WR II and Home Again

This image is for Susan, Charlie, Phil, Mariella, and James--who will understand the reference.

"Of shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings . . ." and so it went at WR II. At times the conversations were loud! So loud that I found out later that the phone in my pocket rang at 6:28 and I didn't hear it.


For me -- former nascent connections were strengthened and, I hope, one new one in the making.

It was, once again, colder than hell at 5 a.m. At WR III we will be talking on the benches at the RR station after dinner, or at least I won't be freezing to death the next morning.

I was not in fact at the Polka Dot at 5 a.m. It didn't open and I learned that its hours were in fact quite irregular. This together with the information I picked up at WR I -- that the owner is quite ill and what I noticed -- that everyone working there is close to 70 -- and that the building itself is for sale, makes me fear that the end is near for this small, unassuming landmark. So, I ate my breakfast in New Hampshire. Grrrr.

White River II

This is where I'll be at 5 a.m. tomorrow: The Polka Dot Restaurant in White River.

This week has been packed. New work was on display last night at the reception at the STAART Gallery in St. Albans. Exhaustion (brought in the last piece 15 minutes before the opening), followed by excitement and a case of nerves because it was the first showing of my Rural Urban stuff (you know, trying to light my ciggie with a flash drive), followed by anticipation of White River (took forever to get to sleep).

Goes without saying that I'm bringing my camera and I sincerely hope it is not as cold at 5 a.m. tomorrow as it was on January 4th. Looking forward to this evening at the Tip Top, and realizing that what, in January was nervousness at meeting everyone, is now pleasure at meeting folks who are no longer complete strangers. It is a very nice shift.

Identity is 'round the back

Now that I've almost resumed my pre-AOA schedule, I'm reading the NY Times again on a nearly daily basis. Somehow today I ended up at this article on "Saving the Suburbs".

Near the end are some fascinating images, well worth looking at. But, in reading it I was reminded of two things out of my visual past:

ONE
When I was living in Canada, all three times, I often took trains from London to Montreal or from London to Kalamazoo, or from Hamilton to Cornwall or Detroit. One of the things I loved most about riding trains was that in the urban areas, you saw back yards--back yards of houses, apartment buildings, industrial structures. Scenes you would never have occasion to see unless you worked, lived, or had business at one of these structures.

TWO
In one of my graduate design classes with a master designer, I remember him saying about suburbia--starting with the idea which we all know, the little box houses that, row after row, all look the same--that though from the street you really can't tell them apart, if they were all reversed so that the back yards were in front, there would be instant individuality. Some with mini-playgrounds, some with pools, some with lush gardens, some with dog runs and picnic tables, etc. Awnings or not, porches or not, bird feeders or not.

Our dwellings in such settings are Janus-faced. Conformity in front, individuality to the rear. Maybe as satellite imagery gets better and better and closer and closer, all will be exposed.

Apologies to Diane and the VAC. . .

. . . not that it matters to them, but it does to me. I had told Diane I would be in Burlington yesterday at the VAC brainstorming session. I was not. (And I am one who, unless I'm dead, will do what I say.)

And, in my own defense, the reason I wasn't there was because of art. The image here is a top view of a treasure. It is the paper equivalent of a chest of gold and precious stones, heaped up in spilling splendor. The book runneth over with creation.

This is one of the myriad sketchbooks of Meta Strick, a Fairfield artist (YES! Franklin County!) One of these is apparently filled every two to four months. Filled with a maturity of visual thought, from a mind that must be a maelstrom of imagination.
I met her in the St. Albans Artists Guild, and she has asked me to design a web site for her. I saw her work for the first time a week ago. And what I saw was one of these sketchbooks. I only got a moment's look at it, but my mind immediately flashed to "how on earth can I get enough money to buy this?" "Can I rob a bank and get away with it?" What I saw was stunning. She said she would bring more next week. Well, "next week" was yesterday. And so, I did not go to Burlington. Instead I photographed a few pages from the four sketchbooks she brought. She allowed me to take them home.

Page after page, spread after spread, colors upon colors, mediums upon mediums--the January/February 2009 book is already filled.

After the morning meeting we were both at, we went to lunch. For almost two hours, then I went to the STAART Gallery hoping to find the owner, Stina Plant, there. I did. I spread these books out before her and she was as entranced as I was. (And we are both photographers.) I was there for an hour, and, without thinking, and in a state of euphoria, I drove home--instead of to Burlington. Meta's black bag with the four small books in it, and now on the floor of my living room would not let me leave.

I have a short list of split horizon times in my life: this is/was one of them. Needless to say, when her site is done, you will find the announcement here.

Butter? A non-organic substance?

At my cousin's birthday party this past Sunday I overheard one of his sons say something about "going organic" in his maple sugaring operation. Instantly my mind went over the list of what goes into maple syrup: one item--sap. Startled, I moved in to listen.

Apparently, because he, as have generations before him, uses butter to quell the foam in the pan, his operation is not organic. I still can't digest this one. Admittedly, I've done no research other than recording the synapses that went off in my brain, but, as far as I know, cows eat grass and hay and produce milk. The milk is used to make butter. And, Tom, my cousin, throws a dab of it into the pan every so often during boiling to calm the foam. And, what's boiling is sap from the trees. There just ain't nothin' else in that pan.

And, yet, it's the syrup that comes out of that pan is not organic! I'm still chewing on this one. Inquiring minds want to know!

Art for the Poor

A cell phone can be a food stamp camera for artists. And, I debated this issue with myself when I was mulling over my AOA project design--at least the part of the guidelines that wanted us to involve Vermonters in art. In the end, I didn't include my idea in my proposal and I'm still chewing on it.

Then I thought of all the "bad art" this idea could spawn. This morning I decided that whatever this produced in the way of "art" could be no worse than the thousands of fake "countrified" craft pieces that only someone who had never seen a vernacular antique could love.

This shot was taken with a Nokia cell phone--back in the day (all of a year and half ago) when I was desperate to get back to photography but didn't have a camera. And here's another from that same time period. Same phone, same desperation.

Both are mucked about with in PhotoShop, but nothing too complicated.

My reasoning that this might be a good teaching idea is that, fundamentally, the source of all art is vision. Whether that vision appears to you in the real world or in your mind, when it gets turned into art it presents a vision for others to see. Of course then acceptance of that vision turns on others' taste--educated or not.

A cell phone is just as good as anything else at capturing a composition and offers a wonderful and ubiquitous tool for teaching a great many aspects of "making art". As to the PhotoShop part, well, there are some excellent and FREE programs that do everything needed.

I'll continue to chew on this for a while, and any comments will be much appreciated.

Ultramarine

The inevitable has occurred. My current obsession with color has collided with my lifelong passion for words. Try to get to sleep after that accident!

Much more than Finlay does, Ball drops bits of information about the words by which we refer to colors. Both bemoan the incredibly complicated linguistic history of "red"; and that being my favorite color, more about that will undoubtedly appear at some point in this blog.

However, last night the nugget concerned "ultramarine". All my life, well, anyway since I learned the word, it has meant blue; dictionaries concur: bright deep blue. And, for me, that's always been it. Red is red, black, black, blue, blue, and ultramarine, a blue special enough to have its own name. "Deep blue"? As in deep (ultra) blue sea (marine)? But of course. If I ever thought about it, that's likely the association I would have made, and perhaps others as well. (I'm in danger here of teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, for which the punishment should be death.)

I am however, teaching myself to suck eggs! I've studied both Latin and Greek and have always been able to call upon those languages to decipher unknown words I come across. Where in hell were they whenever I've used the word "ultramarine"?

The color of the sea is not germane here. These are Ball's words that kicked me in the cortex last night:

Lapis lazuli is found primarily in the East. . . . Its use in the West did not become widespread until the fourteenth century. The name reflects the pigment's status as a long distance import: in 1464 the Italian A. A. Filarete wrote in Trattato dell'artchitettura that "fine blue is derived from a stone and comes from across the sea and so is called ultramarine."

I knew that! NOT! Though I do know that the pure Latin word "ultra" translates to beyond, on the far side of. As in, "beyond the sea". Sometimes the synapses simply take forever to establish a connection -- ummm, something like broadband in Vermont.

AND, a footnote here to mention a new page attached to this blog: because once posts roll off the first page, they are rarely accessed by readers. Which means, books I've mentioned fall off the edge. I've added a link (top right) to the White River Book List. All books mentioned here, and some from my former blogs, will be kept there with my annotations.

Recovering Lost Data!

The image here is an example of what I was mucking about with when I was swept away by the AOA wave. It is a coffee-toned cyanotype made from a PhotoShop-created negative that was printed on a transparency. This particular print is on Arches paper.

This is a detail from that image:
There is a lot of info on the web about this process, generally referred to as alt-process photography. I first fell over it when I was reading Photography: A Cultural History by Mary Warner Marien early last spring. As I read on through the early history of photography I got more and more excited and then I came to the section on cyanotypes and thought, "I can do this!" I got the two chemicals, mixed them up and slapped an old 2-1/4" x 2-1/4" negative onto a piece of paper and sandwiched the pair between a piece of glass and a piece of wood with clamps. Of course, being spring in Vermont it was a day of mostly clouds and a fitful sun. But I ran around in the yard, my sandwich held out before me, catching the elusive rays.
And, sure enough, I got a small blue image. (With a UV light set-up you can expose inside, and at night, and when it's raining!)

And here may be the best part in these environmentally-conscious days: NO nasty chemicals go down the drain. Also convenient: you don't need a darkroom.

The two chemicals are massively diluted with water, and they are Ferric Ammonium Citrate and Potassium Ferricyanide. Their solutions are kept separate until use and then mixed in a small flat, hake-brush-wide container. Paint the solution on the paper and let it dry. After exposure, develop the print IN TAP WATER!!!!!

Well, now I've dug out my alt-process journal and am trying to recover all that I knew before setting it aside for AOA. More later on this stuff.

Digging Out from Under

WARNING: This post is shameless self-promotion.

I was in stasis because I had put so many things aside for the AOA work that I couldn't decide what to do first!

Well, I decided I can live in a pig sty but I can't not eat. So the first thing I've done is update my other (geeky) web site--the one that occasionally brings in money!

VT2000 Technical Services

You might recognize the name from my email address--same email address, same server since 1996 or '97, I forget which now, it's been so long.

So, if there are any artists out there who need web work, heh, heh, I'm here. Don't do shopping carts, flash, or other bells and whistles, just sharp, fast, safe, well-designed sites that handle images properly. Oh, and as long as I manage the site, I can host it as well.

And, as one artist to another, the cost for both is very reasonable.