from the archives

patch, lancaster pa

(excerpts from a letter to a friend...) creativity is giving, but it's not just defined in terms of a physical manifestation- it's how you see the world, how you move through it, and how you live your life. Making things is over rated. To me it really is how you shape your life and how you are shaped by it... be curious about who you are and how you are. give yourself time to read and rest... find ways to be anonymous. it can be really simple.

and don't make anything if you don't want to- just listen.

in Japan, there are mountains and rivers that are unpopulated, but i will probably be in cities like Osaka and Kyoto, and in the pottery villages. ( i hope) There won't be the same vastness and expansiveness (of the american west) but the cultural and language differences will make me feel isolated in the same way. There is no way to insert yourself into that culture, but i am somewhat used to that. What i hope to experience is the aesthetic of the everyday that my friends talk about. How beautifully the food is presented, at home, for every meal-- for the gardens and temples and ubiquity of clay in the realm of the everyday. We experienced a taste of it in Cyprus. the pithari, the roof tiles, plants in terra cotta on every corner. (you must have some of that in Israel?) Where i live, almost everything is plastic, utilitarian in the worst and ugliest sense... Japan is going to amaze and confound me. that is what i loved about the West, and that is what i love about traveling. It wakes me up in a way that nothing else does. it reminds me of how little i need to live and be content with. If i could figure out how to do that in my studio and my life, then we would be getting somewhere... i want time more than anything. I want to slow down. I want to have my solitary time. I want to go camping and hiking and be outside as much as possible. I don't want to work so hard for so little satisfaction... and when you go to your work, filled with ancient broken pots, look at your beautiful, slender, sensitive fingers and thank them for all that they know and do while your mind floats above.

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

memory

"how do you make memory? What is the relationship between memory and anticipation? Can you make something that is physical which at the same time evokes the process of remembering? Is it possible to do this and make something fresh? Like dew or frost- something that just is, as if its form has always been like this?"

Antony Gormley about Domain Field

practice

practice

practice

practice

practice

practice

so much sky

i awoke at 4:00 am this morning worried that i would oversleep and miss my flight to reno, but also full of ideas for drawings, sculptures, cups, installations,weather, white on white, finding a studio. fulfilling the promise to harvest from all of the traveling that i have been doing in the past year and a half.

i feel invisible in/to my work right now, or my work feels that way to me. what am i doing? what do i want? how do i take it forward, take it public, find a place to be and think and make things that suit me? so many ideas, how to hold them all and still finish everything that needs to be attended too?

fragments

bones of the painting- one of my favorite parts.

week one of mural wall- gridded and ready to rough in.

whoever comes are the right people

whatever happens is the only thing that could have

whenever it starts is the right time

whenever it's over, it's over.