drawings: December 2011 Archives

#18 winter solstice 2011

By Catherine White on December 18, 2011 8:02 PM | No Comments
18 bolws.jpgA year ago today we left to visit our daughter in Florence Italy. Due to snow we got stuck in Paris for 24 hours. I made endless drawings of luggage, weary travelers, morning coffee and evening espresso. A year later I am happy to walk my same old circles at dusk, racing to get out before it is completely dark, content to return for warm bowls of leek and potato soup.

travel journal.jpg


#13 winter solstice 2011

By Catherine White on December 13, 2011 7:12 PM | No Comments
This evening, while handing a cup to a friend, she asked, "how do you make this work?" I said I like working within tight boundaries so when I wake up most days I don't have to question which direction to go to feel fruitful once I'm in the studio. I step into my field of clay as if words were shapes waiting to be made. The goal is that they look as if they descended from nowhere, effortless and timeless.

13 cup gesture.jpg"But this morning, a kind day has descended, from nowhere,

and making coffee in the usual way, measuring grounds
with the wooden spoon, I remembered,

this is how things happen, cup by cup, familiar gesture
after gesture, what else can we know of safety

or of fruitfulness?"

--Marie Howe, from From Nowhere in The Good Thief

#7 winter solstice 2011

By Catherine White on December 7, 2011 5:32 PM | No Comments
In October I went to the memorial for my parents' wonderful friend Irene Towbin. Irene's brother spoke of how every object in Irene's life had a story--the grocery cart chair, the photo my Dad shot of her on Prince Street, and her art works that were puns on toast, cake, combs and hangers.

On this gloomy Wednesday afternoon, I took the dog for a sodden walk around the pond. The ground is completely saturated and a muddy field intersecting with a rainy sky reminds me of the inspiration for the plates I made this firing. Every pot I make has a visual story, its state transformed by fire. When embedded in a meal the pot--at its heart--becomes a poem clothed in the food we serve.

07 long field plate.jpg"--a poem needs to have at its heart a transformation, a fire where whatever story within you is burned into something else."
--Marie Howe from an interview in Bomb

#6 winter solstice 2011

By Catherine White on December 6, 2011 10:09 PM | No Comments

06-lines-plate.jpg
"We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss -- we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you."

From 'What The Living Do' by Marie Howe



#4 winter solstice 2011

By Catherine White on December 4, 2011 9:09 PM | 2 Comments
My father told me that he dreamed that Mom came back to the living. She could stay with him for the day but in the night she had to go back to the land of the dead. It made me think one version of the myth of Demeter where winter represents her sorrow for the abduction of her daughter to Hades. The dark and cold night is hard and long.
 
In the dark cold of my house with our heat pump humming I dreamed of my mother. I was holding her by the elbow and we were walking through the snow talking about making prints in Maine during the summer. She told me about a poem she had lost, left on the dirty dessert dishes.


In the light of the morning I talked on the phone to my daughter. We spoke of the poems she wrote, collected and printed for her class.  I am amazed by this triangular pattern of influences from daughter to mother back to daughter. My mother wrote poems, but was reluctant to share them with us. Now, years after her death, when I visit my father I find her voice again as  poems surface in her papers or drawers. Zoe is writing a poem about my parents' New York City loft and over Thanksgiving she photographed it for visual clues. I looked over her shoulder as if through her lens and learned to articulate the details of my own childhood and young adulthood with new clarity.  Recently I listened to an interview with Marie Howe on Fresh Air. She read poems about grief and the death of her brother and mother.  Howe teaches at Sarah Lawrence College where my mother went and where my daughter now goes--both with an intense connection to the education. The poems, the school, the child, the mother, are all so intertwined in my history and in my present; they shift the focus on the dawn of a winter day.

triangle bowl.jpg
"I called her name into the fold between night and day I called it without expecting to hear an answer."
--from the poem Questions by Marie Howe in The Kingdom of Ordinary Time

#1 winter solstice 2011

By Catherine White on December 1, 2011 10:10 PM | No Comments
This is the first of the 2011 winter solstice series. The first image in a series leading up to the winter solstice and the shortest day of the year on December 21.

dust-print-bowl-7603.jpg
I have recently fired my wood kiln so this series will also provide a preview of a selection of the new work.
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