MAPPING MY STUDIO SPACE

the road to independence

Day 5 of blogathon I squeeze down to one sentence: Bring to life the dynamics of your studio. This is serious mind. A studio is my life. The same chair I read, talk on the phone, listen to music and watch movies in is the chair I sit in while painting. I'll move the footstool and put a portable easel there with the canvas on it. An unfinished one has been on the easel over a year. Tired of that kind of painting--painting inside the lines. I want to approach painting in such a way that I'm not bored out of my mind with it before it's finished. For less articulate painting, I lay a piece of plywood, two by two and a half feet, on the footstool and use it for table top. The desk I write at is behind the chair. The chair is at the left of the desk from where I sit writing. The desk is in a corner with a big painting of a Chinese landscape behind, and in front of where I sit, a big painting of Meher Baba by Phyllis Ott. On the left of it the collection of rock, blues and reggae cds. On the right, the collection of classical, jazz and African cds. On a lower shelf, a bunch of books. Philip Roth's Exit Ghost between George Oppen's Collected Poems and Apollinaire's Alcools. Pictures on the walls all around, some photographs, some paintings, some by me, some by other people, five African masks; one, maybe two of them, "real." Home entertainment center against the wall in front of the chair. Flatscreen on the wall, and above it an oil on canvas portrait of my beloved cat, TarBaby, I will grieve the rest of my life, a dvd player, vcr, sound system with one wire, table loaded with dvds and cds. A couple of colored pencil drawings on the wall by Willard Gayheart. One of them is of me painting a portrait of him, Willard, and the other is Tommy Jarrell playing fiddle with Paul Brown (of NPR Morning Edition news) playing banjo. Paul Brown has recently retired from NPR. He's so great an old-time banjo picker, he's one of the rare people from Flatland who took to mountain music and made music like he was born in the mountains. Alice Gerrard has that quality too, to my limited ear.

the road to independence

Pictures of Meher Baba on the walls and one of Ganesh made in a dye process on cloth, behind glass in a frame. I love it. A friend brought it to me years ago from India, bought it in the Bombay airport from a vendor for next to nothing. It's probably made by somebody who makes the same image multiple times a day in a factory-like setting for a bowl of rice, maybe. I appreciate that about it as much as I appreciate the image itself, esp that it's Ganesh. Below it is my 22"x24" photograph life-size portrait of Meher Baba, head and shoulders, b&w photo hand-tinted in India by a devotee, so subtly it looks natural. It was given to me by Kitty Davy, one of Baba's circle of women devotees who lived on the Center at Myrtle Beach in her old age. It was 1976 that she handed it to me. It's in a gorgeous rosewood frame. She said someone at the Center in India had sent it to her and she didn't know what to do with it. She had no more room for pictures on the walls. She said if I'd like it I could take it with me. I about fell through the floor. Me? I deserve THIS? I'm not anywhere near deserving of anything so fine, so precious. She doesn't know me. This has to be a mistake. She's taken me for somebody else. She knows who she's giving it to. OK. Whatever. I'm certainly grateful to accept. It was like found money, but infinitely better. She said, "One day it will come to life for you." I did not understand what she meant then, and don't understand it now. It is the central image, the central point, the hub in my house. It is the focus point in this room I'm describing as my studio. In that way, it is a living image. Under it is a bookshelf with two rows of art books, mostly 20th Century; Brancusi, Duchamp, Warhol, Rivers, Johns, Rothko, Motherwell, Hockney, Serra, Surrealism, Dada, Minimalism, on and on. That's the nature of the collection. I love the art of the 20th Century.

 

the road to independence

 

I am currently exploring writing in my studio. I sit at a beautiful walnut desk of straight lines with a quarter inch sheet of glass on top. I bought it from an artist friend for so little it was the same as a gift. An HP laptop sits atop it. To the left of the laptop stands a block of wood 3.5 inches square, the cut off end of a 4x4. Around it on the desktop are 7 rounded stones of different colors, origins and sizes, and two such stones on top of it. I stack rocks on the wood block in moments when I'm writing and pause to scratch my head and ponder the next sentence, wait for it. I stack rocks to see how many I can stand. Four is the most I've been able to get. Can't make it with five. One of them is my universe rock, roundish from one way of looking at it, oval from the side. It is black with small whitish specks all over it of different speck sizes, like the night sky. It is smooth as a hen's egg and fits the palm of my hand like it's made for it. I call it the universe rock. I see in it the universe. Found it somewhere on the ground nearby, I have no recollection where, thirty-five-plus years ago. I always know where this rock is. It has spent several years outside living with the weather and the seasons as rocks do. I brought it back inside recently. It ended up on the desk. Then the block of wood came and the rock sat on top of it. I found some other rounded smooth rocks close by and stacked them. It doesn't hurt the glass top when they fall. They make a loud clack sound, though it's a soft landing with no sharp edges, no danger to the glass. How many rocks are on top, and which ones, has evolved into something like the arrangement of the day, since I stack rocks there every day. It took up spontaneously; the parts came together seemingly of their own volition. Now there are three rocks. Beside it, a 2cd case for Derek and the Dominoes Live at the Fillmore, 1970. One of the cds is in the player.  

 

the road to independence

 

The only studio need I can think of that would allow for ecstasy would be a warm floor in the winter. The floor is the same temperature as outside. When it's zero outside, the floor is zero. Waist-high it is 65 in the realm where the heater's air current flows. Cold feet make winter creativity difficult. It takes the zeal out of the will. This year I've bought especially warm socks and some good warm indoor boots. Tired of cold feet in winter. Best to sit with feet up and watch movies. Last night I watched a good documentary of the Persian Empire through existing ruins. It brought forward the realization I know nothing of Persia but Persian miniatures, Rumi, Hafiz, Zoroaster, and none of them very well. The Persian Empire played a role in the fate of the Old Testament Hebrews. And the Babylonian Empire. These are the foundations of the Middle East, like the Roman Empire is the foundation of Western Civ. Knowing nothing about the Babylonians or the Persians, I can't understand anything about the Middle East. The documentary brought it forward that the history of the Middle East is a vast gap in my at least cursory understanding of world history. I carry a great curiosity about origins. My wish list for what I'm exploring in my studio right now is more learning about Persia. It seems like I ought to know at least something about Persia before leaving the body this lifetime. This room I'm calling my studio is the inside of my head. It is where I live all day every day. One door goes to bedroom, another door goes to kitchen and bathroom, another door goes to storage rooms, and one door to outside. Three windows with no blinds or curtains, open to the world outside. It's the human zoo, here, where the critters outside look at the human behind the bars in the windows. As long as they can see the human is in its cage, they feel safe. When the door opens, they go flying in all directions, squirrels run across the road and up the trees. It's mayhem. And here come the donkeys. It's the ice cream man that lives in the human barn. Maybe he has a carrot.     

whitehead primitive baptist church

 

 

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CYCLES AND THE WIDENING GYRE

yayoi kusama

 

Today, the winter solstice was a still day of light fog with about fifty yard visibility. Trees in the foreground were dark and wet, and the trees faded into the fog with distance. The foreground had a white background like a watercolor. Light breeze rang the windchimes in sequences of four and five different notes every time. A good day to be at home with no schedule and nothing pressing. A good day to stare out the window in silence with empty mind and see familiar landscape as watercolor. A good day for a long winter's nap. A good day to ride a dugout canoe through a swamp in Botswana with author Laurens van der Post in his 1958 account of searching for the Bushmen, THE LOST WORLD OF THE KALAHARI. I'd read this several years ago, probably around 40. A few weeks ago I saw the documentary film, THE JOURNEY OF MAN, tracing DNA back to the original people on earth. It went back to the Bush people of the southern part of Africa, who are living in the Kalahari desert in this time because people all around them want to kill them. They're little and they're different, so kill them, the mind we like to believe we rise above in civilization, but never do. Sometimes I feel like this is the very mind that guides civilization. However, that's serving a temptation to take something incomprehensively complex, simplify it into a word or two and pat myself on the back for saying something erudite. I returned to van der Post after learning the Bush people of the Kalahari are the original humans we all come from. They have lived in the southern part of Africa for something like 200,000 years. What we call civilization goes back less than 10,000 years.

 

yayoi kusama

 

I've recently learned a word for my view of the world. The word is, apocaloptimist, someone whose vision of the near future is waxing worse and worse, and whose vision of the distant future is that everything will work out just right. We're in a difficult time in civilization, perhaps the most difficult ever, and perhaps the greatest renascence since classical times. Making sculpture of human forms changed from standing straight up with arms straight down to sitting, lying down, standing in varieties of postures, walking, running, realistic in the classic sense. In the 20th Century, we left reproductions of existing objects and human forms for more interior representations of mind. In the Dada period, 1916, Zurich, Switzerland, a handful of draft dodging artists from Romania, Germany, France, Norway, ran the course of 20th Century art in six months. Simultaneously, in Paris, Marcel Duchamp was working in the same spirit. The cycle repeated from then to 1969 or 70. A new cycle has begun in what we call the Post Modern. First cycle happened in Zurich for half a year. Second cycle covered the globe in half a century. Third cycle may last half a millennium, 500 years. The progression I see is raising of consciousness by way of Dada during WW1, Surrealism between WW1 and WW2, and abstraction from WW2 to 1969, when the avatar of the Age left the body. The Modern period. The Post Modern period began doing Dada again. That's breaking it down in broad sweeps, the best I can do for brevity. This span of Dada all over the globe may last fifty or more years, then Surrealism and Expressionism maybe a few hundred years, then the same period of time with abstraction in all its varieties. Then time to run the cycle again, a spiral that started in one place in one time, cycles that grow bigger and bigger to take in all of humanity over a period of at least 500 years, each cycle an advancement by way of what was learned from the cycle before.

 

 

yayoi kusama

 

As we have looked back on Greece and Rome as the foundation of art through the 19th Century, the future will be looking back to the 20th Century as the foundation time when collective human consciousness took a leap without knowing it. It will take a few more centuries for that leap in consciousness to reach all the people around the globe. This does not exclude the learnings from the Classical period or the Renaissance. They will continue and feel as far away conceptually as Egyptian renderings of people with straight arms and straight legs. I was fascinated to see my first Egyptian sculpture of a life-sized human head. No lines on the face. No furrowed brow. Smooth African round face. The classical age of reason, the breakthrough of the forebrain in the time of the Christ in Jerusalem, made sculptures showing furrowed brows, deeply lined faces, the torment of thought. In a way, that period was the introduction of rational thought to collective humanity. It takes awhile for it to get around. We can see in the progression of 20th Century art leaving the physical reality of the body, or what Marcel Duchamp called "the retinal," for an art of mind reality. Perhaps this is leading to the next big cycle of the spiritual. If abstraction and readymades are art expressions of mind, I'm wondering how art of the spiritual would manifest. Perhaps what I'm calling "mind" is the spiritual, and mind came with the classical. It's getting down to defining mind and spirit, which I can't get into at this moment. I don't even know that there is a line. I'd be more inclined to say they fade into each other the way light and dark do at sunrise and sunset.

 

yayoi kusama

 

This brings to mind the next book from the past I want to reread. Not all books from the past do I want to reread, very few. This one I just now picked off the shelf. AN ART OF OUR OWN: The Spiritual In Twentieth Century Art, by Roger Lipsey, 1988. Looking at the table of contents makes me salivate mentally. He walks from Cezanne through the Modern period, chapters on Kandinsky, Brancusi, Matisse, Noguchi. Lipsey previously wrote a biography of Ananda Coomeraswamy, a philosopher of Indian art. Lipsey's vision of art is through a western eye that has learned to see through the eastern eye. He is a scholar whose eyes see both ways. I am comfortable with his approach to the spiritual through the eastern vision. Eastern spiritual engages experience. I remember enjoying Lipsey's prose and insights. I didn't always feel like his interpretations accorded with my understanding of the subject, but that means nothing. He was teaching me. I wasn't teaching him. It's mine to take what I learn from him and weave with my own understanding. Lipsey pulled the whole of 20th Century art together as the dismantling of form, color, name, design, all the way to conception, 1969. I remember reading the 500 page book with the same fascination as a Patrick White novel, another one I'd like to dip into again. I could happily spend what time I have left in this body rereading books I have loved along the way. Another favorite is a biography of artist Giacometti by James Lord. One I must read the first time is the text with a big book of Brancusi's work, written by his closest friends, other Romanian artists living in Paris. And Stanley Weintraub's biography of Whistler. Now I get a logjam in my head and have to do like a dog, shake my head, flop my ears, throw pointless thinking off like water off my hair. Back to the Kalahari of Southern Africa for now. This is what I love about reading, that it takes me to places, times, people, understandings far beyond my own, whatever my own may be. I feel like I'm creeping up on a time to dive back into Lipsey's beautiful book and illustrate it with google images. A review of the Modern to look forward to with the same anticipation as for a cup of Ethiopian coffee.

 

yayoi kusama

 

 

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