attentiveness

"attentiveness is the only means by which we can know the nature and qualities of our moment by moment existence. the entrance gate through which a person can not just be in his or her life, but know it, taste it, consider it. attentiveness is what opens us into a conscious human experience. i do see the development of a continually deeper and more clarified and refining attentiveness as the path through which art and craft, as well as life are more fully revealed."

"...we seek in art the elusive intensity by which it knows..."

Jane Hirshfield

sidelong glance

notes on Christopher Wilmarth

Long Memphis 1973

image from

http://art.1stdibs.com/art_detail.php?id=14124

"an artist is entrusted with an access and required to keep it clear and the tools change with the obstructions but the place is always the same... ungraspable phantom of life..."

"obliquity is essential to Wilmarth's metaphorical imagination- at first literally, when he shaped his lights to make oblique shadows, and later, in a more arcane way, when he thrust out into real space with standing pieces that played upon the convention of perspective and its misleading illusions. The sidelong glance of a sculptor given to reverie is indispensable."

From the catalogue: Christopher Wilmarth: Gravity and Light