there's a vision in the moss patch

I place my work in clusters, groups, or collective strands. At times I orient my sculptures to reflect the communication between organisms in a community.

I work with moss, clay, plastic, water, glass and wax. I select specific materials to create vulnerable events.

My current direction is to combine materials and to continue creating multi-unit, site-specific pieces. My work is evolving towards installations that interact directly with the environment. These pieces change with the hour and the season, evolving with the natural world.

I think of cellular intricacies and differentiation.

white stone landscape

red stone portrait

I marvel at the subtleties in variation and the function of multiples. I think of new growth. I am fascinated by metamorphosis and the temporary stages of life and growth.
Often times these pieces are units of life. Some are a condensed mass of material possessing the potential for emergence, decay, transformation.

blue stone portrait

the lava fields sit for thousands of years before even the hint of vegetation can find it hospitable enough for colonizing. i was inspired by the vast cold desert of back rough rock and the gentle slopes of the washed out lowlands. we drove for a day through this landscape and i came to think of the stones as part of a larger event and also as singular entities. it made me think of the complex families and ways of creating portraits as a means of indulging in an individual while following a set of conventions assigned to the larger whole.

the sketch below inspired an experiment which i am calling blue stone portraits.

in my hands i made small hollow cups with pinholes on the top with clay. i painted them blue and sat them in a line. little, big, short, tall, straight, crooked, and in every which way it resembled to me the way we relate within our families and the way in which we are part of a line and also part of a cluster.

clearly inspired by the water and land of iceland, and specifically the lava fields, glacial icebergs of jokulsarlon, and the relentless relationship of everything to water, i put submerged the blue pieces in water.

pigeon poo painting

i am fascinated by gathering, multiples, flocks, grouping, crowds, clusters, families. i look at populations as a study of numbers and masses compiled of individual units, bodies, things. 524 pigeons wait for stale bread on a grey evening in reykjavik. 7 flagpoles in front of the city hall and 6 pigeons propped atop. i have a parallel interest in multiples and in creating order or a system of classifying multiples. this leaves me with an impulse to categorize and index while simultaneously searching for clues of association left by the residue. indexing can be imposed and an index can be an accident. i was looking for the accidents. see the pigeon poo paintings as a stain and an index of pigeons, their position, their direction and their dinner.

maybe i am more interested in what the populations leave as a trace than i am in the populations or maybe the populations and their residues are the sign of temporality and relentless life cycle of things

north coast of ˈaɪslənd

husavik, iceland

husavik is a whaling town a few miles south of the arctic circle in iceland. the glaciers loom in the horizon and a thick layer of clouds hang low most days. the pattern and entropy of the rigs, boats, ropes, buoys, tides, fish and people compel me to look within the evidence and folds of the everyday life here. the light is constant as the sun only sets for a couple hours and even then a glow illuminates shadows and the aurora borealis shimmer in the sky. summer is the wave of energy that seems to be welcome for the dark days of winter inch measurably into the days, even in july.

everything is mandated by the cycles, by spheres and water, so this is what i study.

I sought a subject that enjoys probing in odd crannies and undefined places, looking for clues to convoluted problems or enigmas. The time and focus necessary for such probing is not readily available but I insist on spending the time to do so and the few moments of modest epiphanies, when suddenly something becomes clear, has validated the time spent. The painting below is from Husavik, where the bounteous debris and material seemed to mound and grow in strange places like the back alley of boathouse. My interest s in the distinctiveness, often crisp or hard surfaces, abrupt juxtaposition, asymmetrical balance and attention to things - textures, colors, materials, forms- for their won sake, apart from the mass.

husavik harbor 1

mixed media painting on paper

3" x 6"

july 2010

stonewalls in chilmark

structure is what makes a lasting impression to me, structure as the architecture within a nature that is forever entropic. the stone walls of new england are part tale from the clearing of pasture fields, part evidence of glacial fields, part evidence of humans building, rebuilding and marking the landscape. they create boundaries and lines that simultaneously separate and join, keep in and keep out, remain and crumble. the moss and lichen, the tiny red bugs, the poison ivy that colonizes and flourishes in the salty island air- this is where I am in the early weeks of July finding shady spots and walking the sandy trails to come across walls and to draw as a way of studying and being with the subject of my interest. my interest? barry schwabsky, my advisor, makes me probe deeper into what might casually be names "interests." since my paraphrase will only compromise his point, i quote:

.... remember {about studying my sources} that this does not mean one should try to define oneself or one's sources in advance--it really does mean that you only find them out at the end (if you are lucky). Another way to put it: Even though in a broad sense you know what interests you, you maybe don't exactly know what it is in what interests that interests you. (If that sounds confusing, you're right.) And you still have to work out how that becomes matter for art rather than subject matter to be illustrated.

I wish I could remember who it was who said, "The origin is the goal."

where the land and sea meet

rocky beach at seven gates farm
No special equipment is necessary for sketching other than my eye, hand, a pen and a compact, sturdy book of blank pages to record almost anywhere and any time. I record thoughts as they arise or draw from direct observation and from imagination. There is no prescribed form or model for these scribbles and they are not intended for public display but in spite of or because of this they often speak a spontaneity and reveal a directness and relationship to my sources of inspiration which is vital.

So I have gone back to drawing through this summer as a continuous means of allowing all the ebbs and flows of circumstances to reveal the journey to me only retrospect. It is a way to be on the journey and be in the place and be imagining juxtapositions without another voice sabotaging the opportunity for breaking into a new place. My process of making art continues to be a subject as well as a means for my work.

painting feet

we are in the land of lakes in where northern wisconsin meets michigan's upper penisula. it is hot summer and the whipporwill serenades our suppers on the porch. the nights are dark and quiet. the days we find the space to watch the wanderings of the bald eagle, catch the resting turtle on the log, row slowly through lilies, and walk long sandy roads with the light fear of the brown bear looming in the thicket. we paint with what we have here. the light paints the water and the reflections layer the light. the forest and the lakes seem to barely nod at human interference as the ecology of a day's cycle slips hour to hour regardless of our doings.

we paint feet. why not. we trace and track our way. the ants leave a marching track. the slugs loop back on themselves leaving spirals and unconcerned paths of least resistence.

the fish wave their fins over their eggs to protect them. slippery gelatinous egg sacks impossible to hold in your hand, impossible to capture in the way we so impulsively feel the need to do.

alongshore and resting back in the boat slip. fish tails for dinner.

looking for the residue of events

Week Twenty One

Week Twenty

Week Nineteen

they say in times of transition you put one foot in front of the other not knowing what exactly lies ahead but knowing that change and movement are relentless forces. my work has been nothing great lately. just progressing along and seeing the looming residency #2 quickly approaching. "it is wrong until it is right"

-chuck close on painting

Week Nineteen

Week Eighteen

it is the memory or recollection of a scene, which is also a whole event, that concerns me. these terrarium paintings are made of many such events, rather than one...

nothing is lost

from observation to recollection

Week Seventeen

inside outside

terrarium studies

Week Sixteen

My preoccupation with inspection and collection naturally have led me to an investigation of the magnification of organic matter. There is really no beginning to the work I am doing as it is part of a continuum wherein I collect, reflect, inspect, and turn the personal into my expressions of reproduction, fertility, nurture, family, and the chamber or the skin that separates the inside and outside, the individual and the other, the mother and the offspring, while also connecting and communicating.

Here is my bud piece and also an oblong canvas which is a inspired by magnifying plant bud tissue twenty times. Through this process I found that the tissues became so abstract they could be read as many types of organic matter.

In this work I have focused on the magnification of organic forms and our cultural preoccupation with inspection.

With the construction of the Terrarium the canvas has become a painting and an interpretation of a container for things in my life. The contained and the container are home and at once about confinement and freedom with funny juxtapositions and veils of threshold.

Has is really been sixteen weeks?

Week Fifteen

Week Fourteen

Week Thirteen

In London and Boston I have listened to many talks, words and discourse about making art and what it all means. At its heart lies Freud’s “return of the repressed”: the more we try to deny who we are, the more we become what we fear. Freud’s psychological abstraction in the realm of everyday living is everywhere we choose to see it. Is making anything a feeble attempt to call order out of chaos and give form and fiction to the entropy and uncertainties in living? What are we doing and why really do we do what we do? Why do we run when we can walk? Why do we sleep when we could play? Why do we paint when we could stitch? Our lives are riddled with decisions. We must become impervious in order to relate in the world and yet we must also become tender and thoughtful. We must repress to hold ourselves together and we must also be honest and reflective. Why is this so hard? Are we empty or full inside anyway?

I have been working on the Terrarium Project. It is good to focus on a single ambitious project since it includes both building and experimenting with the enclosed world (the terrarioum @ 50" cubed). I have 6 canvases to paint the six views of the world including its skin, the enclosed and the enclosure all to scale. It is a play with the contained and the container as a metaphor for the enclosures we establish ourselves in (our skins, our clothes, our rooms, our homes, our psychological comfort zone). I really don't know how it will come out but Sheila has been really encouraging and sees a breakthrough in this process for me. I see it that way sometimes and other times I doubt what really I am doing. Since I have realized that the 'politics of the personal' is really where I am right now I do have to find ways to crack open that container and comfort zone that I, until now, have worked in with my painting and making art. Certainly, in landscape architecture I work with the public in mind and de-personalize the creative process entirely. It is about practicing the art of completing another’s dreams and personal visions.

My advisor has given me sound suggestions: “Don't think that you need to have all the answers right now. Start by outlining your basic concerns and interests. Establish some questions that will drive your exploration. And then examine/investigate different ways that your project might address these concerns, interests, and questions. This might entail making things that you then discard or reject. But eventually, you will inch forward to your final objective.” Thanks Stuart.

Also, Stuart mentions to “re-read Robert Smithson's essay entitled "Cultural Confinement". You might also check out his "Site/Non-Site" pieces from the late 1960's. This body of work served to thematize the binary oppositions between inside/outside, contained/uncontained, nature/culture, controlled/uncontrolled, etc.”

I am sorting through excess, consumption, growth, family and the materiality of home.

Week Twelve

This is a time when I am painting to think and to produce while I sift through the many experience of the last week that will surely effect my art making. I am thinking about the act of art making as a process that is itself art and I am thinking about materials that are in our everyday lives and how they can be transformed. If art is now as much about context and the frame in which situations are created as it is about the physical object then ideas matter. Ideas take time to incubate. This week I am posting painting pieces because this is my thinking and a trace. The paint, ink, charcoal, pastel and glaze are applied and erased to create a palimpsest where the meanings are shifting and multiple. Nothing amounts to anything and all is work in progress.