Notice Each Thing

We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. 

We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.

  

According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate.

Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: By creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we counteract this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even. 

A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.

~ Annie Dillard

  

Witness. Yes, we can do that for one another. These paper structures, created with rusted and water colored papers, evolved from the need to create. Of course they evolved. For instance, we worked surrounded by long pine needles so they became the center of a flower. 

In a tree, on some rusty springs, in the brush, amongst the dried flowers from summer we set up the paper flowers and took photographs. 

          My niece and I walked around and found several different appealing placements.

 These are the new structures, the wholeness we contribute to the universe. And I       have returned home with boxes of pine cones, pine needles and dried summer        flowers. 

  More to come.

Creative Halloween Treats

This collage is 6 inches by 6 inches on paper. It includes papers I have prepared and a few snippets of found marks from the back of an old black and white photograph. As of yet it is still untitled. There is something cozy about making small collage in the evenings. And sooner than you think it will be time for the International Collage Exchange, an event in which I enjoy participating.

Today in the studio I was seized with some sort of energy and began to paint with my bare hands on a large birch panel. I had done a bit of that in my last piece, but today I painted and painted with the tips of my fingers, the palm of my hand and with gesture. It was fun, and resulted in a more organic set of marks. It seemed to me the marks I was making were more powerful than marks I have made in other ways. I’m curious to see how I feel about the piece when I go see it again tomorrow. I have also been marking on collage papers, some of which you see in the side bar.

I have always been the kind of person who prefers a treat to a trick. Here are a few blog treats you might enjoy.

As a visual treat I invite you to see the non-objective paintings and prints of Cheryl Taves, an artist from British Columbia, Canada. Her work can be seen here .

Here are some encaustic pieces I found interesting by Caite Dheere.


Annie Dillard is a compelling writer, as you know. If you wonder what it might be like to take a writing class taught by Annie you may enjoy reading this account of just such a class. The best parts are towards the last half of this essay. “You are the only one of you, she said of it. Your unique perspective, at this time, in our age, whether it’s on Tunis or the trees outside your window, is what matters. Don’t worry about being original, she said dismissively. Yes, everything’s been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. You writing it makes it possible.”

If you like poetry and the writing life you might like this blog by Rob Mclennan full of interviews of poets and writers. The most recent interview is of Poet Joe Rosenblatt. He said of his process “A poem might begin with a fragment, a musical line running through my upper story, and then this fragment germinates and tries to link itself up with other fragments and word linkages and then slowly ever so slowly a coherent pattern emerges on the page. The poem writes the poet, not the converse. It is a strange birthing process.”