Hello Everybody! Now that I’ve been writing for a little over a year, and my readership is growing, I’d like to hear from you. What do you enjoy most? What would you like to see more of? I’ve put together a quick (really quick) survey for you to give me your feedback, and in return, I will enter your email in a raffle for an original piece of art. I love raffles because once all the names are entered, I spin the wheel of fortune and voilà, you may be the lucky winner!
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And on now to this week’s musings. I’ll keep it short, since you’ve already spent some time on that survey. I have a theme in mind— “It’s All Here” —referring to the Four Elements and how I find them every time I go out for a walk down to the Hidden Pond.
Water, of course, pun intended. There is an abundance of wet this time of year. The wood frogs in the rain garden have gone silent now that they’ve had their fun and left layers of egg masses to ripen and hatch out. But guess who showed up today. Mrs. Mallard, busily vacuuming up those eggs. I expect the drake will join her and they’ll spend some time every day gobbling up eggs and whatever else they find in the swampiness outside the studio. Between the ducks and the dry spells, it’s a wonder to me that any wood frogs survive.
Wind is strong in April, and brings the migratory birds back. The phoebes are checking out housing sites. It’s been a few years since they’ve homesteaded in the eave by the double doors, and I have a new roof, so if they choose that spot, as I hope they do, they’ll need to start over with the nest. A phoebe’s nest is a nearly flat cup of moss, mud and twigs. You would think there’s no way it could safely hold three eggs, much less three lusty hatchlings, but it does.
Earth - It’s mud season right now. The robins are poking their beaks into the soil of the dooryard and the driveway, and the flickers have been doing the same out in the meadow paths. Earth, soil, mud, beach sand, all are good names. Just don’t call it dirt, not even when you track it into the studio. There’s too much life contained in every square inch to be denigrating it with a word that has negative connotations.
That brings us to Fire, and I won’t find it outside. The cold stones around the campfire circle are waiting for summer, hot dog roasts and midnight campfire songs. Indoors, by the end of February I am already tired of sweeping up after the wood stove, and now we’re in that shoulder season where it’s a little too warm for a fire and a little too cold to keep the windows open. At the moment, Fire is metaphorical in my passion for a new body of work. Concurrent with an exploration of woodcuts, I’m reading The Slip, about the artists of Coenties Slip, which led me to Robert Motherwell’s anthology, The Dada Painters and Poets. There I found a story:
"Mies van der Rohe tells that once [Kurt] Schwitters was on a train, carrying great roots from trees with him. Someone asked him what the roots were, and he replied that they constituted a cathedral. 'But that is no cathedral, that is only wood!' the stranger exclaimed. 'But don't you know that cathedrals are made out of wood?' Schwitters replied.
It would be a nice way to wrap this up if I could bring that story around to the four elements, but let’s just say that Kurt Schwitters’ tree roots were the result of the elements’ convergence, and it’s widely acknowledged that Gothic cathedrals were inspired by forest trees.
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Robert Motherwell, ed., Dada Painters and Poets: an Anthology, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, London, second edition 1981. Like so many books in my library, I’ve had this one for many years, but never read it all the way through. It’s good for dipping into. I was looking for material on Hans Arp when I came across the quote about Schwitters.
Hans Arp comes up in The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever, by Prudence Pfeiffer, Harper Collins 2023.
“[Arp] was one of the early trailblazers of abstraction in Europe, and had experimented with a number of noncompositional strategies in painting, sculpture, and printmaking with works that were central to the Dadaist and Surrealist experiments with form. His monochrome wood reliefs would be a holy grail for Kelly . . . for Youngerman, it was Arp’s woodcuts that demonstrated how edges could melt away and new shapes could be invented.”
A friend sent me this link to a video from the Soil Health Institute. I haven’t had a chance to watch yet, but am looking forward to it.
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