Letter to Orphée

Thinking of a lyre of wood and wire and earth,
an earth lyre, I think of an elemental music,
a music made of earth, metals and woods
and stones of earth, played by wind howling
outside the house this dim, blustery day. The clouds
last evening, and pale light this morning, look like snow coming,
not rain. Rushes of sound, wind blowing across
the housetop, reverberate down the chimney.
Orpheus picks up a strangely curved branch of fallen
wood off the forest floor, strings it with copper wires, and plays.
His lyre summons spirits of the air, voices hiding behind
wind and mist, his singing voice, his poetry, becomes the telling
of seasons, days turning the planet under stars.
An elemental voice describing a concerto of ever-changing forces
and spirals in the sky. Spiral wood beams struck by lightning
embrace a pale white stone from anywhere but here.
Perhaps an ancient sea. You cannot be unaware, Orpheus,
that time and change take us all, that these stones eroding
to dust and leaves in this interstellar wind were once
a shallow sea, or that the peak of our tallest mountain
is made of shells of sea creatures that died millions of years gone
to fall to deep ooze and be pressed into rock
by the pressures of what came after. My home
is a temple of standing stones. Red and gold sandstones
form a shelter around whose curves the wind howls. We work
these metal flakes, gold bright and soft copper green, into veins
of the lyre of Orpheus, seams in the wood, ore seams in the earth.
Its copper strings gleam with forged memory. Its curve
is a memory of birds nesting in the crook of an ancient bole,
a tree much older than any bird, once fallen forgotten
by the descendants of sparrows and robins who once it sheltered.
Birds nest in the hair, the ear, of Orpheus, and dictate their songs
to his receptive tongue, his voice which forgets nothing,
not even the oldest groan of the planet giving spontaneous birth to life.
It's tempting to believe that those who refuse to hear these spirits
singing have themselves no souls, but we must not judge, we must
leave room for revelation. Everything connects. Webs and orbs
and lyre-spiders who weave them. Atoms of everything, whirling
in apparent silence within these fossiled stones, glint and spark
in light cast by the voice of the son of dreaming. His torn limbs
cast upon waters and forest floor. Orphée retrieves his own bones
and sinew as he picks up another fallen treelimb to weave
a newer lyre. Look, will you not: gold leaves glow
in the last rays of afternoon, below this hillside meadow,
and behind that is the whirling sparkle of molecules dancing,
and behind that the velocity of a shining planet, an orb
hurling itself into silence. We are the cliffs we jump from.
Our naked flesh breaks the laketop shimmer as we fall,
we disappear forever into that water mirror, then placidity returns.
Low hum of oceans singing in the blood, wind in the copper wires
of a sacred city, a lyre strung above dark streets the moon guards.
A forest of shadows grows within oil slicks reflecting streetlights
and trash bins. But in time, deep time, this forest made of bricks
will be overeaten and digested by new forests, returned and ink-vined
along borders of papyrus leaves woven into sheets of sand
by the lyre's unending song. The lowest string on a harp
of air and ice, the lowest tone that, struck,
can shatter crystal mountains. Wind strokes
the highest strings into humming.
Orpheus takes breath, opens his mouth to sing again.
What comes forth
shapes wind-blown broken sandflakes
back into mirrors full of starlight.

Rainforest Art from Photos

Images from Olympia, WA, February 2010

Two images from the temperate rainforest surrounding Puget Sound in the state of Washington, taken near Olympia. I drove up from Portland, where I was staying for a week near the end of my latest long winter roadtrip. I spent the day visiting my aunt who lives in Olympia. We had a nice meal at a restaurant overlooking the Olympia marina, then drove around the area to see the sights. I made some photos from the moving car, capturing what I could, as we drove around.

These two photos are a bit blurred by the motion of the car. But I liked the lines in them, the arrangements of the vine and moss covered trees, and the overall mood. So I chose to work with each image in Photoshop, using different techniques to create different kinds of effects. I am becoming more and more interested in making art from my images, leaving some as pure photos, but working with others to create more artistic effects.



This only slightly blurred image stood out because of the arrangement of trees, especially the gnarled shelf of ferns growing out of the foreground tree. I used an antiquing process and added vignettes to the corners to age the image, and hopefully give it a timeless feel.



For this image I accentuated the motion blur, then de-blurred the foreground tree, to create depth of field. Then I desaturated the color from the background, so that only the foreground tree is highlighted in color. I wanted to create a sense of the mysterious darkness of the rainforest in this image. The color elements are thus in contrast with the moody background, like life and shadow.

I've been experimenting from time to time with creating B&W images with just a few items picked out in color. (A technique that works better with some images than others.) The colored items are either in the color original, or hand-painted in with color in Photoshop. In this instance, which was originally a color image, I kept the central tree in color when I desaturated the background. I also darkened the overall image, to up the contrast and create a darker mood.

California Redwoods

images from coastal northern CA, February 2010



patterns of woven branches
trunks risen sky-tall and stern
hollowed banks of burns, of riven cores
around which the sap still flows



patterns of light, mist, moving cloud
needle-fans and sun-rays spread
similar fingers, grasping a cold moment
between which the day moves without ceasing

Mendocino: Driftwood Abstractions

images from the Navarro River mouth, Mendocino County, CA, February 2010











•


from a gallery sculpture garden, Mendocino County, CA

Mendocino: Wood

images from Mendocino Cty., CA, February 2010



From driftwood along the shore



to land-art sculptures made on private land adjacent to the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens



to the beautifully-carved wooden entrance door to the Gardens themselves.

The wood found along the shoreline, as driftwood, and the wood fallen from the hillside and seaside groves, all go to make a haven for woodworkers. Being in Mendocino wakes my inner urge to work with wood. I collect and bring home a few bags of shore driftwood, to start working with, and learn how to shape into other kinds of art, and other projects. I have ideas for multi-media visual-sculptural work: photos of the driftwood framed in the wood itself; pieces of sea-carved wood attached to the corner of a framed photo; a wall-mounted mobile made of natural forms found in the wood; and more.

Driftwood Art

At the mouth of the Navarro River in Mendocino County, CA, a vast sandbar lies covered with many kinds and sizes of driftwood, blown ashore in the winter storms, lodged there to be moved by the tides, storms, and other waters of change. I go there with an artist friend to find driftwood for myself to carve later, to use in my artwork, to be inspired by, to sculpt with stones and other natural forms. I find several pieces of beautiful wood to take with me. I also find two or three walking sticks, straight and strong and true, for my friend to make into canes, walking sticks, and hiking poles.



And as I do only when moved by the energy and spirit of a place, I make a piece of land art sculpture, in place. I make photographs, the only thing that will endure. The wind was high, and the waves high too. So this river-fence will not endure long, probably less than a day.


RiverFence, Navarro River, CA, February 2010





I also staked solitary poles in several places, as I walked amongst the driftwood piled high, marking places that seemed to need to be marked. And I found a half-desiccated, half-torn-away seagull corpse, bones showing, feathers twirled together, the mark of mortality amongst all the dead and drifted wood.

Wood and Water

Images from Presque Isle River, Porcupine Mtns., MI, October 2009



wild white eyes
of water blur and run—
the long stream falls





encircling winds
carve mouths in white driftwood—
cedar speaking ghosts





ticking of stones
along the wooden spine,
a line of ravens





stone waves scatter
round ingots between roots:
slip of dice

Woodcarving 2

As a first set of projects with which to learn my woodcarving tools, I made a series of enso relief carvings into small slabs of wood. I used my Dremel rotary tools to make the reliefs, shaping them after brush-stroked circles brushed onto the wood. The wood is scrap pine, stained with a redwood lacquer, then carved out.

I made six or seven of these pieces, and gave most of them away as Winter Solstice gifts, keeping only this one, which I thought was the best of the set, and my favorite. This one is currently hanging on the wall in a corner of my kitchen. The first one I made I gave to the friend who encouraged me to start working with wood, and working in three dimensions rather than continuing to work in two.

Consider them practice pieces, sketches for later woodwork sculpture, small little practice pieces that develop skills and might lead towards something more like actual art. I don't view these as finished, accomplished carvings; rather, something to work out technique and learn from doing, on the way to making something more substantial.

I made these enso carvings starting in November, working out in the garage while the weather was still warm, and worked into December, to finish them before mailing them off as gifts. I have a few more wood pieces prepared on my basement workbench now, it being too cold to work in the garage. I really need to get a table saw, which will make sizing the wood blocks much easier. At the moment I have borrowed a friend's scroll saw, which is fine for cutting smaller pieces, but limited to that; although it might be interesting at some point to play with the scroll saw's ability to cut curved shapes. I still have to figure out how to deal with the sawdust; although I saw a woodworking article in a magazine that suggested using an ordinary box fan with a furnace filter strapped to it, to suck up the sawdust. So that might work. I cannot wait until spring to continue working, I need to work right now. One of my Dremel tools is rechargeable and cordless, so I plan to take it along on my next roadtrip, and do some carvings along the way. Driftwood or found scraps as materials.

This evening I made a drawing of a bonsai tree. I did it from memory, from the bonsai room at the Conservatory in St. Paul, MN.

I'm thinking about what forms and patterns I might trace or stencil onto woodblocks to carve out.

I was thinking earlier this week about what images I might like to make, such as bamboo stems and leaves on a longer piece of wood. I've been choosing my scrapwood for interesting knots and patterns, things already in the wood that suggest what to do with it. Each piece of wood gives you a sense of what to do with it, if you spend time holding and looking at the wood.

Then suddenly I had the realization that I am developing skills separately that are eventually going to converge. I've been learning how to draw. I've been learning how to work in wood, both relief and more three-dimensional sculpting.

It occurred to me, therefore, that what I'm teaching myself to do, eventually, is to take up woodblock printing. Perhaps even woodcut illustration. I now have the tools in hand, and am learning the skills, to do relief carving that could lead to woodblock printing. I'll need to look into hand-press inks and wood type. I might try carving type into a woodblock at some point, too. I've done handset type before, but I haven't carved type into a block of wood. That might be an interesting challenge.

Meanwhile, still learning these new skills, still developing craft and technique, still only beginning to get better at each.

Woodcarving

A few weeks ago I realized that I needed to be making three-dimensional art. Teaching myself to draw this past year or so, to draw with colored pencils mostly, has been very rewarding. It's been filled with lessons about seeing/drawing, and also with just looking to see what's there. Some of these lessons transfer very well to photography, of course; and also to video. But this is all two-dimensional work. I've realized I need to do something more tactile, more purely physical.

I haven't felt moved to make a landscape art sculpture more than once or twice in a few months; those mostly happen in response to the energy of a specific place and time, and so tend to be very site-specific. They are also usually ephemeral, only the photograph making them endure after the materials themselves have washed away. It's not a disciplined daily practice, but a responsive, spontaneous one. Although I have a small garden around my house here, it's not conducive to making lots of land art; there's not enough space for me to do much, although I have made a few small stone arrangements, in a few spots around the house. Stone magic is earth magic is representational and healing for the place I choose to live for now. Were I living in a designated monastery, I would do the same. It's as if I am living monastically, at times; so I place sacred circles and spirals on the ground around my house. In the spring the flowers emerge through their forms.

Something more abstract in form, yet also more grounded in touch. In touching materials, in kinesthetic appreciation as well as construction. The needs of making are as much the body's desire as the mind's. I sometimes get this from playing piano. Sometimes I get this feeling from running my fingers along statutes in museums, cold bronze and chill marble figures and shapes. There are beautiful Chinese jade carvings, and Indian stone statues, in the Minneapolis art museum that I have always wanted to touch, although it's forbidden. If you can't touch great art of the past, you need to make and touch your own, therefore.

So I bought myself a Dremel rotary tool, and have been sketching on small pieces of wood. Learning to use the tools, the carving of wood, the logistics and smell of it. Wood supple under the tools, taking on the mind's rough shapes, polished until left unfinished. Working with wood means listening to the wood: its imperfections and individual turns of grain and knot. Something abstract will eventually emerge, a natural form that doesn't go against the wood's own desire, but enhances it.



I think of Henry Moore's sculptures. Their rounded, circling forms. There many lacunae, windows to see through, holes into another world, another way of seeing. I've grown up thinking Henry Moore sculptures were naturalistic and lovely. They were considered radical when he first made them; but that was an era of sculptural realism, which he was among the first to completely break away from.



In my travels, I've seen many Moores on-site, where they live, where the activity of the world swirls around them, not quite touching them. Toronto, Ontario. Columbus, Indiana. The world looks different when you peer through a visionary sculpture, to see it. What part of the screen of the world cannot be seen through the holes in a sculpture?



I think of Constantin Brancusi's pure, moving forms. Bird in Space has always been a favorite sculpture series to go look at, and walk around, view from all sides, and feel its surging energy, remarkably capturing blurred movement in solid material. Brancusi himself once remarked, There are those idiots who define my work as abstract; yet what they call abstract is what is most realistic. What is real is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things. That's exactly what his sculptures do, I feel, and what draws me to them. There's an essential movement to his work—a reminder that even what we think is solid matter is always vibrating with light and energy, on deep levels beyond the visible. Brancusi at his most pure brings the invisible into the visible, and that is completely realistic and naturalistic. Those who think his work abstract see only the surfaces of things.



I think of Isamu Noguchi, who had a knack for making the stone and wood materials of his sculptures retain their natural textures and forms, yet become more than they were. As if he could see within a slab of granite and draw forth the Urtext, the Archetype of Granite itself. I've never seen a Noguchi piece that doesn't move me, spiritually, aesthetically, emotionally. Often there is a calmness to his finished pieces that quiets my mind and heart; a silence surrounding each polished work which radiates out into the space around it. The subtle nuances of the material, once again the invisible made visible, bring one into close contemplation of the solid materials of the world we live in.

I'm barely beginning, feeling my way into the wood. I'll stay with wood as a material for some time. Stone, perhaps glass, might follow, but later. The tools of carving must first be made into natural extensions of my hands and heart; which means taking time to absorb their tendencies and needs. I'm in no hurry. I have no real ambition, other than to find something in working with wood that addresses, perhaps looks through, a lacunae in myself. It's an ambition to work with the materials, to learn them more closely. My grandfather was a master carpenter, after all, and taught me the basic of carpentry as a boy; I have now his tools and one or two of his old carpentry reference books. So there's a lineage. It's also an ambition to find a way to heal something else in myself, something that is as yet evanescent and vaporous; something I wish to make more solid and real, by bringing it into visibility; something I can't name, that feels connected to the earth, to the ancient past, something pre-verbal, pre-intellectual, old and powerful. Something of the earth magic, made manifest. I'm just setting out on this quest; nothing remotely like Art has yet been made. But I'm in no hurry. It will take time for me to feel my way into the wood, and that required time, those attendant lessons in patient seeing and observant touch, will slow me down enough to have actual effect on the pace of my life. I can feel it, even though I can't feel it, yet.

Recycling: Wood

I make a lot of physical art, when I make it, out of recycled or found materials. When I do a landscape art piece, for example, I use what I find lying at hand, as such pieces are site-specific and usually not pre-planned, but form themselves intuitively. I might use stones, or twigs, or sand, or leaves, or whatever else I find lying to hand.

During yesterday's high winds and rain, two branches from the fruit tree out back of my porch were torn down. THey brushed against the windows, and landed in the bushes. None of the roses were seriously damaged by being fallen on. This afternoon, when I was cleaning up the fallen, I sawed off a couple of segments of wood, to dry out and cure, and probably use later for other art projects. I also took some photos of the fallen branches, and of the wounds in the tree. Then I sealed up the wounds with pruning sealant; it's a beautiful tree with a spreading canopy, it provides me a lot of shade and privacy in summer on my porch, and it's otherwise healthy, so sealing the scars will hopefully prevent the tree from catching any diseases or suffering any further trauma, as winter sets in later this year.



I was inspired recently to think about incorporating woodworked pieces into my visual art. Perhaps by making an unfinished natural wood frame for a particular artwork. Perhaps also by incorporating sculpture into the wall-hung visual art, and maybe also weaving, making it into multimedia work. I know an artist in town who goes on hikes out in the fields, picks up fallen wood and sculpts it into beautiful polished bowls. In a recent gallery show, I saw a wall-hung piece that had a large round wooden shield hung next to a sepia-tined photo, all incorporated into a driftwood framework; the overall effect was emotionally resonant for me, almost shamanic. It's been making me think about doing something similar with my own art and materials.



I've always liked working with wood. I haven't done a lot of it, but there's something very emotionally satisfying about woodworking. My grandfather was a master carpenter and builder, and he taught me the basics of carpentry and woodworking when I was a boy. Given a few more tools, now that I have a big workbench area set up in the garage, it might be possible for me to do some actual carpentry and woodworking again. If time and weather permits, perhaps this autumn.

   Tree Tao

Wood

images from the Hidden Garden, Northville, MI

Driftwood

driftwood, Oregon coast, Humbug Mountain & Moolack Beach









as though
the sound (torn
out of you by the river,
the ice, the black water)
could remake you
transform you
turn you into a salmon
or a bear

and the wind
fits around you
like the trout smooth-gliding
in a deep riffle
at the bend
and the light
has weight and heaviness
like a soft hammer
striking you and blinding

as though
the sound (burned
into the air by the light
reflected off the waterfall)
could maim you
topple you
cast you aside
like driftwood

and the wind
fits around you
like a cascade through the trees,
the heron trying to dance
like the light on the river,
and the light
like a firefly, cool
in the darkness,
remakes you, transforms you,
a salmon, a bear