Cristina Toro and Rebekah Tolley at Davidson College

August 28th, 2009 § 0

Rebekah's animated hand impression

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

detail from a painting by Cristina

performance piece?

August 8th, 2009 § 0

Stewart's last Saturday clerking at the store

Stewart's last Saturday clerking at the store

One week from today my last son will leave home for college.  For the first time in 29 years there will be no children in this house.  Naturally inside me there is confusion about whether I’m bereft or ecstatic.  I’m ecstatic, literally, in the sense that I consider and anticipate what spiritual truths will come to fill me.  When the presence of all the boys I’ve loved with all my heart is removed what will take their places?   Instead of them I will invite “the universe” as people call it these days, to fill that empty space with something powerful.

It’s 4 a.m and I can’t sleep because lying in my bed I’m beginning to make this piece of work– a chronicle of the last week of the last child in the house.  I’m going to photograph the ordinary bits of life, the movements through these days.  And I’m going to write about them.  And that will be, I believe, the most  deeply felt piece of art I have made in a long time.  What is art other than a mirror, a magnifying glass, a kaleidoscope?  Beyond this week  I will begin another piece– the pulling together and imagining of the rest of my life.

Stewart's been working in the fields and behind the counter of the Bradford Store since he was 14.

Stewart's been working in the fields and behind the counter of the Bradford Store since he was 14.

Visiting the Vortex

August 5th, 2009 § 0

Bonnard interior, Metropolitan Museum of Art

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

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.

the High

July 30th, 2009 § 0

waterlillies

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.

An Evening with Bob Trotman

July 23rd, 2009 § 0

Bob Trotman with "Arden"

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

Trotman's maquettes

Blue Sky Day

July 14th, 2009 § 0

blue sky day

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

July 10th, 2009 § 2

home-- photograph by Mike Carroll

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.

Independence Day

July 6th, 2009 § 0

little Woodstock

little Woodstock

How did you celebrate your independence?  I cut myself free of my everyday life and went on a trip back in time, and due west  in space.   I went to beautiful Black Mountain, NC.  After locating an old friend on the web,and a 35 year absence from the annual July 4th celebration in Black Mountain, my name was once again on the guest list.

I have dim memories of a communal effort to make pounds and pounds of cole slaw some 35 years ago on July 4th in the old location of this party– The White House.  I remember our young faces, and the good feeling I always had being with this group of people. It meant a lot to me  to be joining them again for the celebration.

Nowadays we look substantially different from our 20-something incarnations, but the spirit is the same.  I really do believe our young selves are still alive, wrapped inside our current selves.  The girl is not gone– she is at the core of the woman.   The humor was just as loving and gentle and knowing as I remember it.  The friendships have held true among this large group of people, and the thread that connects me to them is as strong as if I had nurtured it.  They are of such a loyal and inclusive stripe that I was, even in long absence, at least a little bit present, it seems.

Just like long ago, I still enjoy the quick wit, the practicality, the earthiness and the loving hearts of my Black Mountain friends.  And they really know how to throw a party.  Their fourth was conceived of as a three day affair, in a big open field in the valley, beside the Swannanoa River.  Sobol, Sneed and Allison masterminded a projection screen for movies, a volleyball net, a pond for swimming, and an bunch of barrels for their own unique sport: gocart bowling.  There was a grill, lovingly tended by  Pate, covered in pork coated with a secret barbecue sauce he’d imported  from Alabama which was, I swear, magical.  The Barbecue Brain Trust of Black Mountain has apparently spent years attempting to decode the recipe, but it cannot be done. Sneed says Thomas has Pate bring him a gallon each year which he hides away.  Sneed  is  pictured on this year’s White House tee shirt, and Patty, his  wife organized the Eleanor Roosevelt luncheon for the ladies as well as the tee shirt production and  marketing.

These people, the souls  of hospitality,  erected a huge tent and a smaller tent, brought in a refrigerator to hold the food, and must have shopped for days.  I can’t begin to list all  that went into this amazing extravaganza.  But there was barbecue, corn, marinated cucumbers, savory baked beans, and slaw, so lovingly prepared they’d make you swoon.  And at the same time, we enjoyed live bluegrass music,  a bonfire, kids chasing each other, 80 year olds dancing, tiny babies  being cuddled and old friends’ memories ( or lies).  And this was the 36th time they’ve done this for 100 of their closest friends.

One of the best parts

One of the best parts.

That night I got to sleep at Patty and Sneed’s with the window open, beside a creek that rushed through my dreams all night.  In the wee hours when it started to rain the noises were even more beautiful.  In the morning my last view was of small fat white clouds breaking up against the blue green mountains.  It was really hard to point my car east and slip back down that mountain.

In Praise of June

July 1st, 2009 § 0

photography by Mike Carroll

photography by Mike Carroll

July is brand new but it’s hard for me to let go of June in Carolina.  It’s the month I wait for all year… roses, lightning bugs, tomatoes, yellow sun, swimming, painting all day.

The other night I woke up and opened the window.  The night sounds that burst into the room  made me stop mid-motion, holding onto the window frame, my mouth open in sleepy enchantment.  There was, surrounding my house, a web of sound,  an intricate woven form with nubs and holes, rhythms, punctuations, riffs, and mysteries.

To capture the best of the Carolina June day I’ve been getting up at six and going straight to the garden where I’m learning, for the first time, to grow things.  The garden is around what we call “the ruin”.  The ruin is a couple of standing walls from a mostly destroyed building my grandmother called the Jar Room.  I presume that she stored her preserves in it. Perhaps the day’s milking was also kept there, since it had a concrete floor.  When I was little it was a handsome building, made of creek sand, mortar, and local rocks combined into a kind of peach-colored stucco.  It had a hip roof of standing seam tin, and handmade doors.

I am creating a kind of patio area, enclosed by the remaining walls.  It’s been a lot of fun, learning a little masonry in order to patch the crumbling places. From my grandmother’s old cast iron washpot we made a pool, and water splashes into it from an old discarded spout removed from the general store’s  kerosene pump. The ruin is becoming a space that is quirky and imaginative.

In the cool morning I water the rose bushes my son David planted for me, and work on building a low rock wall to surround my kitchen garden.  Perhaps the best part about this experiment is the chance it creates for me to enjoy my mother’s gardening wisdom.  She is, I’m finding, an encyclopedia of knowledge about plants and gardens.  We have a new subject to discuss.  And, for once, I’m taking all her advice.

In the studio I’m working on a lavishly composed and wildly colorful painting of flowers that grow in Kim’s breathtaking flower bed.  My sister-in-law grows about a quarter acre of flowers in deep beds of great soil.  I’m painting a lily that is 5 feet tall with many blossoms on it, each larger than a man’s hand.  I reverted from oil back to acrylic paint for this piece because I wanted its sharp edges and the variety of colors I have access to.  I knew this painting called for the quinacridone reds, magentas and burnt oranges that are in my acrylic palette.  There were a few awkward moments as I began the painting when I tried to remember the difference in media and shift my mode of handling. But the years of acrylic practice came back to me quickly.

In the early hours of the day I can work in the studio with just the ceiling fan on and the door and windows open.  To conserve energy I’m trying to use air conditioning as little as possible.  I’ve even taken to hanging my wash on the line.  All this was inspired by a program I saw on PBS about energy.  They showed a huge pile of coal sitting on a house lawn and said that was how much coal had to be burned to generate enough electricity to run a light bulb   for a couple of hours.  I was shocked to think of energy in those terms, and the polluting outcome of even a little bit of wastefulness.   I recommitted to turning things off, to being responsible for less wasted energy and more protective of my earthly home.  And to my June sense memories I get to add the clean tree smell of my line-dried clothes.

Painting water, eating corn

June 25th, 2009 § 0

My brother Grier. Photograph by Mike Carroll

My brother Grier. Photograph by Mike Carroll

I brought a very old laptop to the studio so I could use it when the muse struck.  In dog years this computer is 312 years old.  Some screen labeling itself as “Smart” informed me that the hard drive was about to crash and I should swap it out.  I didn’t come down here with a spare hard drive, so this may or may not see the light of day.  Life on the edge…

Today I’m painting the swirling patterns in a creek bed.  The last time I actually looked at those patterns was back in March, so at this point they are no longer observational, but instead an abstraction meant to create a mood in the viewer—the mood you’d find yourself in if you were standing in a voluptuous body of water and it moved around you in small surges and eddies.  And the sun was beaming down on it to add hypnotic patterns all around you.  That’s some pretty vaunted prose for what I actually turn around and see on the canvas.  There is much to be done to make it do what I want it to.  My son, Gordon, is particularly fond of this painting because it explores some of my “weirder” ideas and pretty much walks off and leaves reality behind.  Paintings like this are more fun to paint.  I long ago became bored with the landscape reproduced as it most often is:   technically predictable,  aping reality.  All those paintings look like they’re by the same artist.   They’re missing the weirdness.  They lack the intensity of a real relationship to what one sees.

Background music for painting swirling water patterns:Etta James.  Especially the sulky ones with attitude.  I guess that pretty much means all of them. And Herbie Hancock, triggering the right brain, surging and eddying as he does.

So that is what constitutes this day, along with the newsworthy arrival of the first ripe tomatoes from the farm, and the first of the amazing corn my brother grows and my sister-in-law sells at the Bradford Store.  Tonight there will be the classic summer feast to celebrate this moment in the cycle of things.  I will soon be missing the fresh spinach, cabbage and  lettuces, but they will be replaced by the mid summer tomatoes, corn and cantaloupe, and they in turn by the fall flavors.

Late afternoon I’ll be cleaning out the debris around the foundation of the smokehouse so my brother can clear it up with a loader and a carpenter can look at it for repairs.  The smokehouse is currently supported by the walnut tree it leans against.  We may set it right.  Life on the edge…

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