Drawing

--It's one thing to have a lot of ideas and have convictions about issues that are really important, but it's quite another thing to make a work of art that is compelling or feels successful in some way.  

--I've started making drawings, pencil and ink with brush, which is the way I start all my paintings.  They are very loose and sketchy, but it gives me a way to develop compositional ideas, foreground/background relationships, and build a non-thinking kind of narrative.

--Sometimes I will start with a post-it note sized drawing with a couple dozen lines on it, but it will have a certain slant or feeling that I like.

--Making the painting is when all the development happens and I discover what the painting is really about.

--I will post some of the drawings as they rise to the surface; already I have discovered ideas about the scope of the project as a whole, as I've moved the drawings around and tried different configurations. 

Research

--Ori and I visited the Robert Frost cabin in Ripton today.  Quite a fun day, but a little long in the car for a three year old.  She kept asking "where is the cabinet", which I liked because I felt like I was driving somewhere to look inside a cabinet.

--Both the farmhouse and the nearby cabin are locked, so you can only peek in, but the interiors are preserved intact and very quaint and cozy. The whole thing was a little walk back in time.

--There was even a hunter walking back to his truck (the property borders the Green Mountain National Forest) empty handed, but carrying a gun which gave the scene some poetic texture.

--Now I know what it looks and feels like up there.  The cabin sits in the corner of a large field about a quarter mile up the hill from the farmhouse.  It has two fairly large trees growing very close to one side, and just down the hill a line of 5 or 6 apple trees.  The rough hewn siding grooved and lined with worm trails.  

Farming

--One of the areas I am interested in exploring for my proposal was agriculture in Vermont.  As one of the land uses that has a big impact on the way Vermont looks, and is a part of the rural landscape that people site as one of the main reason they have stayed here or decided to move here, I want to engage in some of the issues around agriculture.

 --My experience this morning at our feed store was fairly typical, a farmer (dairy) in front of me in line complaining about a particular change in milking regulations (some valve has to be replaced regularly), and saying he was tired of having "the government" telling him how to run his business.   Of course government subsidies to dairy farmers have helped the 1000 or so dairy farms in Vermont stay in business.

--Most of the issues that I've seen discussed by the finalists and others deal with some sort "good news, bad news"  duality.  If it is a good thing, then too much of it results in some deleterious outcome (development).  

--Farming is seen from the outside as a romantic and picturesque addition to the landscape, tying us to the land, our past, sustaining us...   The reality is messier: farming is dirty, hard work, and not always profitable.  People should probably be eating  fewer dairy products anyway, and definitely less meat.

Eagles and Turkeys

Happy Thanksgiving!  

--A report on the radio this morning about the wild turkey population in Vermont (about 50,000) all from 39 birds that were brought in from NY state in 1969.  The issue for the turkey was loss of habitat, as the state was largely deforested in the 19th century.  

--Let's be thankful for some of the positive changes that have come to our state over the years. 

--We don't have breeding Bald Eagles yet, but it's only a matter of time before that happens.  It wasn't long ago that this bird was nearly extinct.

--Ben Franklin advocated for the Wild Turkey to become our national bird, more for his disapproval of the choice of the Bald Eagle.  He argued that the eagle was cowardly (chased off by smaller birds) and a scavenger mostly (diet consists mostly of dead fish).

--Including with each post a small detail from one of my paintings.  

--Idea: create "details" as the whole painting, fragments that could work with adjacent works, a collection of details.

--Idea: use native flowers in a bouquet or basket

(picked) with landscape behind, referring to R.F.'s

botanizing, also to  local bounty.  Also colorful bird such as indigo bunting.  Power through celebrating what we have here.

Robert Frost Project

--How did I come to the idea of Robert Frost as a theme for my proposal?  I started by making lists of basic concepts that I was interested in, with some thoughts to a visual component that could correspond with those.   My concepts were things like "Agriculture", "Hunting", "Technology"... one I came up with was "Cabin in the Woods", which I liked because it symbolized an independent, self reliant spirit which characterized a classic Vermonter, but also symbolized Vermont itself - separate from the rest of the country, isolated, self sufficient...

--Later, while making some drawings, I was reminded of the story from earlier this year of Robert Frost's cabin being vandalized, and after doing a little research, was struck by the importance of his poetry and the possibility of his story becoming relevant to my project.

--There has to be for me an image before an idea can develop.  In this case a meadow, looking through trees and brush (past birds and animals...) in the meadow a small unpainted cabin (a figure in front of the cabin?)

--Economic climate:  a friend asked me if I thought the economic collapse would lead to a "Mad Max" scenario.  I said I was imagining a world in which people took public transportation, walked, or rode bicycles, planted vegetable gardens and ate less meat.  

--Robert Frost was a farmer off and on for his entire life.

 

 

Robert Frost Project

--Some background:  my research has focused on Robert Frost, particularly on his life and work in Vermont, but also his poetry, which I didn't know a lot about beyond the classic poems.  Have become interested in how he observed and recorded the natural world, and used those observations as metaphors in poetry.  Metaphors about the human condition. 

--Parallels with my work, though very different.  I am interested in metaphor, and how our vision of nature is fabricated.  I use "nature" in my work, but first it has to be filtered through art.  That is why I have a hard time using photographs as source material and instead rely on paintings, drawings.

--My interest in Robert Frost is also about his story.  I am tracing his biography (he lived a couple miles from my house in Shaftsbury) and the story continues to the present:  His house in Ripton, near Middlebury, where he spent summers between 1939 and his death in 1963, was vandalized last winter by partying teenagers.  As part of their sentence took seminars with Middlebury professor Jay Parini, about the work of Frost.  "The Road Not Taken".