Robert Sparrow Jones

The Gathering: A solo exhibition of oil paintings by Robert Sparrow Jones

2012-01-18T06:32:00.000-08:00

January 18 – February 11, 2012
Opening reception and artist talk Friday, January 27 at 4:30 PM

The Carlos Gallery in the Nabit Art Building at University of the South is pleased to present The Gathering, an exhibition of oil paintings by Georgia based artist Robert Sparrow Jones. In this new series, Jones explores a “Thoreauvian” attempt to coexist with nature. This fascination with the natural world, both delicate and enduring, forlornly strange and intimately known, is Jones’s response to, and escape from, the hyper-civilized, technology-saturated, globalized world.

Inspired by his upbringing in a small, valley town, and a passion for narrative, Jones’s paintings depict safe havens, such as tree houses and boats, amongst landscapes and waterscapes, reminding us that even in Mother Nature’s peril, meditative places exist and survive. In these timeless paintings, the new and old world overlap in a mixture of bucolic and cosmopolitan elements. Heightened color brings merges imagination with reality, and engages a perfect tension of psychology and emotional indifference. Ultimately, Jones wants his viewers to never forget the communal wild that we share with nature.

Robert Sparrow Jones is an artist whose work investigates the relationship between people and the natural world. Working in drawing, painting and print media, his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Some exhibitions include: The Paintings of Robert Sparrow Jones, Pratt Art Institute, Seattle, WA; Oscillating the Landscape, School 33, Baltimore, MD; The Birds of Robert Jones, Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA; Athens Institute of Contemporary Art, Athens, GA; Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, WA, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD, Mason Murer Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Cann Serrat, El Bruc Spain and The University of Hong Kong. He is also included in the Drawing Center Viewing Program.

Jones is an Assistant Professor of Painting at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia. He has previously taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art and Towson University in Baltimore, MD, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA and the Museum of Glass, International Center for Contemporary Art in Tacoma, WA. He currently resides in Athens, Georgia.

Carlos Gallery
Nabit Art Building
105 Kennerly Road
University of the South
Sewanee, Tennessee
gallery hours:

Monday - Friday 8:00AM - 5:00PM,

Saturday and Sunday 1:00 - 5:00PM

The ATHICA Mystery Triennial, Saturday, August 20th, 2011 - Sunday, September 18th, 2011

2011-08-09T05:18:00.000-07:00

This Saturday, August 20th ATHICA (Athens Institute for Contemporary Art) presents their Mystery Triennial. This is a small works invitational, a "Who Dunnit" including the works of 120 extrordinary artists the likes of...

REM (Yes, the band!), Lauren Gallaspy, Robert Sparrow Jones (That's me!), Hope Hilton , Brian Hitselberger, Jon Swindler, David Hale, Didi Dunphy, Will Eskridge, Melissa Harshman, Nash Hogan, Grammy winner Art Rosenbaum and Charles Westfall just to mention a few! There are so many great people involved in this show and gives you a cross section of the eclectic and outstanding community in Athens Georgia.

Also to note; there is a music event by a terrific friend of mine, super-talented singer songwriter Kate Morrissey!

Opening Reception: Saturday, Aug. 20th 7:00-8:00 p.m.: First Dibs

w/ $10 Donation 8:00-9:30 p.m.: Free Entry

Music Event:
Sunday, Aug. 28th
7:30 p.m.
AMT Benefit Concert Series:
Kate Morrissey & Marty Winkler
$10.00 Suggested Donation

Mystery Triennial

It has been almost a decade since ATHICA (Athens Institute for Contemporary Art) opened in the Chase Street warehouses on Tracy Street. Since then, we have come to rely on the nonprofit art space to provide provocative exhibitions of contemporary art on social topics by artists from around the world and our own backyard. ATHICA’s director, Lizzie Zucker Saltz, founded the non-commercial gallery in 2002 after moving here with her husband when he joined the theater department at UGA. Rather than become, as she puts it, a victim of “university spouse migratory syndrome,” Lizzie created her own niche by bringing to Athens some of the excitement she experienced visiting contemporary art institutes in big cities like New York, L.A. and Chicago.

“ICAs were where you saw the most intriguing work—art that made you feel alive! I wanted to recreate that experience: where you see something that awakens you to a new way of thinking about your world,” Saltz says.

This passion became embodied in ATHICA as she found volunteers from the community to join her in creating this new contemporary art space. An army of volunteers (including the director herself) and a sense of community spirit are the secret to ATHICA’s longevity. Art lovers, artists, musicians, performers, students, professors and local business owners are a part of each and every event. ATHICA has put on 40 exhibitions since it began, highlighting challenging work by national, international and local artists and providing a forum for their ideas in Athens. Lizzie describes this approach as one that “lifts all boats” by showing emerging artists alongside those who are more established. Exhibitions are accompanied by a full roster of events that includes music, films, lectures, dance and performance art book-ended, as anyone who has attended an opening or closing knows, by convivial parties with excellent catering donated by local restaurants.

Running on volunteer power, ATHICA has also been the recipient of grants from the mayor’s office, the Warhol Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. These grants help pay the bills: rent, utilities, printing and shipping are still part of the expenses needed to keep the operation afloat but cover only a portion of what is needed. This year, ATHICA is in a gap period before it can reapply for new grants. To show that the gallery has the community support to be sustainable, it is reaching out with an exciting fundraising endeavor: the first “ATHICA Mystery Triennial.”

ATHICA has invited artists from the community to create a small work (5.5"x 8.5") to be sold for $60 (or two for $100) at the fundraiser which opens on Saturday, Aug. 20. Over 120 artists have answered the call and will have their paintings, photographs, drawings, prints and 3-D constructions available for purchase. So, what’s the mystery part? All of the works are hung anonymously, meaning it’s up to you to guess who the artists are. Imagine owning your own Art Rosenbaum painting or collaboration by the members of R.E.M. for $60; guess correctly and it could be yours! Though some may try to figure out the big names, ATHICA board member and UGA art history student Ashley Wespheling encourages people to just buy something they like and find a new artist to love. She notes that while a lot of students want to start collecting art, it is something that is usually out of their price range. This event offers a chance for locals to support this important community resource by purchasing local art.

Artists involved in the exhibition have remarked on the impact ATHICA has had on them and the community. Painter Anthony Wislar points out that “Athens has a pretty great group of artists, and they need places that connect Athens to the national and international art community. Additionally, the community at large greatly benefits from having an art scene. It's a pretty well established fact that art communities enliven urban areas and boost local economies.”

The gallery has been a testing ground for new curators and curatorial concepts as well as artists. Didi Dunphy recounts this as being something she experienced when she curated the ATHICA exhibition “The Way Things Work”: “[This experience] provided me personally with a way to explore my creative possibilities as a curator, something much different than being an exhibiting artist, but more towards my design sensibilities.”

Photographer Jason Thrasher remembers when ATHICA first began and notes how it was integral to building the arts scene that now flourishes at the Chase Street warehouses: “ATHICA is great. I've always loved the chance to show work there. It's amazing what a huge part of our community that the Chase warehouses have become. I can't image Athens without ATHICA, Canopy and all the amazing people at that warehouse compound.”

All of the artwork in the "Mystery Triennial" will be on display from Aug. 20—Sept. 18; attend on opening night to witness this incredible display of local art and buy an original artwork (you will discover who made it at the point of purchase). If you are feeling competitive, arrive during “First Dibs Hour” from 7–8 p.m. where, with a $10 donation, you can have the first crack at owning art by Robert Sparrow Jones, Jill Carnes, Jonathan Jacquet, Judith McWillie, Melissa Harshman, Jon Swindler, Nina Barnes, Paul Thomas, Bob Clements and Claire Clements and many others. With each artist offering one to five works in the fundraiser, there will be plenty to choose from, and you’ll have the opportunity to get your pick professionally framed for only $10. Participants can win gift certificates to local businesses by guessing the identities of the mystery artists and vote on the People’s Choice Award, which will offer a solo show at ATHICA to the winning artist. The bidding will continue until all works are sold, but there’s yet another reason you may want to make sure you are there on Aug. 20: catering for the opening will be donated by Five & Ten and Ted’s Most Best Pizza. Throughout the exhibition, affiliated events include concerts and dance performances before the final closing party where the artists’ identities will be revealed and all remaining works will be offered at half-off.

This playful fundraising event has a serious reason behind it, however, and it comes at a critical time for this important local resource. Participating artist Don Byram makes this point plain: “It is important for the general population of Athens to understand that the 'Mystery Triennial,' in many ways, is one of the most important events to be held at ATHICA. It brings together the two human elements needed for an independent art space to exist in a community. At its core, ATHICA challenges artists to be free: free of censor, free to push their limits, free of stigmas—a safe place to bend rules and push boundaries. With this event, ATHICA brings in the second element, which is local financial support for the arts. It is easy to say, as a community, ‘We support the arts’ if someone else, in a far away place, pays for it. The challenge the 'Mystery Triennial' creates and says is: prove it.”

That we can “prove it” while having a great time is part of what makes ATHICA such a beloved local institution. If you are a longtime supporter or new to the scene, I hope you will consider participating in what is sure to be a landmark event in our community’s history. See ATHICA’s website for details and the full list of participating artists at www.athica.org.

Caroline Barratt

Now at your Local Newsstand!! Oxford American!!

2011-07-28T06:43:00.000-07:00

In this summer's issue of Oxford America: The Very Best of the South 2011, I am lucky enough to be one of the featured artists!! This is an excellent Literary and Arts Magazine/Journal under the National Endowment for the Arts. It is always full of terrific published writers, poets and painters. This edition is especially wonderful. Look on page 112 for a FULL PAGE reproduction of an oil on panel painting, "Islander" I made in Athens in 2009.

Writing is connected to my work in many ways and usually the two mediums are side by side as I create. For me it is exciting to be included in a journal as such, alongside writers who have published novels, short story collections and have completed works for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Believer, Bookforum and Spin—just to name a few.

The editors at Oxford American were so great and in the end they sent me this wonderful handwritten letter signed by the cast and crew:

Coast-to-coast artist settles in Athens

2011-06-08T13:00:00.000-07:00

Admittedly, Athens is a town of learning and music.

Art is considered in the abstract, ‘his or her songwriting is an art’ or ‘he has mastered the art of playing guitar.’ But art, in the traditional sense and as a scene – beyond the halls of Lamar Dodd – is growing, and to know where it’s headed look no further than T-W-O, This Way Out, gallery’s current exhibition featuring paintings by Robert Sparrow Jones.

“[T-W-O] is a new thing and we’re feeling it out, keeping it slow,” Jones said. “On opening night it was crowded. It’s nice to see people looking at art as a thing to do and it’s nice to see it happen outside of the UGA galleries.”

Jones, a relative newcomer to Athens, is a teacher by day and an artist by trade.

But before he could teach he had to learn, and before he could learn he had to live, and in order to live he needed a place to do so.

Jones is from Jermyn, a town north of Scranton in rural Pennsylvania.

“I was able to be in the woods all the time building tree houses,” Jones said. “That sense of strength and fragility of nature, even the idea of a tree fort or a hut is fragile.”

Jones’ appreciation of fragility is more an understanding of nuance, of details. Not surprisingly, he was first drawn to film as a creative outlet.

“When I picked up my first camera I was in high school,” Jones said. “I wanted to be a filmmaker, creating stories and narrative, but the camera, well, it also helped me towards understanding how to design a picture on a plane.”

Jones went on to study at Kutztown University, expanding his work from writing and photography to printmaking and later painting, or ‘”from the mechanical to the physical,” he said.

“Going to college was beneficial and I’m still interested in writing and ecology. When I came to painting it was the summation of everything but with one extra thing: color,” Jones said. “Kutztown has a good art department and for an artist it’s a really cool place. It’s a place where artists remain and it’s still kind of a magical place.”

But Jones didn’t remain, instead he moved west, far west, to Seattle.

“The land of milk and honey,” he said. “I’d just started painting and people were buying art and a lot of young people were buying art – the dot com boom. I lived in a warehouse in downtown Seattle, lived cheaply and illegally a little bit. But it was the cultivation of [my] painting.”

Jones, though, hadn’t given up filmmaking. In fact, his work in that medium ended up opening a few doors.

“I was commissioned to make a documentary on Red Kelly, a jazz musician,” Jones said. “He lived in Tacoma and had opened for [Frank] Sinatra and Elvis [Presley]. People like Tony Bennett would stop by to see him on their way through.”

Around the same time, Jones started teaching at community colleges on the side.

“I really liked it, but if I wanted to teach I needed an M.F.A.,” he said.

And so Jones went to Baltimore and to the Maryland Institute College of Art – MICA.

“Baltimore was a hard place to leave, but I didn’t know that when I got there” he said. “I drove across the country with my old Saab, no air conditioning and in the summer. I came into Baltimore from the west side, just pure devastation. It is where ‘The Wire’ shot, and I thought, ‘I just left beautiful Washington state for this?”
But Baltimore surprised him, welcomed him even.

“It’s still a fun, viable place for artists. It’s the last city on the East coast to live on the cheap,” Jones said.

The community of Baltimore’s creative scene and of MICA, specifically its people, intrigued Jones. One person in particular became an influence and a friend.

“Grace Hartigan, she was the last living abstract artist,” Jones said. “She knew [Elaine] de Kooning and [Jackson] Pollock and was good friends with Frank O’Hara the poet. She’s so interesting, and so crass.”

After completing his degree, Jones taught at both MICA and Towson University.

“I’d teach four or five classes at each. It was OK money but it became too tough to do after a while,” he said.

So Jones looked elsewhere, applying to schools and eventually accepting at position at Piedmont College in Demorest.

“I moved right to Demorest and it was quite the eye opener,” he said. “After living in cities for 20 years there’s nothing out there. I lived near water for 15 years and now I’m landlocked, I’m thinking, ‘Where’s my ocean?’”

Now Jones, like T-W-O, calls Athens home.

“I love it. In high school of course I loved R.E.M. and I actually had this T-shirt, the Life’s Rich Pageant tour, and on the back it had a bird’s eye view of Athens,” he said. “Athens has a mystique about it, and some legends to it.”

But for an artist who’s spanned the coasts, where or what to next?

“I don’t know where it’s going to go,” Jones said. “It can be frustrating but it keeps me on my toes.

by ELAINE KELCH

Cast Adrift

2011-06-06T13:06:00.000-07:00

Troubled Like the Restless Sea: Entering the This Way Out (T-W-O) Gallery is a bit like going down the rabbit hole. The gallery, situated in the hodge-podge strip mall above Ben’s Bikes, looks like a parlor in a historic home. Wood floors, a small table arranged between two welcoming arm chairs and a fireplace are unexpected in a building that shares a roof with a tacky adult novelty shop, but inside are paintings that similarly evoke a dreamlike state. Robert Sparrow Jones’ large-scale oil paintings share with the Romantic masters a sense of grandeur and the sublime.

The figures in these richly hued paintings inhabit land and seascapes or empty houses and fields. The subjects appear like a half-remembered dream or the record of a stranger’s memory in a found photograph; you have some clues as to what is going on, but the more you look, the more mysterious it becomes. Jones studied with Abstract Expressionist painter Grace Hartigan during his MFA work in Baltimore, and this connection appears in the splashes and drips that texture the canvas beneath the high-gloss surface, giving the scenes an even greater sense of movement and drama. His background also includes creative writing and photography; both disciplines are revealed in the way he sets up enigmatic narrative snapshots within his compositions.

My favorite paintings are the seascapes, where a blue-green ocean envelops and threatens to consume curious collections of figures adrift in crowded boats. “Shelf-Cloud” (2010) and “Maelstrom” (2010) appear almost as pendants, the former a picture of a boating party embarking on some unknown voyage, the latter a portrait of a similar gathering of men and women experiencing rough waters as their boat is tossed on frothy waves. Elsewhere, Jones paints figures in rural landscapes in radiant gold and red. Difficult to nail down to time or place, these, too, seem part of an in-between space. The detail with which Jones paints his subjects’ varied expressions allows the viewer to make imaginative leaps in thinking about what is happening in the painting, something you may still contemplate long after you have left the gallery. T-W-O is open by appointment and from 6–8 p.m. daily, Mar. 10–20.

by Caroline Barratt

Nationwide Artists on Display at SIC Gallery

2011-02-18T12:06:00.000-08:00

The art gallery at Southeastern Illinois College is currently hosting the show Isolated Testimonies displaying the work of five nationally recognized artists who are working at locations all over the country.

The artists include Gloria Adams (New York City), Robert Sparrow Jones (Athens, GA), Courtney Jordan and Jarrett Min Davis (both of Chelsea, MA), and Brent Webb (Harrisburg, IL).

The show includes 15 works, ranging from drawings to paintings to silkscreen prints. Wide ranging approaches, influences and subject matter are all on display, but one unifying thread weaves its way through each piece: the artists’ unflinching exploration of a self-populated world.

Webb said the show provides a wonderful opportunity for the community to see such a diverse range of artwork in one exhibition.
“This represents our continued effort to display local, regional and nationally recognized artists.” Webb noted. (Full curators statement below)

Isolated Testimonies will be on display through March 14, and the gallery is open Monday through Friday, 8:30 – 4:30.

Full curators statement:

The artists selected for this show all present us with a tiny snippet of their personal realities. Regardless of the artists' choice of imagery or the method used in creation, one unifying thread weaves its way through each piece of art: the artists' unflinching exploration of a self populated world.

Wide ranging approaches, influences and subject matter are all on display. Yet, each artist lays before us an individual world of systems, symbols, constructions, deconstructions, ambiguities and specifics. These codes assume the guises of organic and inorganic forms, from birds to bridges; each work offers us a delicate invitation to a series of isolated testimonials.

B.Webb 2011

Gloria Adams: New York, New York
Jarrett Min Davis: Chelsea, Massachusetts
Robert Sparrow Jones: Athens, Georgia
Courtney Jordan: Chelsea, Massachusetts
Brent Webb: Harrisburg, Illinois

Robert Sparrow Jones AHA! at T-W-O Gallery

2011-02-17T14:35:00.000-08:00

6pm-8pm Feb. & Mar. 10-20, 2011
& by appointment

Artist's Reception Friday, February 18th 6-8PM
Music by Ranch and catering contributions by Sugarbeet Pastry
680 West Broad Street
Athens, GA 30605

ARTISTS RECEPTION FOR AHA! (ATHENS HAS ART!)

2010-12-06T18:28:00.001-08:00

Come See New Paintings by Robert Sparrow Jones!

T-W-O Gallery

680 West Broad Street

(NE corner of West Broad and Pope Streets)

Friday, December 10 · 7:00pm - 10:00pm

Catered by Gymnopedie,

Botanical Cuisine in Athens, Georgia

Sarah Dunning is the chef/owner of Gymnopedie restaurant. Born and raised in New Zealand, she has always been interested in food. She maintains that food should be produced from the finest and freshest ingredients, which in turn means sourcing from community and organic suppliers, when and where possible. Given that our daily habits are influenced by our environment, eating in tune with the seasons helps us remain in step with the subtle changes in the air. Sarah applauds the local foodscape of Athens, GA, and the ability to interact with the people who grow our food.

She comes from the school of kitchen do-it-yourself, which has served her well. She is a long-time forager, pickle-maker, and bread baker. Being an autodidact, Sarah has never had a class on how to make a salad. Nonetheless, salads are probably her favorite thing to make and eat. She is a chef primitive, alongside the great painter Henri Rousseau.

Art is the Garden you Grow or the Farmer I Wanted to Be (Isn’t art a bit of farming anyway?)

2010-06-16T08:54:00.000-07:00

I always wanted to be a farmer, I hear myself saying and in that remark are the echoes of very familiar voice. My father walked down through the backyard to the vegetable garden, picked a red ripe tomato off the vine. He brought the fruit it up then and without a work; instinctively, he bit right into it. As a child this was a revelation to me. I always wanted to be a farmer, I hear my father saying offering me a bite of tomato with a little salt. From that moment on I have been fascinated with gardens and gardening.

Capsicum annuum ‘jalapeño Pepper’

In Georgia I am gardening by moonlight in the balmy summer air. I have made many transient gardens in bouts of moves, always with some success but never perfect and have been known to create some unusual designs, but this spring I wanted to try something a little different. I was to make my first raised beds.

Salvia Officinalis, ‘Tricolor Sage’

Designing a garden first by taming the wild—the soil, is no small matter. But there is something so gratifying about digging up matted turf. And doing so always signifies that it is spring for me, dirt in my nails, muddy sneakers, the shovel like a lone flagpole or a ballast to some dry docked boat marking where the garden would then grow from.

Gaura Lindheimeri, 'Karalee Petite Pink'

Ocimum basilicum, ‘Sweet Basil’

My idea for a raised bed was this; first, because I had never done it before and it would be a new adventure. Next, they are pragmatic and I am so very thrifty these days. But also raised beds can be set up almost anywhere and with less effort than digging and regardless of soil conditions. Raise beds have the ability to produce more vegetables per square foot. This makes them ideal for a wide range of applications from backyard gardens to urban rooftop gardens, agricultural gardens, community gardens, and I was thinking about my heirloom tomato garden on my fire escape in Baltimore. I also found that raised beds warm more quickly in spring, allowing you to work the soil and plant earlier, they drain better and they will not get compacted, because, well in my care, I was constructed with accessibility in mind.

Achillea X, ‘Moonshine Yarrow’

Genius Loci, Spirit of Place

Consult the genius of the place in all;

That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;

Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,

Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;

Calls in the country, catches opening glades,

Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,

Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;

Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

—Alexander Pope from Epistle IV, to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington

My “Homestead” garden was going to be a little more public than I am ever used to. I was thinking about the lay of the land around my cottage in Athens Georgia and the only spot of full sun was at the very front of the house.

Clippedwing Grasshopper (Metaleptea brevicornis) maybe or Katydid

The rest of the yard is shady with tall oak trees and maples that I didn’t have the heart to clear out. But, lucky for me, the location was garden perfect. A north-south orientation is best for low-growing crops, allowing direct sunlight to both sides of the bed.

Ocimum basilicum, ‘Thai Basil’

Beds that will contain taller crops such as pole beans, trellised peas or caged tomatoes might do better on an east-west axis. Thus, lower-growing crops could be planted on the south side of the bed and still get full sun. Mine was a combination of both. This was the right home for Homestead Garden Athens.

Capsicum annuum, ‘Pimiento Pepper’

Delphinium Elatum, ‘Guardian Blue Larkspur’

Echinacea, ‘Purple Coneflower’

Number One: the Lumberyard run.

I was again thinking with thrift in mind. I pondered over nice planks of cedar (kiln-dried Port Orford cedar I was thinking would be the best) but they were so costly. I knew treated lumber would be unsafe even though it is often used for outdoor projects. Chemicals used to preserve lumber include organic compounds such as pentachlorophenol, creosote and coal tars. Other preservatives contain chromated copper arsenate (CCA), ammonical copper arsenate and acid copper chromate. There is growing concern about the dangers of arsenic leaching into the ground or rubbing off on people's hands from CCA-treated wood.

So a naturally rot-resistant wood like red cedar, black locust or redwood, under most circumstances, will last 10 - 20 years when used for raised beds. Others could be recycled composite plastic lumber or cement block or brick (be aware that the cement in block will raise soil pH over time), but I am an artist and I was thinking aesthetically. I decided on pine bookshelving because I found perfect pieces of 12” x 8’ pieces. All I would have to do is get three and cut one in half for a 4’ x 84 bed. The structure would not last ten years but I am still a transient and didn’t need it to be.

To my surprise my first bed went together with such ease. I reinforced the corners by gluing and screwing a support and then carried it to position like a giant kite. I stood back and admired it from a bit of distance at. I came back, jostled it over some and went to the road to looked at it from the neighbor’s perspective and then I moved it slightly gain. But what I was realizing, what I was envisioning was a garden that needed to be larger. So I moved it once again with the notion of another and went back to the lumberyard.

I then stapled underlayment mesh to the bottom of each bed. This can really be as simple as newspaper to block grass and other tenacious weeds or as elaborate as my landscape cloth or even metal mesh.

Finally, I filled them with inexpensive top soil, a good layer of composted manure—providing roots with a nutrition boost, then a mixture of more topsoil with humus for water conservation. Before the day was out I had two 8’ x 4’ beds side by side ready for planting.

Except that there was something missing...another bed…and then…another.

And when the second day was through I had the right amount of space in a perfectly symmetrical garden complex of a total of four 8’ x 4 raised beds.

Next was the fun part, planting!

Gaura Lindheimeri, 'Butterfly'

The Color in My Garden

I can’t help but think of Emily Dickinson up in Amherst Mass and that her whole life spent there tending to her art work, her poetry, correspondence and her garden and that not a strain of her garden remains but for her art. As a pragmatist I am tending some fruitful vegetables and useful herbs, all for consuming but as an artist I need color in the garden.

Canna 'Yellow King Humbert'

Capsicum annuum, ‘Sweet Bell Pepper Red’

I think it’s very important for that contrast, life is full of contrast and really believe it takes the contingent of plants to harmonize and grow bountiful. That is despite possible root starvation but I was willing to the risk, I was banking on it, really I was pushing the limits here…because of the potential higher yields…higher densities - ideally spaced just far enough apart to avoid crowding.

Salvia elegans, ‘Pineapple Sage’

So Interspersed throughout are some of my favorite perennials teeming the garden with vivid color, sudden movement and dashing with butterflies and bees alike. My inclusion of perennials is no random choosing either. Years of fleeting garden across my sudden living environments I have adopted some favorites, noted for their beauty, spirit and, hearty blooms.

Digitalis Purpurea, Purple Foxglove

Cucumis sativus, ‘Cucumber’

Foeniculum vulgare, ‘Fennel’

Gardens are not just beatificiaries but they are personal emblems. On one of my runs through Five Points I came across a pile of just-cut bamboo stalks and came up with a good visual idea. I rushed back with the wagon and loaded it up with their tips so long and practically dragging on the road behind me to Sunset.

Dianthus plumarius

Coreopsis verticillata

More Floxglove

Cucurbita pepo, ‘Yellow Summer Squash’

Echinacea, ‘Purple Coneflower’

The visual focus of the garden would be arches I envisioned, a bit of structural madness, but not so much as to scare the neighbors too much. They were fun to build and made me think about Gaudi again. And they are structurally sound and worked terrifically as tomato trellises.

Tropaeolun, ‘Nasturtium’

Cucurbita pepo, ‘Zucchini’

Achillea X, ‘Moonshine Yarrow’

This Father’s Day I went out to the garden. With my father in mind, (just after I had called him and we talked about our garden progress) I picked my first ripe tomato—I have been eating garden salads and peppers for the past whole month.

Lycopersicon esculentum, ‘Homestead Heirloom Tomato’

I took a little bit of salt and…

It was delicious! We always wanted to be farmers. I am a farmer! Well…kind of.

Malus Domestica or 'Apple Flower'

Homestead Garden Sunset, Athens, Georgia, June 2010

Landlocked

2010-03-18T08:36:00.000-07:00

I was landlocked. Never in my wildest imagination had I ever thought that I would end up in a small rural town situated in the piedmonts of the Application mountains. Northern Georgia was at once frightening but it was at the same time, romantic. The notion would never leave me and instead a restless energy precluded every decision I could muster. It’s perhaps the very reasons why in my new rural solitude I started painting visionary images of the sea.

In Baltimore I acquired a 1968 Islander. It was a derelict and I was foolish. But in my squalid situation the thought of the sail up and full of wind (it was a lot of sheet—so I was told, 325 square feet of sail, but it was rolled up in a blue tarp like a the torpedo of Claes Oldenburg.). And her keel was tall as I (It was a full keel and seaworthy—she had beautiful lines, so I was also told also but I never had to be told of her lines, I knew she was beautiful.). Like tail of a great whale and I had stripped it to the pure lead, primed and painted and dreamed of living in its 30ft stretch on the open sea. Nonesuch thing would ever happen.

A good time before Islander and splitting my knuckles under the Hanover Street Bridge I had been reading Melville, loosing myself through the arcane colloquialisms and the swarming nautical jargon. I wasn’t really thinking about boats specifically. The relentless listing and descriptions, of stuff, it did occur to me, however, that this comforted me.

My evenings in Baltimore, after slipping on my already-tied old Nikes, were spent running the dirty harbor round, gleeful at me feet; to whichever dock and whatever tipping boat and past the crab shacks, making miles along any waterways I could find. When I wasn’t confronting the sometimes stagnancy and awful flotsam, the down sun always made extravagance when I had none.

Sometimes I meandered Stony Run, trailing under the tall bridges and crossing the manic streets. I was running against the river taking me North from the city, even up as far as the dams. But the river was another lead keel that consistently brought me back into Bolton Hill, the gregarious lights of the B Restaurant and the warm evening windows of upper middle class family life, more golden nuggets of extravagance that I was allowed.

The reason I mention it is because I had been touching water for the past fifteen years. I moved a life from the coast of the Northwest. From a warehouse in Seattle with a spectacular view of the King Dome, before they brought it to a crumbling dusty pollen that sadly shrouded all the parked cars one Sunday, March 26, 2000 (It was the first domed stadium in the country to ever be imploded—remember that Foo Fighters song, “New Way Home,” I think it was on the album The Color and Shape, circa late nineties, maybe 1997?). From there I ran to the bluffs of Tacoma, looking out at Vashon Island. I was in another warehouse on the tideflats with the trains riding by all night long but that’s another magical story for a different time. What I want to say is that I started by the water and in extreme poverty, a sinking ship say, but because derelict ships can be raised—stuff gets built and the unknown is the most frightening, I made something of myself out there and left it to become, of all things, a painter.

Which brings me to Maryland. I lost a lot in Baltimore. Consequently, (and partly because I can never get rid of anything), I gained the heart of this dear, hard-edged town. But just like that beautiful lead keel, life was weighting me, taking me south and I managed to escape peril.

(Maryland) A Documentary of Blank Tongue; a deliberate resolution

The sky was black and felt as though it would fall right beside me on the highway as I drove home from Virginia. I was painting a house in Virginia, out of desperation, and grateful for it, a very dear friend of mine from grad school. My concentration was waning, I was smelly from painting and this ominous reckoning reminded me that somehow I had lost everything.

Platting above me, the impending darkness was a dark stomp and, while looking in the rearview mirror with its relentless vibrations, the storm felt as though it was chomping at my behind. How easy for me and my little mustard 1969 Volvo P1800E to be snagged and then chewed from I-95, I asked myself. And in the constant high octave of my muffler—it was almost falling off (actually the muffler had been truncated and then twisted on fairly well by a clothes hanger); in that mummifying drone I abruptly recalled one day at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

It was a Vuillard, a petite oil painting, on cardboard, somewhere in the early nineteen hundreds, I think (possibly entitled, the Meal; maybe)—a domestic scene that was barely noticeable and ensconced in a small ever-darkening room to save its ephemera from disintegration (but I had to ask myself, what was Vuillard saving?). Its discovery, although a slight work, was wondrously charged and the emotions welled up inside me. In an instant everything changed…

I was eighteen at the time, a bit naïve and stronger willed, or at least I imagined I was then. As the shingled vignette materialized in my head I looked into the (ever-vibrating) lozenge-shaped rearview and it was as if the mirror was that very canvas (or cardboard in the case of this Vuillard—and it really bothered me that it was cardboard because in the darkening storm, may I have been falling apart slowly?), I found myself staring ferociously as if it were a fast-moving looking-glass where I might muster up that epiphany once again from that day. Instead my discovery was a miniature stuttering world of crystal clear doom. What reflected back at me was the most unnerving scene I could never anticipate and, in a strange way, I got my wish.

I saw my face; a pale oaky moon surrounded by the bawling-up of the storm, (there was a wanting light just screeching the surrounding horizon as if the storm was bread that which was squished down in a hunger and that wanting light pulled at your eyes and became the intense mayonnaise (I was also very and constantly hungry those days, as will soon come up.). In the mirror I was saying something to myself; a few mumbles really, but they were mutterings about predicament and my paint-speckled skin, my stubble peppered mouth were water-chopped and repeating, white-capped through two chapped lips and a forced underbite (because, though it waned, my remarkably iron optimism was my steadfast and my irreverent quietude). But here’s when I realized with genuine horrific dread that my tongue had turned a most fitful shade of black!

Everything was sudden then. I ducked my head and swerved sharply into traffic, to the hankering pass of what was dark and appeared to be a wooden ship sailing north on I-95. Hellishly it moaned by. I fell in behind, followed for a hardly a moment—(was it really a wooden boat that I was following? I even have to ask myself this now.). But as it turned out it really was and she was not so mysterious passing like a ghost. Instead she—(magnificently landlocked I should note here), she was speedily sailing by in tow behind the rusted veer of a hulking old flat-black Ford F100 (circa, the early seventies). I sweeply searched the porthole row starboard, looked up to the creeping sky, a slow pass in recovery. When I returned to my reverberating looking glass; my squinting so hard for the truth, my seemingly so determined at the miraculous; I took my fingers and steadied the stutters like a seashell that owned not the ocean but a maelstrom, and there it was, my tongue, black as the pressing sky.

Maybe I thought the whole thing had been conspired by the drastic charging weather system (or against me and the things I had done) but the sharp pining silvered along the horizon; to westward, like a heated lamp and said otherwise, I was sure of it. The sky ripened—it was that forbidding, and my tongue (even more so a hue akin to plum, really, or closer, the remnants of a painful charliehorse bruise) the circumstances were awfully disconcerting.

How impeccably my words, my actions and my emotions had become so well illustrated (I was telling myself too many self-satisfied lies, I rationalized). And, while that darkened room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art had oddly come back to me; as that tiny Vuillard emerged from a conservators darkness (were they really trying to obfuscate this heroic work?) once again my current situation became my Giant. Because the epiphany was startled out of me like a guttural frightened yelp. Right then, in that volatile and immediate circumstance I knew exactly what I needed to do. I was going to make a documentary.

Camera Obscura

Strange that it never did rain as the menacing sky chased me the whole way back to Baltimore. But the epiphany lingered with the storm and after I got home I ate some stale corn chips, fell asleep on the sagging chaise lounge and woke up in the dark, hungry and scheming. I called Steph; it was around ten, to see if she would meet up with me at the pub.

All of the components of that indelible sequence I had collected, it was making me want to make something wonderful. I went over the entire sequence: my tongue in the rearview mirror, the swerve into traffic, the wooden ship, all of this made perfect sense because each part was collected under such urgent and precise duress. In reconstructing, I was thinking, from an onlooker, a sudden focus and sincere confusion mounting my brow in a deep knit across the moon of my face, it was the horror of the discovery. My black tongue in the mirror, I brought it back again to memory, and then the passing ghost of a wooden boat; the horns that dash by are a sort of hinging at a rage. Because the rain—I want the rain to come down hard. Knitting this scene together I pictured myself saying something smart about the rain and the connections would be irrevocable.

I don’t know why it meant so much to me, to save everything. When I try to understand it, I like to think; hey, I am a painter and I collect viscera: images, memories, objects that are, mostly useless but interesting and almost sculpture. As I was thinking about an old ironing board I had passed the other day and forgot to pick up in the Volvo, I thought how I wasn’t sure what Steph would think about the project. I needed to hold on to this for a while. It really was like painting to me (not painting—house painting but painting—Painting, and it felt genuinely rich to have this almost tangible thing.

The night was dark and sweet and my secret burned me. I was animated (not like me) to the point where I could tell Steph was curious. Johnny Cash blared the lonely red room of the Charles Pub as I secured a booth and Steph got us the first round. On the way over—(Steph picked me up because I think she was frightened of my cacophonous old Volvo) out of the blue she asked if I had sold a painting. I assured her that I had not though we both silently knew selling some work would have solved many problems.

Steph and I had been studio neighbors at the painting program in grad school. She was from Texas, had a beautiful full head of curly hair and a steady late night champion for cheap pitchers of Pennsylvanian beer and art talk—or misery talk (which is how it had been lately). And with that impending dooming thought, Steph set the two beers on the table. She was talking about the gallery where she was working at and because I had been all day long on the tippy-top of ladders, with my only substance being the fruit and coffee Margaret Bowen put out on the kitchen table for me in Virginia (I am forever grateful for her), it didn’t take long for me to feel myself a little tippy-toppy. Which is probably why it was inevitable that I let out a little something I saved; a different secret nonetheless, though it was really no secret to Steph.

“I’m lost,” I say to Steph, like a song whale at sea it comes blithely. Lost wasn’t it only, augmenting the ever-familiar rhetoric. Which easily rushed and easily lapsed as we took to our lovingly brother and sister repertoire.

“R,” she sates firmly but quickly pauses to soften her approach, a head tilts, “You need to be alone for a while, dear—couldn’t you just let it rest for a while?” Saying it, she means it really because squeezes her shoulders and then they sink like two wings grabbing the dirty closed air, indefinitely and ruffleless and also, her eyes are pretty, and she makes them softly shut together with the wings as if she were still telling me. The eyes are veiled justly.

With all the self-importance I could muster I say, “Let what rest—I’m an artist—” My attempt at tricking her into agreeing is fruitless. I was aware of this only after the fact. Steph, good friend she is, whips it all to nullification with just the roll of her then opened eyes—is why I need her. Sincerity runs rampant.

“Two months and a half is certainly long enough to be alone,” is my righteous justification because I sit upright and say it as if this would have made all the difference, as if that was just enough to make some philosophical arrest (the beers were tiring my usually sharpened rhetoric into an unconvincing wine—not really like me).

Steph let out an emphatic, “Huh,” then looked over three boys who had just entered the red urging walls of the pub. From busting Charles Street it was like a flushing urge and I noticed that Steph was a little dressed up. She looked good. The movies had let out across the street and the tall walls steadily glowered.

“Have you ever been alone in your entire life, Jay?” Steph’s question holds deep pause under the surge of the drink orders near the door palpitations, “For any extended period of time?” she says and it seems to raise her dark eyebrows, “At all, I mean?” she punctuates because she already knows the answer, and eyebrows even higher.

Inward I turn to a series of long-term relationships. In my head we are all in a row one coast to the other and back again, a slinky down a spiral stairs.

“You didn’t answer the question,” Steph says, her dark, middle-eastern eyebrows reprised.

I begin stern in questioning her response, to display some truth. However it rumples away in a half-laugh and Steph, always raised in a sure poise, deflates to my promises, rests her head on the red wall mural (a mural I keep forgetting about but cannot for the life of me ever forget—) a rising angel, or actually it’s a burning phoenix, or could it be Icarus—I like the idea of Icarus because I like people who build stuff—and fail, especially such a grand end for such majestic intentions, like real life and I had been contemplating real life.

“You never answer the questions, Jay. Just answer this one question, please.” And when she pleases she draws her please such outwardly dramatic. It’s obvious she’s pleading for humankind so that I have to comply, but can’t let it go. I say yes I had (a little white lie, which was so completely awful because I was well aware my lies, even the whites ones, were making my tongue black) and then I retracted my answer my answer.

“No,” I said it again the right way. I said it firmly. I said, “this darkness here, that we are both looking at, this two-months and a half—this is it,” And then My Morning Jacket came on the jukebox and confirmed the melancholy and the regret.

Steph put her hand up as if to make a pointed argument but none came, she was being sympathetic, she turned up and ordered us a few more beers at the bar where the boys gangling around. I was left alone in the dark red light, bathing me and Icarus.

I really didn’t know how to be alone, I felt like saying. The thought made me feel foolish. But I had to say something and when Steph came back and set the beers between us I told her about my black tongue. This is where Steph gasped. This is where it caused me the worry that flattened out my great secret idea.

“What are you going to do?” she asks me and then says “Oh my god,” into her open hand. She makes me show it to her again and I stick it out as far as I can and just shrug.

“Oh dear, really, Jay? What are you going to do about it?”

“What am I going to do about it?” I say, sip off my beer.

“Yes, really dear. Really?” Steph deflates against the wall, “Are you all right, Jay?”

“I’ll tell you what I am going to do about it,” I say, “I’m going to make art out of it—”

That night I went to sleep feeling my tongue on the roof of my mouth. The dry texture grossly resembled Styrofoam or better, a mountainous range who’s vegetation, for lack of proper rainfall, went completely barren (that’s what it like, honestly, that was the right metaphor). The life from that wetted muscle had fallen off asleep like a leg, or an arm, like bad meat, the way my arms were draining then as I read Melville above my head, worrying over my tongue until my eyes closed by themselves. I saw that slinky line crossing from coast to coast. My mind; rightfully, was trying to push out all I was collecting and my resisting turned everything into a sludge. The oily substance of fast dreams inked my mind to a blanked-out sleep. Which was far better than the misery I could have displayed to myself.

Coconut

The next morning I couldn’t get my eyes to open all the way and what followed was a day that emerged into existence in eternity. Fuzzy and bright and so early the radio came on to This American Life and Ira Glass mumbled his sprightly grave concern. Melville laid split on the floor next to my bed where it had dropped to my slipped away dreams. For the most part I could never remember my dreams but I did have just the vaguest recollection of the sea. It was a dark sea, I think. I think it bellied through my inky mind. And perhaps what I thought was emptiness was in reality a vast motif companioning some wriggling rope of chance. Only what came to mind was Géricault’s, Raft of Medusa (fitting for me on many levels). Within the perils of my own life raft, I thought, would be me and Apple and all my collections, bucking aghast the harsh slant of an ominous sky, my boxes of stuff are spilling the sides—for some reason I don’t mind loosing stuff this way, in desperation.

I carried Melville through the studio and set him on the kitchen table in an upside-down sailboat. Sunlight fanned across my eyes as I opened the cabinets to the only trio of cans left inside—a can of split pea soup, a can of stewed tomatoes and a can of coconut milk. This interior was, of course, dire, but something intently took me, as it often does, and I reached for it:

A simple illustration of a cut-in-half coconut shell. This tin vessel in my hand was an offering, the label displaying the coconut with its sallow hole, of clay-white against a flagging yellowed background. I say so because, maybe it was the combination of color, local and warm, set to the abstract—just a few geometric shapes, that to me seemed the perfected depiction of hunger; of depredation—a pining less in the stomach and more gauzzed up in the head. I said to myself that I might have to soon eat this can of coconut milk. The thought stifled me. I remembered my black tongue then, made a few clucking sounds that brought Apple into the kitchen. The documentary instantaneously replayed in my head and I told my idea to Apple who listened to the whole thing with captivated delight. I fed her a half-cup of kibble because she too was rationing.

It wasn’t only the can of coconut milk but the trinity of cans that intently held significance to me and I played the whole scene over in my head. Me envisioning the discovery of three made me reenact it more sweetly, more, what was it, more dramatically. I turned all the cans so that they faced out, to get it right, to get its perfection, it’s significance. I reached into the cold cabinet again and thought, yes. I turned a side view and had the sun split from the cabinet doors again, right I thought.

The hollow insides of the cabinets, three lonely cans half in darkness. I framed them with my hands in an almost dove bird, framing them the way I have seen countless times directors portrayed in movies. Then I pictured my eyes, sad eyes as they study the coconut label. I pictured them in a close-up, then, yes—the eyes are more complex at this range, weary and distraught, which would make a cut-away to the hands next so important. My hands, there was still paint in the wrinkles of the knuckles. Were my hands getting older? Where they shaking? Maybe they tremble in the film just like this, to entice a better sense of realism. My hands, my thin nimble fingers turn the can to it’s simple illustration—was a coconut the symbol for the ideal, what was it? Though abstracted, the coconut definitely had an obvious fertile, motherly symbolic gesture. Inside the coconut crested an interior that was a lifesaving treasure to so many castaways.

I had the peeling desire to dig out the video recorder. I was getting the sequence down in my head. I imagined me opening up the can, the oily can opener, a twisting that spills the sides with milk. There should be a cut right here. To me hovering over the stove, my pensive stance comes across as eager, waiting for the temperature to slowly rise to a boil. In order to show the actuality, the how-pathetic yet how-accurate the situation was—after all this was a documentary and this was as genuine as it can get—the take would have be left a little longer. In this manner I would come across as so alone; I was lonely, so much that when the scene then cuts to me eating in the sunshine it is with a finality—that is, the condition captured contains an absolute quiet dignity and slowly, resourcefully, spoonful by spoonful, we become stewed in the pathos.

I found myself saying this out loud and Apple was waiting for the punch line in the kitchen sun on the rag carpet. I told her the there was no anecdote

Artistically Speaking, Robert Sparrow Jones published in Athens Food and Culture Magazine

2010-02-17T17:47:00.000-08:00

Barcelona

2009-10-17T18:45:00.000-07:00

In Barcelona I had a fever. The night, heated with its foreign shouts and laughter, drifted up to the narrow balcony through the tall open windows and stood eternal. I could hear a fight being broken up from the bar underneath and the scooters interminably plying by. That evening we had met up with a curator from the states.

In El Born we shared a bottle of Grenache that turned into another and took to the meandering cobblestones. We ended up off Passeig del Born in a teeming little place with great strange paintings on the walls with a gorgeous dinner of tapas fusion. Afterwards, we walked through crowded Barrio Gotic, said our goodbye’s after which I had a nightcap at the hotel bar.

Earlier that day I felt overcome by fatigue but shrugged it off from the travel, splurged on a visit to Casa Milà, my favorite Gaudi, and absorbed the awe and wonderment. The undulating windows and the blue tiles made me feel as if I were submerged in the sea and I stood like Neptune on the terrace looking down at the boulevard from the Suess-y stacks and the tiled whaleback-like hump.

Suddenly though, after the gentle day and that happy evening, I became achy from top to bottom. At the hotel bar I sat awfully aware something was off and I barely made it upstairs to my room. As my fever broke out I was doing my best to crawl into bed. I still had all my clothes and shivering uncontrollably.

The few weeks prior I had spent north of Barcelona in the arid rocky terrain of Montserrat. The Benedictine Monk retreat at Montserrat, some of the most spectacular mountain views of Catalunya and a certain fame for its numerous miracles associated with the intercession of the Black Virgin of Montserrat. In another ancient monastery where the monks once made wine and you could still see the stone shoots throughout the walls on the lower level, this is where my residency began and here is where I made these paintings.

The heat was sometimes unmoveable and we were valley-ed by the surrounding groves of almond trees, wild roaming boar and an old winery. You had to walk up out of the valley by a steep dirt road into a small Catalonian town for groceries, espresso or a milky Clara, a half-and-half composition of Damm cerveza mixed with sparkling lemon soda, Fanta limon, or a lemon Fante; Clara refers to the white of a raw egg, precisely the substance that a Clara resembles, at least in color. Or sometimes the end of the precipitous hike was not without a rewarding swim at the municipal pool where, unbelievably, you can gaze up from the base of Montserrat to the solid rock formations reaching up like wrinkly fingers, like drip-castles, and you can understand why Dali and Gaudi made frequent visits here. Afternoons at the pool with a Clara in hand, tipped back on a blanket in the grass and a book, this was good life.

There was another path you could take from the monastery that was mysterious. A hidden, seemingly haunted, grotto, a glassed-in Madonna and a cold running water pool cupped in front. From here the slender path up the hill was nearly vertical and the quick switchbacks, flanked by wild prickly pear and old growth yucca plant, allowed for secret offshoots of narrow terraced farming, a most interesting architecture of land and necessity. I jotted down quick ideas for further use; even my hikes were assiduous.

The first weeks in Spain, the weeks before my beginning my artistic endeavors at the monastery, I spent in a different fever. Barcelona has a darker, much seedy side. In El Raval, my strange lodging in a trendy hotel, offered a start like a shot fuse to a row of ladyfingers. Maddening yelps, it seemed, the night skies touted and gunshot and the Moroccans’ skillfully sweeping eyes. The prostitutes I passed each day; behind my hotel they mixed along the graffiti-ed alleyway, of tiny brimming groceries, in fit-full colors and side by side to small festive clothing shops. I enjoyed being here, the grit of this neighborhood was vibrant and multi-cultural. There was an enormous amount of tapas bars and I spent my days on a rented Vespa, searching for Gaudi, collecting nuggets of visual information, drawing, painting and absorbing internally the language with passion and fervor.

The Mercat de la Boqueria in Las Rambla, a few blocks from my hotel and past the opera house, the Gran Teatre del Liceu, is where I gathered lunches and dinners. An excited contrast of vibrant color, of fresh Catalonian ingredients captured in dazzling displays, the intention of which was with such fastidious care, where vegetables and fruits and just a myriad of aquatic delight; bountiful and freshly-caught, just hours out of the sea, was a feast on extraordinary levels. Tuna and salmon, cuttle fish, the feeders from the top, feeders from the bottom, a brilliant array of barnacles, spiny shellfish—Gaudi was everywhere, and a dozens types of shrimp, mussels, octopus, oysters, lobster and the more rare species, the plenty of which I have never seen but eyed me curiously as I ebbed by.

There was also Bacalao—salt cod and then cheeses that were so difficult to decide which ones to try though each taste was a triumph. Butchery—game and eggs—whole legs of Spain’s prized hogs hung behind the counters; Jamon serrano, the famous cured ham of Spain, lean and salty, utterly delicious and ubiquitous with the most expensive, the jabugo, pato negro, costing over 200 euros per kilo. There were herbs, breads and pastries, wine—and olives! Beautifully lighted glass cases with generous white ceramic bowels brimming with olives. My favorite, the fat, green, aromatic manzanilla, but there were so many varieties, green and black, oil-cured or in vinegar, with herbs, peppercorns or stuffed with anchovy—stuffed in my memory. Oh, a dish of olives and a glass of good vino tinto! Such delightful lunches.

Also, interplayed in the market stalls were the tiny bustling open air eateries—El Quim was one such stand. On my way by one morning a stool opened up and I slid right in. Hungry and overtaken by the aromas of fresh garlic cooking, I immediately ordered the first thing I saw being passed over the counter that looked curious and delicious. It turned out to be eggs and fresh baby squid, Boquerones, truly one of the most interesting and wonderful meals I had on the street.

Against the swarming activity, the everyday ritual of locals and marketers haggling, bartering, squeezing and prodding, all played against the tourists and the so many different languages and the smells and flowers, utterly cacophonous and beautiful at the same time. Later the discovery of the much quieter Mercat del Born offered a much more relaxing atmosphere and a bit cost effective for my quickly diminishing stipend. But both markets were oases for lunch and dinner picnics and made it easier to go out a night and eat in memorable restaurants.

The day Michael Jackson died I was in the Barri Gotic. A bottle of wine and a dish of Paella Costa Brava at El Gran Café. Glamorous Modernisme, dripping red with velvet curtains, carved wooden details, gilded mirrors and warm globed chandeliers. Such elegance in the soaring pillars, which cantilevered a soft plinking of the piano player’s “Bewiched.” In the dining room, looking out onto narrow Carrer d'Avinyó, a bottle of red wine crashes to the floor and the evening balcony diners quickly survey the scene.

All over the city I fell in love. With the narrow streets, the enticing resteraunts, the palatable richness of life and the parks. Montjuïc, the large hill just that overlooks to the south of Barcelona, a lofty ride in a cable car from the Old Port, high up and languidly crossing the sea.

Views of bustling Mare Magnum, La Rambla del Mar, all the way to the mountain bluffs. Later it was great to drive the Vespa up there on the fast twisty roads for a glass of albariño on the National Palace, the Palace of Alfonso XIII and the Palace of Victòria Eugènia.

Looking down on the Plaza España was a grand entrance passing between the huge Venetian towers and the Avinguda de la Reina Maria Cristina. It made an exciting ride home, zooming up the elegant Passeig de Gràcia boulevard; running from Plaza Cataluña up to Avinguda Diagonal to the centre of the Eixample district. Bountiful wide, tree-lined with iron lamps, the opulent smear of light emminating from the designer shops; Chanel, Armani, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Lacoste and Cartier, glowing like insets of lavish gold, fabrics too fine for touch, draped across soft melon displays, the passing; so eloquently dressed, while I, all in a faintly oil, left a smoky wandering trail. It was the Gaudi that impressed me along these busy streets; the architectural treats of Casa Milà and Casa Batlló—an amazing adventure to just witness these beautiful masterpieces via scooter at night.

Just outside of city center, a hilly green gently above Gràcia, Parc Güell overlooks Barcelona, situated and sequestered as if it were the city’s mind. Mid-morning and mild, a Vespa ride fueled by espresso and a pastry, a few things gathered from La Boqueria and another climb. The meander up among hidden villas; and a pact to return just to explore and live right here, to farther up where Gaudi’s visionary Parc Güell awaits in a dream. Hours were spent wandering about the paths, spying city views and the exotic plant life, the palm trees—it was here I discovered, to my amazement, the many flocks of bright squawking green parrots.

It was cool enough to sit in the melding of architecture and plant form/sea form like the terrace supported by pillars, where, from underneath, is a certain lovely underworld. Looking upward I listened to the gifted street musicians while the notes from a bass cello and a violin entwined effortlessly. You could envision them swarming to the ceiling tiles, drifting to the top promenade and surrounding the undulating mosaic bench.

And after wandering the colonnaded paths throughout the park, there is a café where, sitting for a ponderous time, within the shade of a gather of umbrellas, I ordered an espresso, made a few sketches and finished with a glass of wine. Pure enjoyment.

The next there was Parc de la Ciutadella, hosting an exotic array of Mediterranean ecology including one magnificent fountain, the Cascada, designed by Josep Fontseré with his assistant, the then young Gaudí, a strange and ostentatious wonder. You can spy grey herons here, the park is home to the largest colony of grey herons in Catalonia, I was told by a local. You can also use a rowing boat on the lake, though I didn’t. And there was an unusually larger-than-life mammoth elephant sculpture, tusks and all. What a green island to relax, to rebound for a while and to go for long walks, as well a picnic or two and to lie down and soak up the warm sunshine, which for me was my sketching, writing and making a few small watercolors. I thought if I would do anything at all I someday would construct such a garden. What dreams could be made here were plentiful and easy.

After my first rush of Barcelona was an introduction to living somewhat in isolation in Montserrat at the monastery. The calm hot days, the vivacious communal dinners at ten, I began my first paintings here in an intimate format; on none other than rolling paper. I had been thinking of paper, I was sketching and painting small watercolors on the streets and gardens of Barcelona. On Arches and Cotman and Fabriano I painted with a small tin of multicolors and waterbottle.

I was then in the mountains, in queue at the counter of the small town grocery and I spotted them, or rather, they came to my vision. Traveling for so long I rendered myself to a mindset of resourcefulness; I was inspired and ready for anything, come what may. The discovery of the rolling papers in that grocery called up my boyhood like an easy wave. How delicate I remembered the paper had been—and because I knew no translation for them—in the country no one spoke a lick of English and I, not very exceptional at Spanish let alone Catalonian, I pointed and re-pointed, made a gesture in my fingertips, of rolling out tobacco, the craft of smoke which procured the small flat folio.

Painting on the tiny papers—they were about one and a half inches by three, seemed like the perfect thing to do. As a boy I never smoked, though my friends, who were older than I, smoked up a storm in the woods—if nothing, out of curiosity and the longing for brute growth and independence, the likes of Caulfield and James Dean, Harrison Ford in “American Graffiti” and anything Brando, or those orphaned boys in the S.E. Hinton novel, “The Outsiders,” they all easily come to mind. I loved being in the woods and went with them just for the forest. To be underneath a high canopy of deciduous trees, wading the river of fern and laurel and sit timelessly on a rock. That was natural to me, still is. And because I need to make things with my hands, while my good friends practiced a drag, directed an exhale, I carefully dismantled those cigarettes, their fine tooth in my fingertips, their briny odor stained in my palms. Those were fine memories and the rolling papers brought me straight back to the cool woods of Northeastern Pennsylvania. During the evenings in Spain I had been exploring the mountains by running tirelessly through the dusty olive groves and up to the sloping runs of Montserrat that suddenly jutted upward. The rocky roads brought old stone farms to pass, some abandoned and beautiful to explore. One seemed surely deserted but contained a lovely raised garden, a free roaming donkey and a great place to sit under an old shady date tree. I scaled a bit up those solid rock forms and wished I brought my camera for the views and every evening I trudged back to the monastery, exhausted yet revitalized with fresh memories of the cool woods sitting in the back of my head.

After completing a few small works on rolling papers I decided I needed a scale change. I needed for them to be bigger. Tiling the small papers together for the larger works was a natural amendment to my ideas. Using the rolling paper connected with my childhood but also, in retrospect—as with most art; experimentation in different media and form brings out the subconscious, I had been most concerned with nature however the completed paintings took on the unmistakable appearance of the tiles and mosaics I had been discovering and living with; the Gaudi and the Moorish-influenced tiles. Deconstructing the painting by it’s small rectangles, working on them individually and then rebuilding the works onto the wall was a different process for me and allowed surprise.

For a few weeks I painted in this manner until it was time to get back to the city again. And here is where I caught my vertiginous fever and thought I would disappear like an apparition, like a stream of wafting smoke. I could not help but call up the haunting imagery from the Paul Bowles novel, “The Sheltering Sky”. In my hotel room with tall ceilings I was shaking uncontrollably. It was the middle of the night. Quickly my shaking would vacillate to a fiery hot sweat. It went back and forth like this for an interminable amount of time, I hardly slept at all and read halfway through the only American novel I could find on the bookshelf in my room.

Somewhere near dawn I think I finally did get some rest and I spent the following day walking around the city in somewhat of a daze. My recovery was oddly instantaneous—with the aid of some heavy-duty over the counter fever medicine. I took it easy in the park, making a few watercolors and headed back to the mountains.

But I was restless back at the monastery and with country life and a decision was made to wander further north to explore the shores of Costa Blanco. Watching the city disappear into the rolling hills and small towns of Northern Spain I passed through fields of sunflowers and I kept thinking about Van Gough, his yellow house, appropriate for a trip so close to Arles in the south of France. Intense yellows and greens and blues, you could envision the defining brush strokes and direction of paint. These fields held a rushing vitality just as those Van Gogh paintings, the cypress trees, the blue skies and bucolic life. What a tumultuous and passionate fellow, created so many works and left us largely unknown, around the same age as myself…Tea in the Sahara. Passing those tremendous fields of sunflowers, all facing a single direction, I thought how intensely beautiful they were and at the same time, how beautifully violent.

I woke up in Roses to the arc of blue Mediterranean. Brilliant and ebullient the journey began to climb up over the steep mountains of the Cap de Creus, the easternmost part of the Iberian peninsula, the Mediterranean end of the Pyrenees. Slow and steady the steep ascend rendered me wide–eyed and pressed to the windows. Sewing lines of meticulously piled stonewalls and low stacked stone dwellings—architecture that followed the landscape, disappeared into hills and prairie, melding effortlessly throughout the windswept slopes. Among cacti, scrub, sage, thorny broom and French lavender the coastal town of Roses was getting smaller and smaller. The back and forth sway was exhilarating but by the cresting switchbacks of the downward side to secreted Cadaqués I was rendered nauseous. Perhaps an appropriate foreshadow to a Dali adventure.

I have never been to a more romantic and mysterious city in my life (second only to Naples). Like a pearl from the sea, this fishing village clings to the side of a mountain, whitewashed with breakthroughs of the Mediterranean, hidden arcades and a road that hugs the incessant laps of the evening tide. The narrow streets of climbing vine are very steep, paved with rough slate and zigzag over the mountain like a rabbit warren. They become windy alleys by night, all leading down to an array austere beaches. But first from a distance; the far rocky coast is fringed by beautiful crisp and quiet coves and then you approach Cadaqués as if you were to approach a wild animal.

Almost completely cut off by land, this fishing village remains hidden until you get to it. Isolated by the mountains of Pani Puig, Puig Bufadors and the rest of the Emporda, a comforting sense of isolation, and yet the cafes and bars were continuously full of activity, the nightlife was bustling with small excellent restaurants, the best of which were hidden in the secreted alleyways; one of certainty was the Mermaid Restaurant, hidden on a small dead end alleyway off of Carrer des Call, a tiny street named sa Sirena (Sirena literally is mermaid in Catalan) but before you turn the corner, there laid out in tiny stones is an urnshaped mermaid leading you, if your nose doesn’t lift your attention from the path. I stayed at an old hostel near the highest point in the center of the village, just a few steps away from the 18th Century Santa Maria Church. The concierge would bring out jam and toast and espresso in the morning, plates of cheese as well and answer with a curious lengthy and dipping, “sshhee, sshhee”. During the evenings the windows in my room remained open to the cool breeze and the quiet meandering from narrow Carrer de s'Esglèsia. One evening they were singing a birthday song below in Catalan as all the shop owners gathered with slices of chocolate cake on plates and flutes of champagne and mingled in the setting light.

Mornings were comprised of a walk straight down steep Carrer des Call, a whited tall valley to the sea. Everyday it was a surprise to enter the peek-through and enter the Plaça del Doctor Trèmols where people would mill quietly in search of espresso and breakfast. Here, sitting in the evening on the stonewall or a sea-facing bench with a bottle of wine and some cheese this was the perfect place to watch the waves and the setting sun or the people, or both. Before entering the plaza, before the low archway, just on the inside of the village sits a small fruit and vegetable market and a cheese and meat shop to stock up on lunches and then out for a walk in any direction. The dramatic terrain, the narrow and stony beaches; any one of them was remarkable for an afternoon of exploration or just reading and sketching. Also in the mornings, pre exploration, off the village's main square Es Passeig, situates a frenzied pastisseria. Excellent for espresso or tea certainly, but also for the amazing array of pastries; trays and trays of mushroom-cap-shaped cakes, the base of which I was told is just sugar and butter with a little sugar on top, a sort of sponge cake, gets their lineage from the eighteenth century. An indelibly sweet snack; they baked different kinds everyday—some were “flambejat” with rum. The croissants were excellent as well and the barista always said “Mercy” to me.

Tiny and old, the weatherworn Catalonian ladies, after pointing sharply and haggling gruffly inside the little fish market, to my amazement, always made up the village hills with their fish and fresh bread in basketry. After a long day out walks home for me were nearly always a slow surrender to the serious hikes all the way up to the daunting white walls of the Santa Maria Church. When the bell rings, from underneath you can witness its pregnant shape penetrating the tower against the blue sky. The octagonal bell tower, appropriately enough, was used as a lighthouse by the local fishermen and there is an inscription, curiously on a sundial directly gracing the bell tower’s façade. It states ominously; “ If I have no sun and you have no faith, we are nothing.”

It did make me think of Hemmingway. I though of him often. “The Sun Also Rises,” has been in my mind for so long and now I was in Spain. Driving the Vespa by the Plaza de Toros Monumental, was exhilarating and yet I did not have the heart to enter. I thought of those stories mostly here because it felt to me like it was an undiscovered little city filled with romantic wonder and danger. But those bells would ring all through the village and make you remember you were someplace special. Inside the Santa Maria Church is quite a surprise. I had been there for a while until one day I noticed the door was opened and I went in. Within the dark interior, for a moment frightfully, is a most impressive Baroque and golden altarpiece. The artist Pau Costa started this masterpiece in 1727 and it was dedicated to "La mare de Deu de l'Esperanca", patron Saint of the village. The figure central to the altarpiece is a representation of a pregnant Madonna, golden with lovely thin swimming hands and her flesh painted a light rosy-porcelain, matching her quite regal expression. Set in further; both scenes are golden dioramas and concave to the repeat of the womb or perhaps it is, still a womb but more an opened egg and may perhaps be an influence on Dali’s obsession with such imagery—this scene is situated directly over the Madonna, a carved representation of the “Coronation of Mary” (The final episode in the Life of the Virgin, and follows her Assumption) complete with a half-bare Christ, God the Father and lingering Holy Spirit like an apparition in the topmost egg dome. High up and swarming in the arches, the entire golden alters’ relieves are surrounded by golden winged angels. Their child bodies are painted the same pallid fleshy glaze; it’s a wild sight and it’s been said that the local fishermen used to hang live lobsters among the angels. This might be a Dali fable but I want to believe it, like those disembodied heads floating in the gilded wood iconography.

Cadaqués was an attractive distraction but it was time to get back to the monastery and make some paintings. However my arrival at Montserrat, the country life I left had come to, had changed radically. The quiet monastery grounds were now teeming with festival.

The new residents, the most of which were from Norway—nice enough but truly odd to be living in Spain among so many Norwegians—mind you, these were nice and interesting people, however they were entirely friends and family of the residency owners and not there in the mode of creation whatsoever. Their holiday turned into a bit of a nightmare. The unfamiliar faces and their children mingled in the all-night-long evenings—with some really great stories and amazing traditional Catalonian guitar playing, that was the best part however I was here to paint. Our communal dinners in the courtyard literally went all through the night—every night, and the distraction was apparent. In addition to this there was also a not-aforementioned incident involving a much necessary but neglected trip to the hospital emergency room, a hot ripping ride in the lorry with the chef and a small town twenty miles out, the likes of which will not be discussed at the present time.

Vis-à-vis the decision was easy; Costa Blanco was my studio, this is where my inspiration was coming from. I packed up the studio as quickly as I could muster, and the room and the vegetation I had collected. Johnny Shaw drove the lorry, bags and all to the Barcelona Nord. But timing is everything when you travel and in Spain making connections throughout the countryside is essential but sometimes a bit ambiguous. To be stranded is an unpleasant proposition, especially when funds were getting tight as they were then. The objective was to not have to get a hotel room and spend a night somewhere by accident. That said, Johnny Shaw zipped down to Barcelona, through the impenetrable city traffic, entered a wrong way street and bumped up onto the sidewalk right at the door of the station. This was after he accosted the Policia in a municipal lot were he was tersely asked to turn around and leave.

The first time around the trip to Cost Bravo had been relatively easily. Somehow that had all vanished. Connections were tight. I embarked on a different route and consequently in Figueres (birthplace of Salvador Dali and home of the Dali museum—his father was a public notary here—and what a bit of an oppressive town) I missed my connecting bus or, actually, had gotten there right on time but the bus was filled—the last to Cadaqués. I watched as the bus pulled away from the station distraught. Spending the night here in the small dirty station was out of the question. Fortuitously, a young couple, who were also on their way to Cadaqués from Barcelona, we connected through our distress, broken English and broken Spanish and made friends as the boy called his uncle which, moments later, procured a car. The ride was extremely fast and precipitous. In the front seat I kept my eyes on the road and widening at the quickly approaching bumpers, passing cars on two lane country roads, winding up and winding down the mountains. I was in fear of getting nauseous, which I easily fell into again—even now when I think about those rides over the mountains I get slightly nauseous.

What a reprieve to be back in this little fishing village. Cadaqués was my home. It was time to settle in and make this landscape my studio. Mornings were spent walking the coast, exploring, painting and dreaming. In the evenings I ran the coastline, the bluffs and coves, through the arid mountains, the steep grades of packed dirt and cacti to further secreted coves and distant lighthouses. On one such evening I set out into the steep hills south of town determined to make the lighthouse. Which I did but what I didn’t know was that there was a beautiful inland cove, wide and deep. High in the mountains I ran the thin tightwire trail that circumnavigated the perimeter looking far down the steep sheer bluff at the blue water, the languid wooden boats and the nude bathers.

I collected species I thought were interesting and planted them on my small balcony as I always do when I go someplace, along with the plants gathered from Montserrat. When I wasn’t busy hiking, I was selecting a different beach to camp out and make watercolors. The placid blue seas of summer, the boats and ships of all different sizes are anchored in the bay. I’m told the very deep waters of the bay of Cadaqués is Catalonia’s largest natural harbor. And looking across the coves you can witness the abrupt coast, the sheer high cliffs, tiny islands and reefs of rocks. The boats, and old and wooden, specifically the Vela Llatina or “Latin Sail,” with over 2000 years of history, is the most traditional sail in the Mediterranean sea. I had fun painting their shape and making drawings.

Round the corner from Cadaqués is Portlligat, Dalí’s long-time home. He bought this little fishermen house and moved here with his wife Gala. These days, the Dali house is a place of pilgrimage for aficionados back then it was strange and small. The bay here now is anchorage shuffled in with motorboats and yachts, a mythical and enigmatic mooring. Almost sinister, you can say, in the piercing angles of evening sun. The atmosphere of which—the surrounding cliffs, imparts to a living inexplicable landscape of Dalí. He represented this world many times in his paintings of which you would not believe really existed until you are there within it. It was exhilarating to run along the cliffs of Cap de Creus and watch, as I believe Dalí had, as the swells of the sea crashed up against them, and the flocks of gannets, and the seagulls and the shearwaters took searing dives on the battering gusts of wind. Getting lost on the peninsula felt as if I were entrapped in one of those Dali paintings. Actually it felt as if Hitchcock placed me in Spellbound, that dream montage with eyeballs, scenes designed by Dalí himself. And there the sea in all its moods, continually affecting a presence of Dalí and charging my own work in different ways, not quite suffused with a spirit of the strange, but with unmistakable affection and admiration.

I should say, my draw to Cadaqués was unexpected but serendipitous the way I found out this magical place has had a reputation for a larger art and bohemian culture. Certainly the profound influence this strange landscape exerted on Dalí’s fanciful sensibility is apparent in his paintings however Cadaqués, has been an place of inspiration to the likes of Picasso, Joan Miró, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Man Ray but even John Cage and David Hockney and, I am even told, Walt Disney spent some time here as well as Albert Einstein, who played his violin on holiday.

One terribly beautiful but windy day I was having espresso at a café, called Meliton. The local wind, the tramuntana, howls down off the snow-clad summits of the Pyrenees and goads the Mediterranean into a raging ocean. Some evenings the sudden wind would toss the old wooden fishing boats and bring waves crashing up the ramparts. That afternoon in the hot sun the wind was so strong it blew my espresso cup, saucer and all, right off the table and all over my shirt and shorts in an explosion. I had my hoodie in my satchel and so I made into the bathroom to rinse out my shirt. It was here in queue where I was confronted with Marcel Duchamp. On the wall I noticed a half dozen curious photographs collage-ing the wall, salon-style. Apparently the Meliton was Marcel Duchamp’s chess playing café. In addition to some excellent black and white photographs there are some great ephemera, some in Duchamp’s own hand. I mention these artists and thinkers because. And next to beach, Llane Gran is a house where the Dali family spent the summers when he was a child—the house belonged to Salvador's sister till recently. But apparently this is the house where Dali spent some days with the poet his good friend Federico Garcia Lorca, one of my favorite poets and also the film director Luis Buñuel, a director I have thought a lot about. Together, the three of them wrote the “Un Chien Andalou” script here. Slicing up eyeballs—remember that Pixies song? Never mind Debaser, remember the film imagery? A surrealist masterpiece. And there is other curious evidence; outside the church there was always a white 1968 Land Rover, owned by the Dali’s own photographer who had a great curious studio across from the hostel. A sort of cabinet of wonder in black and white images and collections of Leica’s, and Nikons and Olympus’.

The last days in Cadaqués were peacefully brilliant and I went on many runs, exploring as many views as I could find. Each bottle of wine that was finished on the beach in the evenings was thoughtfully absorbed with a piece of nice cheese and some olives and amazing local sea salt and almonds. Days melded into night and into morning, right into departure early in August as the town began filling up with people. The Cadaqués International Festival of Music was beginning and every year the festival brings many talented Musicians to this remote fishing village—some of the best classical artists in the world, I was told by a Norwegian Visual Poet. Musicians to the likes of: Andre Watts, Ivo Pogolerich, Maria Joao Pire, Sviatoslav Richter, Montserrat Caballe, Josep Carreras, Victoria dels Angels as well as the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Stuttgart Orchestra and the Franz Lizt Orchestra of Budapest. Tents were rising to the palms while the on coming traffic from Roses and stretching way over the mountains was stifling bumper to bumper. The last two days in Spain were spent in Barcelona in an old hostel situated in El Born with a wrought-iron balcony overlooking my favorite, Parc de la Ciutadella. The busy traffic below, the foreign murmur and the sweet sunsets reaching over the park—my stipend had vanished and I was dreaming, promising, I would find my way back to Barcelona.

2009-06-19T05:47:00.000-07:00

2009-06-19T05:44:00.000-07:00

2009-06-19T05:33:00.000-07:00

2009-06-19T05:29:00.000-07:00

2009-06-19T05:27:00.000-07:00

2009-06-19T05:21:00.000-07:00

2009-04-30T09:01:00.000-07:00

Salt

2009-04-30T09:00:00.002-07:00

She keeps Earl grey
in her underwear.
She says, “I would like to keep Basil there,”
with uncertainty she says it.

The salt in your hair,
the salt in your bones,
brings me rain,
and salted, the slate wets.

You touch my arm,
tomato leafs in my hand,
I smell their briny dense bouquet.

A white dog licking the salt
in notes off one beautiful thin leg.
Her chest is sunburned apple,
her nose and her brother too.

I liked it when you said you couldn’t listen,
like memory it needs to be burned in.
Here’s where I should have started talking,
I’m guessing an utter would have done.

Such pathetic broken river rocks,
all in the shape of hearts, and hurt lingers
in the forgetful birds,
while under the pear tree
bees dizzy around the ripening
and she’s so lovesick
in her panties.

Sailor’s Blue

2009-04-30T09:00:00.001-07:00

The old sailors
down on the long tongues
of the Ballard locks are blue and gray
and sing, way-ee, way-ee
in the cold wind.

Knuckles fisted to their sides,
they tell stories by stones that glide effortlessly
two-feet above the dark bellies
of the rising channels.

Everything rendered in oil,
oil from the leaking Saab,
the swill and sludge from the bailing-out boat,
held up by stilts on land and half-filled with storms of December,
confused, the rainbows toil.

The oil in paint, in shades of leaks
I keep because they are from the Netherlands
and mend metal skies and deep bucket bottoms.
Oil in tubes I squeeze out like grief
onto large plates of glass
and smear into faces
from my past.

Everything remembered in oil,
the twill smell of cadmium red,
the rye that stayed with you
covered you inside,
and dotted your knuckles
you notice them as you eat a sandwich,
as we sip our Torrentes,
through which two dark eyes
are as dark as oil.

Oil as the stingray slices
to a surface that pools
perfectly still, a suffering incision
as quick as sailor seagulls
as cold as belly locks
the oil nighttime
Ballard breathes out.

Don’t Talk

2009-04-30T08:58:00.000-07:00

Laughter makes two girls bend in the street.
Two umbrellas open up into white lilies
saying, IloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyou
and a little white terrier rolls over on the sidewalk,
she wants you to rub her belly
with just the back of your hand.

Call me when you get this—
like a whale a thought is swallowing.
Call me, though I probably won’t answer the phone.
I will listen, though, like it’s a letter from
a very far off place.

There is no pity in that
so-pink sky on this side of town,
waiting for the sift of Bob Dylan’s rain.
Until across the neon sign of the pharmacy it finally explodes,
and rain is everywhere and people squint their eyes,
like they are so hurt to the every single
every where.

2009-04-30T08:54:00.000-07:00

See Through

2009-04-30T08:53:00.000-07:00

Astringent green,
a harbor of sighs.
Tinder, a dory.
Think Winslow Homer,
filled with foreboding,
Now, Voyager.

But life is not the movies.
Nor is its pictures
a resolute pondering.
I’ve never fainted on this burgundy,
not just so across the moth wings
the Persian rug thins.
I have not gone off to battle,
no immortal in lime, the sea air
off the cost near Dorchester.

It is not the same music,
rue, regret and fistfighting,
estranged dialogue—
where is a very attractive
and overcoming hope? My sacrifice?
Where is it, if it is not
my every, singlet,
my everyday?

It’s the pin stiff of wheat,
that takes me to the sprinkle of anise,
and salt everything like March flaking snow.
Let’s eat brooktrout and make stories
by the row-full, let’s now go,

I can tell a fine one,
one about horses, a silvery montage,
once taken to the light,
and truncated abruptly
as life.

Barebones

2009-04-30T08:50:00.000-07:00

“I love this song—don’t you?”
Piano, then whistling the piano.

“Love this song? It’s so sad—”
I start to walk the house with my eyes closed
and wonder what it would be like,
to lose the both of you.

“It brings you to that time—doesn’t it?
Doesn’t it just bring you to that time?”

The answer I see is all red,
and this celestial wandering
brings my nose up close to the kitchen window,
through which a clear warm undressing
has begun of a devastating pair
of such young beech trees.

Crabapples

2009-04-30T08:46:00.000-07:00

A slant tender yard;
a fence melds into misshapes of boxwood
where a small Austin Healey convertible
turns slowly a sienna, and sinks
sweetly every five years or so;
seems to bow to an applewood stump
my father chopped and burned
one Christmas 1972.

Looking down through the yard,
I have shaved off my beard
and with it ten solid years
of a different life—the whole west coast
was shaved off from there.

But a certain terror,
a hillside bouquet with a stump
and a sinking car, the sweat work
the very edges of axe swings
September brings.

There are no vineyards here,
although the few young ones,
crabapples in my father’s yard
under a perfect moon have been harvested,
the wine stored in remnant row jars,

and as severe as you can,
the emptiness of changing love,
you can bring it back
to the soft side of your tongue,
a remarkable laughter
in a fistful of regretful grounds.

Fall's End Part IV (Part III under Oct.08, Part II Under Sept 08 and Part I Under Jan 08)

2008-12-14T09:06:00.000-08:00

At the far end of the cafeteria a row of large windows ran a raving-fire-green of hard afternoon sunlight. Students charged into the cafeteria across the milky white floor like passing a cloud of vapor. Faculty huddled at either end of the cafeteria and sheep-herded the students to the sunflower-orange tables. Without any forgiveness they folded their arms and went face-to-face. Their eyes turned a mantra, of seeking refuge and within a covetous dialogue they rocked away from each other like sea-bobbing buoys. And the children roosted electricly on the lengths of the picnic-style tables looking like they were burned into the sun-filled green.

The thinner, much younger huddle of faculty was smartly dressed under the far clock. They had set off a charge of laughter so abrupt that, as I walked past, I metamorphosed into the coy child I once was. I averted my eyes, marble-ricocheted an arc into the mulling cafeteria frenzy. A hot pang inside my head felt like it singed the skin of my scalp and in the middle of the milky floor I guided myself to the end of the lunch line.

Students quickly added to the line behind me and curled like coral reef. Looking back at them, along with the sea-bobbing faculty, I became nauseated. The shorter the line got the more the hunger pulled inside my gut. But it passed quickly when I took a hot tray from the tall dripping stacks inside the doorway. However in my close examination I found that the fossilized remnants of mashed potatoes were spackled into the corners of the tray. In several areas they were simply Mesozoic and began to turn my stomach even more. I set the tray sadly askew with the other soiled trays like a deck of trick cards and selected another. It’s unnatural shade of putrid green I gladly slid along the glossy countertop.

Behind the glassed-in cases four hair-netted luncheoneers portioned out food, clinking and scraping stainless containers like a tin set of drums. The first lunch man’s eyes squinted down his bulbous nose. His softly accentuated under bite indicated perhaps he had forgotten his teeth and by way of ice-cream scooper he stiffly dolled out a lump of mashed potatoes. The dry heap stuck to my green tray and did not lose its grainy cue-ball shape. The following lunch lady shuffled a steaming pan of suran-covered entrée’s that under the glass looked like melted cheese. She ripped open the plastic and clipped-in a round diskette of compressed meat with enormously long tongs. When her straight smile erupted into a coughing laugh it bounced her heavy bosom and her tiny eyes, in the divided magnification of hot-pink rimmed glasses, became lost in her tight squints.

“With or without—” she said after the laugh and waited a second, “sauce or none, honey,” she said and her impatience pinged the large spoon to the side of the metal container.

“With please—” I said and the ladle of watery brown liquid spilled to the diskette in the main course compartment of the tray.
I sidestepped in line, gliding my tray down with the other students to the next post where a swash of green beans was sloppily spooned-in. They came submerged in a delicate split of soggy drab, looking as if they had been canned in formaldehyde. The final lunch lady smiled down at the tray with the beans sliding towards her. She was younger than the other three and, one hand on her hip, she curtly turned a loose load of applesauce, form-fitting its resin to the small corner square.

“Misses Morcom—” a small boy behind me in line called out. The second lunch lady had just clipped in the diskette of stiff meat to his tray and the boy keenly watched the whole process. He inched up close to the glass case with his eyes level to his tray while the meat landed, crumb-bursting.

“—Misses Morcom,” the young boy pleaded again for her attention but she ignored him resplendently, “My dad said,” the boy continued, “that I need meat—extra meat, because my shirts are loose.”

The lunch lady exhaled incredulously. Her sigh turned her head away from the boy, rolled her in three sections; one at her head, next her shoulders and then her waist, bringing my attention back to the dizzy sea-bobbing milk of the cafeteria floor. She heaved her chest and then looked in the opposite direction. Then, begrudgingly, she let the hissing air from her chest and neatly set another diskette flush on top of the other. When the boy thanked her she smugly rolled her eyes and her grey pupils swam throughout the two half fishbowls of her glasses lenses. Accepting her weakness she winked sideways at the boy and then shook her head in disbelief.

Calls took the children springing from the mouth of the kitchen. In front of the register there was a stack of plastic milk crates and the beads of condensation collectively leaked onto the floor. I paid for my lunch and took one small carton, its weight slight in my hand and crossed to an empty orange table at the far end of the cafeteria.

Here from behind my tray I confronted the green hill of just cut grass. The neighboring diary farm’s pillars of milk stilted up the ash lucid sky and the fields beyond were in a delicate haze of autumn. I was at ease alone and facing the outside world and I looked down to give the diskette a concerned squint before testing it with my fork. I carefully lifted a small wedge to my mouth when the table rumbled and, without too much grace, a young student set herself down cross-cornered the orange formica. In her hastiness the milk carton jumped completely from her tray and onto its side. Her eyes brightened, they were stunned at the tumbled carton, a surprised guile as if she believed the carton of milk had just passed out cold and she was brave enough to begin resuscitation.

I recognized her as the heroic student who fell frontwards in the first gym class that morning. She had not combed her short hair since, it was riddled with cowlicks and she looked wild and clammy. After arranging herself with one leg up onto the bench she slouched over sadly and I went back to my meal. I was about to take a bite when the table rumbled again as the student stomped her elbow next to her tray and, very primitively, she took the fork with her other hand and raised it into the air. I was chewing a mouthful, studying the young student’s sad eyes and the Hitchcockian knife-hold when, in one circuitous stitch, she jousted the flat meat patty and swooped it up above her head. I parted the mouth folds of my milk carton and pulled them open. The short-haired girl remained unmoved with the jousted meat in the air. The most quizzical look surfaced in her face then. One lazy ripple embossed in her forehead, she lowered her eyelids and fluttered them at me. Then she tipped her fork and jettisoned the stiff disk to the floor. I turned to the dairy farm and looked hard at the silos, waiting for the sweating condensation to drip down them but they were too far away. I absently reached for my milk carton, lifted it to my mouth and took the entire carton of milk in one sitting. A drop ran down my chin like mercury as I set the empty container onto the table.

“Are you going to drink that milk?” I asked her as she straddled the bench and leaned long away from her untouched lunch.

“I don’t believe in milk, do you?” she asked, “You do know that cows are a religious item to some people, like in India and junk—”

“It’s probably because they’ve got several stomachs—” I said.

“I don’t believe in that either,” she said with an insouciant roll of her eyes.

“It’s true,” I continued, “they’re ruminants for one thing. They can digest grass. That is, they take cellulose and turn it into protein—”

“If it’s cows milk, I don’t believe in it—”

“Well that’s not the best part. Do you know that farmers—you can believe this one or not at all, but it is the absolute truth—and I’ll tell you anyway. The farmers manage, somehow—you can use your imagination—they have the suspicious ability to leave magnets in their stomachs. Inside the cows. I think they have three—I’m not sure. Well, cows can have got some pretty disgustingly horrible eating habits, as I am sure you are aware. But it’s so that when they, say, eat up a handful of nails and such, the magnets organize them into an assembled order. You know. For obvious reasons.”

“Well”, the short-haired girl said blandly.” She sat upright.

“Well what?”

“You’re the bomb, I think,” the student said. The statement collapsed her in her own unbelief, “I still don’t have any faith in it,” she continued from the collapse, “Nope. At—All,” she said sitting straight up and accentuated both words sharply staccato, delivering them by her hand jabbing for each word.

“But if I did, that would be all the more reason,” she arched her back in a stretch that lowered her eyebrows and forced out a loud guffaw. As she was recovering and in a half-yawn she took her index finger and thumb of the same hand and she made the shape of an “L”. She brought the ghost up to the side of her temple, closed her left eye and the soft damp line of her dark eyelashes took my photograph. The clucking of her tongue from the side of her mouth was the shutter.

The bell rang out then. She scattered her up from the table and sprinted off into the hallway. In her absence her tray was left untouched and the compressed meat abandoned on the cafeteria floor. I reached over and scooted her milk across the table towards me leaving a smeared trail of water. I finished it in one swallow.

* * *
There was a trace of something so dear and forgetful in the muddle of the gymnasium floor. Within the smears of dogeball and the ineffable streaks of sneaker skids the basketball, remarkably, appeared to be sitting in the exact spot it had been as I first noticed it. I searched the ceiling for one laughing angel but the scoreboard only stood with its lovely neat rows of dusty light bulbs, the indifference of their dull white finish awaiting the warmth of some electric charge. In the pure thought of eggs the insides of me stood up and I made for the basketball.

But one good and sharp step was all I was able to make before the gymnasium doors rattled ajar and I froze like a thief with the basketball in my hands. It looked at first as though there were two boys wrestling each other into the room, trying to turn each other inside out. But as the figuration budded further it became clear that the two were actually one; one boy struggling his arms around the glinting rims of a highly polished tuba.

The boy was large for his age and his hair was bronze, short but heavy. One tussled body cantilevered from the other, mirroring across the threshold of the gymnasium. It was a besieging argument that was misleading; somehow the shiny instrument said one thing and the boy the other. However opposing, the single set of legs they shared held the ground flat and square. The boy stomped out a small circle to butt the door open and the god of golden snakes sucked the entire rows of ceiling lights through the metal conduit of its brass tentacles.

The doors kicked shut behind the boy like wild ponies, pushing the two inside. He gave a skillful tug to tighten his soft arms around the metal-brain of the tuba and then made his way across the gymnasium floor. His breath-holding wobble reached him center court where; desperately, he cocked his head sideways. But such poise, his chunky white sneakers cow-hocked to the patient face of the Chief, a slight throat wheeze and, under the weight of his metal twin, the pallor of his marshmellow cheeks went rosy. Here on the face of the Indian Chief the boy stood slumping, proud and alone until abruptly he lurched the god up into his arms and the large mouth of the tuba combed a celestial measure in its path. Every visible light whirled inside that vacuumous opening while the boy, without even a lift to the eyebrows, pivoted on one foot to a direct-right and paraded himself across court half-ways. When he met the bleachers it was without hesitation that the boy stepped up and thundered him straight to the top plank. Here he gave a slow but eager shuffle-turn, a rabbit in a box trap, caught with a carrot and a pressed nose. One-hundred-and-eighty degrees and underneath the residue of his heavy perspiration and his shortbreath panting the boy finally rested. He sat attentively recital-poised despite the effort to muffle his lilts of wheezing.

It was all I could do to take a few cautious steps and quiet my refuge behind the camera. Slightly bent I stood a treetop tiger with my fingers ready-wrapped to the side-handle of the tripod. I lifted my chin to make for something to say, though I don’t know what it would have been. Our silent length soiled the interlude and I was certain that whatever noise would have come out would have been nothing close to music—my twin was a dark and grave camera, its noises were the strict mechanical eating sounds of grass. Its continual digestion was deceiving while its unlying posture did not at all give in to interpretation.

This is when the doors suddenly parted with such violence it was as though a piano had fallen through heaven above. When I looked for its anguished ebony and ivory keys on gymnasium floor I found instead a steady stream of young musicians. Each child forced the double doors wide, a swing that graciously batted around the very next musician who entered. It was a demonstrated war of the true love of what art and life did to you. It beat you up and it devastated you and the cacophony was considerably on the cusp of disaster. Surviving the bites of the clamoring doors, the musicians crossed through the lemon light of the gymnasium holding on to their bright instruments with such careless delight. Following the bravado of the fearless tuba player every musician visited the face of the Indian Chief by the soft pads of their sneakers and the Chief’s nose took the smears with grudging affection. Then they all marched into the bleachers and their roaring stomps shuffled them into a slanting order of metal-clicking that pianissimo-ed the dissonance an unquiet close. It was hard to watch and it was impossible not to.

I resolved once again to express myself from behind the camera. A single shout, a, “How Grand,” or an emphatic, “Bravo,” anything to solidify a connection, just one uttered syllable would have slivered me into the world. But once again it was the half-breath I took that was on perfect queue as the double doors center-left of the gymnasium and opposite the band erupted a steady flow of PE class.

Children marbled across the empty wood floor, girls and then the boys. An ocean was made of half court where white scalloped shorts outlined in the lightest blue matched the robin’s egg t-shirts they wore. Their jumping and bobbing enraged a white-capped water, a welling up of a storm to destroy what it must until there was a melodious interruption, a sweet voice that took a knife and spread some icing over the humps.

“OK. Ready—” the voice rang out. It was an authoritative yet less dogmatic female song and there was no indication from where it had been directed. And though the vacuous room had lost its acrid edge the command remained sugary thin.

“One-two-three, one-two-three, ready-two-three, band-two-three—” the voice called out.

The tuba player struck up the first notes to exact the rhythm of the instructor’s waltz. One measure of grunting had been completed from the gaseous squid before the band jarred into derelict structure. I had to concentrate to pick out the melody because it was always falling. And falling fast the composition suddenly gut-wrenched into a vague but sympathetic rendition of the Blue Danube. By the thick rope of the tuba player’s steady bumping the children arranged themselves into small bouquet-sets, boy-girl, boy-girl.

Echoed hints from the instructor caused sudden jostles and eruptions of quickened steps, as the children attempted a lighter dance than was theirs. It brought me from the studio as I pictured the whole gymnasium swooning dandelion seeds. The awkward space between each couple was a tested fact that one might fly away from the other and never need to return. The floor teemed in this precarious spin and if you had a birds-eye view I was sure you would have witnessed bursting bloom—their bumbledance taking you from bud to full ignited open.

This is where I found the instructor. During my celestial thoughts she was sewing a gleeful syncopation throughout the two-by-two’s. In her counter movement you could have easily mistaken her for one of the children. Her height, her petite frame, she blended like effervescence into the soda of the room. And if it were not for her red baseball cap with a bright white star that she wore, I would have never have found her.

“Wonderful. Yes, wonderful,” the instructor called and swayed her arms to the compositions slow and attractive slight off-ness, “Feel the rhythm, James—that’s right. One-two-three, one-two-three—” her long fingers were open to such uncertain music while she took ribbon runs across the dance floor like barn swallows. It was as if the music so gently plucked her into their quirky story. The startling white star of her red darting bill pin-wheeled her alongside the waltzing couples. Her carefree dance alighted her from one to another, a clumsy appeal where she adjusted them and then sprightly released, whipping her ponytail a calliope.

A few circles had been completed when the dance instructor bumped her way to the outer rim of the corps de waltz. She passed hurriedly by; my face turned and our eyes grazed, such blue exaggerated. Her ponytail lightly brushed my nose and when her dancing toes entangled in the wires of the main lighting rig, her arms whirled in the air. After she stomped out of the slippery snakes she stumbled backward into the studio. She careened and with such lucky aerobatic alacrity set herself square onto the sitting box. There was a calming moment where she caught herself, just a short intake of her breath before the box tipped backwards and she flailed her arms to gather in her balance.

When she was finally still the dance instructor poised herself, reached her arms out in a giant grand finale and the entire dance troupe halted their seaward cycle to erupt a ferocious applause. It brought the dance instructor, her arms still splayed open in gliding flight, to a low and graceful bow.

I was clapping just as vehemently as the children except that an unabashed smile mustered over my face. Which was suddenly wiped clear as out of the peripheral of my eye I noticed the main lighting rig take a slow timber-fall. I leaped then, but I just remember sliding on my knees and a metal hotness in the floorboards, my skin, my heart. The applause sank to utter silence in that cool slide as I heroically caught the lamp but shuttered in anticipation of the explosion pop. I was half thinking the recoil would shoot me into the hallway on my knees as a lightening Budda when the dance instructor, her arms still out spread in the vaudevillian-finale, simply directed them toward me on the floor. The clapping commenced a modulation higher.

“All right, all right. Enough,” the gym instructor clapped her hands twice, “Back to work, now. One-two-three—band-two-three. Lift your head, Linda. Jason, watch those hands,” the low voices of laughter liquefied under the winding up of the band. The spirits of the children it seemed were justified within the clamorous swaying of this sparsely slow interlude.

“I’m a mess,” the young instructor said to me. She tilted her head down and the brim of her ball cap stood a horizon to the tops of her eyes. I hadn’t moved from the floor. I was folded in my prayer with the giant silver egg cradled to the hollow of my chest and the dance instructor, looking as if she was about to sneeze, burst out laughing. Her gesture was a calamity gesture, an explosion, handfuls over handfuls of daisies.

“I’m so sorry—” the instructor said, her coy recovery in the cherry of her pursing lips. To shake off the laughter she jumped her tightly bound arms out in front of her and fanned her fingers into feathers. Surreptitiously she shrugged her shoulders up and nimbly twisted her spine from gipsy sway to demure alignment.

I stood slowly and wobbled the big silver egg back into place. But in my release it was some other fable, the light stand teetered away like the dandelion seeds. I probably should have just let it go because its collapse would have left us no other reason. But I could not help myself. I quick-fisted the stand. I held it firm and tightened its tension screw at the base. In my caution I glanced back to the trick-timber while walking to camera post. And instead of it’s collapse the amusement rolled from red-capped instructor, a hilarity that erupted from every part of her smallness. Her lily hands went from covering her mouth to shaking them again into feathers. The blur made me stumble behind the camera. I accidentally kicked the corner of the tripod, jumping from one auspicious precipice to another. The tips of equilibrium, every single fulcrum weighted any direction like treading a basketball in a backyard pool.

“I’m so sorry, I’m so awful,” the instructor said out from her rolling laughter. She padded herself clear and then said, “Oh, wait, would you mind holding one moment—I’m not ready—”

The children’s disastrous waltz teetered away from the backdrop in swirls. She peeked over at them. Though I hadn’t even begun to adjust the camera she averted her eyes beneath the red brim of her ball cap. Then she snapped to her pose and uncradled her thin wisps of corn silk hair to her shoulders. You could almost smell turning bronze in the air, honey and apples when she struggled-fixed the strands through her fingers. Even the crooked smile that dipped from her lips tasted pie.
I had to divert myself into the viewfinder because my eyes were limejuice-squinted. I had a sad sort of happiness that made me bite my bottom lip. It was easy for me to hide here except that under the closeness of lens magnification the luminosity of her skin stunned me. The thousand fine candles of beeswax I pictured alighting her from within burned me so transparently. I was afraid to look up.

I pulled the lens from its sharp focus to a gauze blur and rounded the barrel lens back to the crispness of her big eyes, a color so violent and mysterious as a capsizing sea. I took a picture. In my open stare the scene fleetingly jogged away. Her quivering afterimage, the fine honey of her hair, her luminous skin and those two lapis lazuli mysteries burned into memory.

“Oh, one more, please. I was not ready,” the teacher pleaded sifting her hips until she was aligned once again, “I forgot I had my silly whistle on,” she said.

The silver whistle was tied around her neck with red shoelace. She fastidiously unlassoed it until it caught up in her hair. She quickly picked at the snarl as her skinny legs fawn-fumbled. Suddenly the whistle snagged the front of her small white t-shirt. It pulled up to reveal her navel, her reedy stomach and then jumped up over her white cotton sports bra that flattened out her chest. She pushed the t-shirt down to an inking flush of her neck, an apple you could have taken a crisp shine to.

“I am so sorry,” she said. The words parted evasively from her tangley hair that had enclosed around her face. An imploring spill, she let it be known that it was not sabotage. Her lips curled as she lifted her chin.

My face felt hot looking at her messed up hair. Where it had just touched the tips of her cheekbones it was crimson running into the rivers of her boney shoulders in the stretch of her collar. I don’t know what came over me then but I moved from behind the camera to kneel in front of the gym teacher. I fanned her hair through the backs of my hands while her body heated a husking embrace of snow. Her eyes had widened to my gained confidence and the staid corrugation knitted up in my brow. I could smell her skin, of clean sweat and dove soap. She followed me closely with those open eyes, testing but on a perilous slope of laughter.

“I feel like a little girl,” she said trying to sit perfectly still.

It was a dreamlike diorama. And not unreal but more heightened, more concentrated in ecstatic life. I walked back to survey the order of the picture and then ducked in cover of the viewfinder because everything had changed. I refocused twice and followed out of the cameras gaze to lay my temple at the dark metal of the lens. To compare our eyes I took the photograph. The pulsing arrest of the flashbulb whitened out like a gust of wind. My eyes were wide open and the two different brains, one; its metal, glass and precision, the other; my own, the conduit of smooth chambers, just as dark and continuous yet the mystified riddle still was not justified.

With cutting accuracy the music was sliced from the gymnasium. It happened so perfectly I though it may have been my own device. The young teacher stood from the box and she pulled her red ball cap on, tugged it comically to the lovely shape of her head. In such quietude she took one decisive step, placed her dancing toes in the entanglement of what seemed to be nothing at all but her own two feet. She stumbled hard and lurched foreword, padded the ground and delivered her in my arms. At falls end she pressed up flat to my chest. I had to grab her tightly and the impact released a sharp blue jay chirp from the squeeze of her throat. The whistle charged the band into a chug of staggering melodious energy.

“Shall we?” the gym teacher said. Her thin folded up arms bundled my tie into a ribbon and when she tilted her head sideways her thin hair ran a river down.

The red-capped instructor took my hand and placed it on her waist. She pressed it there as if saying here on this small bone will be forever drifting you and I asunder. The process leaned us towards the slow pinning of the couple’s concentric circles. There would be no beginning or ending, this song readily admitted. Except that in it’s offering a rich promise glinted a fortuitous direction but never let you know if its destination would be clear enough to travel. And it was comforting to go nowhere just as the components of the musical score didn’t need to fit each other and rather they lightly overlapped so that some parts were faultless and at the same time the concert fell straight through. Its brokenness bought us all together. Had it not been for the brevity of the fearless tuba player dragging his stumping phrases the roaming piece, our drifting, could have all but disappeared.

The gym teacher pantomimed a lift to my gait. And I did so. I took her suggestion as if I were getting my own portrait taken. My posture straightened and the sudden embarrassment rushed to my face as I imagined I was a light bulb against the blue of the whirligig dancers. My heart, my heat and my ungainly side-stepping were black bolts of lightening within the exposed legs of the children. The both of us became a sure part of every visionary mechanics to this performance. Together our wind-turns were the instrument that produced the passing giggles from each twirling couple. I was losing myself. I was really letting myself gather in the dance. And at the same time the musical interlude also began to bunch up to a momentous end. I was overjoyed, almost penetrating my bottom lip. A miniature crescendo gained velocity and then violently came to a halt.

At that moment I found myself pleasurably frozen in the lean embrace of the gym teacher’s athletic arms. I looked down to see if I would find her as sad as I was, that the dance had ended, that there was a wonder, where to go from this point. And here’s where she surprised me. When our eyes met they suddenly gained a devilish tinge. She pressed herself against me, a cue I was sure had meant to engage in a passionate kiss. Then she leaned me back and dipped me over awkwardly to the ferocious clapping of the dance troupe. I was looking upside-down at them. In my bridging posture, across the courts I watched them as if we were all under water. While panning upside down I then discovered that a perfect line of third grade students was waiting along side the photographic studio. They too were clapping but their teacher was not. Instead she rocked in the doorway a steel pendulum, engulfed in the dismal green hallway tiles.

“That was just wonderful, Mrs. Foxtrot,” the teacher yelled bluntly through her cupped hands while rocking away pensively.

“Now, if you don’t mind,” she added as she crossed her arms into a solid concrete ridge, “I believe we are running a little late?” she said, uncrossed her arms and pointed up at the clock, “I do believe we have the dance floor now? Mrs. Foxtrot?”

“Sorry Rose,” Mrs. Foxtrot said her voice rising sweetly but ended in an obstinate jelly. Taciturnly she funneled her class into the double doors, divided once again, girls and the boys.

“We were just—getting down,” Mrs. Foxtrot turned back and added absently.

“You don’t have to be sorry, dear,” the third-grade teacher demonstrated in a voice of fog, each word sluggish and opaquely unsympathetic.

I had hurried over to the studio straightening my tie and pushing my shirt hems into the front of my pants.
“Now take mine first—dear,” the teacher said to me as I got there. She averted her eyes and ended the plea sweetly, “And hurry on before my hair moves about,” she said smoothing her legs down and the polyester zipped against her rings.

“Absolutely,” I said.

The orchestra began the abandon and thundered down the wooden planked bleachers. My rising tone, one I hoped would be stern, came out much different under duress. I was weakened by the silence; the tender space around us was left vulnerable. Even the parting band, there was a need to tote away their instruments quickly. To sequester them to the dark secret rooms so that their unfaltering, pivotal awakenings would be boxed up and swallowed whole like Jonah.

“Don’t make me look too old,” the third-grade teacher muted. In her irascible tone I framed up the photograph and focused. I understood she didn’t want to be rude and I was hopeful it was not directed towards me. More it was a natural resentment to everything in her wrongful world like taking a heavy roller to a plastic molded contour map.

“—And do not make me look too fat,” she added so that the quick inward laugh she made enraged her justification. It was an attempt to iron-out the situation that buckled before us. Though her rigid, lined-up class of third grade students did not dare laugh.

The laughable, the miracle of the musical interlude had vanished along with the band and the dancers. But there was one searing and sweetly divine solo that saved us all. It called right then from the open clamshell of Mrs. Foxtrot’s hands:
“Say pickles—” she yelled.

It echoed across the basketball court and dripped from the lemon walls. And then she too disappeared into the two draining doors.

2008-10-25T12:15:00.000-07:00

Habitat, November 3- December 7, 2008

2008-10-25T12:14:00.001-07:00

Opening Reception: Thursday, November 13th, 2008 7-9pm

The home as part of material culture is the very place where the intricate relations between architecture, objects, comfort, safety, and gender become visible. The exhibition Habitat investigates the multi-layered themes evoked by the interconnections between these terms. Sculptors; Angelo Arnold, Chris La Voie, Jackson Martin, and Sebastian Martorana, painters; Rachel Bone, Alyssa Dennis, Robert Sparrow Jones, and James Rieck, and photographer, Eddie Winter explore the relationship between the ideas of the domestic and their own artistic practice.

Through the comfortable format of furniture, Angelo Arnold presents concepts of metamorphosis, change and subversion. These metamorphic forms deconstruct the functional object to establish a foundation which recall's past memories, stories and uncanny events. Though his reconstructed objects reference a vocabulary of furniture, the removal of the functional aspects subverts the viewer’s expectations and provokes new interpretations. He employs the gallery as a platform in which to establish an imagined environment of familiar upholstered objects with an unfamiliar twist… he calls this work Familiarture.

Sculptor and multi-media artist, Christopher LaVoie deals with themes of domesticity, stasis, and movement, as he deconstructs and reconstructs familiar middleclass objects and furniture. He sees a correlation between re-imagining our material surroundings and re-imagining ourselves. This transformation often looks like everyday objects that have become activated, released from their boxes, their shelves, their stasis. His work re-fabricates the prefabricated, and gives it animated personality.

Just in case (family of three), is the second in a series of sculptures created by Jackson Martin for the sole purpose of satisfying his obsession with preparation. Recently, he and his wife became parents. With the arrival of their daughter a whole new set of worries and concerns have surfaced. Just in case serves to highlight this newfound anxiety and stands as an ominous and foreboding table, exhibiting daily, an apocalyptic future that might be just over the horizon.

Sebastian Martorana’s latest sculpture, Homeland Security Blanket, is carved from marble and depicts a small child wrapped in a blanket. It serves as a humanist, rather than political memorial, focusing on the sacrifice of others for the security of his loved ones and himself. He believes that the importance of a sense of personal security cannot be underestimated, but is often taken for granted and that perhaps the place where safety and security are most precious is the home.

The women in Rachel Bone's paintings are inspired by a range of people: from strangers in the street & public figures in the news to traditional folk heroines. Although the characters themselves are modest, conservative and domestic, they are often sent on unlikely adventures or put up to bizarre tasks. The lack of individuality or independence of the 50's housewife stereotype makes her an entertaining candidate for such adventures. These paintings are an illustrative reminder that there is little more heartbreaking than a person so confined to a personal world of order and practicality, that she doesn't recognize the beauty of nonsense when it surrounds her.

Influenced by her involvement in a number of sustainable building projects, Alyssa Dennis’ drawings explore architecture as it relates to human function. These images represent a level of disconnect by contrasting aspects of post-industrial architecture with natural building techniques. Alyssa currently works as a research assistant for a "green" architect and brings these experiences to her drawings as she "builds" them using natural materials such as ground pigment, graphite and colored pencil.

Robert Sparrow Jones's narrative vision is a combination of many sources including, landscape, upbringing, faith, family and friends. There is a deep relationship between natural form and human design and his propensity to include architecture within the landscape is a Thoreauvian attempt to coexist with nature. His places and structures hint at human complexity and contradiction and a bold history is revealed as one looks through the layers. Paralleling architecture Jones's loose transparent layers constantly move and pulse like the wealth of wonderful fields, lakes and rivers that are haunted by stories and imply a chance for magic and wonder in an otherwise mundane scene.

James Rieck paints within the language of consumer based advertisements and photographs. His work deals with the illusion of perfection generated through the utopian picture presented in fashion ads: artificial postures that, although seemingly benign, carry with them calculated agendas. Rieck's cool hand, acute cropping, and dramatic scale emphasize the simulated, generating psychological tension and demanding a re-evaluation of what's "real".

Eddie Winter’s photographs are images that encourage retrospective imagination. These images focus on ideas related to domesticity, challenges within memory, and the uncanny circumstances of the human condition. It is his goal to hold the viewer in a state of suspended reading, where he simply suggests the values of intimacy and explores the threshold of description.

2008-10-24T12:13:00.000-07:00

Fall's End Part III (Part II Under Sept 08 and Part I Under Jan 08)

2008-10-23T13:51:00.000-07:00

One mile down the road the Edgewater Diner’s windows were encaustic from the bustle of morning. A suffocating aroma of bacon and potatoes turned in onions surrounded me inside Red Jetta. As orange school busses pulled away from Center Street, they tidied up a line along the school’s sidewalk and the children effused like downpour-rain by the unfolding of the manual-levered bus doors.

I unloaded the boxes against the curb, shut the trunk empty and the thump pitted the depth of my stomach. It seemed I was always empty and though I was not inclined to eat I did so anyway. But nothing ever filled me, I thought as I picked the light box up in my left hand and then propped the camera box under the same arm, bringing the boxes out wide in a half hawk wing, like I was about to circle. Army I slung around my neck and then hoisted bazooka to my shoulder, wobbly and aiming at the Edgewater School’s windows. And those windows brought me back to the hovering of that morning. A dazzling fire crossed the front of the school as the seamless glass windows mirrored the autumn foliage. In magnification, after each child’s springing grace approached and pulled open the doors, a secret entrance was set off in one fierce whirl.

Under the burden of the heavy equipment I made for the trapdoor. I wondered if at all I would even find my way as then a young boy trotted ahead of me. He tugged the heavy glass door, listlessly turned and leaned his backpack roughly up against the cross-lever handle. I nodded graciously at him and then he did something I found very peculiar. He tucked his chin down into his neck and subjected me to the most grievous grin I had ever encountered. His saying to me that this is what you should expect from your day was unforgiving and extreme and I passed the threshold of the Edgewater with that lingering message. The boy galloped ahead of me, blending into the flux of children like milk, into slip-waxed halls and the whited stale compartments of the unconscious classrooms.

I set all the boxes outside the front office suddenly stifled with a stiff interruption of spiced potpourris. My lungs were paralyzed and my eyes watered as I surveyed the office but could find no one. The windowed room was counter-divided one-third into an undulating orange-carpeted aisle dotted with highly uncomfortable looking plastic chairs—circa nineteen-seventy-two and the remaining two-thirds was an open clutter of desks, file cabinets and papers-piles that to me remained perfectly abstract and usable.

By my third aimless pass I was finally able to pick out the secretary. She was on the telephone and when our eyes met she immediately administered a volatile double-take, shifting from her coffee-morning-pleasant to an apprehensive gasp of fright.

I was not sure what had caused the sudden attention and I checked myself down to the flat of my shoes only to find that Uniform had been intact and proper. Then the thought burned over me that perhaps in my cloudy morning I had driven to the wrong school. But I was too careful. I had never missed a day and I had never miscalculated my schedule. Then backing up I slowly realized I had been standing rather opaquely with Army slung over my shoulder and Bazooka aiming straight over the counter in, this means business right between the eyes formation.

I slowly lowered Bazooka off my shoulder and placed it on the floor along with Army and I stood in a more-friendly, at-ease pose.

“I’ll be with you in one moment,” the secretary said. She had covered the phone and mouthed the words to me. When she did this she looked antique. Her violently red painted lips pursed while she patted her hair and the hairstyle easily took the blows. Then she pulled away from her desk and the wooden chair’s castors squawked out like a gaggles south-heading geese. It really appeared as though millions of them were beneath each small wheel and floated her across the office.

“I’m sorry,” the secretary said, pinning the telephone to her neck. Her chalky skin was relieved that the bazooka no longer threatened her life and when she lowered her eyes her two darkly scalloped eyebrows that she had precisely drawn on raised up one higher than the other. She began emitting a succession of short spurted agreement into the telephone. Meanwhile her oversized floral-motifed ink pen wagged with puppy delight as she jotted dabs of illegibility on a block of stick-notes.

With all the visual stimulae of the office I hadn’t notice that there was a reverberating presence to my left side. When I diverted my attention downward I found a young boy on his tip-toes. He had such an exquisite dark-eyed soup of patience that reached his thin arms out on the cold countertop. And upon my looking down to him he gently clasped his hands together and gave a half-roll pressing his ear flat on the countertop. His gazing up at me produced a stoicism that retained dignity yet was ready to play kickball at even the slightest movement.

“Jimmy,” the secretary squeezed her voice into the telephone. She clicked the back of her pen a few times and then punched two of the clunky blinking cube-buttons on the telephone back and forth.

“Jimmy is this you again?” she darted her eyes from the both of us at the counter, “Do you really think I can’t tell when you’re disguising your voice? Hello? Jimmy—Jimmy. You better get your butt in here—hello, hello, Jimmy?” She let the receiver down, took a moment and poised herself by a few gentle sweeps off her lap.

“Misses Miller,” the boy lying sideways on the countertop began, “my mother says—”

“Hold on, Teddy, dear, let me see what this young gentleman wants,” her voice leapt in sweet licorice until her attention reached me whereby her mood shifted to the meat of adult-speak.

“Right,” I said, drawing up from the boy, “Right—picture day. Today is picture day—”

“Oh, how wonderful. I am just so sorry, doll. You are absolutely right. I do remember now. Oh, really, I am very sorry. I thought we were under siege there for a moment. Well, you never know these days. OK, doll, hold on and let me see now—”
The secretary ransacked the wind spray of papers, “The gymnasium, doll. Shall I escort you?”

“I’m fine,” I said, “I’m all right on my own,” my hand seemed to automatically raise as I quickly, unnervingly, adopted the contagious yet unaffected gratitude, “I think I can remember—thank you.”

“And, Mrs. Miller?” I said after picking up Bazooka, hoisting it back to my shoulder.

“Yes, dear?”

“Make sure you get your picture taken today,” my head was foreword-leaning in the departure. I shouldered Army and patted it like a dog.

“I’m having a bad hair day, doll,” the secretary teased. The candy of her words followed my dismissal and she ended it all with a rolling chortle.

Outside the office I took up the rest of the camera equipment. And as I crossed the bleak empty foyer of the Edgewater School the cusp of dialogue between the secretary and the boy trailed off:

“My mother said I could take my shirt off for my picture today—”

“No, Teddy, absolutely not, dear. I really don’t believe your mother would—”

“She said, though—”

“Teddy, darling, absolutely not—”

“But I want to be pure,” the boy pleaded.

***

The equipment dragged me earthbound. I rounded the corner and felt the moist air sucking from the gymnasium through an aching pout of dismal sun. It kept glaring sideward through an unseen window I was unable to get at. Inside the gymnasium the collapsible wooden bleachers had been walked out like accordions that were drawing in the sweet lemon-scented air. I imagined the one sustained note they played, a single dry sort of tremolo. That one note sifted like white sand in my head as I contemplated the gymnasium floor. I was looking for the right space to set up the photographic studio and that unheard solitude of sand sifting took me to the red outlined rectangle that floated the pool of light beneath the basketball hoop.
From this spot the flow of traffic would be an easily flow to and from the hallway, I thought. I pictured the children arriving Home Side and immediately leaving Visitor Side as I carried the equipment until I was zeroed in beneath the chipped metal basketball hoop. But that singing note I heard left a burning that I felt on the top of my head and it caused me to move to one side as if I was under the intense scrutiny of an electro microscope.

I let each box fall to thunderous claps. Around the horseshoe shape the echoes recoiled from the glossy cinderblock walls like a rattled-disturbed water. The cage of flat aluminum lights high above the gymnasium floor were turning from green to a blue-white as they warmed up for the day. It’s weak light seemed to ignite the rote tango of my studio set up.

I pulled out the heavy wooden tripod from Army, parted its legs to a life-sized capital “A” and locked the castors. Without trepidation I opened the Camera Box and took the stout Z3 from a snug, dark foam cradle. A clement dribble of students began to stir when a low buzz grumbled from the two old box speakers on either side of the gym. I could hear them muffled through the elongated door windows. I lifted the heavy camera to the tripod as the doors jangled open. Tightened the camera to the head of the tripod while an anxious estuary of fifth grade class fanned across the varnished blonde wood bleachers. Their energy carried like rainbow-oil and I, Carpenter fool, was bent over the old wooden boxes, a castaway ship hundreds of miles inland from the sea, a madman submerged in the mechanics of resurrecting a visionary arc-like studio.

Slowly the small coagulating groups of students funneled into a causeway that divided the accordion bleachers. I was taking the camera into the hollow of my chest and turned it from where it had already been tight to assure a firm seat and met the eyes of one student in particular. She was a pixie-haired young lady who had just been eddied by a boy’s searing weave and it stopped her dead in her tacks. Upon finding the studio and myself she slapped her hands to her mouth, her eyes widened and, quite stiffly, she gave a steep lean forward. There was no bend to her knees, her body turned into an insect and she was about to collapse. But before the fall she took off in a slingshot-angle that I thought would definitely spill her to the floor. However as the reckless few risk their lives they never really do fall and make you love them for it. With her fingers still holding onto her mouth she zigzagged the remainder of her class until they all surrounded the doorway and disappeared as if down a bathtub drain.

The simple punctuation of the doors chomping shut behind them took me straight to the light stands. I held each one upside-down sliding their necks open in three thin celery sections. I cinched the tension screws to desired height and spread their thin flat legs open so together their wavering was like the tall dried blackberry arches of that morning. So the dull shine of the two egg-shaped aluminum cups that topped the stands were appropriate, something delicate and close to hovering, they were like praying mantises. To each other they were praying so lovely that when I brought out a collapsed box of hairnets and spread one open onto my fingertips it was a paper lung over the face of the mantis. Hairnets diffused the harsh flash; I used one for the main-light and overlapped two for the fill-light.

The aluminum cup of the main light I raised to my empty belly and cinched it there, four-feet from the ground. I placed the stand to the front-side of where my worktable would go. The fill-lamp, at three-feet high, stood left of the camera. After that the backlight lamp was lifted to just over my head, about six-feet and Hollywood-style-haloed the subject from behind. The effect of the lighting apparatus softened the toughest bully into an angelic choirboy; its membranous web transformed the brightest young braces-speckled lady into a starlet of desire. It just made the teachers look old, shining miserably off bald spots and haloed harshly in thinning white hair. I knew enough to unplug the backlight and had to painfully disperse meaningless jovial conversation to distract them from the mechanical illusion.

The final light sat on the floor behind the sitting box. This light angled up to the backdrop and away from the student. It had a filter jig that when cellophane gels were slid into place over the lamp, magically the background changed color. Ruby Red, Robin’s Egg Blue, Meadow Green and Autumn Ocher, at a minimal extra cost could be added to each package. Without them the background remained its neutral brooding gray, which was how I liked it the best. It was natural; it was the way I had painted it. I remembered that morning. I recalled that arcing photograph and as I was grabbing up coils of wire from Army, a vivacious ebb of fifth grade phys-ed class spouted wild from the locker room tunnel. It seemed natural. And they quickly swarmed the hardwood floors while I let out a lifeline from each light and plugged them into the top of the power pack. It’s vibrating was the heart of the studio. I felt its hum while gym class, convulsed at half-court and students tumbled into beating hearts of an awkward and fitful love. A whistle signaled them to split opposing lines. In maladroit formulation they were divided girls against the boys. And then balls were let into the arena so that the second double-chirp ricocheted a scandalous game of dodgeball.

Sneaker stomps and whips of pelting aims were indiscernible form the horrified screams and the joyous call of the game. And the photographic equipment stood above the empty box shells, hollow like holes in the floor that I suddenly felt an imperative need to close up. The few that might fall into them were as good little coal miners asphyxiating a choke white.

Closed up, Camera Box doubled as a seat for the students. I centered it in front of the background lamp where the backdrop would be erected. Light Box cartwheeled onto its tall end and would serve as a worktable for stamping, filling out slate sheets, number-inking and the collection of elastic-banded yellow package cards. The makeshift table stood waist-high beside the camera with just enough room to maneuver around and knocked sometimes like a buoy.

Now we all assumed a tall stature, the thin standing lights circled me like complacent children, aimlessly looking this way and that. I slid out the backdrop from the hollow bone of Bazooka and unlocked the screen’s end to allow it to take a heavy swing. It clicked solidly into place as a life-sized lowercase “t”. The backdrop’s three splayed legs placed it behind the sitting box and background lamp by a foot and a half. The backdrop rolled out upwardly in its perfect sea storm and made everything believable. Clipping its thin metal handle to the top of the steel pole restored confidence. We were masted and floating away into that storm as the din of the gymnasium surged and a ball zoomed past almost taking out the fill lamp followed by two double chirps of the whistle.

***

I was lucky enough to have time to visit the boy’s room and get a drink of water and found myself staring into the patina of the short fountain. When I arrived back at the gymnasium the studio stood alone and solemn in its grays. From leaving such a maddening chaos my return was also as sullen and formless until I was taken by the gymnasium floor. It’s miraculous polish, it was as if without my knowing a bold water had seeped under the flat soles of my shoes and quick-froze into a thin sheet of ice. The rack lights glaring now from the cages above vacillated not on the wood itself but beneath the shiny surface so that they were like schools of fish snapping directions. And beneath the charge and angle the tableau filled further. The topographical map of basketball courts vaulted in deft red outlines, disappearing and reconfiguring beneath the glinting sardines. The trajectories were unknown while all lead to the very center of the gymnasium. Here there was a circle and in the circle was a portrait of an Indian Chief. The Chief’s feathers sprouted the circumference of his circle, all painted flat and geometric like a child’s paint-by-numbers. Everything was outlined in foreverlasting black. The circle was also outlined in black and then traced again in a racing line of blood red. The chisel-angled face of the Chief was executed in dour gradations of peach, lime-white and cerise with the ground of the wood floor wearing through in certain spots. The Chief remained in an always-turned-away pose so that moving from side to side you were never able to look him straight in the eye. Something about this was sad and yet the appearance remained satisfying like a quenched thirst from a squeezed and iced puckering citrus.

In my lifted spirits I noticed a basketball then. In the polish of the gymnasium floor its reflection could have been simply recited as “8”, or half a good luck clover, blossoming from the arc of the three-pointer-line. It was so curious that when I approached, it was in the heedfulness of riverwalking. And though a real athlete would have plucked it firm from the ground and slapped it palm to palm, in my fingertips I lifted gingerly as if it were not an athletic thing at all but more an ephemeral discovery.

Due to the ball’s utter lack of texture there was prudence in my handling and a dangling concern with which only a conservator or surgeon might use. Its surface was bald, toothless in my cradle and as I rotated the worn-away rubber in my hands even the discerning black lines describing its turns, they were not only missing their ebony inlay but could be barely felt by my sensitive touch. They were erased seamlessly like memory, I was holding a memoryless brain and I knew the slightest handling would burst it to nothing, and what would come out might be an energy in a golden powdery explosion I would not be able to recapture. I had strayed too far from my camera.

I let the ball fall then. I heard the explosion pitched as a breath above my head like the left over jubilant laughter of the children’s dodgeball. The ball leaped up opposite spinning and I lightly dragged it to stop in my fingertips. I spun the smooth of its skin in both my hands to make sure I hadn’t harmed it. And when I bounced the ball again I only did so hesitatingly and the delayed claps pressed off the glossy walls. I dropped it once more, and then again, until my convoluted and small sluggish victories transmogrified into a slow-motion dribble. It meandered me down center court where I began a galloping trot. I dribbled the ball best I could though my final two extra-long strides ended abruptly as, without too much grace, I took a shot at the opposing basket followed by a short side-hop. The ball domed through the lemon-lime gymnasium in a perfect rising line and, dipping as gracefully as an egret, it approached the backboard. But then it slumped too eagerly and to my disappointment slapped six-feet in front of the basket. The ball bounced up, grazed the bottom of the net and then bluntly nodded against the red foam padding.

Right then a mean, low-pitched grumble urged out from the school’s old box speakers and I jogged my way to the basketball. I plucked it from the floor and continued a quickened dribble until I was zeroed-in once again beneath the scrutiny of the basketball hoop. Here I turned and, with very professional-looking athleticism I hooked the ball around one-handed. The basketball skimmed tight the backboard and shot up fifteen-feet as I spun in the air. It continued straight back down as I landed on one foot and slipped on the highly polished floor. When I whipped square onto my back a noise that was not my own shot from the depths of my lungs and the ball, completely missing the basket, thumped my chest, bounced to the bleachers and then rolled a speedy double in the wax shine of the floor. On my back I followed the ball until it reached a definite rest then I panned my head upwards. Slowly all the florescent bulbs imbedded in the armature of heaven above rushed a wipe of lazy dizziness that sat me up in a panic. I had a moment where my blinding silenced everything to blankness, a simple skip of relief in the world. And when the room took form I found a line of first grade students straightening along-side the photography studio.

“May I take your order,” I said from the floor. Without hesitation I teetered up and stuttered across the gymnasium. At closer range the line stood a collective icy concern that only chilled by my panning them over. They chilled more as I reached the line and edged to the camera, leaned on its flat top and swiveled it from its lock.

“So, who’s getting a few pictures taken?” I asked and clapped my hands together. Then I nervously friction-warmed them as praying hands. Still there was not a word.

“Well, then—who’s not getting a picture taken,” I said but the vast silence welled up like the belly of a sea. And the intensity raised the tremolo of whiteness to that one sustained accordion note again.

“OK, then,” I tried, “Well, who’s going to take my picture?”
It was hard to hear her through the white static in my head as a young girl had cued out from the line and then slid back in and I had to ask once more.

“You’re taking the pictures,” she said, tucked behind the first boy in line and her almost pure white hair sprang back and forth in agile pigtail swings.

“Who said?” I asked and curled my wrists onto my hips; a pose I was surprised I had done but felt appropriate.

“I don’t know. You’re the photographer,” the white-haired girl replied. The young boy at the head of the line who was wearing a sky-blue suit jacket and had the exact remarkable white hair, quickly huddled back to the girl and squeezed a secret laugh into her ear. This sprouted a chain-reaction and the relief of laughter, small as it was, parted the dense troubled cloud into a cooing that warmed us all.

“Oh, right you are. I’m so very sorry. Step in to my office and let me have a look—Madam?” I reached out to take the young lady’s order card but she did not let go and I totted her small and weary march to the front of the line. After a small tug she finally did let go and I looked over the yellow card. Student: Lucinda Brighten, Package: Two with Wallets, Background Color: Robin’s Egg Blue.

“Please do sit and make yourself as much at home as you possibly can, Lucinda Brighten,” I said to her, “Except that there’s not much in the refrigerator, as you could imagine. Unless you like the kinds of foods that are blue and fuzzy.”

Once Lucinda seated herself on the box she was no longer smiling. I kneeled down in front of her so I could arrange her feet a little the right of the box. We were the same height but the smile did not come back and Lucinda’s eyes never blinked but smoothly followed me like glass marbles. I adjusted her flyaway bangs as if I were waving cigarette smoke from two thick red elastic bands and then secretly slipped the blue filter into the frame of the background lamp. Backtracking to the table I stamped her card 00000001 and within one motion rifled the card into the back of the camera. I leaned to viewfinder and framed the fountain of angel hair, pulled the focus sharp by her white blue marble eyes and lifted my head towards her.

“Let’s have a smile,” I said quietly as if her smoke of hair would start to erase her from the seat and vanish into the backdrop. I took one photograph and then another. Two was an example for the others, saying simply that this was how it worked. That it might be fun and magical. But in the double-folds of the afterimage it wasn’t so easy. And in my blinks the flash emitted such a rise that its sudden transparent visage was a fleeting foretaste of a cold plunge. But it did disappear. I hoped it would come back. Such emblems were no great calamities but I was adding them up, each small epiphany.

After the charge subsided, Lucinda stood. And when she did it was as if she had stepped outside for a breath of fresh air, she left the opposite side of the studio and exited the gymnasium. There was some slight element of joyness in her washed out diffidence. In the hallway their teacher who had just arrived a moment before was standing aloof reading a paperback novel. I recognized her from years before, her strait-cut hair wasn’t at all unpleasant but she always stood off and took the children when they were finished as if one more photograph would be too wasteful of her time. I made a note to not ask the teacher for her portrait. Lucinda smiled at her the very same way she had done in the photograph, forced into the memory of smiles. But it transformed the teacher. She bent down to Lucinda and her mouth softened while leading her across the hallway. Lucinda sat against the green tiled wall and the teacher, as if the smile never happened at all, went back to leaning and reading her paperback in the doorway.

The young boy wearing the sky blue suit jacket and who also had the same fine white hair jotted into the studio and sat down. I kneeled in front of him the same as I had done with Lucinda except I did so a little more stiffly. I studied the boy’s eyes with playful scrutiny and he reared back a dubious façade as I took the yellow card from his small damp hand; Student; Richard Brighten, Package; Two with Wallets, Background Color; Robin’s Egg Blue, same as Lucinda’s.

“I really don’t want to look immature,” the boy said. His statement was curt but unending, “I’ve seen a lot of portraits and that’s what I dread most of all.”

“Why, I’ve seen you smile before, Richard Brighten, and, heavens, you look the farthest thing from immature.”

“We’re twins. And I don’t look a bit like her,” he said pitiless.

“Well, Richard, she’s a lovely looking young lady and you do have the same extraordinary hair.”

“Richard Batman. I’d prefer you call me, Richard Batman,” the boy crossed his arms and tightly they forced up the sky blue suit jacket. Then he lowered his jaw to me. It seemed to ready me for the whistling tune that he then procured.

“Richard Batman,” I mused aloud. I rolled my head up into the white metal canisters and the greenish heaven lights whirled a little, “Yes, I like that—it has a certain—panache, to it. Don’t you agree?”

“I just don’t find it funny,” Richard had stopped his undecipherable whistle only long enough to say. The lowering of his jaw and then the dissident tune began right where he left off, a flutter known only to old men and sad cowboys. Or maybe young brooding superheroes, I thought and touched my breast pocket.

“It’s just a photograph, dear Batman,” I lowered my jaw at Richard the same way he had done to me, so that we understood a certain language though I did not attempt the lonely whistle. I did not have the heart.

“Richard Batman—And it’s more than that. Well, it’s nothing against you at all or anything like that. I actually like this. I have a friend who’s a photographer. I like her too. Well, she’s really my mother’s friend and I won’t call her by her name. The thing is, I just don’t see the funniness in the world.”

“Well, Mr. Batman—Richard Batman, would you mind if I try to make you smile?”

“I guess OK—as long as it makes me look natural. Our mother says we should look natural.”

“That is exactly what I’m here for. Lucinda and I, we just had a very good session a moment ago. And she did give us a lovely smile—very natural. So I’m certain we’ll make you look natural. As the trees and the fields are natural.”
“Well, not that serious,” Richard said. He rolled his small eyes which leaned him to the side a little too much, “More, human-like,” he said, “And I don’t want to look like a dumb old tree either.” The jaw went even lower that it had before. No whistle this time.

I turned briskly to the camera. My pursed lips that Richard’s comment gave me led me there. I pulled the focus sharp into the sun-skimmed wheat of Richard’s white eyelashes with my pointed lips. And he did look sadly mature, I thought. Somehow at seven the dark acorns of his eyes acquired too much. They were the same smooth moving eyes as Lucinda’s except that the weight they carried forlornly wavered his peanut shaped head buoyant. Richard’s eyes were indifferent in that they never expired their vastness and this in turn burdened his posture. He seemed dragged to the earth and I patted the dark camera in empathy. Then I noticed how the pretty blue fabric of the boy’s suit jacket lay flat and maybe a little too big for him. And leaning off the side of the camera I saw that his small plaid slacks were skinned white to one knee.

“Say pickles,” I said, lifting my head alongside the camera lens.

“That’s not at all funny,” Richard Batman said rising up slowly. His eyes raised slowly too and while tilting to the other side like a newborn calf he added, “Nope. Why don’t you say—” Richard paused here and squinted hard just one eye, “say, potato bugs. I think that’s funnier.”

“Ok then. Sit up nice and straight,” I asked politely and Richard brought himself to center from the tilt though he stiffened like a cold cat, “OK, Richard Batman, now, say—orangutan.”

The young boy’s smile grew ecstatic. Richard Brighton in the blue suit jacket, as if the pressure had fallen from his eyes and drained into his two little feet, appeared to grow an inch and a half.
From the camera flash a flat powder pulsed against the boy’s pale greenish skin and the repeat of the afterimage folded softly away like tissue paper. I took another photograph straightaway because it was all about trust and the second portrait always relaxed into a more natural pose. However in the quick stabbing light the studio appeared to rise. It stood up quickly, a smolder of shredded scrim that then quickly evaporated and, because there were no reasons left, I said, “All done—”

“Thank you very much,” Richard replied and after he stood from the sitting box he added, “You should use, “orangutan,” from now on. Because I love orangutans more than anything in the world. But if you want to use, “potato bugs,” that’s OK too. I won’t mind,” Richard straightened the lapel of his sky blue suit jacket by two violent tugs and pulled himself out the opposite side of the studio.

“Thank you,” I called after him, the dizzy of whitness resonating in my empty stomach, “I will take that into serious consideration—”

The teacher pried from her paperback and sat Richard Brighton against the wall next to his sister Lucinda Brighton. The two white heads were smoldering campfire clouds from the patina of the hallway tiles. Richard put his arm around Lucinda and pointed his forehead into her ear. He squeezed Lucinda hard and then scooted himself down the hallway in exactly four spots. He looked off as he did because it was his duty and it would always be. He understood this and I understood this by witnessing his very nonchalant engagement of whatever had been down the hallway and had squinted his eyes so much.
The next boy rushed in from the front of the line. As soon as he sat down on the box he shot off an overzealous, “Potato bugs,” and immediately whirled back to his classmates who gathered in the ecstasy of laughter.

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2008-10-02T12:56:00.000-07:00

2008-09-24T20:42:00.000-07:00