The Fraternal Twins Devastation and Creation

This year on the East Coast the month of March was not only a lion, but a raging, biting, rabid beast.  It was a wet, wet month.  Snow that came down in
February and March as a thick, luxurious blanket of beautiful quiet, turned insidiously destructive.  Writing about it now, only a month after the worst storm, surrounded by all sorts of trees and bulbs that are perfuming the spring air with their glorious creations, seems surreal.
 

March's lions strained so many trees, already soggy from a snow saturated ground, that many giants fell right over.  Morning's daylight revealed neighborhood devastation.  Beautiful, sky high pine trees had fallen right over, shocking people with their shallow, shallow roots exposed.
Within days of each other torrential rains further weakened the grip of tree roots.  Across the street one huge tree fell across the neighbor's driveway, just missing the house, and right nextdoor another fell- luckily downhill, away from the house it would have smashed.  Power lines were down and roads flooded.  It was a fugue of devastation.  Even sunny days later as I walked near the woods there was the crash of a tree giving in to gravity's pull. Our curbs are still piled with cut up trunks and branches in front of nearly every home.  Some yards are still littered with storm debris.  Yesterday, April 16th, the phone rang with an automated message that our town has been officially declared a "disaster area" with instructions on where to go to file for some help.

And yet today the bulbs bloom, the empty window boxes beckon, the dogwood trees are dressed to the hilt, and birds fly busily gathering nesting material. They must be having an easy time finding broken twigs this year! Temperatures have been in the 80's for days in a row. As I pulled piles of loose downy fluff off the panting dog I wondered if any of those birds would choose to line their nests with that soft insulator.  It could make a nest as quiet as the big snow that hushed us through the raging white lion.  That beast could not even postpone spring's insistence on creating. If there is a lesson to be learned it seems it would be:  Creation follows its sibling Devastation, every time.
  

RIVER DRAWING, ©JoyKREVES '10, ink, graphite and watercolor on newsprint.

This is an old theme, but it recurs regularly with variations across the world as it does in my art-making.  Like the birds in search of nesting materials, I have loaded my car with a few especially lichen and moss covered branches that have potential to be sculpture materials. I wouldn't be able to create art from them if Devastation hadn't played with them first.

In another variation of the twin's collaborations a work of art often begins auspiciously, then turns problematic.  I often find that attempts to cure or "fix" the problems are dead ends. Instead, if I either transform or even highlight them they become an integral, rich part of the piece.  There is a Japanese ceramic technique of highlighting cracks in ceramic bowls with gold.  The flaws become the beauty, the character, increasing the value of the piece.  This is a lesson art can teach everyone who creates.  Mother Earth had fraternal twins and named them Devastation and Creation.  We must all negotiate with both of them to succeed in life and in art.

The River Reveals Two Words

As I work on pieces for my next solo show this September '10 at the Rider University Art Gallery in Lawrenceville, NJ, I'm thinking more and more about the river.  I've been out photographing the river, painting the river, making ceramic sections of river, and, crocheting the river.  I've lived near the Delaware River for decades, but it's really only recently that I've felt it's grip.  I've actually been thinking that I couldn't possibly ever move away from this river.  I am increasingly under its spell.  There is a word I've recently learned,  "solastalgia". 

                          
Solastalgia is defined as "the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault...a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at 'home'".  In my case, the pain may be from learning about the  immediate assault on our river's essential beauty and the utility of its water due to gas drilling operations.   An artist friend who creates beautiful nature-inspired sculpture (www.naomiteppich.com) and lives in Northeaster Pa  when she's not in Manhattan, started to send me information on the threats to river water from gas drilling.  Our beautiful Delaware river is just one of the many national water treasures slated for, or already being ravaged by the hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" process that entails from gas drilling.  A  group of "concerned citizens", www.DamascusCitizens.org , is desperately trying to enlighten people about the environmental and health facts of the gas drilling process. Liz Bucar's blog written from an upstate New York perspective, "Breathing is Political", http://lizjbucar.wordpress.com/ is chock full of readable information.  As a  Pennsylvania homeowner who got involved when gas drilling arrived at his doorstep, Josh Fox has documented the dangers in film, and the Damascus Citizens' website has links to his award-winning work.  The imminent loss of our river as the beautiful ecosystem that we know would be devastating in SO MANY ways!  The Damascus Citizens are certainly feeling and being motivated by "solastalgia".

pic:  site of Washington's Crossing
The historical importance of the area of the river just a few minutes drive from my house resonates loudly every year when dedicated history buffs re-enact it's Christmas morning crossing by General George Washington and his troops, dressed in period costumes. One year when the river was too low to row a boat across they accomplished "the crossing" on motorcycles over the bridge! Now the sad state of the economy is threatening this hugely significant state park. With only three employees to maintain it, the park is really struggling.

At Canal Frame-Crafts Gallery in Washington Crossing, Pa, 

 

www.CanalFrame.com

owner Deborah Crow, C.P.A. (Certified Picture Framer) is 

heavily involved in the history of the region.  She is
actively trying to save the Pennsylvania side of the park
from closure, and currently has up a benefit show,
"Rally the Troops".  

10a.m.-5pm Tues. through Sat. until March 6, '10,  

(hurry up!) one can see this exhibit which showcases works 

by many local artists that are related to the area's history.  

Go to 1093 General Greene Rd., Washington Crossing, Pa.

(Below L: paintingby James Feehan)                                            

                 

   (Above: Giclee print by Gail Bracegirdle)

People like Deborah Crow, the Damascus Citizens,  and all artists who have been inspired by the Delaware River region understand the second word I recently learned, "solophilia".  Solophilia is "the love of and responsibillity for a place, bioregion, planet and the unity of interrelated interests within it.  I think I am definitely developing a version of this affliction as I walk beside and cross the river I know best, The Delaware.  I hope my work will express the unity of interrelated art media as well as the unity of interrelated interests along The Delaware, as I create and consider the river in my newest work.

Tree-stamped Life

Dad bought and
added onto
the tiny house
where I grew up.
Front yard was
edged with
maples.
Side yard held
a big, bold
box elder. That
tree had eight
EIGHT trunks!
Bugs came in,
freely covered
our walls
in their frequent season.

Others may have checked
for bedbugs at night; we
checked for box elders
between sheets.
One year Dad
and Mom, perhaps,
had had enough.
Eight glorious trunks,
cut to the ground.

Dad built a house and planted trees
by the door.
After Mother died
he grew weary  of them.
"They drop so many leaves",
he complained.
One day the magnificent magnolias
were exterminated
for their messy ways.

Dad moved into a house enhanced
by tall, tall pines.  Grandfather pines!
He immediately cut some down,
explaining to distraught neighbors,
"They were too close
to the house, and could fall."  Then, "Oh,
I didn't know they were 'protected'".  And,
"What's done is done."

Next, Hurricane Katrina's wrath.
Everyone's tall, tall pines came down,
including more of Dad's,
smashing new roof, new railing and garage.
"You wouldn't recognize the neighborhood,"
he said, "the trees are all
just gone".

Dad moved into a house shaded by old oaks.
The house is "up for sale" now, as they say.
The mowing, the leaf-raking, the yard
is too much for him...
"I'm 88 years old now", he repeats, amazed.
"The plan is to move to an apartment",
this gardener, this grim-tree-reaper and steady tree-planter says now.
"Someone else
can take care of the trees."

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Water

My last post was about the rain barrel project I participated in with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.  Here is a photo of my finished rainbarrel, which will be auctioned off after touring the state with those by other artists, in a PR blitz sometime this spring:

 

Since completing that project I have been scheduled for a solo exhibition in September '10, at the Rider University Art Gallery in Lawrenceville, NJ.  Because it is the largest space I've ever been able to show in, it is an opportunity for me to expand the scale of my work in spite of difficult studio size limitations.  Water seems to be the dominant theme in my mind lately, and I am working on a mixed media wall relief of a river.  I say "a river" to be more geographically inclusive, but the only river I really know is the beautiful Delaware.  I'm crocheting parts of a river, painting parts, photographing parts, and making ceramic tiles for parts of this watery line that cuts between New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  

This week we were on the receiving end of the worst storm the area has seen in many decades, or so our long-time neighbors say.  A foot of snow came down on the several inches that were already there, but it was a heavy, heavy snow.  The 30 ft. tall bamboo folded down to the ground under it's weight, and then froze there.  Snow = water all dressed up in bridal whites.

It was immensely beautiful as twilight settled in.

Then we began to hear noises.  "Wasn't that just the bamboo brushing against the house as it lays down, laden with snow?  Shhhh!  Was that a branch falling on the roof - no, it wasn't that loud...probably more bamboo moving".  Soon the power went out.  Nothing new there, it does this almost every time there is a rainstorm.  It stayed off.  I found and lit candles, remnant ghosts from Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners past.  I'd never seen anything like this though:  in what should have been the darkness of night, long flashes of light illuminated everything brighter than any July dead noon glare.  Pink/white/green/purple light outside as if indeed, the whole world WAS a stage.  Was that lightning?   Was that some arching electric current?  Funny how the mind retrieves phrases stuffed away though not understood.  I didn't really know what an "arching electric current" was, but in grasping for explanations for what I was seeing, the phrase came to mind.  My daughter recalled the phrase, "thunder snow", which I'd never even heard of before, and I grew up near Chicago, Illinois, where people know their snow!

Hours later, the power came back on, feebly at first, and then for real.  We went to sleep amidst the silence that only snow can surround you with.  The next morning all of that wet snow's destructive powers were evident. For us, a tree hung alongside our driveway, branches lay everywhere, and another tree fell across and smashed a section of fence.  Down the street it looked like a tornado had gone through.  Branches and trees were down across the road, making it impassable for several hours.  One of the giant, tall pines that edge the street at the southern end and make our street so special, uprooted and fell, just the tips of some branches hitting the brick house it had stood in front of.  Yet all of this happened with so little noise!  In a summer storm we would have heard great loud crashing and thrashing.  In this wet snow-wrapped fury we only heard, "...shhh...was that... something_____?"  

Today as I was getting dressed I heard the tiniest "drip...drip...drip..."  Of course I looked up.  "Funny, I don't see anything".  Still, that unmistakable "drip...drip...drip".  I opened the shade, hoping to see dripping icicles magically throwing their sound inside the house, but the windows were all wet.  I took down the curtains and blinds, and water was dripping from the inside of the window mouldings.  UGH.  Nothing localized, where a bucket could catch it.

Well the past does haunt:  two years ago our handyman was up on the roof and said we needed some extension on the flashing, because the roofer hadn't done it right.  He added some sheets of aluminum.  Later, the neighborhood yard guy (who nobody likes to call because he is so unreliable and overpriced, but who everyone ends up calling in the inevitable pinch,) was on our roof for something I've forgotten.  He wrested the metal sheets off, thinking they were a roof job done wrong.  Afterwards, he insisted that we didn't need them.  Welcome the big bad snow of '10. Those metal bandaides would probably have saved the bedroom wall.  Now nothing can be done with the "situation" until all the snow melts.  I could be wringing out wet towels for weeks...

Ahhh, water, with your many faces!  So good, so bad, and now so ugly!

Cubism and The Ornery Logic Of Water

Every time there is a natural disaster, water has to be one of the very first needs to be met.  With the recent earthquake in Haiti it is once again a most valuable commodity.  I was already thinking about precious water this month though, because I am participating in a rain barrel project with the NJ Dept. of Environmental Protection, Division of Water Supply.  The idea is that artists will paint recycled barrels (they once held cranberries), turning them into beautiful works of art to be auctioned off, thus encouraging people to save and reuse the valuable rainwater that would otherwise run off the roofs, out of the gutters and into the sewers.  While  relief agencies are setting up delivery systems for getting bottled water to Haiti, I am in the process of painting a design on my barrel that I hope will inspire someone here to use it to save more of the water we get from rain.  The drawing I submitted for approval was basically a combination of two

   above:  detail, THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT, acrylic on canvas, ©JoyKREVES

below:  CEDAR MOTHS, acrylic on linen, ©JoyKREVES

already completed paintings, adapted to the water theme.  It seemed like an easy adaptation.  I would paint something similar to "Cedar Moths", but the cedar cuts would be water rings - the kind you get when you throw a pebble into the lake, and the background would be sky, perhaps with butterflies flitting about in a gentle rain... (no matter that as far as I know butterflies are so delicate that even the gentlest rain would likely pummel them, wouldn't it?)

I painted the barrel with a beautiful blue clouded sky as the first step.  It looked great!  Right away, the art policeman reared his ugly face though, and I ran into difficulty with this seemingly simple project.  I had neglected to thoroughly work out just how I was going to combine an atmospheric background with a flat  design, on a round surface. After painting a few dark blue glazes of ovals over my sky for beginnings of the water rings, things weren't looking promising:  the art policeman told me that water rings only make sense on the horizontal  ground, not up in the sky, and I could see that the round barrel was quarreling with the mixture of flat patterns and illusions of space!  Logic is so ornery! Water clearly follows many traffic rules and I was already in a violation.

I decided to proceed with the flatter design route so, I painted out my entire beloved sky, ending up very close to the medium pthalo blue color that the plastic barrel had started off with!  Square One.  Today I painted water rings, this time as a linear design.  Each is at a different perspective, flying every which way over the blue like Larry Poons' ovals. The cedar cuts in my previous painting had worked well that way, I reasoned, and a vertical barrel, after all, is not the ground beneath our feet, so no need to pretend.  At this point I became insecure about my water rings, though.  Round water ring images do have a way of being more firmly tied to perspective; they are only ever oval because of our viewpoint, and so appear to us in perspective only horizontally.  I hope that I won't have to paint them all out again, to redo them as more logical elipses.  I hope they will "read" as water rings, no matter their mixed up orientations!

When painting, I often find myself having to make decisions about visual vs. mental logic.  i.e., can I get away with this shape here, and then repeat it from the same perspective over there where in the real world it really would be turned?  The art police come knocking.  You'd think I would have learned to deal with them once and for all as part of my art studies in college, and certainly in graduate school, however they continue to visit me intermittently, making all kinds of threats, and each time I have to learn all over again how to deal with them and their charges.

When Picasso decided to forgo unified perspectives within his "Cubist" paintings, what freedom he must have felt! The nose could suddenly be sideways when the painting asked for the line that shape, not when the "reality" of the face dictated it's frontal symmetry.  Why then, don't I take a hint already given?  Isn't the key here actually play?  If one is playing, one can bend and throw away rules to a joyful result.  If one is slaving towards a logical art, (and isn't that an oxymoron anyway!), then one must maintain a unified perspective;  one must present water as we know it to be.  Logistics.  Water.  It's a serious job to collect and get water to Haiti, but my project can just celebrate the freedom of art, and be a barrel of fun! It's sort of a Cubist revelation - again.

The Reptile vs. The Lotus

Above:  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN, ©JoyKREVES'06

I've got to start 2010 (HAPPY NEW YEAR!) with a postscript to my last blog post:  I found this pertinent little item of information in the New York Times last week:  Van Gogh art scholar Martin Baily has discovered that "the artist inflicted injury on his ear after learning that his brother, Theo, was about to get married.  Vincent saw the marriage as a threat to his brother's continued emotional and financial support."  So we now know the famous ear incident was not an accident, after all. In other words, Vincent van Gogh acted out of that most primitive human instinct, FEAR.

Fear and rage are governed by our oldest and smallest, "primitive" or "reptilian" brain.  I first learned about our three brains when I read Robert Bly's woonderful book, LEAPING POETRY, many years ago, and I remain fascinated by this fact:  our oldest brain-part is identical to a reptile's entire brain.  We have evolved two other, newer brains over this first, innermost one.  Why do we have three brains?  Evolution!  Our more recent brains overlay the primitive one, and take charge of much more sophisticated tasks.  The reptilian brain functions from a basic, survival mode.  These ideas led me to create my TurtleBaby series.

Left: Original TurtleBaby, ©JoyKREVES (circa 1984)

Is it Necessary? Mud and Van Gogh's Ear

A friend of my husband's recounted that as a young man he had intended to go to The Art Student's League in NYC, but when he got there everyone was sitting on the floor, and this convinced him it was not the place or the career path for him.  He became an engineer instead.

left: Terrible Tragedy, porcelain paperclay

Last week, in making what will be my new batch of porcelain paperclay, I expressed my dislike for sticking my hands into the thick slurry.  Another clay artist there offered her own hands, saying how much she loved that feeling, how it brought back the happiness of playing with mud as a child.

Did I never play with mud?  All I can remember about mud is how we used it as a balm after bee stings.  My sister and I would rush to the hose, blast it into the nakedest soil we could find, and make mud as fast as possible.  Then we globbed it onto the sting site, where it seemed to deliver some measure of relief.  It was necessary.

below:  Celadon Vase, porcelain paperclay.

That didn't work the time a huge bee landed near my eye.  I stood like a statue, supressing the inclination to outrun the buzzy beast, while my mother cautioned, "Don't run or it will follow and sting you; stay still and it will leave." I can personally attest to that plan being based on false notions.  The bee did leave, but only after stinging.  (Was it angry that my blue eye was not a flower after all?)  That sting caused my eye to swell shut like a tennis ball in a matter of minutes, just in time for the arrival of our dinner guests, two of whom were children.  Their stares told me this evening was going to be seared into their memories, years later coming back up in         conversation as, "Remember the time we went to that family's house and their daughter was a monster with a deformed eye?"  "Oh yeah, I remember that!  That was scary!"  Without the mud balm, it took a week for my eye to fully deflate.

But I digress.  I was writing not about swollen eyes and social disasters, but about whether an artist needs to get down and dirty or what it means to not do so.

My daughter, a budding artist, gets some measure of glee from getting coated with charcoal.  Black streaks smear across her face, hands and arms on a regular basis. It seems her way of proclaiming her artistry to the public.  Does physical intimacy with one's medium lead to better, more powerful art?  It sounds romantic to answer "yes", but I'm not convinced.  My husband has often reported to his colleagues that I could "paint in an evening gown without risking its ruin."  It is true that I rarely emerge from my studio covered in whatever I was working with, and were I to move out of my studio tomorrow, future occupants would likely have trouble discerning what the space had recently been used for.  The floor is not spattered with paint and there is no odor of lingering turpentine.  The main thing I'd leave as evidence is the hundreds of small pushpin and nail holes in the walls, but these are easily filled.

I have been considering the aspect of making art in a state of physical abandonment, but there is also always that sibling state to consider:  the state of mental abandonment.  Here we arrive at Van Gogh's ear.  The big Q:  Was it really necessary for him to experience those emotional imbalances in order to make brilliant paintings?  An artist/psychologist friend of mine who has extensively researched Van Gogh's creativity thinks not.  In fact, he took such offense at my offered birthday game, "Pin the Ear on Van Gogh", that he refused to accept it.  He found no kernels of humor in the game and scolded, "He did NOT cut off his ear!"  (Evidently and possibly only by accident,  he only injured the tip, which produced enough blood to launch the legend.)  The "PUBLIC" seems to desire a certain amount of emotional polarity in artists, and after all it is so much more interesting for a bio to read that an artist cut off body parts in a fit of instability than, "he/she led a calm and balanced life".  Of course, visiting the emotionally dark places is something we as humans must experience sometime, to some degree, but is it necessary for artistic brilliance?  I'm not sure...

If someone who likes to play in the mud is around next time I mix clay, I will again accept their willing hands to do the dirty work.  If not,...I'll get clay under my own fingernails, because it's a necessary step, and someone's got to do it.