Exhibition season...

'Tis the season for exhibitions. My former classmates in NY are now putting up their thesis show

http://www.nyss.org/students/mfa-2011-thesis-exhibiton/

I'm excited for them, excited to see glimpses of where they've gone in the close-to-a-year since I've seen them, but also feeling really sad that I won't be there. This makes the abrupt leavetaking from NY feel more abrupt, and more unfinished...

On the upside, friends, teachers and former fellow-students are putting up shows left and right here in Israel, which I will be able to see--and which I know will well worth be seeing. Here is the list of some of the upcoming exhibitions I'm planning to hit next time I'm in Tel Aviv.

• Noa Shai, a fellow student from the JSS and the International School in Italy, has some works up in a group exhibition at the Rothschild Gallery--closing next week, so have to hurry to make it.
• Jordan Wolfson will be showing at the Rothschild Gallery.
• Hanna Doukhan, a fellow student from Italy, will be having a solo show at the Bernard Gallery
• Ann Ben-Or, another fellow student, will be taking part in a group show about post-natal depression at the Gurstein Gallery

More on these once I've actually had a chance to see them.

Penuel--a history of a series

Now come the finishing touches of the exhibition, including the one I hate the most: the dreaded Artist Statement. One would think that it would be a breeze, considering how much I run on and on, whether in blog or in person. But there is something artificial about giving a single official "Statement" about works in which so many factors are involved, about works that you hope would not be constrained by words. It also seems to put a cap, a closing, while I see this series as on-going. This exhibition is a midpoint, a stop for thinking, considering, hopefully for feedback. It is not definitive.

When I look at the works, I see a history rather than a statement. The

different thoughts, experiences. processes that went into them, the different currents of thought that came together. The series began, actually, from a project for class:

the NYSS opened with the "transcription project," in which all the students were meant to make three small paintings based on pieces from the history of art. The topic for the pro

ject was Eros. I looked through countless images, from medieval art to Paul Gauguin, including Canova's sculpture of Cupid and Psyche. Something in the pattern of interlinking arches drew me, and I photocopied some images for consideration. In the end, I found the sculpture too sentimental for the Eros project, and based myself on Velásquez's Venus at the Mirror and Rodin's Paulo and Francesca instead. However, the Canova images remained in my studio, totalizing me.

Due to very unpleasant circumstances, I had to change classes and studios at the

beginning of the second semester. I found myself in a new space, feeling off balance and out of place. As an opening warm up, I decided to explore the Canova image in a charcoal drawing. To my surprise, small variations in the angles transformed a tender image of lovers into two figures locked in combat. This connected in my head to Rodin's drawings of wrestlers, which keep transforming into lovers--images that had also been in my studio since I had made my painting of Paulo and Francesca.

This led me to make more studies off the Canova image, trying to touch the abstract elements that allowed these two energies to co-exists.

These became Penuel I and II:

But I became more and more interested in the charcoal drawing, which had transformed for me from Cupid and Psyche into Jacob and the angle of Genesis 32. I emphasized the lines of struggle with lines, changed the angle of the head of the lower figure--now Jacob. The assailant became dark, ominous, the wing's transformed from soft feather to harsh line. The drawing connected to an earlier, abandoned series based on Gerard Manley Hopkin's Terrible Sonnets.

I began a new drawing, this time in ink, in which I combined my new image of struggle with the handwritten text of excerpts of Hopkin's "Carrion Comfort," where he uses the metaphor of Jacob's struggle with the angle to describe his own crisis of faith and battle with depression. This poem had reached out and grabbed me like a hand from the grave the first time I read it, and had remained on my mind ever since. On an intellectual level, I loved the seamless merging of the personal life with the biblical text, the archetypal framing of experience. On an emotional level, parts of the poem became a mantra against my own doubts about my art and my choice to leave Israel for art school--doubts which had become stronger in the wake of an anti-Semitic incident that had forced me to switch groups in mid-year.

The poem and the biblical passage it evokes had also gained new resonance for me. This was the first time I had been out of Israel for a prolonged period of time, and the first time I had been in context where I had to deal with continuous verbal attacks on my country. Homesick and alone, the story of Jacob's transformation into Israel became a way to meditate on what it means to be from Israel, and on the struggle for survival and for identity.

So that is reconstruction of how a simple warm up exercise exploring a juxtaposition of angles became a nexus for considering my relation to art, aspects of literature, the connection of text to image, and also issues of national and personal identity... a lot of weight for paintings to carry...which is why it's sometimes better to let these things remain unsaid.

Putting up the exhibition--a matter of framing again

Spent yesterday hanging the exhibition. A mixed experience. What seemed a nice amount of works suddenly felt paltry, and I was unhappy with the framing of the smaller drawings.

It's a learning curve: I knew if I was still in the NYSS, I would have had feedback, and people to speak to, and would have found a frame that worked the way I wanted it to. As it was, I allowed myself to be convinced by the framer that the way I initially visualized the frame--two simple pieces of glass, with the drawing pressed between--was impractical, and ended up with a look that was the opposite of what I wanted. It's painful to admit that I now like the way the images of the drawings look more than the works themselves. When seen online, they are freed from their size, and I can imagine them at the scale they should be. Within their frames, they feel constrained, diminished--a pattern I had noticed in exhibitions before, but of which I did not take enough care.

Oh well. There are some things one can only learn through the doing. And I hope that my disappointment with the drawings will encourage new works in which the scale feels right, regardless of framing.

One of the positives side of hanging the exhibition is becoming aware of how much the works interact with each other. There is a constant conversation between the pieces. When put together, the paintings feel different. They change according to where they are hung, how they are hung, and which works they are near. This was a phenomena to which I became sensitive when I saw Titian's Assumption of the Virgin in its original location in Venice. I was left breathless, unable to move for several moments. It was the most intense response I had ever had to a painting, and I realized that it was partially because it was not only a painting. Titian had directed the way light came in, the direction of my steps, the entire encounter. This was art in context, and it is a different experience. That was the catalyst for my interest in installation art, in curatorship, and my eventual involvement in the Goliath Institute of Art--where I was intensely involved in articulating the conceptual framework. Yet being aware of a phenomena is very different than seeing it happen with one's owns works. Seeing how the works changed in relation to each other made them feel more real, more alive. Hanging the show became almost like setting up a conversation.

An exhibition!!

Been so overwhelmed lately, that blogging has fallen by the wayside. I also was finding that it was making me a little too philosophical about art.

But now it's Pesach--no work, no classes, just sitting at home, enjoying the family, so there's some time to catch up on all the internet aspects of life.

So: some good news. I am having an exhibition of my works from last year. It's an ongoing series, exploring the interaction of text and image, through Hopkins poetry (I posted about these works earlier) and its biblical source.

I uploaded some of the pieces here:

http://local-artists.org/user/11623

The exhibition will be opening right after Pesach, at Matan, Jerusalem, at 31 Rashba Street, it the Katamonim.

See the official invite:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=201217853251268

This has finally inspired me to begin working on my web-presence. While I have yet to rebuild my website, I at least made a Facebook page with some of my work.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Batnadiv/148008425264391

As well as joining the Local Artist website.

I hope to be adding to it soon!

Emergence and Art

Last week I was reading the final leg of Steven Johnson's Emergence--the by now slightly dated 2001 overview of self-organizing systems, emergent phenomena, and consciousness. I started it several weeks ago, but non-fiction books always take me longer to read. Partially because I can't get lost in their world, partially because I keep needing to stop to think.

One thing that kept making me pause was the thought--how do these ideas apply to art, and to our conception of the artist?

On the one hand, the idea of creating something emergent, something that is unpredictable, out of one's control, open ended, endlessly developing--seems like the ultimate art: to birth something that truly stands on its own, unlimited by one's own limitations.

Yet I remember that the year I finished high-school I got involved in designing an computer adventure game with some friends. It was just when the filmed games like my well-love Gabriel Knight were going out, and the 3-D craze was beginning to hit. At first we were entranced by the endless possibilities, but then got frustrated when the game began to be about the technology. We couldn't create a coherent plot, or characters, if the world could take off on its own. We wanted to be the gods of our little world, the stage-managers, not the observing scientist.

In his classical work the Mirror and the Lamp, Abrams outlines two primary views of art and the artist. The first is the Classical: Art is mimesis, and the artist is a mirror, reflecting the outer world in a new form. Then comes the great Romantic revolution, which conceived art as creation-ex-nilo: the artist as a God-like being, who creates art out of his own being, a self-sustaining lamp rather than a passive mirror.

We would need another revolution for an Emeregence-like art: a turn towards a more Darwinian view of art as an emergent process, or as observation, or as setting a system into place. Though we still live in a largely Romantic milieu, with an obsession with genius and individuality, and the persona of the Artist, it is beginning to happening. There is process art, and instillations that are formed through the participation of the viewers. Not to mention the Robert Wilson's early work, with its semi-improvisations. Yet these do seem closer to Intelligent Design, with a great Artist setting the parameters, and marking the final results.

And another part of me, that finds much of the new art lacking (though not Robert Wilson!) protest that all great art has an element of emergence. Even in my earliest work, I would not consider a painting done until it began to express more than what I had put into it, until it became more than what I was looking at, and more than the paint and canvas of which it was made. One of my teachers, Jordan Wolfson called it "having a face": the painting looks back at you. I still remember my shock at seeing Caravaggio's Flagellation close up, the big toe near my eye, and thinking this is paint. A splatter of red, the mark of the brush. And yet the next moment, it was not paint again: it was light, and it was beauty, and it was heartbreaking vulnerability. Or Titian's Ascension of the Virgin which literally left me breathless, able to do nothing but stare. A glowing point ahead of you, as you walk down the dark aisle of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, seemingly lit by its own light, even as the light of two windows hits it. There is the emergence that comes of the transformation of matter, when material becomes something else through what is invested in it.

The Zohar writes "when all the artist came to finish their work, the work finished itself."

Is there a relation between these two kinds of emergence? Is there still room for the latter in a world that is more and more defined by the former? How do you connect the two? Can they be connected? Making material breath, "have a face", seems to require a deeper investment than setting a process in motion and watching where it goes--or endless time, for the profoundly slow work of evolution to take place.

The Possessed

A rather dramatic heading, but I sometimes feel like that lately...

There comes a time when mental confusion spreads to the body, and you end up literally at war with yourself. My last two weeks of a hellish ear-infection combined with a come-and-go stomach virus are a perfect example.

But I actually was referring to Elif Batuman's The Possessed, which was recently given to me by a friend as a "must-read for any literature graduate student"--which it is.

I'm not even half way through, but wanted to post a few quick thoughts, just to make myself feel connected again (oh for the the number of thoughts that have slipped through my brain in the past chaotic weeks...). Somehow books often act as the easiest touchstone for writing. Maybe its the academic training.

First, the fascination of the writing style. A montage of vignettes from college life (though I must say, she gets to do far more interesting things than I I ever did as a graduate student), those strangely juxtaposed events that can only be reality. We all have them, but we usually let them remain fragmented and half forgotten in the back of our mind. But somehow Batuman strings them together in a way that the whole becomes more then the sum of its parts. You begin to get intimations of wholeness, of meaning, behind the chaos.

In visual terms, this would be a kind of collage of sketches that somehow interact together to form a coherent whole.

And, just wanted to share a quote that really spoke to me. In regards to her doubts about the value of studying Russian literature, Batuman writes "I now understand that love is a rare and valuable thing, and you don't get to choose its object. You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things--and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that's the wonderful gift right there" (88-89). I think there is a profound truth there. We get so caught up in the questions of what's right, or what's meaningful. Is painting yet another small still-life of a pear, or an onion, really worth anything? But there is also the fact of love. The things that draw on us enough to connect. And sometimes we have to take the time to pause, breath, and stop ourselves from undermining this more "rare and valuable thing".

Reading this passage this morning, I suddenly vividly remembered a poem I had almost forgotten: PatrickKavanagh's "Innocence"

They laughed at one I loved-

The triangular hill that hung

Under the Big Forth. They said

That I was bounded by the whitethorn hedges

Of the little farm and did not know the world.

But I knew that love's doorway to life

Is the same doorway everywhere.

Ashamed of what I loved

I flung her from me and called her a ditch

Although she was smiling at me with violets.

But now I am back in her briary arms

The dew of an Indian Summer lies

On bleached potato-stalks

What age am I?

I do not know what age I am,

I am no mortal age;

I know nothing of women,

Nothing of cities,

I cannot die

Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges

A different time, a different ambiance, a different literature, but I was happy to remember it...

A few more images from Tel Aviv

I never can resist spirals:

And have a deep fashination with the hetrotopias of reflections:

A Trip to the White City: On the Joys of Exhaustion, and Rediscovering Photography

I recently (has it been almost a week?) went to Tel Aviv to try out a new sculpture class. I--who am not a morning person--had to be out of the house by 6:00 A.M. I hadn't slept well the night before, and so walked through the sunrise-kissed, quiet streets in that exhausted airless high where everything looms remorselessly real, and yet strangely disconnected. Like the eyes have a jerky zoom and pan button that isn't quite working.

There is something oddly invigorating about it. Sitting outside the door, waiting for the studio to open, I couldn't stop sketching. The stairway was an abstract composition. The candlesticks a perfect still life of moving lines.

I thought: I need to try this more often. This is an energy I can use to have a small morning painting every day, before the house comes to life with all its distractions.

The floating rush carried me through the sculpture class, one of the best I had all year. I decided to make a Tel Aviv day: walk through the Bauhaus architecture that gave Tel Aviv its moniker, and maybe check out some of the galleries.

But when I stepped outside, the adrenaline dropped , and I was left with the faint nauseas four-hours-of-sleep headache combined with a day that was getting progressively too hot for the clothing I had put on for a rainy Jerusalem morning. When I finally found a gallery that was open, I was too tired to appreciate it properly.

So my conclusion is:

Exhaustion is a useful commodity, but like everything, good only in moderation. Push it too far and you can destroy an entire day. If I want to begin painting before sunrise, I need to leave time and place for a short afternoon nap, or get to sleep before the a.m.s (hard to imagine...)

When I found Rothschild Boulevard completely blocked, I gave up, and wandered into Neve Tzedek and down towards the beach. One good thing about the collapse of my grand plans of exploring artistic Tel Aviv is that I finally took out my camera in an attempt to wake myself up. There was a time when I would not leave the house without my SLR semi-manual camera. But when it broke--and digital replaced the darkroom--I lost my connection to it.

Spending a few hours wandering around with a camera rather than my sketch pad reminded me why I loved it. There is something about the immediate imagery of photography that connects me to the moment. I begin to look at these small details that I usually would miss. The framing isolates compositions within the burley of phenomena. Patterns and echoes come alive. And the ordinary is for a moment blessed by the extraordinary.

There is poem I love by Dylan Thomas that somehow encapsulates for me the possible power of photography to bestow a "radiance" to what is usually, maybe rightfully, missed:

Here are some photos from my afternoon walk:

I love this composition in blues, but as usual find the color quality of photos disappointing. It was one of the main reasons I stopped using the camera: the sense of loss when I saw the photo was too deep.

Anna Ticho and the drawing biennale

Once I was at the Anna Ticho House, I nipped upstairs for a quick visit to the regular exhibition space. After a day of looking at the photography and prints section of the Jerusalem Drawing Biennale, Anna Ticho's familiar drawings struck me anew. There is something incredibly moving about the sense of infinite patience in her large charcoal drawings. You feel that she would be happy to rest forever on each blade of grass. There is no hurry to get done, no worry about a final product: it is all in the process, in the loving contact of mark with landscape.

I was reminded of my thoughts at the Sotheby’s auction of Israeli art last year. For me, Ticho's work embodies within it the innocence and idealism of early Zionism--the dream of regeneration through contact with the soil, the melding of soul with land. Something in the complete unison of philosophical commitment with material expression makes these relatively unsophisticated drawings more complete works of art than most the sleek modern works of the biennale.

A Matter of Hanging

This Wednesday, I went to see the last two section of Jerusalem’s fourth drawing biennale: one in the more out of the way Jerusalem Print Workshop; and the other in one of my favorite hidden jewels, the Anna Ticho House--now shaken out of its magical calm by the roar of construction. Brief moment of mourning for a lost oasis.

One thing that struck me in the one room exhibit of photos at the Ticho house was the power of presentation-- the mode of hanging. The small, dimly lit temporary exhibition space is not the most conducive to highlighting a piece. But the two works that worked best for me where Gilad Ophir's digital prints, seen alongside.

Part of it was the size: other than Sharon Yaari's haunting picture of a ruined house (below), they were by far the largest.

But even more was their lack of frame. I realized that the scroll- like hanging gives them a presence that seems to expand outwards, spreading across the room, while the simple yet clearly defined frames delimit a constricted space. They seem to say: this is the picture, and it goes no further.

While I love the experience of framing a small work, and suddenly having it leap into focus as a finished piece, I suddenly realized how frames can help make a work eminently ignorable.

I'm not sure if it is the fact of the frame, or the frame's nondescript nature (see below).

Or perhaps it is the interaction of work and frame--photos of a limited tonal range with pale, plain frames.

This is an old question. I think of the way Eakins carved notes into the frame of his "Concert Singer," or how Seurat painted his late frames, creating a transition between painting and world.

Or of Puvis de Chevannes' painted internal frames that define the structure of his paintings.

A question to consider...

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Just finished Muriel Barbery's Elegance of the Hedgehog. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a book this much.

On a literary level, it was amazing to see how philosophical ideas can be seamlessly integrated into a work of fiction. It is thought-provoking without being pretentious, and the ideas grow out of the characters, rather than the characters becoming a vehicle for the ideas. The closest equivalents I can think of in terms of the engagement with philosophy are George Elliot and obviously (for anyone who has read this book) Tolstoy, that ubiquitous presence. But despite these rather heavy antecedents, the book remains an easy, pleasurable read.

It also offers some of the most moving ruminations on the nature of art that I have found in a long time. I found myself continuously folding down the edges of pages to mark the spot (a deplorable habit that has almost pushed me--a bibliophile!--in to the cold arms of a Kindle), and stopping to go back and re-read passages.

Before I return the book to my very kind, long-suffering, and semi-patient neighbor (he asks about it with a nice smile every time I see him), I thought I would share some of my favorite passage.

First, I loved the idea (be at as pretentious as only a 12 year old can be) of Paloma's two journals:

"I thought I ought to make up for the 'glory of the mind' side with a second journal that would talk about the body[...] Not the profound thoughts of the mind, but the masterpieces of matter. Something incarnate, tangible. But beautiful and aesthetic at the same time" (p.33. Page numbers are from the Gallic
edition)

This can almost serve as the by-line for this blog--it was the central idea that drove me to start writing it: to note down both the thoughts, and the passing stimulus and phenomena that feed art. Alas that I have not been as consistent as Paloma in keeping with my plan of Journals of Profound Thoughts and Journals of the Movement of the World.

More quotes:

""Humans live in a world where it's words and not deed that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who've been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get shafted by others, the fine talkers, despite the latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabbit home for dinner, or procreating properly. Humans live in a world with the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction." (53)

"At moments like this the web of life is revealed by the power of ritual, and each time we renew our ceremony, the pleasure will be all the greater four our having violated one of its principle. Moments like this act as magical interludes, placing our hears at the edge of our souls: fleetingly, yet intensely, a fragment of eternity has come to enrich time. Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people love and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn--and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and untertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flame, and tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb.

...The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes ...has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, the autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And with each swallow, time is sublimed." (P. 87)

On still-life painting (the whole of chapters 10-11 are wonderful, but I bring my favorite extracts) :

"Whence comes the sense of wonder we perceive when we encounter certain works of art? Admiration is born with our first gaze and if subsequently we should discover, in the patient obstinacy we apply to flushing out the causes thereof, that all this beauty is the fruit of virtuosity that can only be detected through close scrutiny of a brush that has been able to tame shadow and light and restore shape and texture, by magnifying them--the transparent jewel of the glass, the tumultuous texture of shells, the clear velvet of the lemon--this neither dissipates nor explains the mystery of one's initial dazzled gaze.

The enigma is constantly renewed: great works are the visual forms which attain with us the certainty of timeless consonance....

In the still life with lemons, for example, this essence cannot be reduced to the mastery of execution; it clearly does inspire a feeling of consonance, a felling that this exactly the way it ought to have been arranged. This in turn allows us to feel the power of objects and the way they interact, to hold in our gaze the way they work together and the magnetic fields that attract and repel them, the ineffable ties that bind them together and engender a force, a secret an inexplicable wave born of both the tensions and the balance of the configuration--this is what inspires the feeling of consonance. The disposition of the objects and the dishes achieves the universal in the singular: the timeless nature of the constant form. " (197-198)

On art in general:

"What is the purpose of Art? To give us the brief, dazzling illusion of the camellia, to carve from time the emotional aperture that cannot be reduced to animal logic. How is Art born? It is begotten in the mind's ability to sculpt the sensorial domain. What does Art do for us? It gives shape to our emotions, makes them visible, and in so doing, places a seal of eternity upon them, a seal representing all those works that, by means of a particular form, have incarnated the universal nature of human emotions." (199)

"Beauty consist of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death...Constantly posed between beauty and death, movement and its disappearance. " (272-3)

And on life in general--echoes of Ecclesiastes here:

"Personally, I think there is only one thing to do: find the task we have been placed on this earth to do, and accomplish it as best we can, with all our strength, without making things complicated or thinking there is anything divine about our human nature. This is the only way we will ever feel that we have been doing something constructive when death comes to get us. Freedom, choice, will and so on? Chimeras. We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of the bees, but we are in truth nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our tasks and then die." (238)

And the closing of the book:

"It's as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, and always within never.

Yes, that's it, an always within never."

More dance drawings

Late into a three hour dance class, I began having fun with materials and colors. These are a mixture of panda and colored pencil. I used the panda to get the general sweep of the dancer's movement, and then went in with line to fix it in the specific.

In search of dance...

One of my favorite parts of New York was my discovery of the world of dance. Between the New York City Center, the Joyce and the New York City Ballet, I was seeing dance almost every week, and sometimes more. It became almost an obsession. The music, the lighting, the immediacy of movement, the constant division and recreation of space--and even in the most abstract of dances, the necessary figural element of the dancer's own body. In some ways, it is the most human of the arts.

And with the human, there is relationship, almost an implicit story. Dance cannot leave you cold.

Since coming back to Israel I've been trying to keep up this passion. There's a lot of great modern dance, but its harder to hear about--or at least I have not yet found the central information hub. And there are less great student tickets available, which in my current financial state unfortunately means a lot .

A few weeks ago, I went to the special late night opening at the Israel Museum, which served as a venue for student dancers and performance artist. After speaking to the dancers, my friend and I were lucky enough to get permission to come and draw during the advanced improv class at the Vertigo dance company.

These are mostly quick gesture drawings, often done so fast, and layered one over the other, that even I can barely tell what they are at the end. Here is a typical 5 drawings on one paper:

While viewing a class lacks the fusion of elements that makes of a finished dance performance, it focuses you more on the internal space of the dance: what the dancer is thinking about, how they are speaking to their body, what the movement means, the relationship to other dancers.

These sketches try to capture the essential line of the dancer's movement:

While in these I tried to catch a sense of the essential line of the dance as a whole by marking the different position of the dancer as she moved:

These focus on the relationship between the dancers in a duet:

The level of self awareness and of trust involved in improvising a duet is truly awe-inspiring.

Map Project: Task II

Wanted to write week II, but then realized that it has been almost a week since I posted the images from Week I. Hmmmm. A week leaves a lot of leeway for getting lost. So...

Some scheduling protocols for the Map Project. Yes, being organized is a work in progress. Here we go:

Images of completed tasks will be posted Thursday night. The task for the following week will be posted immediately afterwards, or the latest Friday afternoon.

My tasks will generally be inspired by Sarah Salway's Writer's Roots workshop, but adapted to my personal interests and the visual medium.

Task II

• The belated topic of this week are childhood landscapes. This can be interpreted as broadly as possible.

I hope to have this posted by Friday mornings. Wish me luck!

A collage image of of some of my Map Project papers

The Maps Project: Task I Completed

Well, I did it! Task 1 completed!
I went on a shopping spree on Tuesday, buying lots of supplies I couldn't afford.

Most importantly, I picked up 3 sheets of heavy-weight (400 gr) cheap watercolor paper, and a large jar of PVA and of gesso. I cut the sheets into 12 pieces of 35 cm hight. I alternated the width, making half 40cm and half 50cm. This will allow me to play around with foldout pagesand diffident styles.

I also bought a dark blue Conte paper. I will cut it to 35, and have it expand lengthwise.

In retrospect, I think I could actually have gone for a simpler paper--the PVA and gesso offer enough strength. That way the paper would be more flexible (these surfaces are so stiff, I'm not sure I'll be able to bind them)--and more cheap. Something to keep in mind for next time.

Today was a beautiful, sunny day, which made it perfect for preparing the surfaces. I took all the pages out to the roof, and began playing with them. There was no specific plan. I just wanted to make 12 different surfaces that would inspire me to approach them differently.

The first few were very simple:

Tea staining to age the paper

Splashes of ink

Sponged liquid acrylic
(I apologize for the photographs. They're taken at night, with a flash, just to give a feel. I wanted to post this before the end of the week, and knew that if I got precious about the pictures, that would be the end of that).

As I went on, I began to get more creative. There is something incredibly freeing about working on so many pages at once, and knowing that they are not a final product.

The one I had high hopes for--rubbing loose pigment directly into the PVA-- did not come out as well as I had hoped.

But a boring yellow liquid acrylic livened up with spilled coffee grinds splashed with PVA became quite dramatic

And a not quite-successful-attempt to use dead leaves began to work better when I spilled coffee over PVA, and then let it run down.

By the end, the prepared surfaces were almost becoming independent collages--especially in the case of the last one, where I combined old books, my music notes, pages from school books, and torn up drawings from my sketchbook:

Which made me think that since I am anyway not binding the papers until I am done, it might be better to make the preparation an essential part of the project, so that the collage elements will fit the topic.

Something to consider for next time!

I do think that I will buy I few blank papers, just in case...

Hope to see some other people joining!

Late night thoughts on Museums, Assemblage, and the Power of Instant Apprehension

I went to visit the newly renovates Israel Museum this Monday with a friend. It was my second visit to the museum since its refurbishment, but the first when I actually had a chance to look around.

Just wanted to jot down a few thoughts before I they were forgotten. Sometimes I do think that is the purpose of this blog--to catch all those fleeting observation before they sink into the ethersphere, never to be recovered.

There are no photos allowed in the museum, so these will unfortunately have to be verbal notes. First, on seeing a roughly-hewn sculpture from the Easter Islands with a beautiful conch-shell attached with a rope, I thought--assemblage is not a modern art. It is, in some ways, the earliest art. One of our most primal impulses is to use our surrounding objects, the things we love, in a new form, to make the found truly ours by making it anew.

One of the hidden jewels of the collection--this is the first time I've seen it--is the Jacques Lipchitz room. The sculptor bequeathed his private collection to the museum, and it's hidden to the side of the Fine Arts department in an easily missed, intimatly darkened room that feels like a Victorian library. In the cupboards of hundreds of unlabeled small sculptures from around the world. The most beautiful to me was a leaping fish, made out of a single piece of driftwood. The fins, tale, and mouth had been beautifully carved, but the body was the untouched branch, with small shells and stones attached to accentuate its movement, and two beautiful stones for the eyes.

It reminded me of the sculptural garden rocks in the Astor Court at the Met--beautiful found stones, which were polished a little, put on a stand, and became a sculptural landscape. It's an idea of art as a change of context, as a way of looking, rather than a way of making. The object is allowed to be, is almost unchanged, except that we look at it differently. It is far less a violent relationship to material than carving (for all that Michelangelo spoke of freeing figures from teh rock), and more organic than painting and drawing--where we seek to construct something from within, rather than letting the material speak...

And yet it was the little touches of skill--the beautifully carved mouth with all its little teeth, that brought it to life...

On Museums...

One of the best moments in the museums new design is a window which connects the African arts department to the Modern Art. Through the corner of your eye, while looking at tribal masks, you suddenly catch sight of a Max Ernst sculpture and a Picasso painting. And the connection between African art and the development of modernism hits you, immediately apparent. It was far more powerful than any essay I had ever read on Picasso's influences.

And I thought, Wouldn't it be incredible if we could build an entire museum on this principle. A kind of panoptican where everything can be seen from a single viewpoint, and create actual structural links--windows, doors, passageways--highlighting the connection between related works. Reading art on an immediate level.

The University of Michigan Museum of Art has attempted to create something like this with its DialogTable --a huge touchscreen of all the pieces in their collection, in which if you select one, all related elements come up with it.

But powerful as it is, by using charts,texts, and different categories for search, it is already appealing to the verbal, symbolic element of the mind. It is reading art at a remove, rather than by direct apprehension...

Some work inspired by Hopkins

Last year, I worked with Hopkins poetry while focusing only on one poem, responding to a single line. Here are some of the drawings and paintings from the yet unfinished series.