On Attention

The material stuff of dirt and plastic, stains, and insects, flowers and clouds, surrounds us all the time, but how often do we actually see these things?  We spend most of our days cleaving the foreground from the background, stumbling through our human lives, convinced we are separate creatures, disconnected from a larger whole.  What brings us back from the confused and isolated condition of being human?  In a word: attention.  Christian mystic Simone Weil equated attention with love and prayer:

The quality of attention counts for much in the quality of prayer . . .  Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. (1)

To be moved by an object, even if it is a twisted piece of twine lying on the pavement, is what  seems to lie at the heart of these photographs by Victoria Mara Heilweil. Like prayer itself, her daily practice of walking through the same ten blocks of her Mission District neighborhood created a constraint and a cauldron for something new, something intimate and wholly unexpected. In doing so, Heilweil changed her photographic practice. As she says, I could not longer plan ahead for what my content would be.  Instead, she had to trust the world. Which means she had to return to the world on its own terms. Much like the 9th century Zen monk Dongshan taught his disciples: Just This. (2)

Dongshan’s phrase underscores a basic tenet of Zen Buddhism: spiritual practice does not involve getting something new, but rather taking care of what we already have. Like Heilweil, he is asking us to pay a different kind of attention.

 But in our age, paying attention this way can feel like a radical act. For all its benefits, our digital world tends to distract, rather than focus our gaze. It also trains our brains to seek constant stimulation and experiences of divided attention rather than sustained open awareness to what is present.  As I type the period that ended that sentence, a ping from an email entering my inbox lifts me out of one thing with the promise of something else. Always the promise but never the presence. And this pattern repeats itself, over and over again.

 So, when a photographer takes up the call to pay attention each day to the beauty lying in plain sight in her own neighborhood, we should turn off our screens and take a look.  In Heilweil’s images the world begins to reveal itself in new ways. Much of what she captures is the residue of daily gestures-- life coming into being and then passing away. A torn scrap of handwriting, an empty glove, an un-named stain, the fragile shape of four pine needles resting on the sidewalk. These visual haiku startle with their beauty even as they mystify us with their meaning.

 Within these 166 images we also find coincidences of composition. Suddenly objects seem to be in conversation with each other. A blue vinyl glove delights in the murmur of fallen leaves, a crushed plastic cup drags its shadow across the green crack in the sidewalk; the word zest from an old soap wrapper speaks to the withered visage of a dead leaf. None of these vignettes can be explained by the closed loop logic of an isolated self.  Instead, the mind that knew the world before it went on this particular walk, is suddenly freed of its old conceptions.  As we pay attention with Heilweil, as we walk with her, we allow the world to come to us.  In these images we enter a more mysterious landscape of syntax and rhythm, echo and possibility.

 It is precisely that mystery, that not-yet-known quality that delights us in these pictures. In a famous Zen story, two teachers meet on the road, and one is carrying his bags:

 Where are you going?”, inquires the first teacher.

“I’m going on a pilgrimage”, the other teacher responds.

“What’s the purpose of pilgrimage?” asks the first teacher.

“I don’t know.” he responds.

“Not knowing is most intimate.” replies the first teacher. (3)

Not knowing is most intimate. No wonder that mystery is such an important part of beauty. It’s what enables beauty to sit side-by-side with some of the darkest parts of our world. When we think we know everything about what life is, when we are convinced that the world is just one way, either beautiful or dark, life loses its magic, and we lose our capacity to see what is really in front of us. 

 Paying attention, as Heilweil does on these daily walks, expands our awareness and opens a space beyond our limited view. In this way, we feel ourselves embroidered back into the world.  In one of her pictures, the dark shadow of a tree spreads across the face of a blank wall. A familiar darkness set against the dying light. But then we see the crenulated shadows of the tree’s leaves are in fact exact replicas of the curly-edged hair of the photographer. Heilweil’s own shadow has entered the frame and completes the composition.  As philosopher Elaine Scarry writes:

At the moment one comes into the presence of something beautiful, it greets you.  It lifts away from the neutral background as though coming forward to welcome you—as though the object were designed to “fit” your perception. . . Your arrival seems contractual, not just something you want, but something the world you are now joining wants. (4)

If love is the quality of one’s attention, then paying attention helps us fall back in love with the world.

Notes

(1) Weil, Simone, Waiting For God, Fontana Books, 1959, pp. 66, trans Emma Scott, 1959.

(2) Book of Serenity, Case 49, p. 206, trans Thomas Cleary, Shambala, 1998.

(3) Book of Serenity, Case 20, p. 86 trans Thomas Cleary, Shambala, 1998.

(4) Scarry, Elaine, On Beauty and Being Just, p. 25, Princeton University Presss, 1999.

Art and Spiritual Practice

In May I was part of an afternoon of art and poetry centered on the theme of art practice and spiritual practice. The afternoon came about after one of those meandering conversations that takes place repeatedly and over many years. I’ve been thinking and practicing with the connection between art and spiritual practice with a small group of artists I continue to study with in Italy, with my Zen teacher, poet Norman Fischer,  and with other artists who are part of the Everyday Zen Sangha including sculptor Marshall Elliott and painter Eva Bovenzi.  

We were delighted that more than fifty people braved the Memorial Day traffic to join us for an afternoon of looking, listening and contemplating art,  poetry and the interesting parallels between contemplative practice and art making.  We enjoyed a wide-ranging discussion with the group and hope this sets the stage for further conversations. 

True to my love of list making, I contributed the following observations on this topic as reflected on my own experience over the last decade or so.  I could write an essay about each of these, and perhaps someday I will. But for now, here they are in no particular order. 

Spiritual practice and art practice . . .

1. Both pursue questions or instincts that the rational mind cannot immediately grasp.

2. Both benefit from an understanding of lineage and a respect for what has come before.

3. Both are full of techniques that guide the practitioner in her discovery of the work and life she was meant to make.

4. Both are based on a foundation of solo inquiry and communal celebration and support.

5. The studio, like all places of worship has its rituals.

6. At the heart of both art and spiritual practice is an aspiration for revelation: to see more deeply, listen more expansively, and speak more honestly.

7. Central to both practices is humility about control, and an openness to what comes next.

8. Both recognize the need for quiet places of retreat for the purpose of focusing the mind and opening the heart.

9. Both maintain a complicated and sometimes fraught relationship to the marketplace that requires careful soul-searching and attention.

A Typology of Gates

To the rest of the world a spiritual retreat implies the need to erect some kind of border or fence, however temporary, between you and the rest of the world.  Retreat can suggest a sort of gate that closes behind you as you enter a world of silence and meditation.  And on some level this is certainly true.

 But like all assumptions, the closer one pays attention the more things change. For one week, each year I attend a silent meditation retreat. And each year, although it may appear that I am leaving the world, day after day of meditation I find myself getting closer to the world.  The Italian word for gate is cancello, which for me, reinforces the one-way purpose of gates. But retreat is about opening gates as much as it is about closing them. 

 So it was with amused interest that I began to take note of the driveway gates in the wealthy suburban neighborhood that surrounds the monastery campus. Each afternoon I would take a walk along the same stretch of road. (The name of the road itself, Deer Park Lane quietly referencing the holy site where the Buddha is said to have given his first  teaching).   

 In my survey of no more than 500 feet of roadway I noted a typology of gates that seemed to mirror my own meandering relationship to the rest of the world. My growing intimacy with these structures was only heightened by this awareness. Here they are in no particular order. 

There is the gate so in love with its own image that the exterior world, like Plato’s cave, seems to be nothing more than a surface on which to project itself.  It is a gate of limited, but strongly held certainty. Here lies a form not yet aware that its size is nothing more than the play of light and shadow.  

There is the gate of the self-contained imagination. The winding road leads clearly around the bend up ahead, but we cannot see where it might take us. It’s intriguing, but, on closer approach we on the outside are not invited to penetrate its very solid perimeter fence. 

There is the no-way-no-how gate. This gate demands that you not even look in its general direction. Here, a presence fortifies itself with other gates, just in case.  

Then it unconsciously configures the objects of its own housekeeping in such a way to ward off curious onlookers.  

There is the non threatening gate, whose exterior and interior landscaping suggests an unbroken continuity.  If you enter this gate, the wide gapped fence promises, you will find more of what you already know: the same red flowers, the same greenery. 

But don’t be fooled. On approaching this particular gate, one gets the first glimpse of something wild (in this case a metal sculpture of a horse) leaping through the middle ground of the interior.

There is the hidden gate; the one that offers no glimpse of what might lie on the other side and yet intrigues by virtue of its plain beauty.  Perhaps its quiet, understated edifice belies a deeper knowledge. A patient awareness that knows eventually we will notice its doorway, even if it is streaked in shadow. 

And finally, there is the come-and-stay- awhile gate. In this gate, that is not really a gate, what you see is what you get. One feels the full openness of a structure that has come full circle in its understanding of fences and borders. We are invited to walk through the gate, take a seat even stay a while because life is short and the view from here, so expansive. 

I've looked at Pop From Both Sides Now. . .

The painter James Rosenquist died last month.  I’ve become reacquainted with his work this year thanks to SFMOMA.  I serve as a tour guide a few times a month there and every so often I often find myself sitting on the gallery floor with a bunch of elementary school kids in front of Rosenquist’s massive painting A Leaky Ride for Dr. Leaky.  The painting is a bold mix of images and colors drawn from classic advertising tropes and woven together with the sure hand of the sign painter, which Rosenquist was before turning to studio art.  The brash and bright colors are part of that crazy Pop sensibility— a nice flat rock in the art historical stepping stones that seem to link abstract expressionism and post-modernism.  

Roy Lichtenstein, Live Ammo (Tzing), oil on canvas, 69.5" x 57.5", 1962. Courtesey of SF MOMA.

Though one cannot deny its conceptual importance, I’ve never much cared for Pop Art visually, be it Warhol, Rosenquist or Roy Lichtenstein who painted those Ben-Day dots with such loving attention.    

Roy Lichtenstein, Live Ammo (Tzing), (Detail)

 It could be because, like many others, I already feel oppressed by corporate advertising and its ugly ubiquity in American culture. I’m not particularly drawn to looking at more of it. My views are perhaps more in line with writer Peter Schjeldahl’s description of Pop Art: 

 “The goal in all cases was to fuse painting aesthetics with the semiotics of media-drenched contemporary reality. The naked efficiency of anti-personal artmaking defines classic Pop. It’s as if someone were inviting you to inspect the fist with which he simultaneously punches you.” 

 Unfortunately, this punch-in-the- face approach to advertising has only intensified since Pop’s heyday.  Perhaps it comes from my experience working on land use and urban planning, but I hold particular disdain for the way corporate advertising now plasters our once shared and ad-free public spaces like bus shelters and public transit stations. 

A few days after reading about James Rosenquist’s death I found myself on the wrong side of a Muni bus headed to my studio in the southern part of the city. I say wrong side because it was the slightly dim, colorless side of the bus where not only the bus, but also the windows are wrapped by advertising.  

Staring out the window, I felt like I had crossed a new and disturbing threshold in the corporate media drenched culture.  I was no longer outside in the “real” world looking at (or trying to avoid looking at) the advertisements. I was now stuck inside a giant rolling advertisement trying to look at the world.  Instead my view was obscured by so many grey Ben-Day dots, it was hard to know what I was looking at.  A sad day for daydreaming through the bus window. A sad day for the ad-free commons.  But maybe a good day for artists. . .  

At least viewed this way, the ad loses its intended meaning and  creates (quite literally) a window through which to view the granularity of the world.  A good reminder that things are  not always as they appear to be.  A truth we all need to be reminded of. This teachable moment brought to you by Roy Lichtenstein via Clear Channel Advertising and SF MUNI. 

For now however, I'm sticking with the view espoused by Carolyn Caldwell and RJ Rushmore and their  Art in Ad places campaign.  Its time to take back these public spaces and beautify them with art and something drawn by the hand. Until we get real policies in place to protect the ad-free visual commons, these guerrilla tactics will have to multiply.

Noel'le Longhaul, Absence. Photo by Luna Park. Courtesy of Art in Ad Places. 

Still Point of the Turning World

Change is afoot in San Francisco and nowhere does that seem more apparent than in my studio neighborhood South of Market.  In the 1970's and 1980's artist Janet Delaney began chronicling this  neighborhood and the places and lives that were being transformed at the time by a wave of urban renewal efforts.  My studio sits above Klockar’s Blacksmith shop which looks very much like it did when Delaney photographed it. The picture above was included in a survey of her work at the  DeYoung Museum last year. 

 Fast forward thirty six years and here we are again. This time, a new form (the high rise condo tower) is rapidly replacing the empty lots and low rise, light industrial buildings left in the wake of the last round of urban renewal. Every day I marvel at how much new development has transformed what used to be the dominate form and scale of this neighborhood.

My studio building.  

The new neighborhood.

I am  reminded of a book I used to love as a kid called The Little House by author and illustrator Virgnia Lee Burton. In the story, a little house in the country gradually becomes surrounded by other homes, then a road and finally a city with an elevated transit system.  Some days in the studio I feel I have stepped inside the pages of Burton's book. Compare the images above and below this text.   

Virginia Lee Burton, The Little House, 1942.

Being a children’s book published in 1942, the solution to the drama and crowding  of the city was for the little house to be put on a trailer and driven to a new pristine location in the country. Problem solved!

Virginia Lee Burton, The Little House, 1942.

Here on Folsom Street my little studio building remains an anachronism. But it feel like an important and necessary wrinkle in the fabric of time.  On the increasingly busy sidewalks surrounding this block, I feel a kinship with the ghostly figure in the famous picture by Daguerre taken in 1838. 

Louis  Daguerre Boulevard Du Temple, 1838.

Although Daguerre's Paris street scene was bustling with traffic and pedestrians, none of them show up in his image.  His early long-form exposures did not work well for taking pictures of moving crowds. Nonetheless, Daguerre managed to capture his first photographic image of a person entirely by accident. The man having his shoes shined  near the bend in the road was the only person on the street who stood still long enough to be "seen" by Daguerre's technology.  There is power in stillness, perhaps even more so today. 

Louis  Daguerre Boulevard Du Temple, 1838 (Detail)

Nowness

This year I’ve become enchanted by Devotional Cinema, a small book by experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky.  Dorsky has spent his life thinking about the relationship between religion and cinema – not where religion is necessarily the subject of a film, but as he explains, “where film itself is the spirit or experience of religion.” 

As I often do when reading the work of a kindred spirit, I find myself inserting the word “painting” or visual art where he refers to film. Dorsky discusses the two kinds of time that are central to a film’s materiality. The first is relative time—the way a story moves from the opening shot to the last frame and all the dramatic movements in between. Think of it as linear time.

The second kind of time is as absolute time or nowness. As Dorsky explains: 

“If one looks at an Egyptian votive sculpture from 4,000 years ago, one can appreciate its uncompromising presence. The Egyptian sculptor’s direct experience of nowness is being communicated in the present moment. Being able to experience nowness and experiencing it in a work of art allows you to participate directly with the very heart of that work and its maker. You are right there with them sharing their vision. There is a secret underground of continual transmission that is possible within human society and relative time, sitting magically right in front of us but often not seen.”

Summerian Stone Sculpture ca. 2600- 2500 B.C. Metropolitan Museum of Art

For film to have a devotional quality, it must accomplish the difficult task of balancing these two kinds of time.  Dorsky points to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928’s silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc as an example of a film that strikes such a balance. Dreyer’s emphasis on point of view and skillful editing of montages, brings us directly into a compassionate presence with Joan’s suffering even as we move through the relative time of her story. 

Film Still from The Passion of Joan of Arc

I remember seeing The Passion of Joan of Arc many years ago at the Paramount Theater in Oakland where the 200-member UC Berkeley Alumni chorus and a 22-piece orchestra performed an oratorio written by Richard Einhorn as accompaniment to the film. Once the film started, I could not for the life of me figure out where the chorus was standing.  There wasn’t any room for them in the orchestra pit.  Nonetheless, their voices felt all encompassing and integral to my experience of the film.  It wasn’t until after we reached the climatic final scene of the movie that I realized that some 200 members of the chorus had been sitting with us the entire time. Choral members had been seated in various rows of the theater, singing beside us, behind us, in front of us as we sat together in the dark while the film’s light flickered overhead.  When I rose to add my applause to the standing ovation I felt that deep sense of relative time mixed with a commanding sense of the now. 

Convergence

One of my favorite books is a collection of essays by Lawrence Weschler titled Everything That Rises, A Book of Convergences. In the book Weschler uses the essay form as a dynamic thread that weaves together art and visual culture, history, memory and serendipity. He also finds ways to connect seemingly disparate topics into short pieces that are as delightful to read as they probably were to write. 

 Since reading his book, I’ve been more aware of my own experiences with visual art convergences—places where images from art history reach forward to inform, deepen or perhaps reshape what I am seeing right now.  Here is one I was reminded of while traveling last fall. 

Deposition From the Cross, Filipino Lippi, panel from Altarpiece, 333 x 218 cm, Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence.

The Deposition from The Cross by Filippino Lippi was completed in 1506.  I was immediately struck by this piece after seeing it for the first time several years ago at the Academia in Florence. The colors are vibrant, the scene dramatic, and in his focus on movement and gesture, Lippi has choreographed a balanced but active dance of limbs and bodies in the upper half the painting.  As I learned later, Lippi actually only painted the figures on the ladders as the rest of the painting was completed after his death in 1504 by the painter Pietro Perugino. 

Years earlier before I had ever set foot in Italy, I snapped the picture above on a trip along the coast of North Africa at a busy shipping port in Mauritania. I was struck when the image ghosted back up on my computer screen recently and thought immediately of the panel from the Lippi altarpiece above.   Here are the two images side by side.

View fullsize

View fullsize

The figure of Christ is not present from the "convergence" photo, but perhaps the cross is still there in the wooden slats and uprights that occupy the empty space in the center of my photo.  Nonetheless, the gestures of work and care and shared endeavor are there. Look at the hands of the man leaning over the net at the top of the photograph and his counterpart holding Christ’s arm at the top of the painting. The two men in red shirts at the middle left and upper right of the photograph find their counterparts in roughly the same position in the painting. They echo the arm gestures and drama of balancing a single foot on a ladder.  

 Here two images separated by over five hundred years come together, but why? Perhaps to remind us about the power of bodies joined in shared effort. Or perhaps to underscore the importance of labor and effort in any endeavor be it spiritual or secular. Or maybe, well I could go on, and I will as I think more deeply about why these two images have converged.  Let me know if you have any thoughts. 

The Diver

One of the highlights of my recent trip to Italy was the opportunity to explore the archeological remains of the city of Paestum, which lies near the southern city of Salerno.  The ruins are magnificent for many reasons including the incredibly well preserved Greek Temples dating to 510 to 520 BC.E.

The site also boasts an excellent archeological museum, which includes the remains of the Tomb of the Diver.  As Wikipedia explains:

“When the tomb was discovered, these surprising frescos revealed its importance as they appear to be the “only example of Greek painting with figured scenes dating from the Orientalizing, Archaic, or Classical periods to survive in its entirety. Among the thousands of Greek tombs known from this time (roughly 700–400 BC), this is the only one to have been decorated with frescoes of human subjects.”

The image of the diver, arcing gracefully into the void continues to haunt me.  By some accounts the tomb, which sides are painted with tender frescoes of a Greek party or symposium, conjures Plato’s dialogue about the nature of love. In his hierarchy, love moves from physical beauty to moral beauty to love of knowledge and finally to the love of absolute or divine beauty. Interestingly, Plato wrote the dialogues more than a century after this tomb was painted and covered with earth. 

The diver is a literal and figurative capstone to the movement from the world of the senses to the world of the spirit. The diver’s perfect form sails out across the known world as depicted by the Gates of Hercules and into the empty space above a pool of water. I am moved again and again by the spare elegant power of this image.

May we all dive with such ease into the unknown of the New Year.   

Niches

I’m back after traveling for several weeks through Italy, taking pictures, looking at art work, meeting with old and new friends. It was a great trip.  This will be one of several blog posts in which I hope to share some of what I have been thinking about and bringing into the studio since that trip.

As my art practice is driven by an effort to understand emptiness and form and metaphors for the ineffable nature things, I was drawn again to Renaissance Altarpieces. Here’s one by Giovanni Bellini in Venice.

San Giobbe Altarpiece, Giovanni Bellini, oil on panel before 1478. Now in the Academia in Venice. 

Belinni has created an entirely convincing chapel niche with Mary seated on a throne with the infant Christ. A darkened lamp hangs over head even as the divine light illuminates the figures below.  Saint Frances on the left with an outstretched hand, beckons us into the space. It is that interior space of the niche and the questions about what is outside and inside that intrigues me. Renaissance altarpieces are rife with all kinds characters and objects that serve to bridge the gap if you will between the sacred and the profane. 

Detail of the Otto Pratica Altarpiece by Filipino Lippi. Reframed and located at the Galleria Uffizi, Florence. 

The St. Lucy Altarpiece by Domenico Venezianno is another piece that I had the pleasure of taking a long look at one afternoon at the Uffizi.

St. Lucy Altarpiece by Domenico Veneziano, tempera on panel 1445-7. Located at the Galerie Uffizi, Florence. 

Originally designed for the Florentine church of Saint Lucia dei Magnoli, this altarpiece also invites the viewer into the scene, if not the actual niche where Mary resides. The figure of John the Baptist on the left engages us in a space that is designed to hold the figures in the painting and viewers just outside the paitning. Nonetheless, John the Baptist invites us to go deeper into the niche behind him. Here natural light from above illuminates the mysteries of the space.  

The shape of a niche, its implication of quiet contemplation has captured my imagination for a while.  Once I started looking, I found a lot of versions of these shaped openings on my trip. I am drawn to empty niches in particular for their ability to hold a wide variety of silences.  Here are just a few.

Accumulating an Essence

A couple years ago I had the opportunity to view one of Wolfgang Laib’s pollen pieces at the Seattle Museum of Art.  If nothing else, the work is certainly more than a sum of its thousands of pollen grains. Laib spends days collecting these golden grains by hand and then meticulously spreads them into a square which can be viewed from many angles. By patient accumulation, Laib creates beautiful hoverings of pure transcendent color. 

From accumulation of color, my mind drifts to accumulation of form. And then the wonderful phenomenon called murmuration when hundreds, sometimes thousands of starlings or blackbirds gather and shift their collective selves over the sky.   If you haven’t watched this video already, its one of my favorites.  

Photo by 

Murmuration.  The word itself is the sound of the world coming into being.  Those lulling mur, mur’s  conjure the slow emergent nature of things.  In the studio I’ve been working with my own slow accumulations.   

Tracy Taylor Grubbs, Blue #4, Rollerball pen on paper, 25" x 30"

Using a blue roller ball pen I’ve been drawing one slow line at a time, accumulating hundreds of lines over many drawing sessions. In the process new and unexpected forms emerge. What I like about this particular drawing practice, is that each line registers a unique response to breath, pulse and the subtle grips and shifts of the body. Each line relates to what has come before and to what will come after. But with time and accumulation these drawings offer up something new, unified and greater than the sum of their parts.  

Perhaps that is something that the world needs now. A reminder of the eternal that is buried deep inside the ephemeral nature of things. 

Tracy Taylor Grubbs, Blue #5, Rollerball pen on paper, 25" x 30"

To Take Care

I was honored to curate the Geography of Hope art show this year in Pt. Reyes Station, CA. The show is part of at the bi-annual conference sponsored by Point Reyes Books. Artists from coastal West Marin were invited to submit artworks based on this year’s theme Mapping the New Geography of Hope: Women and the Land. 

As an artist this was a new venture for me and it gave me new insights into the difficult choices and wonderful serendipity of selecting and arranging other people’s work.

Difficult, because I knew each piece submitted was the byproduct of an individual search for meaning. Whether that search took the form of exuberant expression, ongoing political discourse, contemplative imagery or some other visual language altogether. If art is an expression of these journeys then curating is an effort to shape a mythos or recurrent narrative about our collective search.

Each show is an effort to bring the stories and totems back to the tribe, so to speak, for further contemplation. The word curate after all, comes from the Latin root, curare: to take care of. In this way, the artworks not chosen for the show are just as important as those chosen because they remain deeply connected to the life of inquiry.  They are part of the endless search for meaning we take on when we fully inhabit our human life.

In Hans Olrich Obrist ‘s recent book of essays Ways of Curating he affirms that idea this way:  “The very idea of an exhibition is that we live in a world with each other, in which it is possible to make arrangements, assoications, connections and wordless gestures, and, through this mise en scene, to speak.“

In addition to all the wonderful artists who submitted work for the show, I would like to thank the staff at Point Reyes Books for giving me this opportunity and artists Rebecca Szeto and Rick Paxson for their invaluable assistance.

Pictured in foreground Omphalos, a sculpture of found objects and sand from Kehoe Beach by artist Judith Selby Lang. Photograph by Chris Reding on the left.

Discussing two photographs by Tim Burns.

Yosemite in Winter (Part 2)

“Presence is diluted and permeated by absence. Since things no longer attract attention, no longer even stand forth, the painter paints the world emerging—submerging—it is said—not quiescent. He paints it coming out of the original confusion or sinking back into it, following the great respiratory alteration, breathing in and breathing out, that brings the world into existence.”  – Francois Jullien

Tracy Taylor Grubbs, graphite on paper, 18" x 18"

During my residency in Yosemite last December (part 1 here) I took a stack of books with me but found myself returning to,  or rather ping-ponging between, the same two  texts on drawing and seeing. The first was J.D. Harding’s classic Victorian manual On Drawing Trees and Nature. The second was a philosophical text by Francois Jullien entitled The Great Image has No Form or On the Nonobject Through Painting in which he focuses on the painting and emptiness teachings of Chinese masters like Shitao.   You can see a bit of  both influences at work in some of the many drawings I made from downed tree branches.

Tracy Taylor Grubbs, graphite on paper, 18" x 18"

Tracy Taylor Grubbs, graphite on paper, 18" x 18"

The Mystery of White

In December we spent the holidays with my family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Going back east for Christmas is always tricky weather wise. At the same time, it is always a blessing when we experience a little snow.

My older brother J.R. walking in the neighborhood I grew up in.

These pictures were taken a couple years ago. Although I am not aching to live in snow country again, I am still charmed by snow’s power to re-invent the world.

And that makes me think about artist Robert Ryman, and the simple pleasure of white.

Robert Ryman, Untitled, 1958, oil on canvas, 43” x 43” Image courtesy of collection of SFMOMA

Ryman was asked once what is it that a painting communicates to the viewer. He replied:

“An experience of. . . enlightenment. An experience of delight and well- being, and rightness. It’s like listening to music. Like going to an opera and coming out of it and feeling somehow fulfilled—that what you experienced was extraordinary. It sustained you for a while.”

Yosemite in Winter (part 1)

Last month I had the good fortune to spend two weeks on a solo artist residency in Yosemite National Park. I stayed in a small cabin near Wawona.

I was particularly happy to be there during the dark march toward the solstice. A quiet settles into the mountains at that time of year and inside that silence a familiar spaciousness rises to the surface.

I was fortunate to be there when the first (and so far, only) big storm of the season arrived in the parched mountains. When the rain came, I collaborated with the drops to make a series of ink drawings.

Each one, unique as a snowflake. For me these drawings open a door into a new and yet ever-present world. You can view more the drawings here.

The Slow Line (part 1)

Last week  dancer and choreographer Hope Mohr and I continued our exploration of movement and mark making by unfurling a large roll of white paper onto the sidewalk across the street from my studio on Folsom Street in San Francisco.  The paper was the length of a city block and it created just the right slow contrast to the 9:00 am rush of commuters and traffic. Hope and I bowed to each other in our stocking feet and then squatted down on all fours and began drawing a small black line from each end of the white scroll.

We did not rise above the level of our knees, often rolling on to our backs or half crawling as we kept the black marker moving continuously across the white promise of the paper. We moved slowly, shifting from fetal position to a curled roll, back to a fetal position. Sometimes we lifted the pen above our heads as we rolled, dragging the black line with us as we moved inch-by-inch closer toward the other end of the long white pathway. With our faces so close to the ground the only thing we could see was the line as it emerged from the tip of our drawing tool. Occasionally, light flickered across the white surface of the paper when a series of cars sped by. Pedestrians on the sidewalk approached with curious respect or perhaps dismissal.

They avoided stepping on the white path along the concrete. Some slowed down long enough to watch. Others kept a safe and uninterrupted clip to their pace on the way to the office. A young man bent down to snap a few pictures on his cell phone. Except for insects moving between the cracks in the sidewalk, Hope and I were the slowest moving creatures on the street. We were two women relishing the useless, but oh- so-necessary act of drawing a slow line down the sidewalk on a Friday in September of the year 2014.  Thanks to artist  Georgia Smith for sharing these images.

Artist Residency at Pilchuck School of Glass

n May of 2013 I was honored to work for 10 days at the Pilchuck Glass School nestled in the foothills of the Cascade mountains north of Seattle. I was able to work there as part of the generous Hauberg Fellowship which the school grants to a selected  group of artists once a year.  While not a “glass artist” myself, I had the great fortune to work with a small group of very talented of artists (pictured below) including Carrie Iverson, Gay Outlaw, Lisa Blatt Julie Alland and J.D. Beltran.

My intention for the fellowship was to extend my exploration of impermanence and change by working with the leftovers of the glass making process. If you have ever watched people blow glass, you know how addicting it can be. indeed, campus locals call it watching glass T.V.

After pulling myself away from this mesmerizing mixture of skill. heat and endless transformation, I headed for the dumpsters just outside of the hot shop where glass “rejects” were summarily and often ceremonially tossed.  The contents of these dumpsters changed daily depending on the color, thickness and attitude of the glass blowers working in the hot shop.   Each day a different crystalline world would bloom inside these bins.

I was particularly drawn to the light and shadow effects created by various combinations of clear broken glass.

After arranging and re-arranging the discards into an images that I could photograph, I worked with Kelvin Mason in Pilchuck’s vitreography studio to create a negative.  We then used a sandblaster to transfer the image onto a clear glass plate. The plate was then inked up and used to make prints like the one below.

In the hot shop I was also drawn to the rustic and beautiful wooden paddles used to shield glass blowers from the scorching heat of the furnace

I was inspired by the paddle’s shape and utility and its slow disintegration as it absorbed heat and took on the charring effects of a lifetime of work. Using the kilns in the warm shop I created pieces like the one below.

Finally, because I still had (and have) iceberg shapes on my mind, I took some time out to work on a series of monoprints, conjuring iceberg forms and unforms from my imagination and then working to “cook” some of these images into glass plates using a image transfer technique developed by artist Carrie Iverson.

You can view the pieces above as well as work by the other Hauberg Fellows from March 25  through March 30 at the AAU Gallery 2841 Levnworth Street, San Francisco, CA 94133.

The Divided Self

“Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows

Like harmony in music; there is a dark

Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles

Discordant elements, makes them cling together

In one society.”

 – William Wordsworth from The Prelude

 The push and pull of competing forces continues inside the studio, but my understanding of this ongoing struggle has been sharpened lately by a couple things I’ve been reading.  The Wordswoth quote above is an epigraph that appears in Anthony’s Storr’s short but thought provoking book Solitude that was published in 1988—the year after I arrived in California and many years before I had the courage to make art.

I just finished reading the book and enjoyed the way Storr wanders through the worlds of literature, music and psychotherapy for clues and observations about the importance of solitude and its ability to bring the artist or practitioner into deeper connection with a unifying whole. Storr hews closely to a Jungian view of artistic endeavor explaining: 

The path of self-development upon which such [middle aged] individuals embarked under Jung’s guidance was named by him ‘the process of individuation”. This process tends toward a goal called ‘wholeness’ or ‘integration’:  a condition in which the different elements of the psyche, both conscious and unconscious, become welded together in a new unity.

I continue to wrestle with my own interest in creating a unified whole in the studio. Sometimes the rifts and fault lines are obvious and I create separate bodies of work to hold and extend those powerful forces letting them break cleanly along lines of inquiry that lead right to the surface in a quick and complete succession of paintings. As was the case in launching a series of iceberg paintings earlier this year.

But more often there is a constant push and pull around questions of what I want to say and how to say it. Some days it is the tug of academic training and figuration on the one hand and the long reach of art history and a need to engage in contemporary art dialogues on the other. Some days I feel pulled in one direction by questions about painting’s relevance in a world oversaturated with images and short attention spans coddled by animated screens.  But other days I feel painting is the last best refuge, an important if unacknowledged radical act that will continue to take place in the privacy of my studio regardless of what happens outside.

A bit to my surprise, because I do not necessarily agree with all of his political  or artistic opinions, many of these questions are raised by art crtic Jed Perl in the most recent issue of The New Republic. Thanks to painter Deborah Barlow of Slow Muse for alerting me to this piece. It is recommended reading for anyone who cares about painting. It doesn’t hurt that Perl, like me, has a deep fondness for Richard Diebenkorn’s work and draws upon his most recent show at the De Young Museum in San Francisco to illustrate his major theme.

To close, here is a quote from Perl ‘s article The Rectangular Canvas Is Dead: Richard Diebenkorn and the problems of modern painting  that brought me full circle to the ideas expressed by Wordsworth, Storr, and Jung:

 “The great question now is how to preserve and even honor the age old stability of painting without falling into the trap of a frozen academicism.  Richard Deibenkorn, in his figure and landscape paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s, suggests a provocative balance, one worth reinvestigating.  The bottom line is that each artist must now begin pretty much from scratch, obliged to develop both a personal conservatism and a personal radicalism.  This is the painter’s predicament.” 

The Shift

If I have learned anything in the past few years, it is to pay attention to the quality of my mind (both thoughts and feelings) while I am in the studio.  In fits and starts I am learning to recognize when I am not really ready to paint and I have developed a variety of studio practices that serve, in the words of John Cage, to sober and quiet the mind. This enables me to slow down and focus myself before picking up the brush. When I am in the right frame of mind for painting, I move with an energy of open awareness, where possibility and delight move forward and concrete goals and ideas quietly take their seats off stage.  Being aware of the state of one’s mind and developing the capacity to shift one’s awareness is perhaps one of the greatest challenges of being human.

Earlier this year I completed a collaborative project with dancer and choreographer Hope Mohr, one of the many things I was reminded of while working with Hope and the other dancers was the power of the body to sober and quiet  the mind. In her most recent blog post, Hope writes  about this very thing in her own eloquent way. Here is an excerpt:

“For various reasons and to varying degrees, we all hide out in overgrown mental functioning. This is what graphic novelist Alison Bechdel calls “a fantasy of self-sufficiency.” We relate to our intellect like a parent. We pretend that the intellect can protect us from what we fear. But allowing intellect to drive the creative process closes off the possibility of being transformed by the creative process itself. If we control the process, how can it transform us?
”

— http://www.hopemohr.org/blog/2015/4/5/body-based-inquiry

And this:

““Listening to the body can be subversive. I’m not talking about sexual desires, although certainly those can be radicalizing if followed. I’m speaking more generally about listening to the body as distinct from the brain. Listening to the body subverts the disconnection of body from brain or, in other words, soma from psyche. When creative process is rooted in body-based expression, it subverts a culture warped by the Cartesian fallacy. When we make from an intuitive place, we unmake the dominant culture. We slow down. We pay attention. We open up to ourselves and each other.

Why do I aspire to this way of working? Because I like the results. Intuitive, body-based creative process can achieve results impossible to replicate with the tools of the conscious mind. And part of the reason I make art is a longing to be transformed. Intuitive, body-based creative process changes me.””

— http://www.hopemohr.org/blog/2015/4/5/body-based-inquiry

Amen Hope!

Oh Be Swift

““Life is short, and we have never too much time

for gladdening the hearts of those

who are travelling the dark journey with us.

Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.” ”

My old friend, the poet Jim Begg sent me this quote from the Swiss philosopher Henri Frederic Amiel not long ago. It reminded me again of how important it is to reach out to each other in the spirit of gratitude and kindness particularly as we make work.

This year, as never before I have discovered Skype and Facetime as technologies that help to keep me connected on a weekly and monthly basis to two artist friends in their studios—one in London, one just across the Bay in Emeryville.  I know my friends are out there, working in their own studios and would respond at a moment’s notice if I called, but a regular, scheduled check-in has made all the difference.  Therese Lahaie and I meet weekly this way to check in on each other’s work and our progress on a list of administrative tasks that make the artwork possible.

It was during one of these weekly conversations that she suggested I dig into an impasse I was having in the studio and make 15 unfinished pieces in the space of 2 weeks.  She learned this trick from artist Michele Theberge.

Many of these studies that I made were created on on gessoed cardboard to keep the spirit up and the critic down as I shifted and re-worked my questions and approaches.  Under different circumstances, these 15 studies could have turned into the beginning of a series, but in this case, many of the pieces served as roads-not-taken or at least not-taken-right-now. They taught me a lot about the material I was working with and what I did and did not want to do with it.  The unique surprises along the way have opened new possibilities in my work.  New possibilities are always a welcome thing on the sometimes dark and winding journey of studio practice.