River People, River Art

What kind of water person are you?  Years ago an artist I knew decided to leave his small river town residence and business in order to move to the ocean.  He said "I hate river people.  River people are just slow and dull."  I'd never heard anyone before stereotype people's personalities according to what kind of water they resided near, so his pronouncement surprised me and stuck in my memory.  I love living near the river.  I think I must certainly be  "a river person" by now, having lived by the Delaware River for many years. It wasn't always so.

THE RIVER DREAMS HERSELF INTO EVERYTHING,©JoyKreves '13

I grew up in the land-locked Midwest where the sky is the main event due to the flatness of the land.  Trees and tall buildings seem to just perch on the land while they grapple with the sky.  The uninterrupted acres of cornstalks in my home state had plenty of sky to rustle against.  When I moved from suburban Chicago, Illinois, to New York City, I definitely noticed a difference in people's personalities.  A Midwesterner was not so likely to have a public quarrel.  Arguing was saved for the privacy of your home.  Politeness was valued and practiced much more amidst the land-locked.  In NYC I was amazed to hear people unselfconsciously shouting, arguing, or expressing all sorts of emotions in front of whatever public surrounded them.  Without the sense of pressure from all that sky bearing down, people seemed to spark with an electric energy.  "Please" and "thank you" were not a main staple of interactions or words to be thrown out from habit, but were more selectively doled out.  I've barely been back to the Midwest since moving east decades ago; certainly much has changed now, but back then people from the two environments acted significantly different.  Undoubtedly some of the difference was because the population in the Midwest was so much more homogenized than that on the East Coast, but was any of it caused by features of the landscape? How much does the landscape affect a person's personality?

Having lived on the East Coast, close to the Delaware River for years now, I've grown very fond of the river landscape and it's surrounding environment.  Admittedly, I haven't spent enough time near the ocean to conclude anything about "ocean personalities," but I surely must be among the ranks of the "river people" my friend detested!  The water that flows in earth's rivers is mirrored in the blood running in our veins.   Although I am far from a traditional artist, living near the Delaware River has definitely influenced my creative thinking so that many of my artworks involve water somehow.  I truly understand why so many  painters have flocked to this area and found it a rich source of inspiration for their landscape paintings.

I, however, am inspired by the river in a different way.  The river flows, and along the way the water collects stories and builds history.  You can never see an entire river at once except perhaps from space, so you have to experience a river one section at a time.  This is how you view a hand scroll, also.  You wouldn't expect to take in the entire scroll painting at once.  I've been thinking about this aspect of rivers and hand scrolls for several years and have been interested in creating artworks that unfold in a cinematic time.  

I finished two such works this past week.  Because I wanted to make artworks that imply a continuation beyond their immediate boundaries, I decided to make ceramic scroll stands with paper art that one could either scroll through or experience in a non-participatory way. 

ON TALKING, graphite & colored pencil on mylar on stoneware scroll stand, ©Joy Kreves

In "ON TALKING" I wrote a narrative about talking in my family.  Because I hear conversations as sound weavings, I wrote as if on a loom's warp and weft.  In the center of the scroll the writing almost forms a kind of plaid.  The resulting words can be read with some focus, but also function in a purely visual way.  This piece can be viewed in the juried "MERCER COUNTY ARTISTS 2013" exhibition opening at Mercer Community College Art Gallery, Communications Bldg, 2nd fl, 1200 Old Trenton Rd., Trenton, NJ, beginning on Wednesday, March 5th, the reception on Wed. March 13th from 5-7pm.  The show runs through April 4, 2013.

ON PRACTICING RESTRAINT, ©Joy Kreves '13, mixed media.

I left the pure beauty of the paper unmarked in the second scroll sculpture, "ON PRACTICING RESTRAINT."  You can scroll beyond the title writing, but all you will find is the lovely translucent mylar paper hanging above the textured and glazed slab base.  I'm working on more of these scrolls, intending to paint and write on them.  I love the format.  It is the format of a walk along the river.  Perhaps I just see it that way because I am "a river person."  What kind of water person are you?

Getting to Utopia

RIVER LIFE, mixed media drawing ©Joy Kreves, 12"X36"

When was the last time you thought about Utopia?  What does Utopia mean to you?  It's an idea that comes to roost on my shoulder now and then.  In the birthing class I attended years ago as preparation for our daughter's arrival participants were instructed to visualize and thus create in our imaginations a Utopia to go to, in order to ease the pain of childbirth.  I'll bet you that a pure, sparkling river was a common feature in all of our imagined refuges.  Rivers have long been part of our collective vision for a Utopian landscape.  How Utopian are our rivers really now though?  Most of their clear waters have been contaminated to some degree by all sorts of organic and industrial wastes, plastic garbage and now, increasingly with fracking poisons.

Olana with Views, photo ©Joy Kreves

Olana exterior details, photo ©Joy Kreves

Painter of large, magnificent landscapes, Frederic Edwin Church (1826 - 1900) built his mountaintop Persian style mansion, Olana, overlooking the beautiful Hudson river. He charged entry fees whenever he (literally) unveiled a new painting in his home studio. According to the docent at the now historic museum site, he made sure the viewers got their money's worth by incorporating a multitude of visual intrigues in each painting to hold and reward their gaze.  I'd already been rejecting the less is more path to creating an aesthetic experience in favor of much more is even more ideal. The docent's comment about Church's attitude appealed to me!

I was visiting Olana for the Artist's Talk of a friend, contemporary painter Dan Ford.  Dan has studied the Hudson Valley School of landscape artists (in which Frederic Church was a key player) and has evolved a body of work that matches their lushness while incorporating witty, contemporary references in the scenes.  Therefore, this was the perfect venue for him in which to reveal his connections to and departures from the Hudson Valley School of painting.

Both Ford's and Church's paintings have things in them just waiting to be discovered.  You look at Church's painting and your eyes keep finding things to alight on that are an unexpected delight to behold; in Ford's idyllic landscapes your admiration of the beauty of nature is suddenly interrupted when you spot the little gas station or fast food joint that has cropped up along the mountain stream.  Whose idea of Utopia includes a view of the Golden Arches?  Our culture and conveniences extract a huge cost from our dreams!  I wonder, if Frederic Edwin Church were painting today, would he paint the idealized, Utopian version of whatever landscape he was working from, or would he include any of the contaminants of contemporary civilization?  The docent had reported that Frederic Church had done lots of nature editing (cleaning up, rearranging trees, etc.) to enhance the breathtaking vistas surrounding his magnificent house. Getting to Utopia requires lots of editing!

As I completed my mixed media drawing, RIVER LIFE, this week (photo at top of page) I kept thinking back to those ideas that Olana had brought up for me: themes of Utopia vs. of the Here and Now; More CAN be More, and Prolonging and Rewarding the Viewer's Gaze.  I added another turtle, a ceramic one, and I felt compelled to add some bits of plastic wrap to the composition; it's a more realistic portrayal of the condition of our contemporary waters. Yes, there is purity and beauty there, but there is also pollution and garbage.  The sparkle of the plastic related to the gloss on the collaged photographic area anyway.  Pollution isn't always ugly!

Tiny Quarter-Sized Smashed Turtle, photo ©Joy Kreves

Maybe getting to Utopia is actually less interesting to me now than the actual journey there.  Currently I'm less interested in creating a sublime vision (in spite of my past exhibition title!) than in creating a time-released experience of little discoveries and multiple focal points.  That's why Japanese hand-scrolls are so appealing though it's a format I haven't tried yet.

It's amazing, the little discoveries one simple walk can hold.  Once there was what appeared to be a smashed  coin on the road ahead of me but when I got there it was a tiny smashed turtle no bigger than a quarter.  Although saddened, I was amazed to see that such a small creature had been trying to cross the wide road probably en route to the creek yet another street downhill from there.  I wondered how many of these tiny turtles make that journey successfully each year, and where it was coming from.  Had my car been the one to end it's journey?  How many lives do we obliterate without even realizing it?  Later in the same walk I heard some creature calling from a tree.  It almost sounded like a kitten, but maybe not quite.  I could not locate the exact place it came from, but it was regular and persistent.  Perhaps it was a baby squirrel.  I couldn't see anything moving in the treetops.  A bit later I witnessed the canal-side take-off of a large heron.  If you've never seen a heron alight you've missed one of the most sublime visions there is!  The emotional keys touched on in this one walk included sadness and wonder, concern, and awe!

The unfolding of that walk is the way I'm currently thinking about my artworks.  I want to create multiple interests that are there to seize and ponder and simply to relish, in a time-released fashion. Instead of painting one show-stopping moment in time, I am combining several moments that reveal themselves over a little span of time.  The cinematic ribbon-like journey of a walk or of a river is the model that continues to inspire my compositions.  Does that lead to Utopia?  Who knows?  It seems the Realist in me is most interested now in what's on that journey. What ideal is steering you?

Needing Old MacDonald's Forest Song

Autumn Fog on the Delaware River, photo ©Joy Kreves

A sudden duet of animal call and electronic alarm pierced the otherwise still night.  I'd forgotten to take the house alarm off before I ran downstairs to open the sliding glass door to better hear the strange animal noises from the back yard. They'd started around midnight, and it must have been around 2am by the time I finally decided to get up for a better listen, since they were keeping me awake anyway.

It's hard to tell where sounds are coming from at night; they seem to echo off the river that isn't far away, and bounce off the mountains and were probably not coming from our back yard.  My first impression was of lowing cows, but the nearest cows that I know of would probably not sound this close or we'd hear them often.  Wouldn't we?   There seemed to be more than one and I judged the noise as having to come from a large mammal.  We do have the occasional bear come around, and way too many deer.  I decided it was most likely a deer mating call.

When I googled deer rutting sounds, the first video that came up was of a red-tailed deer in Scotland.
 http://youtu.be/jf7bOSPihrk
That did sound very much like what I heard, but audios of the white-tailed deer we have here in New Jersey, did not come close to the sound at all!  How odd that the two kinds of deer would have such different "roars."  Days later, I don't really think the sounds could have been from our deer.  The next day neighbors confirmed hearing the noises also and they were equally confused.   Maybe it was cows after all; it's still a mystery.  
In further pursuing an answer I came across this audio track of Shakuhachi, traditional Japanese bamboo flute, used for meditation and traditional Japanese music.  This audio is part of a traditional piece that evokes the calls of deer in the autumn forest.  The music sounds nothing like what I'd heard, of course, but is very lovely and appropriate for this season.  "Distant Cry of the Deer":
http://youtu.be/f6ljwJoG8zU

According to the International Shakuhachi Society website   the "Distant Cry of the Deer" was composed by Ueda Hodo who began the Ueda Ryu School with his brother around 1917.
What an image this music creates for me!  I see the two deer standing in the midst of a forest of trees that are clothed in brilliant autumnal reds and oranges.  A misty fog lingers between the mountains, hovering over a small creek that separates the deer. As they call to each other, leaves slightly quiver on the trees before they release to gently float down through the fog.  It is a love scene full of longing, and the breathy bamboo flute sound aligns in my mind with this misty image.

Music can be so much like painting!  In high school I had a wonderful violin teacher at The Chicago Conservatory of Music, Ki Joo Lee.  I was having a bit of trouble with a passage in some concerto I was playing.  Mr. Lee finally stopped me and described a scene...I wish I could remember exactly what he said now, but maybe it was something about walking through a shadowed forest, going around some turn, and then suddenly seeing a mountain range...perhaps there was a sunrise there, too... with a feeling of freedom at hand.  Mr. Lee clearly related to the passage in the music in a personal, emotional and visual way, and I immediately played the passage much better, having realized on many levels, what it was (or could be) all about.  Of course the best visual art touches us in those same ways.

The incident with the unidentified animal noises has brought home how little I know about my surroundings.  In this way I am like so many American suburbanites, living amidst many plants I can't name and many animals whose cries I can't identify.  We don't know our own environment!  This year it took a more nature-aware friend to point out to me that our usually brilliant red and yellow autumn leaves are all dotted and disfigured by the drought we had last summer.  There is a new term for our condition of ignorance about our environment, called "Nature Deficit Disorder," caused by living too much of our lives indoors.  I am sad to find myself afflicted.  Maybe we need a new version of the song every child is taught to learn farm animal identification - a version for city dwellers and suburbanites:

Old McDonald had a forest / EIEIO / and in that forest he had some deer /  EIEIO /  With a ? ? here and a ? ? there .... everywhere a ? ? ...

How many American adults can sing what the deer, the bear, the bobcat, the opossum....the raccoon....the squirrel....the skunk... the coyote...the tree frogs...say ?

Shame on us!  We Americans should know all of these and more!  The composer of "The Distant Cry of the Deer" knew what deer sound like before taking artistic liberties with that sound.  I am saying that creativity comes from everything the artist has experienced as well as everything the artist knows.  To be deeply touching, abstract art also must stem from an understanding of the environment the artist lives in.  I've seen a lot of superficial abstract work!  People often think it is easy to create abstract work because it doesn't have to conform to the visual rules of realism, but actually it does have to stem from that same realism or it rings false.  My violin teacher understood that and the bamboo flute composer and player in the track above understood it.  I am beginning to understand it in a much deeper way.

A Relationship With Rocks

This week I've realized that people have many ways of conversing with stones, not always involving sound. Rock walls were the first art surface, and modern people still enjoy looking at cave art and wondering what those image-filled surfaces are saying. We have a rich relationship with all kinds of rocks.

TAIHU ROCK, Chinese, Qing dynasty, 1644-1912, Gift of the P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art, and museum purchase, Asian Art Department Fund [2008-65], Princeton Unversity Art Museum.

Recently I visited The Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey.  After viewing the brilliant special exhibit, "The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art, and Society",  I went downstairs to the Asian art collection.  At the bottom of the stairway there is a magnificent decorative garden rock, riddled with holes.  Of course I've seen these rocks before in Chinese gardens but I was surprised to learn that that these limestone "Taihu Rocks", were formed by collaboration between man and nature.  This rock would have been drilled with holes and then immersed under water in Lake Tai in Jiangsu province for perhaps hundreds of years until nature carved, smoothed, eroded and shaped it into its present form.  The resulting "Chinese scholars' rock" was probably displayed in a garden where one could ponder the fascinating shapes it presents.  Surely these rocks must speak as the wind whistles through their holes? Surely they tell stories from their water years?

When I was a kid my parents always planted a huge vegetable garden in our Illinois backyard.  One day they found a rock that looked exactly like the potatoes my mother was digging up for dinner.  In what was an out-of-character mischevious mood, she heated it up with the other spuds and served it to my sister who promptly burned herself with it and did NOT laugh.  A long string of apologies did not allay her offense at having received a stone instead of a potato on her plate.  My mother had no comic talent and felt terrible at her misjudgement.  Whenever I see a "potato rock" I think of that prank gone awry.  Perhaps this story has something to do with my enjoyment of making ceramic "rocks" and mixing them in with real rocks as I did in my Solastalgia installation:

Rocks detail, SOLASTALGIA, ©Joy Kreves 2010

One of my in-laws was buried this week.  At the graveyard  a woman with a green emerald-ringed hand (emeralds symbolize harmony, wisdom, love, reason, and prophecy) placed little rough stones on top of the smooth tombstones of other family members.  I'd forgotten what that meant, and asked.  "It says we've been here, visited..."  Of course!  That is simple enough.  No obscure symbolism there.  The stones speak for people, these with their rough surfaces in contrast to the polished granite headstones, saying "I was here". 

 
I was at Ringing Rocks Park in Eastern Pennsylvania again this past week. The land there is riddled with boulders large and small, deposited by glaciers so long ago... In the middle of a boulder-filled forest

Boulder field at Ringing Rocks Park, Pa, photo ©Joy Kreves

you come to a clearing, a field of boulders where nothing grows.  These rocks hold their own mystery.  When hit with a hammer, some of the rocks ring like a bell, others do not.  Many of them are riddled with dents from the number of times people have tried them, hammer to stone.  The ringers and non-ringers have been

Rocks pitted from hammer hits. Photo ©Joy Kreves

scientifically analyzed and found to contain the same elements.  It does not matter what size or shape they are.  It doesn't matter where or how they rest.  One theory is that it depends on the stresses inside of the rocks.  Basically, it is a still a mystery why the ones that ring do so.  There have been performances there, incorporating sounds of the rocks, but when humans aren't there striking them and forcing sounds I have to wonder, what are the ringing rocks saying?  What histories do they speak of?  What is their role in this unique environment?

I have a large heart shaped rock that came to my attention shortly before my mother died.  For me, this rock symbolizes her presence and I placed it beneath a tree that I can see out my kitchen window.  Once when I did an internet search I found that there are lots of people who have whole collections of heart rocks. That isn't my goal, but I appreciate the one that seemingly found me.

At our grave sites we ask the carved and polished headstones to mark where we lie, and the pebbles to tell we came to visit. We throw them in anger.  We skip them on water and live in houses built from them or have counters topped with polished slabs of them; we value their sculptural forms and we find "special" ones. We wear polished, faceted gemstones if we can afford them, for their symbolism.  The Taihu rocks were eroded by natural lake water in a gentle conversation between man and nature.  Here in the United States our bedrock is now being fractured with a man-made toxic stew in our desperate grab for more natural gas.  I don't know what our energy solution is but surely it cannot rely on this method that too easily poisons us and our environment! 

Rocks are holders of meaning.  It seems all people are attracted to them and we each have our own relationship with them.  I am thankful for the continual evolution of my own relationship with rocks.