--Now we are on the side of light, the days are getting a little longer; think of the earth tilting away from the sun...

--This morning I finished my proposal for the Art of Action.  Two pages written, and a ten minute video (I'm going to be away, far away in Mexico in a sort of artist residency, and unable to make my presentation in person, and arranged to show a video of my proposal).  I'm glad I'm done with it, I was agonizing over it to the point where it stopped making any sense.  Ann watched the video and thought it seemed good, but she is biased.  

--I didn't expect to get so involved with the whole process and project.   I was thinking that it would be a little side job, figuring out the whole proposal, but it kind of ended up being challenging and fun.  

--Have also enjoyed getting to know some of the other artists through their blogs, what an interesting bunch!

Art of Reflection

--When you are working in the studio, who is your imagined audience?  

--I agree with all the responses from my last post, but it still leaves a lot of conundrums.  One of these is how can we communicate in our language that we are so familiar with (painting) with a group of people who might not have any experience with that language?

--Some of the stuff I've been trying out for my proposal involves things I think work conceptually or visually but I have no idea if anyone else will "get it", but I must proceed on to make it interesting for me. 

--For example (above) I have some disjunction in these panels that I want to push together to create a panorama, and there are some rhyming forms and scale shifts that I want to use to create some connection.   The vignette of figures (not shown) will play somehow with the still life arrangement and the goats in the background to create a dialogue about active and passive uses of the land...

--Anyway, I'm also bringing in the Robert Frost stuff in various ways that make sense to me because I know the whole story and love visual metaphor (a scrim of trees) but will anyone understand any of that unless I'm standing next to my work explaining it, or there is a wall text (not a fan) explaining what I was trying to say?

--My work (all of us finalists' work) is accessible to a wide audience due to realism, certain level of logic, ideas of aesthetic  balance and harmony... but a lot of it is available only to other painters, and other people who have experience with reading visual images.

--Giotto is a good example, and in fact I was thinking of him the other day when I was trying to think of artists who told a story in a way that I found interesting. (other Sienese painters).

--All that work was commissioned to tell stories to people who couldn't read.

Art of Action

--After reading some of the other finalist's blog postings, I feel like I've been avoiding the issue of what exactly, or how exactly, my project could effect change.   It is great to see all the energy that everyone is putting into figuring out how to make their work more effective politically or socially, or how to design a proposal that addresses "issues".

--I would like to make a plea (and this is probably more for my benefit than anyone else) that as artists, we must trust our instincts, and also trust in the ability of painting (we're mostly painters) to carry meaning in ways that we understand non-verbally and intuitively.

--There is something to the notion of going "outside our comfort zone", and I think in trying to tackle this project everyone seems to be experiencing that, but I know for me that in order to complete an ambitious project like this (if I am chosen) that I would have to be working on something that compelled me as an artist, not just a concerned Vermonter.  

--All the research I have done for my project will weave it's way in to whatever I make, I hope and trust.

--I am excited about the project I am working on, and in fact will carry it through and complete it whether I am chosen or not.

 

Changes

--People talk about preserving the character of things, but "character" is continually being lost.

--From the moment people came onto the scene, the dynamic began to shift.  Not just white people either: the early native hunters eliminated the mastodon and other pleistocene species when they came into North America about 15,000 years ago (There were other factors too).

--On a relative scale Vermont is in pretty good shape, (New Jersey) though if you try to imagine what has changed in the last 50 or 100 years, it is substantial.

--My little town of North Bennington is very cute, but there are a lot of things that junk it up to someone with a sensitive artistic eye.

Point of View

--Have you ever seen a  flock of small birds that flies in suddenly, animating a  bush, then they move on?  

--Follow that flock across the panorama, here and there, flitting about...

--Let one of those birds be the protagonist.

--"Who was so foolish as to think what he thought."    R.F. from "The Wood Pile".

Eden

--This is not one of my details, this is from the cover of a book about botanical illustrations called "Eden".

 --Another source I've been looking at as a possible model for my project proposal is a section of 19th century French wallpaper (landscape panorama) also called "Eden".  This landscape is different from most of the other French wallpaper in the book I have on the subject, in that it is unpeopled.  The viewer becomes the sole inhabitant of "eden".  We wouldn't want to share Eden with anybody, unless it was Eve, (or Adam). 

--In what way is painting an attempt to recreate this world and reclaim eden?  "Eden" means something different for every artist. 

Transformation

--This is a view of some drawings I'm working on, the edge of one overlapping another.  Shifting spaces... 

--One of the major themes in the poetry of Robert Frost is Transformation.  Many of his poems describe a transitional moment, wherein one thing is lost and something else takes its place.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Edges

--One thing I realized while driving up to Ripton the other day and watching the landscape was how important the boundaries are between woods and clearings.  Many kinds of wildlife thrive in this edge environment (woods for cover, openings let the sun in which provides better food selection).

--I use this edge too in my paintings.  I like the feeling that we are peering out from behind some brush and trees, hiding sort of, and quiet enough that the edge animals and birds don't notice us, watching people going about some business or other in the clearing beyond.

-- Robert Frost uses a similar strategy in his poems.  Many of them involve an observation of nature that is so close that it seems we are holding very still, listening to wind, bird song...  And behind these observations is always the world of human issues and concerns.