Tiny Raindrops

I wanted to say something a while back and it has been bothering me this whole time. I even tried, but I don't think what I said was really... I don't know, "It".

My interest in still lifes goes back a ways, and as I told you already, I realize that I have had a bias against representational art which is silly because I couldn't even paint badly if I tried, let alone as well as the people I have dismissed. In October, I went to a residency in North Carolina called Elsewhere, and while there I created a body of work. Photographs. They were photographs of objects available around the space of the residency, because this all took place in what had been until several years ago a Thrift Store. These photographs were taken with Mamiya 6x7 camera, which is maybe in some way important. This camera was the one I used 10 years ago to shoot abstract close-ups of bottles from a collection I had amassed for this purpose(and continue to expand to this day because, well, maybe I am not done with that body of work even if it has been 8 years since I last shot one of those bottle photos). The images were in some ways a return to that way of working I had started back when, arranging bottles in front of the lens, with the sun setting in the West. I stopped taking those photos – which were all shot on my porch – when they tore the 100 year-old Duplex, that I had been living in for six years on top of a hill overlooking Lake Union in Seattle, down. I didn't think of those as still lifes, but technically they could be considered as such. It would be useful if I could show you some of those images, but maybe that will have to wait.

At Elsewhere I found myself working with different things, not simply glass bottles. I found myself wanting to explore the idea that collections of objects could be arranged like a collage, or a map, representing ideas, or clusters of ideas, or trains of thoughts or trajectories or narratives. In Songlines, Bruce Chatwin talks about the idea that song predated language as a tool for mapping one's journey through the landscape. I wanted to see if there could be a visual equivalent I could create out of the relationships between objects in space.

There is, or was, an exhibit at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Maybe these things exist everywhere, but that's where I saw it 18 years ago. It consisted of a closed clear box that had a pool of Mercury in the bottom. As you watched, you could see these little streaks form of tiny raindrops of Mercury that would materialize from thin air and drop to the bottom, creating consecutive ripples in the pool. Ostensibly the piece was to demonstrate the existence of tiny rays that travel through space. These rays or particles or whatever they were were said to be so small (I have to take their word for it because I didn't see them myself) that they passed through everything in existence without bumping in to anything. The only way we know they exist is because as they streak by they generate just enough charge to crystalize some of the vaporized Mercury as they pass, which causes the lines of tiny silver raindrops to form for the time it takes for them to realize their independence and plummet to their ultimate reunion.

I think ideas are like this and I keep thinking that somehow I can show this... (to be continued)

Still life with Refill

Yesterday was a big day. Later I'll post some pictures and write some things and backdate it to make it seem like there is no lagtime in blogland.

Now, there is a mostly empty glass of a Bordeaux that was two Euro at the store yesterday. That, and us. Ok, make that an empty glass. I like to joke that I am not a glass "half-empty" or "half-full" person, but a "as long as I can get a refill" person. Perhaps that's why people like the idea of reincarnation, the is always a refill.

There is a branch of Mahayana Buddhism that took root in China a long time ago - when an Indian monk known as BodhiDarma (also known as Daruma in Japan) went North and spent 9 years staring at a cave wall (and is considered the founder of Shaolin Temple) - which then spread to Korea and Japan, called respectively Chan or Zen (as we know it in the West) that you have probably heard of as it has become extremely popular as of late.

Zen is a glass "always full" kind of perspective. I'm still working on that one.

Still life with Pencil and Honey

Still life, with sounds of China

An afternoon to recover.

An afternoon to lie of the couch, which is only two cushions wide, forcing me into odd and uncomfortable contortions as a matter of course. But then, if I were a river I'd overflow my banks regularly as a matter of course, so it's no surprise. It's actually quite remarkable how much misery we are able to put up with, given the right circumstances.

An afternoon to listen to "Release the Cheerfulness, China - Ground Up 2" the new CD field recordings and street and classical musics from Jason Kopec of Noise|Order Recordings. It was part of a crae package from home and a great way to lie on the couch.

An afternoon to wonder what the hell to do with my life.

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Mention email from local reporter apologizing for the fact that the piece about what we are doing here, including the open house with the "Good Neighbor Soup" isn't in the paper for some reason that isn't entirely clear. Maybe they didn't like the photo.