Charles Tarlton: "A Rock in a Jar"

      

While I work on my next artistic post, I am posting another poem by my husband, this one otherwise unpublished. I think it relates to Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar, which is, in turn, related to Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn."  Stevens, Helen Vendler wrote, was answering "a vow to stop imitating Keats and seek a native American language that will not take the wild out of the wilderness" (quoted by Antonio José Jiménez Muñoz, University of Oviedo, http://www.academia.edu/7357036/Wallace_Stevens_Anecdote_of_the_Jar).  Charles Tarlton, whose narrator has, for the moment, "taken the wild out of the wilderness," says that his own poem came about because he dreamed of a rock that was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. And says, now, that the poem may be about how difficult it is, and how scary it is, to change your whole view of the world.

 A Rock in a Jar

            1

your eye catches it

(unexpectedly, a straggly fugitive

detail amidst the forest’s

disarray, illogical and off-hand)

in a glimpse of sun down through

a brushy filter of pine.

just a small irregular rock,

glassy blue, and subtly blurred

below the currents of a mountain

creek, somewhere off the road.

not at all auspicious, this rock,

water pocked and angular,

the underside a flat polished

mica sliver of sky, grey

on the upwards. A rock gone

unnoticed other than obliquely

by the odd skittish deer come

for a drink, or raucous blue

jays stirring up a bath.

now, visualize this rock

in the palm of your hand, destined

for the jar of souvenir seashells; 

see reflected in it now

your own curious glances,

the backdrop of sky and cloud

you’re standing in.  It goes

in your pocket, clicking up

against a penny and a quarter.

once home, emptying your treasure

on the kitchen table, you laugh,

remembering the little rock,

and drop it in the jar

of seashells. It alters everything;

its mirror refracts the crowded

seashore contents of the jar. The shells

roll over and roll their eyes.

           

2 

“every vacation from now on,”

you’d said, on that last day at the beach

“we’ll come back here and add more

seashells to the jar. A sort of observance.” 

notice the clumsy, lopsided

collisions of the rock against

the smooth parabolas and ampersands,

the swirled edges, and thin ridges

of the lustrous shells. Turn the jar

in your hands, and the tumbling

upstart rock reveals the graceful

seashells to themselves.  Mother

of pearl discovering its reflection

in the watery isinglass;

the rock wears their likenesses

disguising the dissonance.

            3

the red and yellow kitchen walls

awake and crowd the scene;

a roomful of common objects

strategically pinpointed like 

the sectors of an artillery map,

imagined ribbons stretched,

and fastened to thumbtacks,

the battle of ontological

vectors. New truths revolve

in the room, the jar and the rock

and shells arc along the compass,

projecting, as from a disco ball,

the center out to the periphery.

the increase of distance

and of angular rotation throw

rock and shells lewdly

each against the other.  They exchange

expectant kisses in the jar,

the jar caresses them.  This dumb

subversive rock has brought

the windows in, and with the windows,

trees as well as sky.  No glass

confines its movements, the rock

sees at the speed of light.

with the seashells in the jar,

the jar centers the kitchen,

surrounded by yellows and reds,

the colors spreading inward and out;

the rock greedy, the rock coquettish,

looking past the kitchen

and its own projected kitchens

into the trees and clouds. 

what does its cold eye remember? 

            4

not ever being born, the rock

knows nothing about ripening,

or the fluctuations of growth emerging

ahead of the blood’s vulgar spurts,

but only sameness, always the one

thing. The water lay over it,

beyond the water, light and dark,

blue sky in its stillness,

clouds slow, white or gray,

and glaring sun. The rock had no

organic roots, no family; it was a chip

randomly broken from some larger rock.

memory was of no consequence to it,

nothing grew or passed through it.

geometry and physics were its genesis,

whose Forms are over and over

seeded, crystallized, and dumbly cleft

(no massif could ever conceive, gestate,

or bear pebbles in its image.  No boulder

promiscuously unrolls

green tendrils to bind itself

to the fence.  Now, the rock finds

itself transmuted; it can smell the ocean

on the shells, the hints of flesh

in the wet jar, a salt-sea stink

unknown amongst the magma and things

that have simply boiled and cooled

from which he came.  A real novelty,

this rock, burly adjacent

to the daintier seashells

exhibiting traces how they once

were hinged to allow life to pump

in and out, wherein they could hide

from the light itself, or wear rings

marking how they grew, were used,

and had aged.  The rock cannot grow,

but only be worn down, roughly gouged

across its glassy eye, or broken.

past the shells and the kitchen 

implements, the rock records the sky, 

exploring how to seize the garden,

and bring it all in, to catalogue

the exuberant and unfamiliar

flowers, combing the saw-tooth

of picket fence for new theorems. 

Gathering as it goes along,

it wants to teach the shells more

than the walls, to reveal the widening

circumstances a propos themselves,

to show them to the moon.

5

nothing waits behind these

reflections but impenetrable

crystal; how a little rock contains

the world.  Everything adds up

—shells, walls, windows, trees,

fence, clouds, and the sky,

and as far as the eye can see

into the little retina in the jar. 

but the rock still knows nothing.

no time passes there, though movement

and stillness come and go and rest.

inertia, wound up or disengaged

like a broken watch spring,

metes out random, uncalibrated

distances and speeds.  Time

should be able to record

something meaningful.  All the things

inside and out are sizing

one another up according to weight

and their proximity;

they go fast or slow, eagerly

waiting (or tense with dread)

for something to come around

again, make any of it matter.

we will keep vigil out

our windows, throw one another

censorious looks, tragic

to comic, in the to and fro.

scenes projected on the rock’s

cinematic surface need more

than what the reflecting

unreflective little rock has

so far been able to deliver us. 

            6

a lonely pine tree

on a hilltop miles away

resists the gathering leer

of the rock (circling birds, warm

air rising, housetop TV aerials,

and wood smoke in streaks above

the rows of chimneys partly obscure

the tree’s conical shape;

its millions of needles cannot

be seen at all; they will not

project on the rock’s tiny screen).

in true synthesis, large

is found in small, complexity

hides simple, and distances

obscure reduction.  Up to now,

fine coincidence of angle

and light defined the standpoint

of the rock; the seashells were

perfect, too, companions

in illusion, motionless, solid,

yet happy to pass through the glass.

but, we have not been scrupulous

enough about cupboards

or picket fences.  We ignored

the obvious limitations of the rock’s

field of view in the excitement

of shattering boundaries.

everyone’s eye had overreached; 

with these troubling observations

we have a turning point.

the story’s true; the last rays

from reclining Helios (not even

a rock can look straight

into the sun) cool obliquely

off the white paint of the fence,

cool flames in the window’s

bold returning stare. The shells grew

anxious. The walls come in close.

“Everything is just an idea,”

thought all round. The rock failed

to hold the fractious light

in lifelike image, the beholder’s

visual cortex reduced to changing

photons into bare neural impulse,

making inferences from what

others had said they’d seen. 

distant objects are, perhaps, best

drawn, then, in the mind’s eye.

to enter into the cave of the mind,

the world must become a dream.

rock walls intrude uncouthly,

but interpretations and design

are dreamed. No properly

animated rock would continue

to prefer geometry to process,

or give preference to sine

and cosine once he’d known

the asymmetric shrubs and crooked

cupboard doors, or the fine

irregular squiggles rough soles

have randomly scratched on

the checkerboard linoleum.

the rock is moving on just so,

abandoning straight lines

and perfect parallelograms, isosceles

triangles, regular zigzags,

and logarithmic curlicues. 

“Let the the rock be sentient!”

the audience chants.  “We need a thinker

to imagine needles, who will

let us see their impossibly

excruciating distant thinness.”

            7

pondered deeply, our thinking

reveals it lineage in flesh, 

how it was always birthed

behind closed skulls.  Along

the atom-to-atom circuitry, chemical

reactions pile up, a cluster

here, a sinewy string of connections.

absence and presence, stuff

cluttering the doorway, well-lit

garden gates and pitch darkness. 

such a lot is going on.

shadow and light play

in tangles over the retina;

synthesis-choosing metabolic

pathways down the cell-morass

of nerve and cerebral fluids. 

isomerized draperies of purple

and violet, waving rods

and cones, linked beyond wet

surfaces, bravely running

neuron rapids to the cortex.

it is all the same with seeing.

clusters of electric charge

positioned like infielders

on the trusting retina, where

the brain extrudes part of its inward

workings to the outward

like a hernia; just so that

inside and out connect

on the mica layers of our rock’s

eye, on its flat reflecting

side.  It picks up light waves

and reworks them. If a hair

is missing from a well-known

ear, the conceptual apparatus fills

it in; the same with pine needles.

the general idea spiffs up

the fragmentary thing. Experience

makes metaphors from our

stimulated nerves and the secretions

washing in waves over brain

cells. Changes of temperature

and the rhythms of discharge

turn into hatred, logical relations,

a bad chill. The scientist probes

the one, devising machines to manifest

the unseen goings on, the poet

dresses up in the tattered others,

rummaging for lacey brooches and

sepia albums with dried flowers and

obituaries cut from old newspapers.

            8

the rock as poet, poetizing

rock (to complete the metaphor) 

simulates without within

in both the crystals of its micaceous

window and deeply in the hard

granite below.  It can conjure

what collides, rework whatever

dances on its screen.

it can make corrections

in obedience to theory where

observations might just not

confirm specifics.  All this was

expected from the start,

the careful reader will allow. 

we were always looking through

the rock’s eyes. Now the pine needles

are displayed fo r all to see. 

the jar reaches round to caress

the seashells, the seashells

rub up against the glass,

each other and their reborn

hero rock.  The rock makes and shows

movies on its little screen;

the camera dollies and tracks

in an ever widening gyre.

until now no one had noticed

a defect in the mica, on the lower

left-hand corner of the little

squarish mirror, just a tiny chip

that marks a blind spot,

a hole in the rock’s retina. 

it shows up as a blur on the edge

of the closest huddling mollusk,

causes a bend in the third fence

picket from the left, but goes

unnoticed up in the clouds,

where details roll, spread,

and swirl anyway.  Anyway,

it’s just a quirk that makes

the rock’s world entirely

the rock’s own; the rock’s theories

are rock theories.  Undeterred,

the rock detours around its chip. 

            9

now, we have humane intelligence

performed by a reproducing rock

picked up from a brook where

it had tumbled, probably,

for several lifetimes.  It can

see anything as far as

there’s good reason to see,

though an imperfection

nicked into its glassy edge

drives the eye to replicate

the error in each successive

scaling; progress and increase

are thus bought with ever

magnified distortion.

the goal was, absolutely

from the start, to see the swirls

etched in the pearly core

curvature of seashells in the jar

and then reflected in the shape

of the assembled stars (maybe

to discern the milky-way, and

with it, God’s own plan,

in the nacre inlay mirrored

in half a clam).  What the rock

lusted after was much more

than merely sight and sense;

it now sought a knowledge,

some certitude how everything

was governed, how each and every

part imbued the whole.

in the passing of Time,

the immense distances reaching

always toward us, fold over

themselves along a fault line,

a cosmic curtain wafting

in celestial breezes.  Undulations

fan out from the center

to the edge, from large and near

to small and far, and the reverse,

exhibiting the infinite

in all its insignificance.

to the rock, what’s happened

might all have been predicted;

the shape of the world resembling

familiar whorls inside familiar

seashells. All worlds grow, the gods

from rows of planted teeth;

everything unfolds until it

runs up against our stone

idiosyncrasies—our philosophies

will then certainly mount up.

            10

The Philosophy of the Rock, I

this rock considered farthest worlds

subject to its mirror, they could be

dragged into the jar, put under glass. 

remote was just another instance

of close by.  If it fits into

the mirror, how strange could

it be, how hard to understand it?

the shells themselves had never

moved of their own accord; sometimes

the jar was jostled or revolved,

and shells appeared at odd angles. 

the rock’s sweeping gaze edited

the jockeying calcite matrices

composing tableaux framed to

show only their very best sides,

oil on water spreading rainbows

of soft violet, blue, and pink.

when the sun stood just above

the picket fence, and the rain

had gone, the rock could paint seashell

patterns in the sky, could imagine

clouds as trompe l’oeil bowls

of fruit, could fashion mythic war

chariots, the mirages

of their steam-snorting horses

quivering in a rising patch of pale blue sky.

in the rock’s mind the world

gave up its secrets in the mirror,

what the mirror could imagine.

from familiar to odd and weird is farther

than the distance traveled back,

when we hold our discoveries in old

cloth sacks sewn from common

knowledge.  Nothing was entirely new.

blue light off the pretty shells

bent oddly as we know (don’t forget

the imperfection on the mirror’s face,

that unseeing smidgen), so the farther

away it surveyed, the farther the rock’s

estimates were off.  The larger errors

presently began to haunt the intimates

within the jar.  No shell was long

allowed to mean just what it meant.

shells became embodiments of vaster

implications; they wrongly stood

for more.  The rock could not turn

to face away from any blemished shell, 

could not ignore an imperfection

(it was powerless in that regard;

it could not move nor could it see

just how it wrongly saw), so it read

less meaning in the places its own

reflection spread.  Those sad stars

received the names of lesser deities

     —panic, narcissism, cupidity. 

in the rock’s garden, they were simply

moved into the shade, where

they vied with dying lilies.

             11

The Philosophy of the Rock, II

there are two senses, the rock

avers, of center; the jar

that holds the rock and the rock itself. 

the rock contains the world,

and the jar holds the rock,

but cannot hold the rock’s roving

eye. Knowing no limits, the rock

imagines also God in two persons,

one that does, and another

that makes possible. The rock

is the moving center,

going where it sees things

on the cracked, distorted glass,

inventing fabulous objects

and creatures, three-winged

blackbirds pecking insects

on a twisting fence, or rooftops

droopy in the center, bowed with

imaginary weight.  The jar is

the center that holds still.

what moves, is then moving

around it.  See it and you are

justified and can understand

how to drag objects under the lens

and read out the name of each --

“fence, flower, shell, cloud, star,”

edicts from proclaimed divinity,

vain and arrogant, insisting

Time and Motion owe their Being

to its Will (the rock in the jar).

no other Genesis is countenanced.

word gets around—the Cat is out.

the fence was created for shade

infrequently dappled in dark

and lighter stripes along the flowers;

the flowers were born from the need

for a capricious yellow

offered up to the rock; the clouds

and the stars among them sing

a music silent in the yard,

heard only by the rock itself

within the jar; the cracks are plastered

up with mysteries.  “listen. . . .“

the rock begins to hum,

some excess energy blows as wind

through a whistle-notched reed,

hardly audible at first, but soon

a rattling is noticed among

the seashells, sending brittle echoes

along the curved glass of the jar.

the table sways in sympathy

and the whistling, ever shriller,

passes through the windows to the yard,

past the fence, into the waiting sky. 

as if the world had been tapped

like a tuning fork, the pitch

infects glass, rock, wood, plant,

and stars.  They squirm in oscillating

rhythms—No one can sleep.

            12

the action in the jar intrudes

impossibly into your own restless

tossing in the noisy, jar-shaking

night.  Culpability awakes and wakes

you and in you, makes you stare

into the blackness.  The night

hangs slack in the windows,

but the rock glows in your mind’s

eye, threatening reason

and routine with its anarchy.

“I’ve got to put it back,”

you whisper, coming up from sleep.

“Something’s very wrong.”

“Put what back?” your wife wants to know.

“The rock,” you whisper, “the rock I stole

from its place in the stream bed.”

“Oh, that’s silly; go back to sleep.”

instead, you get up quietly

and dress.  In the kitchen everything

is still.  Some invisible token

of calamity remains, but you can’t

be sure.  The whole room,

the windows, and the yard outside

are holding their breath.

you pick up the jar, walk to the sink,

twist the lid, and smelly water

pours through your fingers

along with seashells, till you have

only the rock inert, so small

in your hand; it goes into

your pocket and weighs a ton

by the time you’ve hiked

and found the pool.  The exact

desecrated site discovered,

an obvious hollow the size

of the errant rock in the sandy

bottom of the stream.  Surrounding

rocks gape blindly, oblivious

to dull shapes and shadows,

waiting in perpetual obscurity,

dead to the spreading dawn. 

you go down on one knee to refit

the stone, face up, like a glass eye

in its socket. It barely glances,

but you catch the wet suggestion

of yourself as the rock sees you. 

the fracture on the layered mica

surface twists your cameo,

making your right eye enlarge fiercely;

then it’s gone.  The tumbling

stream rolls the rock over

on its face, its unseeing granite

backside facing upwards now.

Charles Tarlton and the Changing Nature of Ekphrasis

Ekphrasis may have started with Homer, describing the "mighty and peerless" Achilles in The Iliad, Book XVIII, 1- 617.  At this moment, Achilles ia "a fallen giant" in despair, "enraged" and "idling": he failed to protect Patroclus, "he whom I honoured as my own self," who has been killed by Hector. Patroclus's body is being dragged through Troy. The time is ripe for a hero, but Achilles has lost his armor, which appears to symbolize his will. As they do, the gods intervene: Hephaestus is charged with creating new armor, in particular a new shield:

.... On the shield also, he portrayed in gold a fine vineyard laden with grapes, though the clusters of heavy fruit were black, and the vines were tied to silver poles. Round it was a ditch of blue enamel, and outside that a fence of tin and a single path led to it, that served for all the coming and going of harvest time. Girls and youths, were joyfully carrying off the ripe grapes in wicker baskets, while in their midst a boy sang .... Then on the shield he showed a herd of straight-horned cattle, in gold and tin, lowing as they trotted from their byre to graze at a murmuring stream beside the swaying rushes. Four herdsmen, also in gold, walked beside them, and nine swift dogs ran behind. But in the next scene two savage lions in amongst the leaders were gripping a bull that bellowed loudly, dragging it off, pursued by youths and dogs .... On the shield, also, the lame master-smith added meadowlands full of white sheep, in a fine valley, with sheepfolds, huts and pens ....

These are only a few lines, describing, apparently in direct fashion, rapidly multiplying images on a shield, images so many and so detailled that this shield would have needed to be the size of the earth. And, of course, that is the point. This is Homer.

We know other instances of ekphrasis. W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" discusses this Breughel

in a mere two sentences:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

The soldiers surrounding Achilles may have worried for his sanity; Icarus's flight to the sun, a man trying to be a god, could not succeed. And yet "children [are] ... skating on a pond," and in the painting's foreground "the ploughman may/Have heard the splash" but it was not his own death, so he continues on, the "sunshone as it had to" and the "expensive delicate ship," closest to Icarus, neglects him altogether. The world continues on its axis, as we weep.

My husband, Charles Tarlton, composes poetry about painting, probably because he has been with me as I paint for the last 27+ years. He says:  "ekphrastic poetry should aim to illuminate aspects of the painting that might elude a more conventional prose description.  It does this by setting up illuminating images and associations to make us see the painting differently.  Like any form of commentary, it is meant to broaden our view of the subject work. But, importantly, it aims to do this by creating further art within which the painting is an element.  It is art about art, locating the painting within the poetic field in such a way as to suggest almost a third synthetic work, a work that is neither the painting nor the poem."

I think his poems strive, not to describe the undescribable, with Homer, and not to unlock the meaning of the art, as Auden has done, but to describe artistic process, a thing that is, in its way, also indescribable and filled with meaning. Here is an ekphrastic poem that he has written about my work.

Ekphrasis #1

Ann Knickerbocker’s Dappled

“Although I know it’s no way to look at abstract paintings,” the ekphrastic docent said,  “still I see a raven here, on the dead burned stump of the last tree somewhere in an ominous desert.”

[Yellow stripes, pink and orange ones, too, and some blue perpendiculars, faded blue against a beige sky.]

“It’s not about anything, “ I said, “and that’s not a crow!”

 [A patch of royal blue and some wide brushstrokes coming out of it.  One turns quickly up, and voilà, a crow.]

“He is looking across to a red butte,” the docent continued,  “rising up into a wild pink and shadowed sky; rain or worse is draining out of the clouds. 

[She has slashed back and forth with a loaded brush and now she lets the drips run down.]

“A layering of pastels,” I said, “see, a working of quick red strokes, and only then does the red spill.  Why does it need a name?”

We both focused then on the middle and to the right, where, completing the mystery, the word “DAPPLED” was stenciled in and then faintly painted over in white.  

[It was that word, but you know, in this context, it’s hardly a word.]

“I know...I know it’s none of these things,” the docent cried, “that it’s even wilder than I’ve said, but I’m trying to get you to see it.”

in the gallery

she offered to trade this one

for a smaller drawing

of a horse looking out of

a stall, waiting for visitors

why does the smaller

canvas pull everything in

closer and tighter

but the larger painting is free

to riot in all directions

it’s a dream report

of first impulses layered

over with fiercer

thoughts in depths of pentimenti

before there was anything

And again here, how and why we artists paint. Enjoy!

 Two Ekphrastic Tanka Prose

1. The Negation of Impulse

I decided to do only what I meant to do and not what other people did. When I could observe what others did I tried to remove that from my work. My work became a constant negation of impulse....

                                                            —Jasper Johns

The first thing she did was coat the large canvas with a faint sort of gray all over (got by mixing a little black in the gesso).  Then with a roller she laid broad overlapping X’s from corner to corner, first in red, then brown, then orange, and finally green mixed with black.  A diaphanous layer of white put on with a foot-wide hand scraper and the canvas was ready for painting.

now go very slow

meticulously dribble

red up to a clot

with a black dot as center

setting the stage

so you just stand there

looking, and let your mind go

feel the whole idea

in your fingers, but hold it

till you just cannot resist

ideas of order

deeply felt in the layers

slow the strokes down

let your mind see a dream

let orange peek out freely

2. An Abstract Expression

“My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square, they are rectangles a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn’t set out to do it that way. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.”

                                                           —Agnes Martin

The painter stood up close to the big canvas (taller than he was, though he was tall) and pressed a small thick nub of burnt sienna oil paint against the splatters and scratches with his thumb.  In his other hand he held a two-inch angled sash paint brush dripping white enamel that he suddenly swung in a long arc, like a comet of thin white mist across the upper left quadrant of the painting. In a minute there were several long feathery white drips running down and around the dollop toward the floor.

show the line run on

to the end of the hard pull

what exactly light

means, how it does or doesn’t

bend, way out to the end

look under the paint

see there’s more paint under it

and more under that

until the painting comes up

in ten dimensions at once

there is no such thing

as a straight line, the closer

you get to the light

the more the bumps and fibers twist

away from plumb, roughly

Do you have an ekphrastic poem of your own to send me? Ship it to me via the email on my website (www.annknickerbocker.com) or send me a link in the comments section below, and I will publish the best one(s).

Gallery One, Connecticut: To See and Be Seen

The artists of Gallery One: ten artists, working without their own gallery space, but working, as one of their members says, “with the strength of ten,” exhibiting where they will.  Their current show is on through this Sunday, May 15, 2016, at the Mill Gallery in The Guilford Art Center.

Here is what the artists say about themselves on their website, where the show is always on, www.galleryonect.com :

Gallery One is an association of mid-career artists working in a wide variety of media and styles from representational to abstract, including painting, sculpture and works on paper.  Our vision is to provide Southeastern Connecticut with a stimulating resource and to support one another as artists. 

In the absence of patronage of church, guild or wealthy merchant, artists have to find their own way “to see and be seen.”  Commissions are rare; artists have the freedom to “see” and choose our own subjects, which sounds lovely. Yet the absence of patrons also means that, in the absence of a guaranteed space (a church window or a parlor-room wall), we must find our own ways to “be seen.”  Gallery One does not pay a year-round lease ... they move.  Their shows (every few months, as a group, and artists also exhibit on their own) exert a little more pressure on the viewing audience: find us, because here is something special. Here is a breath of fresh air, a space to wander, for two or three weeks only, for now: a terrific idea.

And it seems to be working rather well.  I have just seen their show in The Guilford Art Center, up through this weekend. I wrote about one of the gallery artists, Judith Barbour Osborne (this blog, May 10, 2016).  At Guilford, I spoke to another of Gallery One’s artists, Diana Rogers, who explained about the gallery as a group and then talked about her own process.  Rogers says that she does a layer of “underpainting” with her pastels first, which, I think, makes her final version that much more open to suggestion.  Here is her “Marsh Grasses, Mid Summer,” a work in pastel on sanded paper:

I am drawn to the separate, abstracted bits of color here.  The materials and gestures suggest flowers and grasses without going into fussy detail; the mix of colors allows viewers to create the final mix of colors and shapes themselves, as they would if they were walking through the landscape.  Here is another pastel, “Marsh and Sky, Summer Palette”:

and a detail:

The marks have a beauty and a depth all their own.  Close to, we can see the artist’s hand and her view as she was creating this piece; farther away, the colors merge in our minds into those watery paths to the sea.  It’s very hard, a collector friend of mine said once, to get the greens right in a painting; Rogers has captured them perfectly, without using every other color to rein them in. This is a limited palette that busts with color.

Another painter who suggests -- without filling in every line -- is Catherine Christiano. Her cottages have that summer haze over them, the one we all find at the Connecticut shore. She’s got it just right, here, in “Cottages, Hawk’s Nest #4”:

I was lucky enough, a million years ago, to stay in that red cottage for a week; I would look back from the Sound and see the house shimmering in the heat.  We don’t need to see each individual shingle in these paintings, because we don’t when we are looking, even if we are really looking. We put the picture together in our heads.  And we are grateful for the chance to make that momentary image.

And then, moving around in the gallery, I see glowing abstract works. Gray Jacobik says, on her website (grayjacobikartist.com/about) , that “my art is two-fold: imagination-brought-to-bear upon received images joined with the rapidly transforming events of process, the entirety a means of making sense.”  Jacobik arrives at her worktable with ideas and expectations, but does allow the materials (encaustic on cradled panel, most often) and accidents to move the work forward, and the exchange continues, back and forth: “ I may go through 4-5 metamorphoses before the final work emerges,” Jacobik says. Her titles sound as though she paints realistically, and, in her own way, she does. Here is “The Sea Mollified”:

I had to look up “mollified”; it isn’t a word I use every day! Jacobik is also an award-winning poet, with a national reputation, so the wording of her titles is quite deliberate.  But “mollified” means appeased, soothed... can the sea be mollified?

Is this painting calling up the image of a calm sea? The work is beautiful; I stood before the painting for a long time. Turquoise waters, pictured (abstractly!) here, generally offer an invitation to wade in and cool off.  Serenity. Yet this water is reaching upwards, moving in a great wave.... in life such a wave would make lifeguards nervous and vigilant.  But the title is the one certainty we have, so the soothing of the sea must come from treating the work of art as itself.  This is a mollified, imagined, controlled sea, on a canvas small enough to carry.

Jacobik’s painting “I Saw It Raining Fire from the Sky” is also a beauty with a puzzling title:

If I were to begin a conversation with the sentence of this painting’s title, “I Saw It Raining Fire from the Sky,” I would frighten my listeners.  But, viewing the painting, we see a gorgeous combination of colors at ease with one another, filled with energy, yet well-matched in their opposing reds & oranges, blues & purples. Perhaps we have wandered into a dream that has been (encaustically) executed into a small portion of space. Jacobik’s paintings come from deep within, from experience and from art itself.

The show included ten member artists and two invited guests, Steve Llloyd and Deborah Hornbake.  These guest artists fit in perfectly as they, too, give us original and imaginative art. Here is Steve Lloyd’s “Forest Edge,” in full and in detail:

Again, he is... and isn’t... realistic. He makes the air circulate here.

And Deborah Hornbake’s “Caldaria Basin,” (ceramic with wood-ash glaze) is organic but somehow totally new; here it is from the side and then over the top:

There is much more to see on the Gallery One (Ct) website and at the show! I will be watching the artists of Gallery One. This was a wonderful day.

Judith Barbour Osborne: "Synchronized with ... head and heart"

“A really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image ... one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.”

                                                                                                            Helen Frankenthaler

“Really good” pictures tend not to happen “at once,” though, as Frankenthaler knew better than anyone.  Her “Madame Butterfly” woodcut, below, is composed of 102 colors, from 46 woodblocks, and measures 2 meters (6 ½ feet) wide (www.nga.gov.au/exhibition/Frankenthaler). The print is far wider than one wrist motion, and took a bit longer to put together than one minute. And yet, when we look:

 ... this woodcut doesn’t make us feel anything that isn’t in this moment, right now. All we see is that Frankenthaler had a way of making paint and inks float away from their supports, whether she poured or printed.   And somehow you don’t want to solve the mystery of those floating images. You fall in with them, as you would any compelling natural landscape. 

Her work is sometimes critiqued as “just too pretty,” a damning phrase designed to undercut the work and its maker, yet artist Amy Sillman says there’s no “just” about it:

Frankenthaler’s taste and grace are tough, like ballerina grace: those women aren’t sugarplum fairies but muscular athletes, with machinelike, disciplined bodies. Frankenthaler is in an incredible athletic decision-making process while working... It’s an experiment with the alchemic and extreme reliance on color as material and as optics...

                                    “House of Frankenthaler,” printed in The heroine Paint,  p. 267

Sometimes, it takes another artist to see the underpinnings of a work, along with the artist’s consciousness and experience that remain (almost) invisible.  When I see work this strong, I want to know that some artist, somewhere, has seen the work and is willing to try and take on its challenges.                                                                                                                                                                                               

Judith Barbour Osborne is a likely suspect.  She has several shows on at the moment in Connecticut galleries.  I have just come from her Exit Gallery show at the Essex Art Association (an opportunity given as an award, the highest the gallery offers), and then I visited more work in a show at the Guilford Art Center. 

Osborne has worked with poets and musicians...  She works with words as well as paints, choosing to bring meaning into the light, to make “aspects of non-visual reality visible, as if staining the wind” (JBO artist statement).  Judith  Barbour Osborne’s compact show in Essex, “Staining the Wind,” is a master class in making an intimate space feel immense. She works in smaller spaces than Frankenthaler, yet she manages to create huge effects with her close studies. I think she has found the very next level after Frankenthaler, and pushed it to its very limits. Here is her “Revelation # 4”:

 It has a calming presence, for me, although Osborne says that she generally hears people talk about the energy in her work.  It may be that calm and energy come from the same core place, in us, the place that relaxes by the sea or in the mountain air. In the artwork before us we find words, too, embedded in the paint and inks, just barely there, like a whisper or the strain of a song being sung far away. Osborne says this is an integral part of her work: “My artwork is text-based and utilizes elements of chance and intention. I abstractly write text with tools ranging from small hand-made brushes to mops and brooms, from syringes to batiking tools”  (see the site where she has worked together with a poet on an artist’s book: www.vampandtramp.com/finepress/o/judith-b-osborne.html).

Here is
“Revelation # 3,” also at the Essex Art Association:

 and a detail:

All the marks Osborne makes seem interconnected, indivisible from one another. As we stand before them, we see that there is no looking at one mark, or one place in the painting. The eye moves over the whole surface, the whole “landscape.”  She has made a whole world, here.

Osborne is not only connected back to painters like Frankenthaler, though. She is thinking forward, so she is also the director of a group of ten artists, Gallery One (http://www.galleryonect.com) and they are exhibiting work at the Mill Gallery of the Guilford Art Center (through May 15, 2016). They support and encourage one another, a gallery without walls. The works as a whole make a very strong showing. Here is one of the pieces,  Osborne’s “Revelations # 1”:

and a detail:

This is a painting created with transparent inks, brushstrokes, and splattered marks, and it is luminous.  It was a rainy and gray day outside, so we lingered indoors as long as we could, staying with the art. The courage it takes to leave all that “blank” space in an artwork... fierce.  The words and the strokes from the artist’s hand somehow turn us inward, crawl inside some empty space we must have been leaving there, a space exactly as big as art.

Je Suis En Terrasse xox