couldn't be happier

I have noticed recently, whilst driving all these great distances up and down and around the Hudson Valley and environs, crows. Or maybe ravens, but I think crows.

I have always loved crows. There's a park across the street from my house and one of the big old trees there was a roost tree -- until the West Nile epidemic in 2005. Since then, virtually no crows. But recently, and so very happily, I have begun to see them again.

Last year, I noticed one or two or, at most, three at a time. This year, small flocks. This is a very unscientific sampling, but I am so happy about it. Crows.

co-incidence

What a coincidence -- according to to day's post over at The Writer's Almanac , today is the day that Moby Dick was first published -- to no acclaim whatsoever. A "damp drizzly November in my soul" and a case of a prophet being without honor in his own country indeed.

I was thinking a lot about the book today. My friend Denise and I went to the Dia in Beacon -- and it was glorious. But also very, very white. Rooms full of extremely ascetic paintings by Robert Ryman -- white paintings on white walls, which are purely about the paint itself and the painting's relationship to & with the wall (or other supports). Years ago, I saw an exhibition of his paintings in San Francisco and was so baffled I asked the guard if the paintings had been hung. What a difference two decades makes in my willingness to understand. I was very enthusiastic about the paintings but was interested to find that the longer I spent in the room, the more unsettled I was becoming by All That White. And I wondered if the oft-quoted line in MD "It was the whiteness of the whale that appalled me" has as much to do with the epic size of the whale as with its unnatural color.

But the most transcendent thing in the museum, I think, is Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses -- four huge vessels (as Denise calls them) in a room only just big enough to contain them that have profound mythic, shamanic presence. From the website: " in these works space shifts and moves in wholly unpredictable and unprecedented ways: so destabilizing yet so beguiling is this sensation of movement that the spectator quickly gets caught up in an exploration of extended duration." Walking around and into these works was like walking into the womb of the time-- disorienting, then exalting.

Then there were several -- I don't know what to call them -- pieces? works? by Fred Sandback who is probably at the most extreme edge of minimalism. The works are simply outlines formed by tautly strung acrylic yarn. They create the illusion of glass panels, but there is literally nothing there.

About Sandback, also from the museum's website: "The first sculpture I made with a piece of string and a little wire was the outline of a rectangular solid . . . lying on the floor. It was a casual act, but it seemed to open up a lot of possibilities for me," Fred Sandback wrote in 1986, looking back over twenty years of activity to a seminal sculpture he had executed in 1966. The key implications of that determining impulse remain at the heart of his practice today. In wanting to create sculpture that did not have an inside, he found through this seemingly "casual act" the means to "assert a certain place or volume in its full materiality without occupying and obscuring it."

This experience of looking at something that was simultaneously there and not there was really delightful. I thought pieces were very playful. I used to not like being played with in this way, but I hope that as my understanding and appreciation of the goals of artists that I found and find challenging grows, that I will continue to be less troubled by the feeling that I'm being had in some nefarious and mean-spirited way and be more genuinely engaged.

It was a wonderful day -- lots to think about, much inspiration, and a good time with a good friend.

macro II

hmmmmm. This is a lot more dynamic in my mind. Well, it's still early days. These are some of the things I've been thinking about attaching. Twigs (imported from Massachusetts), twine, shiny metal rounds. The cats knocked over a stack and some photocopies of that hand tumbled out, so I thought I'd put one down and see what I think. And I think . . . maybe. I think it may be -- all together now -- too much color.

The eternal conversation of art vs. craft arose recently over at Karen's place. I was reminded -- several years ago, I worked a needlepoint (kit) of the fairly famous quotation from William Morris: "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." I find the verbs provocative (a reliable function of verbs). I think you can know if something is beautiful, not just believe it. On the other hand, I have a three-story house stuffed to and beyond the gills with a plethora of things that may or may not be useful -- and I find that much harder to gauge with any accuracy.

And so to bed, leaving both twigs and philosophy for another time.

macro progress I

I still don't have a source photo. Nevertheless, I think I'm making excellent progress on interpreting it. Don't you? Thus far, I have a foundation piece approximately 12 inches by 18 inches comprised of a backing fabric (grayish off-white), white low-loft batting, a single layer of cheesecloth, and all-over seed stitching in grey carpet thread. That's a whole World Series, plus a couple of evenings, worth of stitching (minus a little time diverted to exuberance about a happy outcome for the home team). Here's a detail, almost life-size:

I think what comes next is kitchen twine, metallic silver thread, slim-slim-slim twigs, and some of the metal bits I've found in the street and in drawers, and in tins in the closets. Maybe some glass. But if there's glass, there will need to be a reinforcing layer to support the weight. More cheesecloth, definitely more cheesecloth.

Never let it be said that I don't know how to have a good time.