LIFE FORMS: like a bird

In my last post, I detailed the thinking, methods and materials that I used when making the work that comprised my last online exhibition, in spring of 2016, and I mounted one suite of those drawings in that post (last month). Please visit that post to read about that process.

For today, I will just post the six drawings that made up my suite called "like a bird."

As always, if you open the first image, you can click through in a lightbox form that enlarges the images a little, so you can see them better.

©Ravenna Taylor, "like a bird, 01," 2016, graphite, 15 x 11 inches

©Ravenna Taylor, "like a bird, 02," 2016, graphite, 15 x 11 inches

©Ravenna Taylor, "like a bird, 03," 2016, graphite, sumi ink, 15 x 11 inches

©Ravenna Taylor, "like a bird, 04," 2016, graphite, sumi ink, gouache, 15 x 11 inches

©Ravenna Taylor, "like a bird, 05," 2016, graphite, sumi ink, gouache, acrylic paint, fabric collage, 15 x 11 inches

©Ravenna Taylor, "like a bird, 06," 2016, graphite, sumi ink, gouache, acrylic paint, fabric collage, india ink, 15 x 11 inches

LIFE FORMS

Beauty is not enough, if there's one thing I'm sure of this morning, that would be it.
And what about reincarnation––I'm starting to think that's a good idea, or at least starting to understand why one might want to believe it.
Maybe I can learn to beg for mercy, I don't think I've tried that yet.
There comes a point when the extraordinary aspiration snaps and what do you have then?

 © Ravenna Taylor 2016 LIFE FORMS: Surface Tensions, Like A Bird, Like An Insect. Three suites of drawings

In my next post, I will present one of these suites of drawings along with some explication of the works, which were featured during March in the online Galerie Cerulean, and are now archived here.

HUM

©2013 Ravenna Taylor, untitled, gouache, colored pencil on toned paper, 3 x 4 inches

HUM

Stirred to wakeful
Words stream without start, unending

Streaming stringing
Strumming

Stranded constellations
Voices seeking ears

Like fingers searching
Thoughts to rest in verbs

Have you seen?
What with Life we share

Is the small I


©2013 Ravenna Taylor

Work Is What You Do To Live: Blue

Ravenna Taylor, 2012, Heat Waves #7, watercolor, pencil, 8 x 10 inches

This day was so crisp and bright, breezy, heaving scents of honeysuckle and wild multiflora rose! When I woke this morning to a chilly, dry, gem-like day, I immediately felt I'd had a long, complicated and colorful dream, although it took my looking away for it to come back to me. 

 Ravenna Taylor, "Rent Time," 2009, gouache on linen, 6 x 4 inches

In the dream, I remember there was a pair of birds with their fledgling chicks - somewhat large, ground-dwelling birds with big heads, like the Whip-poor-wills that used to suddenly flush from the ground in Arkansas.

Ravenna Taylor, "Facture #5," 1999, collaged watercolor and printed papers, 6.5 x 6.5 inches

(In summer there, in the Ozarks, one could actually hear the approach of twilight - the Whip-poor-wills began their calls at a very particular moment of the evening, so their song rose at the same even pace that the sun fell, and starting far away to the east, would come increasingly near to us on the almost-visible waves of dimming light.)

Ravenna Taylor, 2000, watercolor, gouache, collaged paper, 4 x 6 inches

The birds in my dream were fluttering as if injured, a defensive ploy to deflect attention from their helpless brood that hadn't yet grown their flight wings. Their colors blended with the leaves on the forest floor, but their eyes were bright and dark, penetrating and watchful.

Ravenna Taylor, 2000, watercolor, gouache, 4 x 6 inches

I had no water in my studio today. I looked around in my boxes, drawers, and on the walls, for small works that featured blue. These are a few that drew my attention. Here also, a small painting from 2008, which is back on the easel now - I don't think I'll change it much, but I've always known that it needed something, a very delicate kind of shift in the surface, while not demolishing the already delicate sense of something either coming into being, or disappearing -- which? After 5 years, I'll attempt this balancing act again, with hard-won grace, I hope.

Ravenna Taylor, "Susurrus," 2008, oil on wood, 8 x 7.75 inches

WHAT YOU DO TO LIVE

I don't know what there is to know.

Maybe time's a trinity—
before and after
pressing in on present—

meeting at the fragile skin, and bone—
the taste for sweets,
the nodding off—
beginnings loop to meet their ends.

I don't know what to know. 
I fall back upon the three,
the whole trinity -
the middle age belongs to now.

Summer comes, the hourglass
still fills with grains of light,
as lengthened days fill with sensation—
each scent pinpoints a shadow:

honeysuckle; ripened hay; multiflora rose;
low tide, and sun

on a rough woolen blanket.
Its olive weave smells just like sand.

My tender skin of eyelid shut

to better see my dream;

my inner ear is tilted to my heart.

This, the work we do to live.

Heat Wave Redux

Last summer, during an intense July heat wave, I completed a series of small works on paper, employing colored pencil, watercolor, gouache; the series allowed me to conserve my body heat and not move from in front of the fan in my studio more than necessary. It turned out to be a very fruitful series of drawings, which nourished oil paintings that followed upon them in the fall. Have a look at the post from last summer: here.

Our spring this year, which unfolded so slowly, seemingly reluctantly, and then retreated back to late winter chill last week, has more than caught up with itself today, and we're having an extraordinarily hot afternoon. As it happens, I have just finished a new watercolor which was based on one of the drawings from last year's Heat Waves. The month of May has been a little overwrought, not just the weather, but myself also -- I've been mainlining adrenaline; but working in watercolor is, for me, a wonderful way to remember to breathe and flow. 

I completed my performance season just this afternoon with audition for the next season with Princeton Pro Musica. The hay is ripe for mowing here, and I was too nervous to feel my best, but I think our kind artistic director, Ryan James Brandau, knows well enough what my better days can be. I will one day learn to breathe better with a pounding heart, I hope, allergies or no.

Now I'll spend the next few months on my other artistic goals. With the dropback from the art world, I'll drop back too, from Facebook. I have no travel plans, I just want to sink into my work: to paint, draw, write, continue study in my private voice lessons, and also to get underway a new website, and learn Lightroom. I'd like to also pay a little more attention to what others might need from me -- I've been in survival mode for too long.

Tell me again, how long is summer?

Ravenna Taylor, 2013, watercolor, gouache, pencil, on handmade toned paper, 20 x 19.5 inches

See other smaller new drawings on my tumblr page, Here Today.

Sonata Rondo

Before going to bed on the night of the full moon, Friday, I stood at the window looking out, and I saw its light reflected in little spots all around, like stationary fireflies. I have never seen snow quite like this; the flakes were individual, and flat and smooth, as though they'd been pressed and glazed before being cast from a cloud. Then they remained separate and didn't clump or cling, were almost like a cold fluffy snow, but those I can usually see, in the characteristic snowflake crystal, and these were, as I say, more flat and shiny, lying like fish scales. They appeared designed for sparkle, intended to delight, to hypnotize, to send me flying into a White Dream of eternal return.

I must describe these things; it makes them last. Some of the phenomena I experience I am not even able to describe, they are too fleeting, faster than the breath of one word. That's where painting takes up. Nature is my life raft. It was for that reason that I had to leave the city. I feel I can't count on anything but the perception and emotional attachment I have to the landscape, rivers, trees, birds and bugs. Maybe it's inherited; I often think of one of the last things my father said before he died: "There will be no more bushes and trees."

It's snowing again today, but a warmer, clumpier, softer snow falling to the ground, in a dimmer, warmer, morning kind of light. An appointment I had has been cancelled, and I'm reassigning those hours to music practice, yippee! I love our current program and even though the concert is more than a month off, already threads of that music have woven themselves into my brain, and I find them when I wake, or in a moment of indecision. This has been a tough winter already, although it's only halfway through, but my private voice lessons too have been sustaining me - I have been quietly working on performance skills for the last few years, and recently had one of those encouraging threshold experiences that give me the impetus to keep on growing -- to no purpose, just because I am, and I can.

Ravenna Taylor, "Song Cycle, Rondo Pastoral," 2010, paper, photos, fabric

I also finished a painting Saturday and started another, and I will bring this one quickly to its conclusion also; I am completing preparations for another online-only exhibition next month. I have one recently completed painting which is impossible to photograph; I'll have someone with more skill and better equipment give it a try, but I'm betting that the optical qualities are not going to translate. It's a pity that my work will only be seen in photos on computer screens; the way I use oils doesn't really come across, the work looks much flatter on screens.

Yesterday I was at a concert (Dryden Ensemble) featuring a fantastic piano that was built to duplicate the one that Mozart used. I loved the sound of that instrument so much (would love to sing recital with a piano like that)! If I had such a piano, I might start playing again, I thought. The pianist gave a little talk about his instrument, and my imagination was sparked by his mention of Beethoven and the piano's evolution -- how Beethoven was working at a time of fast development in the design and building of the fortepiano, and that must have influenced his composition and expression.

I thought about that and how, in our time, what has been developing so fast and has influenced so much of what we do is digital technology. There's a whole world of people who have dedicated themselves to early music. There's another world of people who paint in slow-drying layers, oil, pigment and canvas. I look at art online every single day, and have for the last few years; but I am finding it increasingly dissatisfying. Sometimes I feel as I do when I enter a large supermarket or a restaurant with a long menu, and although I might have entered hungry, I want nothing anymore.

As I prepare for my exhibition, which will occur only on computer screens, it is wonderful to have a show to look forward to, one that is "open to the public" 24 hours every day all over the world. It occurs to me that what looks good in a photo on a computer screen might be having too much influence on the contemporary art world though. I know there are works that I won't put into an online exhibition; they will remain in my studio and be there when I leave this world, I guess, without ever having been a part of the ecology of art thought -- that's how I see the value of exhibiting work, to become part of that ecology. 

Music only exists in the time it is unfolding -- a voice is subject to the conditions of one's anatomy, as is one's "self"; in that way it is more like my life than my drawings and paintings, which will outlast me. Even if they end up in a landfill, they will be all that they ever were for longer than I will be. I guess that's what the poem I published here last week was getting at, with many fewer words than this, today.

An unseen river must yet flow

This morning I woke again to the whining of chain saws; it is one month to the day since Hurricane Sandy hit the Mid-Atlantic coast. Hundreds of people are still coping with losses and displacement, which can seem mind-boggling to the many thousands (like me) who were shaken up by being severely inconvenienced. It is a cold and dark time of year to be without heat, light, shelter.

I live away from the coast and about 200 feet above the Delaware River - on the map, it's that part of western New Jersey that seems cinched at the waist, where the Delaware River heads SE from SW. There wasn't much rain in the hurricane here, it was primarily a wind storm of unprecedented duration for its strength. I was afraid that night for the trees overhanging my home and my studio, and I'm grateful that those trees weren't damaged, and neither were our buildings. But other trees fell, including across our road out, and we were without power at home for 5 days, for a week in Lambertville, where my studio is located.

I'd thought the forecasts were being hyperbolic, but we were prepared for some time without power; we had water, canned foods, candles, flashlights, and a small generator to keep the refrigerator and freezer sufficiently cold. However, the storm was more powerful and more devastating than I'd believed it would be, and we lost all phone service, including cell phones, and internet cable service. I'd been planning for two months to dedicate this very week, following a performance, to another "home-made residency," an intensive work week in the studio, and now I couldn't get there at all; for much of my days I was occupied with keeping warm, keeping food cold, doing in the rapidly shortening daylight what had to get done, and feeling very cut off. I hardly even knew how much worse it was for others, but had heard a bit, enough to arouse my guilty feelings about how irritated I was.

As days passed, I started to feel dread of the darkness and the cold as the afternoon light fell. All around me, people were becoming tired and depressed, myself included. At the end, when power was back, I had lost my dedicated week, and some trees, but nothing more. It was amazing, the instantaneous response I felt, the release of the anxiety from my lungs like an expelled breath. I was profoundly, unutterably grateful that my life could resume, with nothing more lost, just some time that I might have spent at work, on paintings that don't matter, to anyone but me, anyway. The thought that my lost time at work mattered so little, signalling depression, had me sifting thoughts for ideas to move me forward. 

The restoration of power soon was followed by internet service, the tree was removed from our road, and my life could return to normal as soon as my mood could. But that last was an effort, knowing how much suffering there was still along the coasts. Chorus rehearsals resumed too, that helps. And because of that, I was impelled to attend a concert in Princeton, performed by the chamber chorus, Tenebrae. That concert in Princeton really lifted my leaden heart. In the opening chords, I felt my resistence soften and some tears fell all around me. I'd been all bottled up and wondering what to do about it. During the concert, I got some good drawing time in too. I took out my pencil and sketchbook, not knowing what I was going to draw, and discovered what was going to be the most compelling way for me to visualize all that the experience had held. That night I had a dream that I'd been photographing outside, and the following day, I went out to take photos.

Where I live, downed trees, their roots still gripping soil, lie on their sides by the hundreds; not small trees, very few ancient ones - mostly they are the tall, healthy, middle-aged, still in their prime, being cut into logs to be split and burnt. Heaps of logs, more than most people can use, are stacked at the roadsides, marked "FREE." 

The day after the concert was sunny, and I went all over my township, photographing the trees, mostly the upended wads of roots. The tragedy of our forests' losses might seem small to some, but to me it was visceral. I posted some of these photos in a previous post here on my blog. The next day was not so bright, and I went out again and took many more photos, some here in this post.

The beautiful red clay soil, the imprint of stones, the knitted roots exposed to light and air, seemed more and more to connect with my empathy for the families and communities along the New York and New Jersey coasts, people who'd lost homes and personal belongings, and many artists whose work was damaged by flooding. I photographed the roots and imagined that in the spring, rain will wash the soil away, and in the crevices between their roots, birds and insects, small mammals and fungi will find shelter; in the depressions where those roots were lifted, puddles will form, frogs and salamanders will lay their eggs. But until then, we have the bright winter days, and the naked crowns of trees can't shield the dying roots from exposure to the frozen air.

Here follow some images of drawings on paper with pencil, and other drawings I made with my iPad, along with some more photo studies of the exposed roots, just a few of the many thousands in our fallen forests. I have to thank the members of Tenebrae for breaking open the wall so I could find a way to encompass all my feelings about this event in just a few sketches.

[As always, you can click on the first image and open it up to a slideshow of larger images.]