November 19, 2010

When Worlds Collage

This is a collage in white grease pencil (china marker) of drawings I copied from Lynda Barry and Robert Fludd.    I chose Fludd’s drawing, which I saw for the first time on the front of a book catalog, because it uses the phrase “mundus imaginabilis.”  I mistook his drawing  as a diagram of Sufi mystic experience which I had just been reading about in books by Henry Corbin.  It turns out that Fludd’s ideas were a bit different but by the time I found that out, the drawing had been made.   I combined the drawing of the mundus imaginabilis (which now that I think of it may be the mundus imaginalis in Corbin) with drawings from Lynda Barry because it suited my abiding interest in the difference in accounts of visionary experience in different periods of history.

The Lynda Barry drawings I took from her 100 DEMONS, one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read. These panels come from the introduction where she describes the writing exercise which gave rise to the book (and the title of the book): intending nothing, leaving her brush free to record her every stray thought, she captures the demons that enter her mind. If you haven’t read 100 Demons, I’m not sure what you’ve been doing. You must read this book.

I did this drawing initially as a card for my friend Avy’s 30th birthday. I liked it so much that I made three prints of it, giving one to Avy, one to my friend Kat, and one to someone else (OF). 

 I post this drawing today because I spoke to Kat on the phone and because today, after years of waiting, I received my copy of Lynda Barry’s latest,  THE NEAR SIGHTED MONKEY BOOK.  Years ago, I put my name on a list so that I could have it as soon as it was available but its publication was repeatedly delayed. I kept getting little e-mails from Amazon saying, “Sorry, not yet” and “oop wait a second.”  So the book finally arrives — with $7.50 due COD — and Kat  tells me Kyle bought the book for her a week ago from the bookstore! 

Kat and I spent the rest of our conversation talking about writer’s block, ways of breaking it and how Lynda Barry is the coolest.   Always good to talk to you, Kat.

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November 18, 2010

Time to Present

These three  images are from the archive of my Mentor’s Grove Project. 

They represent two distinct efforts at design of the relief sculptures. I like how different they appear.  I have learned a great deal thinking about that difference and still have a lot left to learn.

The relief sculptures were to surround the visitor once they had reached the center of the labyrinth.     The two distinct design processes can be related to one another once you know the conception of the reliefs: the whole story of Gilgamesh was to emerge from the walls like the images seen in clouds.  

Imagine that: lying on your back, gazing into the sky and, instead of picking out a duck or a snowman in an individual cloud, you see surrounding you over the whole horizon, linked cloud by cloud, an entire coherent epic story.  This was intended as a metaphor for the naturalness of human life as story. That is, to suggest the way human life  relates to the rest of nature.  

(But think what changes the world would have to undergo to witness such a spectacle. How is human life like and unlike that? That question was central to my process)

But, two efforts: 1. To tell the whole story of Gilgamesh and 2. to tell it in sculptures that appear in the same way that images appear in clouds.

 First the cartoony sketch — I have, over two sketchbooks, the entire epic of Gilgamesh messily sketched out as sequential art, in an effort to see what was visible (most visual) about the events narrated in the story. 

 Second,  these ambiguous photographs: My idea for the visual look of the reliefs was like “images seen in clouds” — except seen in stone,  fieldstone and mortar.   I wanted viewers to see the sculptures the same way they see  images in  natural formations, clouds, rocks, trees.   I wanted the images to be invisible until viewers pulled them out of the undeclarative  surface with their imaginations.   

I have hundreds of photographs of rockfaces and treebranches — particularly oaks for some reason — which I took in an effort to learn the style by which natural forms suggested images. The photographs here relate to a later stage in that process: trying to catch the repetition and interruption of such forms,   I incised a grid into a piece of plastic and then photographed images reflected in its divided surface.

Included in the computer slide show of images I reflected were pictures from Ankor Wat.  The Kmer sculpture and architecture from Ankor Wat has always struck me as a sort of hallucination occuring in our perception of natural forms.  It is far more visible and declarative than the sculpture I intended for the grove but still I like it. 

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November 17, 2010

a study for a relief sculpture

I’ve been thinking about my Mentor’s Grove project today. I’m in the process of writing a page about it to post here.   The Grove was a very ambitious sculptural-setting I designed (but was unable to sell) in honor of my mentor, Ron Brady,  who died suddenly in 2003.  It was/is a very rich piece but in brief it was an experiential sculpture, half labyrinth, half outdoor classroom.  The student’s experience of the sculpture began as navigating a maze that then opened into a quiet interior space — a grove —  where the journey just taken was depicted in relief on the walls. The whole piece was intended as an invitation to other professors to take on the full role of mentor (conveyor of life wisdom).

The main motif  was the grove in the underworld where heroes in stories travel in times of trouble. There they meet a wise soul who helps them untangle their difficulties. My mentor’s mentor, Paul Piehler, wrote a book on this traditional literary occurence.  The book was called The Visionary Landscape. I used the specific imagery of the journey to the other world from the Epic Of Gilgamesh because that was the subject of the most stunning lecture I ever saw Brady give. 

The picture above was an an early concept sketch I did of one of the planned reliefs.  It was  to represent the moment in Gilgamesh when Enkidu realizes he is a human being: his identity (here represented by his face) contracts from the rest of nature.

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November 10, 2010

Collaboration and totality (1)

I started this blog in the second week of a three week pause in the mural workshop I’ve been running with Project WOW! at NJCRI in Newark, New Jersey.  I intend to use this space as a true log of the progress of that collaboration and others.  A reader might have missed that fact given the posts so far.  I explain it this way:  I also hope to present, to the best of my ability (and in my own way if you don’t mind), the context in which these collaborations occur and the new contexts which these collaborations create out of themselves.  As I already wrote in the “about” section: “we are none of us the sole proprietors of discovery.”  I may not share the readers’ assumptions and my premises may not be their’s.   A sensible conversation is very difficult to have under those conditions.  So slowly, one post a day and occasionally interrupted by a log of the actual business at hand, I will try to sketch my horizons so readers can see where we cross.

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