Live Like an Artist – Overwintering
— I’ve been thinking a lot about the process of overwintering, as I have brought in a couple of geraniums to spend the next season or so on my kitchen windowsill, and a hibiscus plant for another corner. The winter at latitude 53 in Canada is a whole vibe, as they say. The long nights, the dearth of light, the cold — all require a certain mindset, a fortitude, and the ability to make the most of what warmth and light we do have. For some reason, making art in the winter seems to mirror this situation in a lot of ways.
— This week I learned about the “right to light” on Instagram, and the idea really hit me.
— I’ve never really delved into the work of Philip Guston before tbh, but I was reading an essay in Amy Sillman’s Faux Pas. “From Garbage Cans to God” and just went down the usual rabbit holes. She says, “I mean, what else is life made of? You plod to work, eat a sandwich, think about death, call a friend, feel dread, walk the dog, notice some stuff, get an idea, take out the trash, then go back to the painting wall. (And that’s if you’re lucky).”
— You might know or have spent time thinking about Guston’s Head and Bottle.
— From the NGA essay: “Renowned in his time and in ours, Guston’s work continues to resonate, attract, and provoke, raising crucial questions about the relationship of art to beauty and brutality, freedom and doubt, politics and the imagination.”
— It’s good to randomly pick an artist you think you know something about and just do a little internet delve on them. The internet is increasingly unpleasant, but it still has a lot of uses, ha.
— I’ve spent some time this week, as one does, comparing two translations of the same line from Tomas Tranströmer.
This is by Patty Crane, from the book Bright Scythe:
“We look almost happy out in the sun, while we bleed to death from wounds we don’t know about.”
This one by Robin Fulton in The Great Enigma:
“We look almost happy out in the sun, while we are bleeding fatally from wounds we don’t know about.”
— They resonate in different ways, and I’m grateful for them both. I like the word fatally, in the second, but I like the finality of the sounds in words bleed, death, wounds, together. And I’m sure each translator mulled over these possibilities. Meanwhile, we look almost happy out in the sun. Worth a life’s work to have written something so true.
— Teju Cole on Tranströmer upon his Nobel win: “Reading him, one is also reminded of American poets like Charles Simic (for his surrealism) and Jim Harrison, Gary Snyder, and W. S. Merwin (for their plain speech and koan-like wisdom). But Tranströmer casts a spell all his own, and in fact the strongest associations he brings to my mind are the music of Arvo Pärt and the photography of Saul Leiter.”
— Teju Cole is an amazing writer, speaking of which. O to write like this as he does in the same article: “The images with which Tranströmer charges his poems bring to mind the concept of “acheiropoieta,” “making without hands”; in Byzantine art, acheiropoeitic images were those believed to have come miraculously into being without a painter’s intervention. The Shroud of Turin and the Veil of Veronica are the most famous examples. These were images registered by direct contact, and they were usually images of the Holy Face of Christ. (Albrecht Dürer, in his immodest way, was alluding to such images when he painted his deliriously detailed full-frontal self-portrait of 1500.) I feel Tranströmer’s use of imagery is like this, and like contact printing, in which a photograph is made directly from a film negative or film positive. There is little elaborate construction evident; rather, the sense is of the sudden arrival of what was already there, as when a whale comes up for air: massive, exhilarating, and evanescent.”
— The gift of artists and writers speaking about art and writing. I’m grateful for that today.
— I’ve been bookmarking articles about the horrors (continuing) of AI, the incredibly sad decline in reading and therefore cognitive ability in this time, but you know what, maybe some other time. I’m preaching to the converted here anyway. I’ve been thinking too, about how no one ever picked up a book because someone said “you should read or you’ll be stupid.” People do things like read or look at art because they want to be delighted, or be shocked by beauty, or for joy or surprise or to be taken outside of where they are. They want radiance and the sublime and to feel, to experience. Why not show them that? How can we show people that more? I mean, of course we can. We need to keep trying.
— Thanks for reading my “art notes.” And thanks for all the support! If you enjoyed this post there is the possibility of leaving a tip on my Ko-Fi — link on the bottom of this page.
