It’s All About Me

Recently, I’ve been painting early morning light and shadows reflected off the wall behind pottery in our living room. I’m choosing a limited palette in a different set of primary colors for each painting. These paintings are small. I’m going to a larger format next.

In the meantime, I’m working on another cleaner primary color painting, from a photograph I took on the ferry headed back to Bayfield from Madeline Island a few weeks ago. Beautiful colors in  an unexpected setting. This painting is unfinished.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Squeak Carnwath/Cy Twombley

One of my favorite paintings at The Anderson Collection at Stanford University is Squeak Carnwath’s 74″ X 74″ painting, Full Time, 2003. Carnwath has included more imagery on her canvas than Cy Twombley included on his Thyrsis of Etna, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. But, like Twombley, Carnwath’s work includes childlike imagery, and the writing looks a lot like my own elementary school papers.

As soon as I type the words elementary school papers I see my own smeary lead, torn newsprint, and simultaneously I remember that some of my most treasured belongings are notes written for me by our sons when they were just learning to write.

Written slanty across the bottom of Carnwath’s canvas, what seems like a title: Life is A Full Time Job. Beneath the words all time, what looks like a handwritten notebook page filled with words: memory is not/ accurate recall/ We remember what/ we want. What we/ choose. Our present/ moment influences our/ memory of the past./ We remember what we/ want./ We make it real By/ writing our own history/ one tattooed in our memory. Poetry; lyrics, another word for sounds.

When drawings or paintings include perspective, it figuratively creates an image with three dimensional depth on a two dimensional surface. When Cy Twombley and Squeak Carnwath add lyrics to two dimensional, soon to be dry surfaces, they have added sound. And phonetically speaking, what about those names, Cy and Squeak?

Images of Squeak Carnwath’s work are not available to use online for free. www.squeakcarnwath.com/

And I Digress: Birds

I have one more artist I want to include here before I move on from painters who write on their canvases. I am waiting for permission to use a copyrighted image. So, in the meantime, I’ve printed some favorite poems recently, and Carol said she would like to see one of mine. So, this week it’s my two bird poems and my bird painting. Prayer was published in The Christian Century years and years ago.

Prayer

 Into the space between looking and seeing

skimmed the owl you asked for.

One shade darker than dusk

you could have missed it all together

as easily as you forget

faith and fear become the same thing on different days.

But one broad sweep cleared the mist

and one sharp glint bounced back.

Be careful.

Lord of the sculpted sky and flight,

even the birds obey you.

 

Dove

In a world where appearance outstrips essence,

people seem to prize their porcelain preen,

these finely crafted big-bodied birds my mother, the lover of birds,

chases from her feeder. Stupid puny heads.

A waste of good seed on some softly shaded china doll

crested by an ugly nut so small that,

would you crack it, you would find inside its fragile walls

little room but that required by deep blue pools of looking,

and the flow of throat that feeds from them their murmurings.

Water washing sand.

 

More on Writing and Painting

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/01/27/lars-lerin-swedish-institute-watercolor

Lars Lerin wrote on a number of the paintings included in his recent show at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis. It may not be clearly visible in the online image, but writing adds the texture that runs horizontally along the walls in the painting above. The writing on some of his canvases was clearly comprised of what looked like journal writing.

But, as far as I could tell, a number of his canvases, like the one on top, included shapes of written words, not actual words. Of course, had the writing been actual words, I wouldn’t have been able to read them since I don’t read or speak Swedish.

Byron and I visited cousins in Sweden on the same trip when we were in Berlin. Before that trip I wrote to a number of relatives my parents had visited and known. Only the one cousin responded. I asked her about the other cousins and was told they didn’t respond because they didn’t speak English. She told me how much the others had appreciated my mother and the fact she had spoken Swedish with them when she and my dad visited a number of years before that time.

My mother grew up in Lindstrom and Almelund, Minnesota in houses where Swedish was spoken. It wasn’t spoken in McMinnville, Oregon, where I grew up, and it wasn’t on the television set that always played in the living room at our house when my dad was home.

Byron and I enjoyed a lovely visit with our English speaking Swedish cousins. Our trip there was short. It was also the correct amount of time because I could tell that speaking all that English exhausted them.

Recently I mentioned a woman who told me that creatively it doesn’t matter if one paints or writes because they are both communication. Besides writing on his canvases, Lars Lerin sometimes paints images manifested on the glass in front of images he is painting.

On reflection, if I wanted to present my childhood home for posterity, I could write a series of stories, write a novel, or make a series of paintings, one of which would be the still image of our father’s face in glass on top of moving images reflecting back from a noisy television screen spilling empty stories.

 

Word’s Worth Part 3

I started thinking about the value of words again when I saw Lars Lerin’s watercolors at the Swedish American Institute in Minneapolis in May. Lerin’s work has joined a short string (possibly a bracelet) of memorable painters who write on their work. I am intrigued, puzzled, and usually entertained.

I laughed out loud when Byron and I came across Cy Twombley’s, Thyrsis of Etna at the Hamburger Bahnof, a museum of contemporary art in Berlin.

As a struggling left-handed child who, luckily, missed the forced-to-be-right-handed era at my elementary school by only one year, I’ve always struggled not to smear the pencil lead or ink when I dragged my hand across the freshly placed marks. I probably don’t need to say how the Calligraphy classes I took in college worked out for me. (Hint: Just about the same as Fencing) Standing in that well-known museum of art and looking at that smudgy triptych the size of a railroad car, made me laugh. I’ve read Twombley’s style referred to as calligraphy, and that makes me happy.

Lots of people admire Twombley’s Thyrsis of Etna. Studies have been done. Analyses have been written. YouTube videos are online. I’ve been thinking about the painting off and on for about five years now, ever since I first saw it. I wonder why I liked it so much. Visually, it looks like someone struggled to make it. I like that. The words, which appear as smears on the canvas in the image above, claim: “I am Thyrsis of Etna/blessed with a tuneful voice.” One writer I found says the pleasure in the painting is found in the musicality of the phrasing. http://averygooddinner.tumblr.com/post/7277869766/cy-twombly

Here’s what I think. “I am Thyrsis of Etna,” claims power. “Blessed with a tuneful voice,” claims beauty. Placed in a childlike manner onto an otherwise smudged surface claims power and beauty in the face of struggle. I like to repeat it myself. It sounds good; it feels good. It still makes me happy.