This isn't really about the moon, I call it a moonblog because a new homepage image appears twice a month on the new and full moon. The home page shows a featured image —sometimes freshly minted, sometimes seasonal, sometimes from years past— along with improvised ruminations. Previous entries are here for your perusal, something like a leisurely blog. You can also visit entries from 2010 and 2011; see links, above.
Kerry from Valentia Island
This watercolor, along with three others, is on its way to Ireland for a sale to benefit the Cill Rialaig artists' retreat in County Kerry. I had the good fortune of spending two retreats there, one in 2003 and another in 2007. Cill Rialaig's founder and patron saint, Noelle Campbell-Sharpe, has insisted that visiting artists should be able to come to Cill Rialaig free of charge. Funding this has been a challenge in recent years with the continuing slump in the global economy. You can get more info about this benefit sale at the Origins Gallery in Dublin. May the sale go well. The painting here is based on a view from Mossie and Mary O'Sullivan's cottage on Valentia Island. My grandmother, her parents and siblings left Valentia for America in the 1880s. It must have been a sad time for those who remained: during those same years tens of thousands of Irish left every month, most of them never returned. It was haunting for me to go back to Valentia knowing that some of my distant ancestors were buried there in unmarked grave plots in the disintegrating Kylemore burial ground. I was able to find important clues about my grandmother and I did get water from one of the springs there, which I hope to pour onto my grandmother's grave in New London, Connecticut; she died there in the 1918 flu epidemic a week after my grandfather. They were both in their mid thirties.
New Moon ~ April 21, 2012
Huerfano Iris
Some time shortly after the turn of the century I re-discovered iris. We found a bed of them abandoned in a closed-down trailer court in Boulder, Colorado. They had made a life for themselves unattended for several years. Iris are tough. This is a good thing because I'm an irresponsible gardener; you might even say I'm an abusive gardener. Anyway, iris are beautiful and their variety is endless. The yellow iris here was recovered from a long abandoned homestead in Huerfano county in southern Colorado. The painting here is another example of my perennial affection for grids. This series was done in a peculiar manner: each square is a watercolor done in isolation from its neighbors, then assembled into a whole. Somehow this approach encouraged relaxation and looseness. I did this one about ten years ago. The piece is about 18″ x 18″.
Full Moon ~ April 6, 2012
Marissa's Hands
This painting came out of a series of one hundred drawings of hands that I did about ten years ago. Come to think of it, it may have been closer to fifteen years ago. Either way, the idea of doing one hundred pieces on a theme is an old idea and one I recommend in any medium: drawing, painting, music, poetry, risotto, or whatever you like. The eighteenth century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai did at least two series called, One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, reproductions of which are still in wide circulation today. The contemporary artist Alfred Leslie has his One Hundred Views Along the Road; Jennifer Bartlett's In The Garden is another fine example—in in this series, she did over two hundred images of the same fountain in an exuberant display of technical experimentation. The painting here is acrylic and charcoal on canvas; the image is 22″ by 30″. And who is Marissa? Marissa Tiroly, a former student, marvelous artist and performer, and old friend. I always admired her hands.
Full Moon ~ March 9, 2012
Cowries
Cowrie shells have a long and colorful relationship with humans. In some parts of the world they are symbols of wealth and have even been used as money. Their visual appearance also have associations with fertility and birth. Some of my colleagues in the art therapy program at Naropa University have been organizing an ongoing service to Cambodian girls and young women who have been cruelly harmed by the sex trade prevalent in that part of the world. To raise money for their efforts on the victims' behalf they are hosting a grand fundraising art auction event on March 17th in Boulder, Colorado. I did this painting and other watercolor paintings of cowrie shells which will be on auction along with a series of matchbox creations made especially for the event by an array of artists. I chose the cowrie as a symbol of healing for this endeavor because of its feminine symbolism and its cool distance from human brutality. Read more about the art event for Cambodians here and here.
New Moon ~ February 21, 2012
This is another one of the combo paintings from about ten years ago. I guess when I was experimenting this way I didn't quite believe in the paintings' final results. I wish I had. When I look at paintings like this now I find their queasy uncertainty is more to my liking. It is one of the maddening things of artistic practice to not know what you are doing. It's easy enough to come up with a scheme and easy enough to draw conclusions about what has been done, but clarity in the moment of doing is elusive. This, by the way, is why mindfulness practice holds my interest: it turns out to be quite difficult to steady the mind; it's always on its way elsewhere. I suspect that this flitting quality of the mind is why artistic practice is both useful and surprisingly demanding. The painting here now makes more sense to me. The puzzlement of doing of it now makes sense to me. Unfortunately, the three panels of this painting have gone their separate ways and the triptych no longer exists.
Full Moon ~ February 7, 2012
Pitcher and Lake
During the late 1990s and early 2000s I found myself combining paintings that may have been done at different times, sometimes with very different intentions in mind. The resulting diptychs and triptychs make for an odd viewing experience: What are these two doing together? Apart from combining images that were neatly the same size, the process was not logical. There was a lot of trial and error, of the sort that cooks are familiar with; it's a matter of tasting as you go. I still like to work with images when I'm painting. Literal references are loaded with flexible associations of all kinds, triggering responses that depend on the circumstances. The two images here - one of a flea market pitcher and hand, the other of what appears to be a lake (it is actually based on a photo taken of a highway during a thunderstorm deluge) are joined in a kind of matrimony, just like most couples we all know. You sometimes wonder what the initial attraction was but here they are years later having settled together into crusty elegance.
New Moon ~ January 23, 2012
Bosc Pears
This painting, which I did some time in the mid 1990s, was the first home page image on my first web site, launched ten years ago. I still enjoy the way these pears look: sort of like oiled muscle men on parade. This painting appeared above a quote from Francis Bacon, the English thinker active in the late sixteenth, early seventeenth centuries. He said, “The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.” This is a good description of what meditators sometimes call “non-fabrication”, seeing things without opinion or subjective conceptual overlay.
There was an ancient wild bosc pear tree in my childhood neighborhood of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. We used to eat the pears by the dozen, young unsupervised hunter gatherers. We also found that the pears could be used as crude writing instruments on the pavement for our early experiments with obscenity. It's likely to have been the start of an artistic lifetime.
Full Moon ~ January 9, 2012
Solstice, Ireland
The winter solstice just passed a few days ago. I'm always relieved to know that the sun will be around a little longer now each day. Hibernation makes eminent sense this time of year. Hibernia was a name given to Ireland by the Romans; no one seems sure whether this wasn't their assumption that it was perpetually wintery there or if it was just a linguistic warping of earlier names for Ireland. In any case I'm writing this in dry sunny Colorado, far from Ireland but still feeling the pull. I'm hoping that the turn of the planet will throw new seeds and birdsong from my fingers. It's been a low ebb. Oh, and the painting: this is a watercolor done about a year ago based on two weeks of daily conjurings of Ireland; it's watercolor on paper 10″ x 14″.
New Moon ~ December 24, 2011