Recently in drawings Category

In May I installed a series of my sketchbooks as part of an exhibit called Sculpting Time at VisArts in Rockville, Maryland. These notebooks represent images and writing that have accumulated over the last several years. I try to write five days a week as part of my process of finding direction and clarifying ideas in my work and life. I write three pages and then paint a page with color which later gets an added collaged drawing. Some notebooks are only visual records of what I am pursing in the clay realm and some are collages of the varied streams of life. They are like the lining of my mind.


This week one of the notebooks was stolen from the gallery. I am stunned.  Suddenly the memory of what those pages held gains importance. From each volume I have selected one single page or spread to exhibit, but the whole book lost represents a month or more of personal reflection.



The report that the notebook is gone comes on the heels of the news that my parents' summer cottage has had a major fire. The fire began in the kitchen which is now destroyed. Over the years my mother had brought many of my pots to use there. I am struck by how those objects  held snapshots in time. Particular moments are captured in the clay when I experimented with texture, color and simplicity. I may revisit those ideas but I will not be able to make those pots again.

I really liked the notebook that was stolen and so luckily I had scanned many of the images. I had used several of the pages of writing as the basis for other projects, so I know the gist of what the pages held. I plan to recreate a book called The Lost Notebook; rather than mourn its loss, there is the hope that I will come up with something better than the pages that are gone.

"Barn's burnt down ... Now I can see the moon"
Masahide

The night after the inauguration I downloaded my photos of the crowds on the mall. Images of the quilts that women wrapped themselves in along with photos of Obama and his family infiltrated my dreams. The hats with Obama's name the t-shirts that said, "yes we did," flashed before me again and again . And then Amanda's black gloves floated in front of my eyes with the words inscribed on each finger... hope and change.

The lines of Elizabeth Alexander's poem invited me in. A friend suggested we memorize it and that idea pushed my attention. Collages give me a reason to copy compulsively, line-by-line, and layering color adds inspiration. Cutting, pasting, cropping, and seeing contrast made it illegible. all of which led me to make a poem-inspired series of text plates.

I have learned to bump into the world in words. Intuitively, I translate the planet in images and movement. I roll my clay into flat sheets like pie crust. I layer the raspberry red earth with a coat of creamy white slip. And then I inscribe it with the velvet and spinney words of  Alexander's poem.

The language is whispered and declaimed in my scratching scrawl. Considered as expressions, each line is copied as they are committed to my Swiss-cheese memory. I cross the gravel road and pound these pancakes of clay into vessels for deep ideas. We are walking with raw materials into that which we cannot see. I am hand lettering these words into plates to place them at the kitchen table, shrine of the everyday. The sharp sparkle of winter light has inspired new equipment to be made, new sentences begun. I have moved past the brink and am walking forward into the reflected light of an icy morning.

At the start of the New Year I find myself looking back in order to step forward. My college-age daughter sat on the couch and looked through her notebooks starting from first grade, reading out loud choice bits. It reminded me of all the stages in her path of learning to write and read, as well as how I companionably tussled with documenting her growth, transforming these experiences into artistic fodder. One result was a set of stamps based on some scribbles that she had done of imagined script.

While my daughter was learning to read words, I thought about learning to "read" pottery, an often slighted visual skill. I made several stamps on this theme, some of which I used in a 2004 essay titled, "consider the postage stamp."

Recently, Jennifer New asked me to contribute to her nascent blog-entry about lists, lists being a common New Year endeavor.  As I read through the list I had made for my 50th birthday, there it was, "design a postage stamp." My end of the year clean-up retrieved last year's Christmas gift card for making a page of stamps. So on New Year's Day I used one of my collages for a new postage stamp.

Sunday, Jennifer sent me her blog post at Mothers of Invention where she used some of my collages and an essay I had written  which features my stamp "can creativity thrive on distraction."  Today I looked through sketchbooks and postcards from the early 90s to find some more postage.

I consider the postage stamp whether it's on a love note or a bill, a tiny piece of art stuck to the mundane artifacts of snail mail. I love postage stamps and I have wanted them to reflect a handmade aesthetic. When I left home (for school) at the age of sixteen my mother sent me a postcard each week. Her handwriting was hieroglyphic-like. When I wrote her back, the placement and selection of stamps was a carefully considered choice. I had a friend when I lived in France who would go to the post office to buy the smallest, most varied postage to cover her letters sent home. I was envious of her efforts, but found myself intimidated by the French postal workers. My tentative artistic desire and simple French could not withstand their glare. I would save postage from international letters and make tiny drawings that represented my imagined portals into a greater form of communication. Years later, I discovered boxes of old stamps in my father-in-law's basement. He gave me boxes of canceled foreign stamps from a boyhood friend once he found out how much I enjoyed their variety and wanted to use them for collage.

At times, as I practiced brushwork for my pottery, I  cut up discarded pages and made stamps out of the lively brush-stroke tails and expressive drips. These were then added to my collages as if the stamp sealed the image. [If you're interested in more variety, Cabinet Magazine published a book of artist stamps in 2006. Their original pre-publication description includes PDF's with artist and regular stamps.]

This afternoon Zoë and I looked through journals my parents had created for their parents to document living in Europe during 1951 and 1952. The pictures of Italy, Greece, and France were both familial and eloquent, attesting to so many realms of life that have disappeared. Zoë was struck by how much we all take after each other.

We found drawings I had done as a small child with my name printed mirror-image backwards. Zoë looked at them and said it seemed like a picture perfect dyslexic illustration. We read a children's book my parents had written and inspected all of their handmade, eclectic birth announcements. I saw the character of my hand and vision so clearly evident in these photos, books, and collections. As I sat down a few minutes ago to work on my Christmas presents, I thought--reminded yet again--that I cannot fight my innate outlook nor my desire to make things. With this sequence of solstice images I re-learn that focusing on a chosen pot, a daily drawing, and a given day's light helps me to intuit more about images, more about pots, and more about how the light affects me.

Best wishes for a family-rich and friend-rich holiday!

We deal in things that are continually vanishing...and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on Earth that can make them come back again...  --Henri Cartier-Bresson
 

This afternoon, with my father, daughter, husband, and dog, we went on an outing to select an Xmas tree. We made an easy choice and brought our tree up to  Dad's apartment. Zoe and I strung lights: we started with new lights on the tree, then were carried away to drape old lights over the tall window frames, all infiltrating some white sparkle into the late afternoon gloom.

Life is a scavenger hunt. Expect the unexpected and you will find it.--Keri Smith

more solstice at www.artistvisions.com