art notes from a cabin in the Woods

There is something about this Fall....

2009-10-14T15:09:00.000-07:00

Everyone says the animals are really on the move this year. My neighbor up the road was vandalized by a bear, who stole her bird feeder. I have wild male turkeys who think it good idea to try come inside the house on cold afternoons when I feed them their ear of dried corn (yes, I know I shouldn't be feeding them but...). Then there is the deer family-a mother and two fawns who live part time on the back of my property. Yesterday I saw the local bald eagle deep in thought standing on one of the swampy promintories of the lake; he seemed contemplative. I am not drawing any conclusions from all of this activity, just reporting in.

The old viridian painted rice tray above holds a bowl of rocks from Jasper Beach, Maine which is way Downeast on the Bay of Fundy. Several years ago I made a great off season trip there with my sister in early November. Lovely beach, terrible frozen fish!!! Then there are my squash... the lady in the farm stand said she could here me laughing at the checkout counter while I picked my selection out for this fall. They have always looked like bizarre aircraft of some kind to me. I am taking a drawing class every Saturday this fall at the Farnsworth Museum from the wonderful Sam Caddy (see the link for his Meg Ryan Gallery, New York) and these squash are some of my subject matter for my daily drawing. All those bumps on the squash makes me want to do pen and ink.

The Art of Memory

2009-09-01T16:30:00.000-07:00

Compose

     Learning by memory was, until recently, considered an important part of an educated person's learning. My father, who is nearly 80, can still recite "Gunga Din" and "Men of Cardiff" on the spot.
Lately with electronic distractions and different teaching techniques, memorization doesn't seem to be a terribly important of the learning process. I believe it is called rather dismissively learning by rote.
     Today I was moved by how important basic sensory memory is to the emotional part of the brain, at least to the brains of cats. Neurogists tell us cats are very similar neurologically in make-up to humans,which is how they justify vivisection feline work.   Pictured above is Luna, who was adopted nearly two years ago on the day of an almost complete lunar eclipse. She came from a home of 40 cats, accumulated unintentionally by an elderly gentleman in Rockland, a near-by town. In December of 2007, the house caught on fire and was lost; the cats were rescued by the Rockland fire department and slowly adopted out by the people at the wonderful Knox County Animal Shelter. These cats are still known as the "Rockland Fire Cats" and people remember their story. (I was in a drawing class with a firefighter this summer who wanted to know all about Luna's welfare, after he discovered her origins.)
     Luna arrived here with some lung damage and severe trauma about 3 months after the fire. I just let her be. She lived in the studio, wedged up on a shelf with a pile of fabric. Occasionally she would
forget herself and make forays into the communal area, usually at night when I wasn't obviously present. She has adapted well, but anytime there is a trauma-a trip to vet etc. she retreats to the studio. Is feels like we must start over each time.
     Today I lit a match to light a candle and the smell of the match went directly up her nose. She went rigid and disappeared into the studio. I found her a couple of hours later still panic stricken, still hiding in between a pile of fabric. That a sense of smell could evoke this response nearly 2 years later was amazing and sad and yes, I know that Proust told us about senses and memory quite a while back, but to experience for myself was quite powerful.
     This episode in the life of my household made me begin to think about the 1930s quilt tops I have begun to buy to have made into bedding for my family. It was scrap quilts like these, made by my great-grandmothers, that first made me curious about the art of quilting. When we were little, sleeping under one of them was a treat of some sort. The first one I bought is on my bed and is shown above and I do sleep peacefully there .It worn on the back, by the unknown people who have washed it and slept under it. It is a wonderful feeling to be linked back through the generations to my foremothers in Tennessee and Missouri. There are so many ways memory can function.

Fiberarts-"Reinventing Fiber"

2009-08-13T14:41:00.000-07:00

This is just a note and may seem a bit cranky. It is August and has rained most of the summer and it seems as if I have been incredibly busy, so maybe I'm entitled. The newest issue of "Fiberarts" has been kicking around my house for weeks now; it remained unopened because I hated the work on the cover and the general theme of the issue, at least based on the title seemed slightly beside the point to me. Wasn't the whole Modernist notion of destroy the past to invent something new determined to be a failure about twenty-five years ago? Is it necessary to declare every so often that fiberarts have completely turned the whole medium upside down. Finally, I opened the magazine and paged through and remained unimpressed: when did leather become catagorized as a fiberart, why embroider money?... Actually I found the work of a couple of the artists' downright creepy. If one has any knowledge about the field, some of the work isn't really reinventions at all, just a slight recombination of elements. I know thar the parent company for Interweave press is Barnes and Noble, so the audience for this magazine has changed or grown or become diluted, depending on your point of view. But the most pressing question seems to be about the nature of fiberart itself: are the various artforms so limited or shopworn that we must feel compelled to declared we have completely reinvented the entire field every decade or so?
I miss the old style of the magazine and the image of everyone putting it together maybe not quite so slickly, in the wonderful old building in downtown Asheville, North Carolina.

my trip Downeast

2009-06-24T14:11:00.000-07:00

The desire had been building for this trip. At night when I closed my eyes, I would see favorite glimpses of the ocean I've come to treasure from many drives down (up???) the coast. Its been raining for weeks and we have all been shut inside our houses, mildewing and feeling cranky. I decided I had to go.
It didn't really matter that my car began to break down at Perry's House of Nuts- I was on my way to Deer Isle!
Accompanying my drive was Willy Claflin's sad old folk song about a Downeast Cafe closed for the season which sang in my head. Then I was there. The magic was waiting. I don't know what the magic is exactly. A certain energy powerful enough to choose it as the home for wonderful craft school . People find themselves unable to leave and move to what feel like the end of the world forever.
So I was blissfully pondering these things and hunting for baby mussel shells, talking to Postmistress of the Stonington post office about the dire straits of the economy, watching the tides and the fog and rain come and go and trying to take photos like John Marin's cubist watercolors of Stonington of nearly 100 years ago. Nothing important and all of it memorable. I am planning my next adventure.

being the Heirophant

2009-06-14T07:04:00.000-07:00

This morning, as part of my journal-keeping practice, I made a list of the parts of my life which have provided me with greatest stability over time (I see I am talking like Hierophant already). The list was simple: work and my spiritual practice, specifically the Tarot.
That being said, I returned to the chaos that is my studio. I was looking for a painted table cloth which had been the beginning of a quilt which I wanted to return. I searched downstairs without success and decided to try the plastic bins in the guest room closet. In one I found 3 quilts all just begun sometime in the last 5 years and all very interesting. (completion is not my strong suit) I remembered only one of them. One in particular excited me because the color combinations were just so weird and the idea behind it was appealing. I have been given several falling-apart quilt tops from the 1930s and 1940s and this appeared to be a quilt in which I intended to preserve at least parts of these old quilts in an interesting way. I realized with great excitement I was being the Hierophant, preserving tradition, just as it seems to be my destiny to do. (I went to graduate school in the history of art) I remembered an article by Thalassa
in "Llewellyn's Tarot Reader" from 2007 ( I think) about being Tarot and this morning felt like the proverbial Helen Keller moment.

so what was it about "less is more," anyway?

2009-06-04T15:25:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I do take a peek at myself in the mirror before I leave the house. This morning, for a second, I got a big surprise (see below) then I thought, "I guess I look like my quilts and people in town should be used to me by now."
Although I live in New England, austerity does not become me or maybe it would be better said that I really don't understand it. I seem to respond to Modernist aesthetic in the same way. Clean, pure, simple Zen-like white boxes really do sound like peaceful places to live and work and be contemplative, but what about pink and red and purple...together. Where would I put that decorative scarf? Detritus of daily life quickly forms itself into an altar or some other little collection. (Some people call this "clutter".) The first large quilt I made in response to moving to Maine is "A Mayan Child Moves to
Maine in November." This quilt suggests a landscape; the stones are there, the spindly trees without their leaves, the night sky in all its winter purity. If one looks closely at the different kinds of embellishment used for different
purposes, one can see a glimpse into my brain: "Oh, an empty space, fill it -quick."

beginnings of a love affair

2009-04-23T14:09:00.000-07:00

23 April, 2009
thursday.
Long before I was a studio assistant at Haystack or an off season visitor to Round Pond, Maine, there were Robert McCloskey's books with their lyrical texts and wonderful illustrations. My love affair with Maine began at the figurative knee of Captain Kangeroo in the morning and the real elbow of my mother reading to me at night. I am not sure if it was the book, "One Morning in Maine" or, my favorite, "A Time
of Wonder" which cemented my romance and curiosity about this piece of the world off the beaten path.
Last year I encountered this enormous fallen tree on Monhegan Island with treasure accumulated among the roots. I remembered Sal had found a similar tree scouting about her island on her own. The contents of detrius tangled among the roots seemed like faery treasure.
It is these alluring moments that cause me to remain here, a Southerner bred to the bone and most assuredly a fish out of water.