Break in

The sense of my space has been altered yet again. piles of broken glass, the kids trashed the house..It took me some time to actually get that some one other than me had been ransacking the place. Seems that my disordered process for putting things 'away' makes it necessary to dig into every place to find any one particular thing..
but this was the work of others.. and it felt really terrible.
So I am trying to get things in order.. or some better order..

I am numb from the resident teacher training, but it is almost over.

I broke my coffee pot. I am always dropping things, spilling liquids.. ugh.. can't feel my hands .. cooking is impossible. I even drop the damn microwavable kibble meals. Spaghetti is the worst. The only safe thing is a meal bar.

Grendel has been savaging the base of his tail. He has stopped linking his tummy raw, and moved on to other body parts. He probably needs some Valium. It is disturbing to see raw cat and spine. He is old and grumpy, but he is my friendly little hairball hurler. I think he will be my last cat. He still purrs a lot and snuggles up, but every once in a while he attacks me and bites though my skin.. maybe he has kitty dementia.
I haven't done any more photos because the house-trashers busted up the shells. It is really too depressing. They knocked them over and just trampled over them. They are not remineralized, still calcium, more like chalk .. and I haven't really wanted to look. Some are crushed for sure.

I saved the glass from the door. It is really cool. I will probably shoot that before I try to return to the shells.
Someone finally threw out the basket of crabs at Dunkin Doughnuts, so that project is done.. There is still more than enough garbage at my parking lot. No one ever clears up over there. but then.. who knows, random do-gooders could take an interest and then it will get all cleaned away. I was thinking that litter was a pretty sustainable resource. not poaching on some one else's cultural territory etc.. well. the next grey day, I will go over and see what is left. It has been way too sunny lately!

fossils

Funghi

Day12

Day 11

  

Trapped day seven

Sunny day

After the storm last night, the sun came out early this morning, by the time I arrived at the Dunkin Donut parking lot there was a lot of bright sun and shadow.

trap day 6

Floats and Nets Martha's Vineyard

Wet wood

The wood had changed with the rain as well

Trap Day 5

I went back to the parking lot to see how the weather had changed the plastic. It was raining. I decided to go back and replace the photo that had been in the first shot. somehow its meaning had changed with the wear and tear from the two nights of storms. In situ, found narratives arise over a period of view the same thing as it it changed, transformed or meaning arises..

shells

Intersections

I record the intersection of materials, objects.. impositions and contrivances of found narratives that accumulate in gutters, parking lots, along the shore, the waters edge..

the human stain on the natural world..

In the "Trap" series, I found a luminous pile of discarded plastic sheeting. It had rained heavily and the condensation was an interesting micro system to record. I was not until I began shooting that I found the clover plants struggling through the pile of plastic.

Day 4 Garbage

Day 3 Trap

day two

day one

Photos from Southern France

Yard workkkkkk

before

After

A few more bricks, then the sand .... I haven't done this in a long time. Iam thinking that this summer, I will want to relax in the back yard without thinking of all the stuff I need to do. There is a ground hog and some possums again.. or at least one baby possum.
My rhododendrum is so lovely, I wanted to give it a nicer space.

in the studio

Painting, working from the model, wrestling meaning from a puddle of paint, the paper resists, the brush seems particularly uncooperative, and where is that foot coming from? My ego is alternately blushed by the success of a wonderful mark, then crushed by the clumsy blob that might have been a hip or thigh? I have to put that 'mad' ego voice aside if anything is going to happen.
I want to be a good painter. NO, that is a lie.. I want to be a magical, genius painter. I want to see poetry float above the surface anchored by the rigor of knowing everything about the figure and then ignoring it, allowing the paint and light to do its job.
But all this talk must wait until the work is done. I can't paint if the mind is grabbing for approval.I will let the paint speak and tell me its secrets, for that, I must shut up.
I look into the mark I have made to see what it has to offer. Something begins to emerge and I follow it. There is nothing right or wrong, something is beginning. At least there is more paint on the paper and that is something. There is too much water and the paper is behaving badly. I wipe a lot off and suddenly there is more. The drying pigment is a shadow of the gesture and though not articulated, it is the heart of the figure, and only a little more is needed.
Thresholds of recognition, tolerable limits of reality, the least amount needed to know, the image asks the viewer to come in and finish it.
It is what is most elusive, mysterious... the art of engagement.
Carl Belz, past curator of the Rose Museum at Brandeis came to my studio in the early 80's. I had hung a bunch of paintings about the place. He said nothing. He walked over to a pile of collages. What are these? I answered, "Studies for the paintings".. Well, these are interesting...
After he left, I looked at the studies and then the paintings. The studies were the questions and the paintings were the answers.. hmmm.. he was right, the questions engaged curiosity, struggle and not knowing....where the paintings were competent execution of some painterly - ness. mess. Decor. Easy on the eye..

In the figures, I ask, what do I see. The work is tentative. I put something down and wait to receive, tolerating the gap, staring into the silence... The model gives me the frame, the light is slower to give up it's poetry.

Questions my students ask.
How did you get to be a such a good painter? I was naive enough to think that it was possible, patient enough to keep painting when it seemed impossible, humble enough to live through painting many bad paintings to fill many bins, hungry enough to sell good and bad work to make it possible to keep buying materials, healthy enough to keep at it.

What do you mean good and bad work? Well, I didn't want to sell bad work because it was bad and I didn't want to sell good work because I wanted to keep the good work. So, I gave up thinking about that and sold what ever I could.

How long did it take for you to paint that painting? All my life.

When did you know you were an artist? When I was 5.

How do you know you are a painter? When I paint, I am a painter.

How long did it for you to learn to paint? I am still learning.

Who taught you to paint? Everyone, everything.

You are not really answering my questions, why wont you tell me what to do?
I can only tell you what I did, they are my answers, not yours.

So, what do I have to do? Keep painting.

Do you think you are a great painter? No, compared to the many great painters... it is enough to say I paint. Actually, I would not show a great painter my work.

Why not? Great painters have already done their work, to learn from them, all you have to do is look.

Would you like to be rich? Yes.

What would you do if you were rich? I would paint.

Finding Berringer. MOSES

 I received an email from a gentleman whose wife had purchased this piece from Clark Gallery in Lincoln MA.  He had also seen some of my early work  at Tufts New England Medical Center.  This is one of the first group of large scale monoprints that I made in the early eighties. In terms of my development as an artist, it is not too much to say that without the support and vision of Meredyth Moses my work could not have continued or matured.  The people who support emerging artists can see the trajectory, the momentum of an artist's energy and vision, sharing the hope of seeing the work through to its fruition. An artist can not work forever in a vacuum. Regardless of whether art is ever acknowledged by the public or the art pundits, it was made to communicate something. To make manifest an idea that could be expressed in no other way. Without some connection ideas float into the void, without the touch of being known, madness.

Working at night

.. has completely messed up my sleeping cycles.. If I get up at my usual time, (around 6 am) I am hallucinating by 8 pm.. driving home I have missed my exit on the beltway twice now and have to drive to the next exit which adds 15 miles to my drive.. then I have to stay awake enough not to miss the exit again on the way back...
and how boring is this.. writing about missing my exit..

So I will tell you about the mouse drama. My cat has stopped catching mice.. I think he is losing his eyesight. He has cataracts that seem to glow red in direct light... maybe I am imagining that... any way. I resorted to glue traps after I found a dead mouse floating in Grendel's water dish. He was not happy about that part either..

I caught two mice. One dragged the trap under the dishwasher. When I went to move the dishwasher, I popped the solder on the hot water lead. So then the dead mouse floated out from under the dishwasher on it's glue trap raft in the rush of hot water. The whole experience was very diminishing. The glue trap is like... mouse hell. The evidence of his struggle to get away... but getting eaten by Grendel must also be unpleasant.

I finally managed to solder the pipe again and things seem to have settled down for now. I have an uneasy relationship with animals, I don't quite trust them. The night the mouse drowned in his bowl, Grendel was so freaky that I locked him out of my room. I thought maybe he had rabies.
Of course, his behavior was totally appropriate, I mean how gross..
I would not have wanted to deal with the mouse at three o'clock in the morning in any case.

There is something quite creepy about being bumped, trod upon and bitten by an animal who wants me to get up and attend to some random event, like the night the raccoons came in and ate 25 pounds of premium cat food. I think it is better not to learn shocking things in the middle of the night.