German artist Paetrick Schmidt created this phenomenal collage painting and sent it my way in response and conversation with last week’s Edisto Bottle Tree essay…a long tirade comparing antebellum-era plantations to Nazi-era concentration camps, and requesting the United States follow Germany’s lead: recognize the human rights atrocities that happened there, protect them as national...
Read more »
A family legend tells that in the late 1700s, an ancestor was scalped by the Catawba and Edisto tribes on Edisto Island, South Carolina, along the shores of the Edisto Creek. This branch of the family had recently fled a village in County Antrim right before that town’s most notorious series of witch trials...
Read more »
Getting struck by lightning last week over the ocean – and in a 757 – gave me an unexpected but perhaps not perversely unwelcome glimpse into the cosmic beauty of death by simultanous drowning and burning. This came at an odd juncture. I am looking for more confidence in the human species these days....
Read more »
One of the first mornings in my glorious new studio downtown, and what happiness – I discovered a long-lost yet lovely pair of reading spectacles deep within an ancient and disintegrating hand-painted pasteboard doll’s trunk someone salvaged from a barn in far eastern Tennessee. It’s rather an intriguing contraption, that Appalachian trunk. Many peculiar...
Read more »
THE NEW NEST, BEFORE FULL FEATHERING For the past month, the blog – like any good egg – has been experiencing a cozy winter’s incubation while I’ve been feathering the new nest – moving my art studio from “the cottage” in Culver City to a wee aerie above downtown LA’s gallery row area. The...
Read more »
Stalking hedgerows – like a fox, I’ve been skirting fields, stalking stalks of corn, looking for trespassing signs, hunting signs, signs of life, secrets of history within the wires. The hedgerow is a lovely spot. The intergenerational swap meet of cultivated land: rusted horseshoes, broken tillers, jawbone of a horse, mock oranges, arrowheads, abandoned...
Read more »
Another evening’s word doodle with a handful of now-familiar words cut out of the New York Review of Books. Here is the last batch. Words, a fireplace, a cat, a plate of chocolate cookies, and a telenovela murmuring in the distance. Time to play! Language lives on surfaces – we are accustomed to finding...
Read more »
The etching gets a bath! A zinc plate covered in brown grounding substance, scratched away with a little stylus. It’s amazing that this wee bamboo brush survives a dunking in the nitric acid bath, but the zinc plate gets eaten up like a corncob on the fourth of July. Watching the acid work was...
Read more »
In a city devoted to the dead, a cemetery’s living inhabitants sometimes go without notice. After four months of nearly daily pilgrimages to graveyards, I now begin my acquaintanceship by seeking out the live guides – the cats and birds, the flowers and plants and lichens. They are different there than elsewhere. Calmer, I...
Read more »
It’s the hour of trysts. We witness a love affair between a pair of kitchen scissors and the headlines of the December 17th, 2009 edition of the New York Review of Books. Their seduction? Rather literary. A bit obscure. Certainly irrelevant. And once cut, all letters must be used. Just like a bouquet of roses...
Read more »
Donkeys are surrealists. Look at those ears. Gorgeous and preposterous. Donkeys of France, I salute you! Behind me (not pictured) envision a quite dashing French farmer – charmingly perplexed and desultorily amused to encounter me shortly after dawn one rainy Tuesday, deep in a portrait session with his donkeys. The farmer had been standing there...
Read more »
At the Centre Pompidou ELLES exhibit, I came across a poem by the absolutely ferocious South African painter Marlene Dumas. But before we get to read her poem - look at that photo of her. Fantastic. She is a force of fearlessness. And a mistress of technique. Marlene Dumas, whose broom is a brush....
Read more »
