About the tension, fear and mystery of creative practice...
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The Why of Poetry
I sat looking at the faces that had been meeting mine for the past four Saturdays....
In a Divinatory Poetics session, we read together—the poetry of masters, the masterworks of artists who have perfected their craft. We read them slowly—silently, and then aloud. Each individual voice, with its unique cadence and tone, feels its way through the metaphors and imagery, the fields of emotional color.
Then we write; without censorship or second thought, (as much as possible). And finally, we converse, wedding our voices with the language that inspired them. It’s an imaginal journey—and the landscapes we invoke together are so rich they often give me chills.
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Ask
ask questions.
a question is open and receptive,
yet articulating – it invokes.
this is the art of divination.
amidst all possibilities, it reveals a subject of concern,
curiosity, attention, attraction.
it reveals a prayer – the desire for a meeting or
an answering that reveals itself only
in the act.
it is revealed IN the working.
Bricolage
Bricolage. The word embraces me. It has the graceful awkwardness of my long limbs. It describes the curious jumble of thought, aesthetic accumulation, fragments, the bit of stripe, the ragged graphic, the pencil cursive interrupted, torn. It accepts the enchanting ordinaryness of my life. All of it worthy. All of it rich. All of it in dreadful disarray.
Look how that irritating shred, that meaningless utterance, goes just right there and sings.
Bricolage defies the tidy. Bricolage is collapsed sculpture. Bricolage is image in three dimensions. Bricolage is askance and askew with asymmetric angles. Inclusive. What else can i say? Depart.
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Glimmerings
There is a sense that things simply arrive or else have been there, waiting for me. There is a rhythm, each thing to its place. These elements of ephemera represent pauses; a place where I bent down for a closer look, an irrelevance that became relevant beneath the caress of my primate thumb. A place where the world stopped me, where stillness reclaimed me.
I want to be willing to allow it to remain a mystery, the reason for this absurd marionette, this playing-at-god: fragment- suspended between idea and material. How does this peace utter the particularity of a wound, the mission of this insignificant-essential Atom?
Soul Retrieval (work-in-progress)
"Use your Imagination."
"Use your imagination". I never understood what was being asked, when I heard this in my young years – what it meant I was supposed to do. I suspected that I didn't actually have one - else I would certainly know what it was and what to do with it. So I fumbled and bumbled about, stalling and evading, ever-fearful more questions be asked of me, revealing the extent of my handicap.
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Without Sin
30” x 45”
mixed media & oils
Whispers & Incantations
(Susurros y Encantamientos)
I like to work improvisationally and step back periodically to see what has arisen. When I stepped back from this two-month collection of works as a whole, what struck me was the colors – an unusual palette for me – Mexico brought color into my blood!
Apophasis & the Well
I found a pathway. Or made one.
Yes, made a pathway into being:
Picking and bending my way up the dried river bed–through thorns of doubt
Excavations
That is the nature of the split in me. by nature i am dream-oriented. irrational, wordless, quiet, unformed. but i am also compelled to examine and explicate; it is also my nature to want to know why: to find meaning as the cliche goes. of late, i regard this latter aspect as a most certain liability – the compulsion of one who can’t stand emptiness: the inexplicable void-splendor-terror of being.
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Unexpected Visitations
Practice is a frame into which I pour my mind. It is a method of alignment, a point of orientation. My practice sessions have a score: I mark the edges, define the area of inquiry, lay out aspirations. Yet an equal measure of unguarded territory is necessary. A door must be left ajar for unexpected visitations. In every session, I reserve time for improvisation. Improvisation is where seeds of the best work are dropped. When expectation is abandoned and agendas are replaced with listening, waiting and attention, this is when beauty that I could not have planned emerges. (From Voicings from Underground; The Slow World p 60)
Anchoring the Art Mind
Sit. Sumi Circle. Sit. I remember the instruction from a Contemplative Art class I took fifteen years ago. Sitting motionless, eyes soft, feet on floor, and the blank, white paper, ink, brush. Pause. Lift arm-brush. Dip. Inscribe circle, unfurl line onto white space. I am revealed in the mark: a collapsed edge, unmet ends, a blob, a waver, a dwindling scratch. Everything is in the weight of hand meeting substrate through brush. This is marriage. Commit.
What is at stake, in this circle, in this line? My great success? My immanent failure? The voices yammer on, yet, almost imperceptibly, they also begin to recede. There is so much in that ragged little mark, the quavery and dented circle.
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What have I revealed?
An intimacy I did not realize, accumulated over hours and days passed by, as I felt around for the missing piece–sometimes cursing, sometimes crying, sometimes in a quiet joy–listening for the right color or word. Will this wax fuse to this oil? Will this image bond with this substrate? Will I use acrylic and sacrifice the luminosity of wax or use wax and sacrifice the dexterity of acrylic? Each piece took days, weeks–most of them–months, to come together. I have not, do not count the hours spent. They take the time they require. And through this process the intimacy developed, unbeknownst me.
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Real or Imaginary?
As a child, like most children, I was not much interested in designating the differences between ‘real’ and ‘not real’, (not to mention that much of what was considered ‘real’ by the adults around me seemed positively distasteful). I longed to know, to validate and discover, to make real and to follow the beauty, mystery, and luminosity that emerged unexpectedly in glimpses, at moments when the motivation to avoid punishment receded or the teacher looked away. This longing did not loosen its grip on me.
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Gas Giants and Gravity
1000 Jupiters could fit inside of the Sun.
Last night I discovered the Edge of the Universe series on Netflix. I usually enjoy having my mind blown and oftentimes a good science documentary will do just that. Watching this one, I realized with awe and glee how absolutely inaccurate my roughly collaged concept of planet and star relations was.
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EnFolding Research
About a mile and a half down the path from my attic rooms, (home since March) is Grey Matter Books, a maze of a used bookstore. I am feeling for threads, listening for the emergence of the voices that will guide fresh work, as winter descends upon the aftermath of my frenzied graduate studies.
The art section that I thought I was headed for is two rooms deep past multiple corridors of books, but I barely get past the register today.
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The Wasp's Nest
Today, for the second time, my work table performed the miracle of resurrection. B brought me a giant wasp nest from a work site, (it is a thing I like to incorporate into pieces). I asked him if he was sure nothing lived within.
Read Morethe Path Between Stones: Immersive Installation at Goddard College
Last week, on the Autumnal Equinox, I led this immersive installation as part of my final graduate presentation at Goddard College in Port Townsend, Washington.
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The Middle Path
i walk the path between. to my left four lanes of traffic. traffic. traffic. sometimes it rushes. sometimes it is a black clot of oil. always it is impatient in its pursuit of destination. art is like a levee: on one side, this irritated flow of metal and mental, and the other:
the other side is ravens over cornstalks yellowing and an indigo sky full of storm.
at my feet is an exodus. an envoy from the mythic mind? there is satisfied beauty in the burnt umber wings with black bars, the domed head like the globe of a frog’s eye. they appear confused, made frantic perhaps by the mid-September heat or the crushed bodies of their allies nearby. many die on this humble bicycle road.
the envoy make their journey, adorned in colors that speak jungles and remind me that size is relative. they pull like a gauze veil, the empty, ominous, windy quietude of the wild lands behind them. they whispers, softly penetrating my racing mind.
Her Cities
internal history
is written on
her cities
her roads
her sewers
her tunnels
it is to be read
on graven bones
and a thousand
etcetera of
personal adornment
sepulchers
unveiling
the inner arcana
Divinatory Poetics
Not knowing, waiting and finding — though they may happen accidentally, aren’t accidents. They involve work and research. Not knowing isn’t ignorance. (Fear springs from ignorance.) Not knowing is a permissive and rigorous willingness to trust, leaving knowing in suspension, trusting in possibility without result, regarding as possible all manner of response. The responsibility of the artist […] is the practice of recognizing.
~Ann Hamilton
Divinatory Poetics describes a particular approach to composition: the cultivation of attention, entering in to a sort of lucid trance, experimentation with modes of thinking and angles of perspective.
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