. A squirrel skull. Feathers, wings, a fragment of a hornet's nest. Bowls and vases and cups too small to use. Tintypes of people you'll never know anything about.

Doll eyes. Feet. Hands. Heads. Shells meant for the tiniest of sea creatures. Shed cat whiskers. Dragonflies that could snap like matchsticks. Bees curled up as if asleep.

Bits of quartz and pods and milagros and burrs and sea glass and the toy volkswagen your Dad kept on his own shelf. Things that you could live without. Things that would be the easiest to throw away. But somehow, always, the hardest to.

The Bell Jar

2011-08-10T10:14:00.002-04:00

I've been asked more than once to put my work under glass, something the Victorian in me actually likes. But the small pieces I've made have survived cat attacks-that's part of the point to them, that they aren't real, and they aren't delicate. I clean them up with rolled up masking tape. But there is something tender about the zone of silence, and melancholy in their distancing and limitations. Something ceremonial about raising up the dome of the bell jar, letting people see up close.

My Neighbor's Orchids

2011-08-08T10:44:00.006-04:00

I have no talent for orchids. But some of my neighbors do.

Early mornings, I ride past them on my bike. I hardly see anyone around here in the summer, so I don't really know who lives where. But I know their orchids.

I love their mix of Walt Disney and Willy Wonka and David Lynch, too bright, too cheerful, too much. They work with our white-hot sunlight and the kind of humidity that makes it feel like you could reach out and grab a handful of air. They always look to me like they're sticking their tongues out, laughing behind our backs. They stand up to us, growing the way they chose to, insinuating themselves into the trees, busting out of their little slatted boxes.

Love me, don't love me, they seem to say. I bloom when I'm ready.

So much like...

2011-08-06T21:46:00.007-04:00

I just finished a new sewn piece, so after naming it and photographing it and justifying its existence I can take a little breath. Think, or preferably, not think.

Mostly, I look. Look at pictures, look at things, pick things up. Remind myself about why I surround myself with certain objects. Why I go straight to them, bring them home, if I can.

I was given a piece of a hornet's nest today.

Amazing thing, and so much like my barnacled shell from Sanibel:

Not the same, not the same function, but all those visual analogies out there-it's really what I do, I think, just make analogies based on those intricacies everywhere I look.

Mushroom coral, well, obvious. This one was Dad's.

(The gills of a parasol mushroom out in the yard).

The odd fungus that popped up at the edge of the lawn after this summer's first rainstorm:

and a tree burr, if made much much smaller,

is echoed in pollen, and I could go smaller, to the point where the smallest things pictured look like the oldest, furthest, largest objects in space. In my work, I'm primarily indifferent to scale, as our minds, thankfully, tend to be.

Collections: Gently Worn

2011-08-03T10:59:00.005-04:00

When I was eleven, I went with my parents to an antique fair. It was one of many I had followed them to, dozens of weekends wandering among old things. This time, I found a pair of black high button shoes, exactly my size. I couldn't afford the pair, my allowance didn't stretch that far. But the vendor must have seen a reflection of herself, and allowed me to buy just one. I was, almost literally, button-hooked.

Hats followed:

A Christening gown my parents brought home to me from London:

Blouses and underclothes, a cream colored dress:

All that detail, pieces hand-sewn, made by and made for and worn by people I will never know.

Interior, with Solomon

2011-08-01T10:43:00.015-04:00

First of all, Solomon is fine. Since Oliver came to live with us, he's monopolized photographs and stories-Ollie's the ham, the clown, the drama magnet with the cat-in-the-back-alley demeanor and flying saucer eyes. So when Solomon shows up on Flickr, in his camouflage, people immediately ask, is he ok? Has he passed? Is this a memorial? No! He's fine! He's surpassed the danger zone of seven months since his surgery, and he's like a small horse. Tough, strong, healthy, hungry. King Solomon.

When a cat has been with you a long time, in my case over eleven years, he becomes so much a part of your home as to be inseparable from it. Dogs have exterior lives, an outside world, interactions with neighbors, with neighbor's pets, with trees, with birds, with the lawn. Solomon rules over my interior landscape, has relationships with certain table tops, with rectangles of sunlight, with a folded square of red blanket, with a window sill, a particular section of the hallway, a singular dining room chair. (This one, not that one). And he's so much of a presence that when he's not here, for a very short list of reasons, the uncounted elements that make up the house no longer add up properly. I unconsciously expect him to be there, or there. I sense him outside the doorway even when there's no sign or sound of him. I see him out of the corner of my eye, running, smacking at Oliver, muttering about the indignity of it all.

I was looking through pictures of my old home, and found myself smiling because of all the close-ups and portraits and details of Solly I've taken, it's the house pictures that describe him best. His wine bottle shape and slow-mo tiger pacing and road-kill mimicking napping are as much a part of the shape and sound of things as the satin shine of the top of his head, the press of his curled sleeping shape next to me on the couch. He's background as well as foreground. He is home.

Studio Revisted

2011-07-29T12:17:00.001-04:00

I felt like going back into my studio in the attic of the Blue Barn today. I think I just plain miss it.

In a funny way, since it's been stored away, I remember it through the photos, and it feels more like a real place I've lived in than if it were right in front of me, on a table, in one inch to one foot scale.

As real as my old studio, at home, that also exists, as it was, only in photographs. So much of the world is all in our heads, it turns out.

Beached

2011-07-27T10:37:00.003-04:00

No. I'm not here today.

Not here either,

giving a sand castle a try. (I didn't build this one, but some very talented person(s) came, built, and went away).

Not walking along this path, made up of millions of tiny white shells.

Haven't done any of this in a while. It's ok, I'm awake, I'm alive.

But why don't I? Why don't we? Even when we can. Not all the time, not every day, but sometimes. Sometimes gets short shrift, pushed away like Someday. And is in very short supply.

Joyce's Garden (part 2)

2011-07-25T10:02:00.006-04:00

Closer up in Joyce's mountain-side garden. Still-lives from a place not at all still, from the hum and fizz and whir of the smaller things. Even the colors seem to make their own sounds.

One gift that Joyce's garden has given me was this: that one early evening, a few years ago, I went outside to walk. It was the perfect few minutes between day and night, when the mountain top still held the last glow of setting sunlight, but the rest of the woods were darkening: not so dark you couldn't see, but drained of detail, a deep blue-green. And the evening primrose that lined her walk,

(here seen in daylight)

were glowing like lanterns, a color I'll call lavender because I haven't been able to come up with any better name. For those few minutes they nodded and waved a little, lit from within. The gift was this, of course, but it was also a gift of memory-I have those few minutes to define dusk for me, possibly forever.

Joyce's Garden, (part 1)

2011-07-22T10:36:00.002-04:00

In May, I wrote a little piece about my friend Joyce's house. A few days ago, she sent me photographs of her garden. And, of course, I had to share them. Joyce's home has always been more than a house, it's the focal point of her many talents and a gracefully composed poem about what she loves. But the interior is only part of her story. Joyce's garden is a genius of choreography-she takes often uncontrollable elements; weather, water, light, individually growing things, insects, birds, and guides their waltz. And her photographs, (all hers), capture the dance. I had to divide my post into two parts because I could hardly bear to edit what she sent me.

One other thing to know: Joyce's garden sits on a mountain side.

Next week, the details, the close-ups, the blossoms, the butterflies, the snails.

TV!

2011-07-21T12:10:00.005-04:00

I can't pretend I'm not a bit of a dork. Okay, more than a bit. I grew up with tv. I am, literally, a first generation Sesame Streeter, so there's no time in my life when there wasn't one on somewhere. (Not in my house, particularly, there was a no tv before six pm rule, though I remember so many Brady Bunch and I Dream of Jeannie re-runs that the rule must have been broken, and often). Anyone born after I graduated high school wouldn't be able to imagine a world when tv, and to a much lesser extent, radio, were the only windows to the world, or versions thereof, and was a place for people hired specifically to recite or act out written scripts. Regular folk pretty much showed up only on talk shows and game shows and the evening news, and did what they were told. Quaint, right? I've adjusted, of course. I'm not quite old enough to be buried in the basement of my youth, not yet. But I'm probably more excited to find any aspect of my little world on tv than any kid with a YouTube account. Hence, my dorkiness. And my doing a little tv dance when I saw two of my 20 piece "Collection" sampled on WKYT's news report on the show "More is More", at the Lexington Art League's Loudon House. No matter how small the moment, the tv legitimizer brings out my inner exhibitionist. Well, brings it out a little more than usual.

Anyway, More is More opens tomorrow, a show I'm very excited about. For curator Melissa Vandenberg, the exhibit "examines a common tendency towards multiples and repetition in contemporary art. Whether it's an influence from industry, technology, materialism or consumerism, these serial acts have profound implications about the society that created them". My pieces use repetition to explain and expand on my personal obsessions, so to see them in context with other artist's use of multiplicity is going to be really interesting.

At Kenise Barnes

2011-07-20T08:00:00.003-04:00

One thing I miss most about New York is not being in New York. I grew up there, and went to college there, and I am grateful every day that I did. That I could find a two hour break between classes and get to chose between the Met or the Whitney or the New Museum, (etc, etc). That I got to chose from a long list of etceteras at nineteen was the city's great gift. That when I was a teenager I could take a train and in half an hour get to see or hear or watch or walk through the plays and concerts and shops made up by astoundingly creative people I hoped to be like some day. That my summer job was at a nature preserve where I dug up marsh mud and pulled a seining net and marooned a row boat when the tide went out. That when I was small there was a beach nearby and a public pool and we had a big backyard and streets canopied by interlacing Norway maples, and three different states were within driving distance, their landscapes unfolding past the back seat window of my parent's car. But for some reasons I can name and some I can't, I stopped making art. I worked plenty, at textile design, at graphic design, at designing kid's products. But art stopped. I started again in Florida, whatever got tangled up inside me unknotted itself here, maybe because of the distance, maybe the landscape, the extremes, maybe it was just the right time. But whatever I manage to do here has its roots up there, they almost literally stretch their way back up. All the reasons and impulses and origins are culled from that time and place.

But not being there means that I can't go up to see We've Got to Get Ourselves Back to the Garden, at Kenise Barnes' beautiful gallery. Happily for me, my brother Jody still lives in New York, and he and his girlfriend Kirsten went there for me. And took pictures.

Photos from the opening, in Kenise Barnes' blog, here.

The Red Shoes

2011-07-17T11:44:00.008-04:00

On a Saturday afternoon, when I was eleven, my Dad called me into the living room. Channel 13 was airing the film The Red Shoes, and he asked me to sit down and watch it with him. Up until then my cinematic world had been saturated with tv airings of The Planet of The Apes and The Poseidon Adventure, and weekend matinees of Oliver and Dr. Doolittle and Willie Wonka. There was nothing at all wrong with their images of upside down cruise ships and submerged monuments and pick-pocketing orphans and chocolate rivers and giant pink snails. But being asked by my artist father to sit with him and watch an old movie, a movie completely occupied by adults, (ballet dancing adults), was a turning point in my growing up that I didn't truly understand until I was an adult myself, and testing myself in my own version of a creative life.

The center of the 1948 film, by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is the ballet of The Red Shoes itself. But the entire movie is so visually balanced and beautiful, something I'm sure I didn't notice when I was eleven. Part of this came from being young, and part from the limitations of our black and white television. I had the chance to watch it recently, and I couldn't get over the way each scene was composed, like a ballet on a stage but free of its confines. In London, where it begins, every set was balanced like a painting, the red stripe in a woman's dress echoed by roses in the corner, the red of a hat and crimson fingernails. Individual scenes were so elegantly composed, but they moved, and the actors and dancers and acting-dancers animated the film so well - ballerina Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook as the Diaghilev-inspired impresario Boris Lermontov, and the wonderful Leonide Massine, the great character actor of ballet.

I remember my father pointing things out-making sure that I would see the parts of it he appreciated most, as a lover of painting, and music, and ballet. Making sure I watched Massine as the Shoemaker, watched his face, his hands, saw the way he moved, twisted, leaped.

Today I also see the kind of images that I've always been most attracted to, that may have had their beginnings in the living room with my Dad pointing the way:

Watch the newspaper drifting here, he said, as it turned into a sad pas de deux.

It was so sad, and so beautiful, and I felt, for what might have been the first time, how an abstraction from reality- a film, a dance - could set off emotions that I actually felt in my own life, in my eleventh year, on the edge of my painful teenage years: the fear of losing home, and its safety and love. The dangers and traps of the outer world, in the creative life.

I didn't become a true fan of ballet, though I became a devoted adorer of movies. And I didn't completely understand that day the main theme and battle of The Red Shoes, embodied by Lermentov:

"A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love will never be a great dancer. Never."

Growing up seeing many examples of people balancing art and love very well negated that for me as a rule to live by, (though, to be honest, I have found myself making that kind of choice often and voluntarily. There is a basic truth within the movie, though theatrically heightened). What The Red Shoes was for me, ultimately, was a gateway. It was a rainy weekend when my father decided that I would understand and appreciate something that he, an artist and an adult, loved, that he thought enough of me to share it with me. That he showed me I was ready, for films, and paintings and ballet and theater, to start to take in both the lovely and the terrible, to appreciate not just the beautiful but the frightening and grotesque beauty in the body and face of the Shoemaker. How you need to know both to truly live.

Secret Garden

2011-07-12T10:00:00.002-04:00

Okay. Not an absolute secret. But if you were driving past this strip mall, and didn't need a wig, or a fan, you would see little reason to stop. Maybe the pink posts flanking The Girls would give you brief pause.
Most likely, not.
But if you knew what lay behind it, you would stop, you would park, and step through.

And there would be gum, and ice cream and candy, and jam, and chocolate covered pretzels. Promising, if you like sugar, but that's not it.

Through the store and out the back door, and you're there.

A pineapple plantation. A hydroponic strawberry farm. A microcosmic jungle,

thick with trees growing their very strange and beautiful fruit, dripping with them-

jack fruit,

and mangoes,

avocados,

and bananas.

Banana's flowers,

and pineapples like flowers.

Then rescued birds, in every color, alongside peacocks and swans and goats and miniature horses, and a tortoise, sleeping somewhere.

No lie, I hear.

But it remains, ultimately, a place to pick strawberries, in season, and buy local fruit, and it's five minutes away. My adopted state can be a strange and frustrating place, and the source of odd stories and much head shaking. And I do shake my head and sigh a lot more than I want to. But it's also a place where people make their own ordinary square feet over to realize their passions, transform them into tropical gardens and bird shelters, bamboo groves and jungle grottoes, glowing with color and humming with sound.

Storm Coming in

2011-07-10T11:43:00.001-04:00

We've been dragging through the worst drought in Florida's recorded history. Grass burned brown, flower beds gone thin and bowed, ponds looking like drained bathtubs, revealing their hidden depths-old bicycles, crushed cans turned green. Even the algae that furred submerged things went powdery and frail.
But the afternoon rain storms have come, at last. They mumble and mutter way off at the horizon for a while, making a pretense of coming, or not coming through. And then they're here, crawling in, hanging overhead for a while, heavy and grim.

For a short time the sun still makes an effort, spotlighting the roof tops, giving every ordinary thing a theatricality that makes you stop and admire them.

And the cabbage palms, like stage actors anyway, begin that arm-waving, frantic dance they do when the wind slides in. Pieces of things tear off whatever they were attached to and fly around in circles. It's almost fun. Then lightning rips everything open, and I remember terrible lightning-strike stories, fishermen glued to the ground by their melted rubber boots, trees landing on picnickers as if they were specifically chosen, my neighbor's car halved by an ornamental palm. The rain pours down from what seems like a gash in the sky and the dance is over.

And I hide, inside.

Where the rain makes the window frames into abstractions, and everything gets small again.