Last night I had an opportunity to listen to Alice Ballard  (www.aliceballard.com)speak about her life and work at Hodges Taylor Gallery.  She has long been a favorite  artist of mine.  Over and over I have come around a corner in a gallery to see a piece of hers and been stopped in my tracks.  The desire to touch her work is always overwhelming for me.  The pieces are always based on natural objects that happen to appear in her life– perhaps stumbled upon on a walk outdoors, or sometimes arriving in the mail– gifts from a sympathetic friend.                    

It seems to me they are often generative forms– pods, seeds or bulbs– carriers of the next generation of life.  Not always, but often, they are cool and sensuous white forms, coated in silky terra sigillata, and burnished to  a soft glow.   It was interesting to hear of her journey as an artist from two dimensional painting to sculpture, and of her love for handbuilding.   Her formal education centered on painting, and her sculptural studies were all self-taught.  

Many of her most intriguing forms were sleek pinchpots. She explained how the act of pinching the clay compresses it and adds to its strength.  She also gave insights into her process, including the occasional working of the piece upside down which allows gravity to act as a partner in the construction.  

Alice Ballard posited the theory that the most important events in an artist’s life often happen before the age of six.  She talked about her own memories of being at her grandmother’s farm and being given beans and corn to plant wherever she liked.  The magical thing was being there long enough to  see them sprout.  It is easy to see how those childhood experiences were seed for this contemporary work.

tree trunk in the maritime forest

It’s Monday back in the real world.  I’m attempting to pretend I’m all here, but I still have one foot on an island.  Yesterday’s sunrise, which seems a continent away and a month behind me, was a battle between blackened hovering clouds and peach colored light thrown at the edges of billowing cloud formations.  It came and went, shifting back and forth.  I sat in the sand and tried to paint a seized moment here and an arrested cloud there.  Sand blew low and hard, needle-pricking me.  It completely filled my paintbox and scattered itself on my page.  My brush, new and sharp-pointed- became frayed and full of sand particles.  My hair blew so hard across my face I couldn’t see.  The waves tossed spray high above the horizon line.  A heron flew overhead.  Then a peregrin falcon.  It was altogether a spectacular and peculiar sunrise.

The night before, at dusk, we had traveled to a roosting site, hidden away from the public, to watch perhaps one hundred or more egrets and ibises rocking up and down on tree limbs suspended over a perfect mirror of a pond.  The mosquitoes lit on our faces and arms and drew blood in spite of toxic doses of bug spray we’d bathed in.

Part of that day had been spent in the maritime forest, learning about plant species.  The woods were scattered with deadwood more extreme than any sculpture.  We were irresistably drawn to touch it and photograph it from every angle.  Yesterday morning we took a walk in the marsh and sat long enough on an ancient dune, now covered with cabbage palms and live oaks  ( called a hammock), to observe the behavior of fiddler crabs.  I had time enough to do a lightning fast sketch of the underbrush on the hammock.  I learned new words for the plants  and creatures that fill the marshes– spartina, sea lavendar, periwinkle snails.  Mike picked up a glass lizard, the only legless lizard I have ever seen.  Empowered by my previous night’s experience of petting the belly of a California King Snake I attempted to do the same to the glass lizard, who struck at me.  No harm done beyond the embarrassment  of my own reaction–  abject bone-rattling fear, which greatly amused my fellow adventurers.

There was butterfly catching, seining, lots of drawing to record what I saw.  I was swimming in a soup of sensation.  It made me delirious and carried me out of myself and back into union with the earth.  It is with reluctance that I bring myself back to electric lights and cars, billboards and cellphones.  I looked back at my journal from last September’s trip to this island.  In it I said that I’d had the revelation while there that the secret to living this second part of my life was to live it like a poem.  “order it and edit it and take time to live it consciously”.  This year I plan to remind myself everyday that I am in the midst of a poem.

the loud creek

Last weekend I camped beside a loud stream near Asheville.  All night I got to hear the stream rush by– my favorite way to sleep.  The canopy was dense so I could only catch small bits of the mountain starlight.  My alarm clock was a loud crow who would arch through the trees, cutting his handsome black silhouette against the green patterned canopy and insisting I get up.  On Saturday, in spite of the the crow,  I slept two hours later than my definition of sleeping in because it was so delicious.

For entertainment I started by visiting the Faculty Show at UNC-Asheville (www.unca.edu).  I was particularly intrigued by the work of Mark Koven there.  The sculptures he was showing were small in scale, and kinetic.  My favorite was a tower with a small generator that was powered by a turbine.  (I was reminded that Leonardo invented the turbine.) The turbine required the breath of more than one observer to turn it enough to power the dragonfly wings mounted at the top of the piece, which in turn evoked, for me, the flying machine drawings of Leonardo.  I also was captivated by the drawings of  Tamie Beldue, which were skillful and voluptuous, in graphite and watercolor, and floating under a layer of wax which gave them an extra aura of delicacy and intimacy.

My son Stewart and I had fun going to the Asheville Art Museum (www.ashevilleart.org)  which has its own special style– Very Asheville.  It’s in a glamorous Italian Renaissance style building in downtown that was the former home of the town library.  Now it houses a wonderful collection.  Lucky for me the work I’d seen there in April had all been replaced with other work so I got a larger notion of the museum’s holdings.  There are always plenty of surprises there, but the piece that sticks best in my mind is an abstract Maud Gatewood rendering of a tunnel (also very Asheville).  One sees the view framed by the tunnel.  Snow is falling and creates a pattern over the framed vista.  

I paid a quick visit to the Blue Spiral (www.bluespiral1.com), ate some great food, watched a guy dressed in a nun’s habit complete with a black miniskirt pedaling up Biltmore at a 45 degree angle on a red bicycle that had to be 10 feet tall (employing the same Attitude as the Wicked Witch of the West).  I heard the drum circle in the park.  Saw lovely bits of blacksmithing here and mosaic-making there… bits of random wall painting, and the basic urge of many creative souls to express themselves.  My refrigerator is now full of mountain apples from the Farmers’ Market.  And my head is full of  nature, color, and snapshots of focused energy made material .  Thanks Asheville.

I’m just back from the last summer vacation– a long weekend at the coast.  My friends, BJ and Rodney Cooper joined me there.  We started the weekend by staying up until 3 a.m. talking, but as time passed I unwound, and the weekend became more restful.  We bought shellfish and enjoyed cooking.  Rod made a tomato tart I can still taste if I think about it.  I took long early morning walks and spent as much time as I could outdoors.  The sunshine stupor set in, which disables thinking and forces relaxation.

Rod and I visited a small local gallery and left feeling like we’d overdosed on candy– the color oppressively bright and sweet.  One wearies of beach  cliches.  Having painted dozens of pieces in that environment I know how hard it is to find a fresh and unexpected approach.  Sometimes I give up and just paint what I see, just to be painting– no clever twist, no new idea. 

But later, back on the beach, I realized how many odd and lovely things  there were to look at.  The skies were deeply patterned wtih buttermilk clouds.  I found the perfect round black stone.  A gull walked by with a small crab in its beak.  Someone sculpted a sea turtle in the sand and paved its back with scallop shells.  The marsh was remote and romantic.  Chartreuse butterflies flocked to the wildflowers on the dunes.  They hovered next to trumpet shaped blossoms that were both orange and fuschia.  We found a dune covered in bay bushes and crushed the leaves to smell them.  Today, back in the classroom, I passed out broken seashell fragments, chosen especially  for their unexpected  qualities, and told my students to draw them, exploring them as abstract forms.

Rebekah's animated hand impression

Every year I look forward to the fall opening of the Visual Arts Center at Davidson College. It’s the occasion of the faculty show, and a lot of fun, seeing old friends and new art.  It’s a last vivid summer art memory before the chill of fall sets in.  Tonight was appropriately sultry and rich.  http://www3.davidson.edu/cms/x25463.xml

RebekahTolley is new to the faculty and was exhibiting tonight.  She is a printmaker who is concerned with exploration.  I was privileged to hear her very brief but evocative talk.  In just a few minutes she managed to spark my imagination in a dozen ways.  She touched on the idea that printmakers today seldom make editions, being less inclined to quality control and consistency than to experimentation.  Also touching on the role of the found object in her work, she showed a piece of worm-infested wood she had rolled up with ink and layered over an image of her hands.  The key word she played with in the talk was “impression”.  One piece recorded a crab’s shell– “the impression the crab has left of itself”,  just as prints are referred to as “impressions”.  Rebekah also talked about her use of morphing software to create  progression, taking her images in the direction of animation.  I was particularly taken by an elegant piece with moving hands.

Cristina Toro, who lives in upstate New York, was showing her new paintings in the smaller gallery.  Cristina is a friend, and I knew her work would be wonderful, but I wasn’t prepared for how wonderful it would be. Turning into the gallery felt like walking into a jewel box or a sultan’s tent.   Like everyone in my family, she is fascinated by pattern, and her work is a combination of the balancing of bright, but modulated colored boxes, on which appear fanciful figures.  There is dancing rhythm, humor, intimacy, narrative, all rendered in fields of flat color covered  with pattern …  Persian miniatures writ large.  There were passages that might have been whole paintings, but instead they rested in the midst of a crazy quilt picnic blanket laid for a feast.  It was the Coat of Many Colors.  It dazzled.  Best of all, it exposed something of the life and times of Cristina.  It felt like a heart-to-heart talk, like reading her journal.

detail from a painting by Cristina

Bonnard interior, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Where to begin writing about five days of looking at art and being with people  I love in New York!  It was such an overwhelming experience I can only think in terms of lists.  With Gordon I visited the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum and MOMA.  With my stepbrother, John, I visited Chelsea galleries.  By myself I went to the Met and some SOHO galleries.  We balanced all the art with lovely walks in wonderful outdoor spaces.  Gordon and I started one morning with a long walk through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, lingering in the Japanese garden,  and by the lotuses and waterlilies.  John gave me a fascinating tour of  Central Park on foot.  And, after dark one night, he shared with me the new elevated park built on a former train track only a block or so from his home.  The sky was huge, the moon was full, and the wild grasses and simple wildflowers beside our feet were softly illuminated.  The only word for it was magical.

So, out of all that art, what leaps to mind when I think back over my trip?  This afternoon, once off the plane, I took a nap and dreamed about a tapestry in peaches and blues, heavily patterned, serene, reassuring.  It represented, I think, some kind of amalgam of all those visual experiences and their emotional and psychological weight.  I think it represents not only the art hung in the towering rooms of these great museums, but also the complex weaving of thousands of faces in the subway and park and on the streets– of every nationality, color and mode of dress.  It made me smile over and over to observe people strike up a conversation between subway stops– the Muslim explaining his religion to the Puerto Rican couple, who showed him the tee shirts they’d just bought, the Hispanic girls who worked so hard to understand my questions and help me find my way, the young medical students talking about their particular cadavers, the smooth, perfectly groomed elderly man, in red shoes and hat, proud of the baby clothes he’d just bought to give as a gift.  The dream tapestry’s pattern was probably inspired, at least a bit, by the Bonnards and Vuillards I saw hanging together in the Met.  The peachy tones were probably from the terra cotta sculptures I saw, and studied for inspiration.

Roxy Paine, roof garden sculpture, Metropolitan Museum of Art

John told me to be sure to go up to the Met’s roof garden to enjoy the sculpture by Roxy Paine, installed across an area probably 40′x25′.  It was a series of limbs made of stainless steel, glistening in the sun, pointing the way for us to look, in the same way I use tree limbs in my work, and casting bold shadows on the floor and on the viewers.

Some large retrospective gestures that were supposed to excite the viewer, instead bored me.  I’ve seen this work in many museums, and on magazine covers, but it does not speak to me as it speaks to the curators.  I was mesmerized, however, by the installation at MOMA of the saved objects that made up the worldly possessions of one Chinese woman.  The piece was conceived of and created by Song Dong and his mother, as an act of healing in the aftermath of her husband’s death.  The poignancy of her story, and the tattered, exhausted nature of the things she had saved all her life added up to something real and compelling. I still see the tapestry of empty plastic soda bottles, capped in various colors, displayed together in the shadow of the remains of the framing of her original home, beside every shoe she had ever owned, and every toothbrush.  It had elements of everyone’s secret closet.

Interestingly, I saw the newly discovered “first” painting by Michelangelo.  It was on loan to the Met from the Kimbrell in Ft Worth, and was a small painting on panel, based on a popular etching of the time.

On Saturday I went to Atlanta to attend a party for my friend, Becky.  Becky was retiring after an illustrious career in business.  We’ve been friends since high school, and for some time she has been a major collector of my work.  Going to Becky’s was going to be an interesting trip back in time and experience for me– seeing intimate moments removed by a number of years and hung on unfamiliar walls.

I left home early so I could stop at the High.  It had been 40 years since I’d visited that museum  so it was overdue.  I arrived so late in the day I only got to see half the museum.  Highlights:  the Oldenburg peach and pear sculpture.  The pears had been removed for some reason, but the peaches were terrific and memorable all by themselves.  The museum had a three panel Waterlily on loan from MOMA, and  judging from the way it was hung, in a kind of curve,  I would guess it was originally intended to hang in a curved space, as were the 22 panels in the Orangerie.  I enjoyed falling under the spell of the Waterlily panels.  I found myself wondering if Rothko was similarly affected by the Waterlilies.  The mood that comes from communion with the Waterlilies and with a Rothko have a lot in common, not to mention the similar experiences of very pure color.

The High had a strong collection of African American work,  and in several cases I was seeing the work of these artists live for the first time.  I loved the three pieces I saw by Tanner, strong, sophisticated and lyrical.  The Elizabeth Catlett bust was a knock out, with its clarity and cool geometry.

The party was wonderful.   By the end of the evening there was lots of laughter and story telling.  The food was wonderful– beautifully made or carefully chosen.  To cap it off there were grapefruit and blueberry sorbets, homemade by Mike.  My paintings seemed to have a harmonious home, just right, as if they’d been intended for those spaces.  I visited with them like old friends, and felt just as much at home.

Bob Trotman with "Arden"

Trotman’s maquettes”

Bob Trotman with “Arden”

I’ve been an admirer of the work of Bob Trotman since I first saw his furniture in the 80’s at an exhibition at Davidson College.  In my way of thinking the ideas behind that work were sufficiently rich and quirky to be mined for a lifetime.  Bob, as a woodworker, had  flawless craftsmanship  and combined it with a lot of unusual ideas to come up with  truly imaginative results.  But Bob morphed, as artists always do, pressing forward in his exploration of the world, moving toward a more focused vision, and finally leaving furniture behind.  There was a transition phase I always liked between the furniture model and the current figurative sculpture model.  It was figurative furniture which seemed to arise from a reticence to embrace pure sculpture (or perhaps it was just a fluid movement from one idea to a wholly different idea).  It read  as wildly imaginative because it came from  internal notions unique to Bob.  Nobody but Bob was walking that particular walk.

Tonight I had the lucky opportunity to be present for a talk by Trotman, with a small group of interested folk, hosted by Hodges Taylor Gallery.  Bob, with much humor and insight, described in detail his current process, showing some of the preliminary drawings and maquettes he uses to make his newest figural sculptures.  He is concurrently showing at the Mint Museum and at Hodges Taylor. The gallery had  three large-scale wooden busts and a wall-hung figure.  Trotman talked about his lack of interest in naturalistic human proportion, saying it felt “banal” to him.  He began the talk by describing the personalities and histories of the people he’d sculpted.  The pieces all showed an expressive use of proportion to bring to life the inner realities of these people.  In his current work scale is also pushed for the purpose of “turning the volume up or down”.  The volume is very much up on the busts.  Having seen his work in small scale as maquettes, and in a sort of 3/4 scale he employed for a time, and now in this extreme large scale, I would have to say this scale seems to work to create distance between the object and this viewer.   Trotman, on the other hand, said that our smallness next to their largeness makes him feel good.

Human frailties are expressed by the checking of the wood, which Trotman says is more common in works that come from whole tree trunks than from wood that is laminated together.  He said it’s like the “damage that is done to us”. He talked about the crack that  doesn’t work.  His example was a crack through the eye, which might alter the work’s gaze, or prevent our connecting with the character.

Trotman referred several times to the fact that he’s self-taught, seeming to bear out the notion put forth by critic David Hickey that the most important artists are not products of some MFA program, but come to their work via their own  unortodox path.  Rosenquist is defined by his billboard painting experiences; Vollis Simpson, by his training as a WWII airplane mechanic.  With Trotman, past furniture making is always present, along with a healthy dose of wit and imagination.  As my construction attorney friend, Sneed says, of his background as an apprentice mason starting at age 13, “no learning is ever wasted”.

Trotman's maquettes

blue sky day

Why does this day seem so wonderful?  The sky is that washed-clean intense blue after it rains.   It’s July—it’s supposed to be torrid and unbearable and instead there’s a cool breeze blowing.  I have the studio door open and the ceiling fan stirring things up.  Whatever I play on the stereo suddenly seems like the right music, and what’s on the easel seems fascinating for a change.  I’m spending a few days putting the late spring’s work to rights.  It was plenty flawed, with hundreds of sequences that jarred or disappointed.  I’m painting back into it with this breeze and some wild jazz behind me like a tailwind.

Why is this day blessed?  Because it’s early morning and the day stretches before me with no commitments. I can dress like a slob and work until I want to quit.  I can sit in the shade in the ruin with some cold mint tea and just lapse into dreamy thought.  Maybe by the end of this day three paintings will be finally resolved and finished… until I wake up the next day and notice a few more places that aren’t syncopated, that fall flat.

The day is special because Marie sent me a photograph to bless it: her mother planting flowers in the garden with her granddaughter, 5 years old.  They both seem completely unaware that they are being photographed. What arrests me about this photograph is that there is no less sense of discovery in the face of the grandmother than in the face of the child.  It’s a photograph of a state of being that is extraordinary– to be expected in a five year old and hardly ever observed in someone in their seventh decade. That image has stayed with me all morning.  It has inspired me to look at this day with wonder.

home-- photograph by Mike Carroll

It’s been a quiet week of work,  so quiet I lost track of what day it was by Thursday.  Looking for a hook to hang a story from, I’d  resigned myself to not writing anything this week, it seemed so mundane.  Later I realized that the reverse was true. It was a  week lived on the highest plane.  It was a week spent as an artist.  Nearly all my hours were wrapped around a painting I’d started last week.  It was a reflection of the intense beauty of the land around here, plants growing exuberantly, the sky deeply blue, the patterns in nature more complex than any oriental rug.

Between stints in the studio I enjoyed visits from  friends.  John, who lives in California, surprised me by appearing at my doorstep.  John has been a part of my life for a long time, all the way back to driving me to the church on my wedding day.  We talked for hours, sharing who we are now and remembering who we used to be.  On Sunday  Linda, whose laugh lights up the room came by, and she and I sat in the ruin talking well into the night.  At the end of the week my step-brothers John and Tom and my mom came for a summer supper.    The food at the end of this artist’s day is a final act of art-making.   The dinners this week have all included my homemade mozzarella cheese with Grier’s organic tomatoes, Kim’s basil, and a bit of my best olive oil.  There was organic cabbage made into cole slaw and Bradford Store corn which has its own fan club.   We dined in the ruin, Cat rubbing against our legs, hoping for a handout.   John described a funeral he’d attended in the Sandhills last week, of a venerated family friend.  It ended in a meal of chicken salad.  So many occasions I’ve attended in that region culminated in chicken salad, including my own great aunts’ funerals.  When Grier and I were little we went to visit our great aunts in their intricate Victorian homeplace.   Beneath the glow of a stained glass window they served us tiny lady plates of chicken salad, pickled watermelon rind and little biscuits.  Growing-boy Grier was somewhat amused by this meal.  But I will always associate chicken salad with the Sandhills.

Blackberries are ripening on the edges of the woods.  The cantaloupes are coming in.  It has been a wonderful week , after all, of art, friends and summer food, enjoyed in the best of places– home.