New Art

I recently completed an oil pastel of a flower bed in the Jarden des Tuileries, which is just west of the Louvre in Paris, very near where the old Tuileries Palace once stood.  The pastel is based on a photograph I took there in May.  I framed it this afternoon and it now hangs in our entryway.  Here it is:

Understanding Fiction

These days--the last days of summer break--are work days, as I tune up syllabi, etc.  Today I was working on the reading list for my Understanding Fiction class, which is populated with short stories and two longer works:  The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy and The Metamorphosis by Kafka.  I use a fairly consistent list of stories for this course, which I teach every couple of years, but change out a few of them for variety.  It's a first-rate line-up, including Sandra Cisneros, Toni Bambara, D. H. Lawrence, Amy Tan, Ralph Ellison, Sherman Alexie, Flannery O'Connor, Tim O'Brien, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ha Jin, Margaret Atwood, Isabel Allende, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Bobby Ann Mason, William Faulkner, and Raymond Carver. I teach novels in other courses, but the short story always seems to work best in courses like this, mainly because it's a compact form that includes all of the basic elements of fiction and each story can usually be covered in one class period.  I also like the variety of voices in the stories over one semester, and I like the windows they open into the human condition.  Last time I taught this one of my students characterized the course as a kind of "psychology of literature" because we spent so much time talking about what motivated the characters, which is the central question in fiction I believe.  

The Dream of Paris

Before I went I had often imagined Paris, and read about it, of course, especially Hemingway.  I the past few years I had taken to painting it as well, always in watercolor.  I would find a photograph online and use it as the basis for art.  I was primed, then, for the reality of Paris I suppose, but nothing quite prepared me for the emergence into City of Light quite literally from underground.  My son Peter and I had taken the Metro from Gare du Nord south to Vavin, the station on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, and the closest one to our hotel around the corner on the Rue Delambre.  It was a rainy evening in May--is there any better way to first experience Paris?--and I came up the stairway into Montparnasse and found that the dream had taken sensual form around me, as if I had walked into one of my own watercolors:  There before me was boulevard with the lights of cars and the windows of the cafes Le Dome and La Rotonde reflected on the mirror of the wet street. Three months later the moment is still with me and I suspect it will always will be--a moveable feast, in Hemingway's celebrated phrase.

Though it's not taken at night, this photograph of Le Dome on Montparnasse in 1925 by Eugene Atget captures a certain "look" of Paris from that time that has always captured me.

I'll probably do some more blogging about the Paris trip, but the weekend is here and I begin teaching again on Tuesday.  Just a couple of days to complete start-up chores before the semester begins and I want to write some about that.  Guess I'll have to stop thinking about Paris--for a day or so anyway.

August Turn-around

Seems like months. . .

The summer is about over.  I've been back at Conception Abbey this week cleaning my office, preparing for another year of teaching.  Today I saw some of the new students arriving on campus, cars packed with clothes and other dorm-life necessities.  Next Tuesday, the 21st, I'll be back in the classroom for the new semester.  It's the August Turn-around, when I shift out of summer mode.

I read a lot this summer, but nothing focused.  I've got no new fall courses to prepare for--only re-runs that simply need some tweaking.  I finished books on Thomas Jefferson (American Sphinx), the Civil War (The Longest Night), Caravaggio (Graham-Dixon's bio), a history of the Finns in Minnesota, the physical structure of the Internet (Tubes), Bell Labs (The Idea Factory), string theory (The Elegant Universe), and the history of Paris (Seven Ages of Paris).  I also read a lot of spy novels, mostly by Daniel Silva, Alan Furst, and John Le Carre (The Karla Trilogy).  Diversity--the way I like it.

No writing, though.  I've still got that book percolating inside, but my only creative output this summer was in the form of paint, pastel, and graphite.

Oh, yes--I also went to Paris.

Speechless and Renewed

You might ask:  How is the Book coming?  The one about God as a kind of poet that I wrote about in a post late last year?  Well, the Book abides, as the Big Lebowski might put it.  It rumbles, bumbles, grows.  I've been reading books, doing research, taking notes, and thinking thoughts.  Not much writing yet, except for the notes.  I'm not ready to write because to be quite honest I'm still not sure what I want to say, or if I have anything worth saying to anyone other than myself.


I think--I think, mind you--I have a beginning:  Jesus writing in the sand.  You might remember the scene from the eighth chapter of John's gospel, the one where the woman caught in adultery is brought to Jesus as a test of his orthodoxy.  "Should we stone her, as Moses taught?"  Instead of answering immediately he stoops and begins to write on the ground.  The authenticity of the passage has been disputed, but I like the scene a lot because I like the idea of Jesus writing something--or drawing a picture:  the Greek word here is ambiguous--in a kind of delay between their challenge and his response.  Perhaps he was stalling, making random marks or even playing tic-tac-toe while he thought of how to answer the Pharisees.  Or perhaps he was writing a poem.


In his essay "The Government of the Tongue," the Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney comments on this scene:  ""Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught [the imaginative arts] are practically useless.  Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life.  In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil--no lyric has ever stopped a tank.  In another sense, it is unlimited.  It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed" (107).


Speechless and renewed.  It describes my experience at mass in the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception at Conception Abbey, where I work.  Jesus' poetry is there--in the priest and the people, the Word spoken, the bread and wine.  His poetry also abides in the stone, wood, and stained glass, in the Beuronese murals of the life of Mary on the upper walls.  But he's outside the sacred walls too, sliding and slamming his poetry of everyday life.  It's all poetry, and that's what I want to write about.

Art Chronicles (1)

I'm dusting off the blog once again in this new year, this time to post some recent (and not so recent) art and write about it a bit.  Along with writing, art is my chief creative expression and I've been producing quite a lot of it over the past few months and learning a great deal in the process.  I'd like to share some of that learning here on the blog, partly as a way to re-start (again).

I used to draw and paint in high school, oh so many years ago, and only picked it up again in the last few years.  Since then I've been practicing in watercolor, acrylic, oil, graphite, charcoal, and pastel.  I've also messed around some with collage and mixed media.  To characterize my style as "eclectic" is an understatement:  I like to imitate the style of many artists, from Michelangelo to Modernism.  One of my favorite strategies is to take an artist who happens to be inspiring me at the moment from a book or a recent visit to an art museum, and imitate what he or she is doing in order to get inside of the art and learn something.

Though I have a particular fondness for gestural abstraction, such as in the work of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, last week I decided to take one of my long-unused square canvases (24" X 24") and "do a Mondrian."  Though the paintings of Piet Mondrian do not inspire any kind of deep pathos in me, I find his abstract works interesting from the point of view of composition--especially the balance of elements within the compositional space.  In his case, grids of black lines and geometric shapes of (mostly) primary color.

I started out with a mock-up of a possible composition of a "lozenge"--a rhombus, or diamond-shape.  Mondrian did some of these and I wanted to see if I could do one, too.  The mock-up, using construction paper, looked like this:

This gave me a point to begin, but did not dictate how the final composition would look, as you can see:

My work imitates Mondrian's style, but does not duplicate any of his lozenges that I know of.  It was a step-by-step compositional process as well.  My first line was the vertical black one on the left, next to the blue triangular area (which I painted after the line had dried).  I believe (I didn't keep track) the next one was the right-hand vertical black line at center right which runs down the right side of the yellow area.  After adding a thicker black line on the bottom half of the lozenge, I decided to paint in another vertical black line to make a double track.  I have seen this in Mondrian's compositions, but to me it simply felt right both for the sake of balance and interest.  Thereafter, the lines and blocks of color were added, one by one, and sometimes tweaked for balance, not only from right to left, but from top to bottom.  For example, the top horizontal line under the red patch was thickened near the end of the painting process because the top felt too "light" to me in terms of weight, even with the deep cadmium red there.  (It was an odd and interesting thing to consider the relative "weight" of colors in this kind of painting)  The final patch I added was the small triangle of black at the bottom of the blue triangle where the two lines intersect.  Then it was done.

I'm not sure I'll do another one of these, but I do like how it came out, and my respect for Mondrian's skill as an artist was confirmed.  Doing one of these pieces is not easy and it took me a full week to complete it, even though I was using fast-drying acrylics.  Mostly, I needed time to just look and let the painting tell me what to do next.

There's a purity of form in Mondrian's geometric compositions that is satisfying to undertake, at least to me as an artist, though not in the same way as hurling paint at a canvas, which I also like to do.

I'd appreciate any comments you'd like to make about this post.

Advent

With Advent nearly here, I'm going to "restart" the blog--too long neglected--with some excerpts from the new book I'm beginning to work on.  The following will appear somewhere in the preface or first chapter, I think.  It recounts the ice storm we experienced here in Maryville back in Advent of 2007:


In the stark middle of a winter’s night I lie awake, listening to the fall of trees.

It is Advent—mid-December—and rain has come to northwest Missouri where I live, a sprawling mass of moisture out of the south is being lifted along the blade of a cold front slicing down from Nebraska. It should be bringing snow, as it usually does this late in the year, adding several inches to what’s already on the ground.  Further north in Iowa the snow is falling fast.  Here in Missouri, though, it comes as rain. 

An hour ago I was still roaming the house, peering out the windows at the rain and the trees that cloak the house.  It's been raining since yesterday, falling through the wedge of freezing air over the town, glazing the trees.  I went to bed after midnight, but couldn't sleep.  I know what’s coming.  

  

First, the sharp snaps of smaller branches punctuating the silence.  Brutal silence.  Forced silence.  Broken tree silence.  The silence of rain--and of death.  Freezing rain sheathes the branches like sheer, clinging nylon until the weight breaks them off.  The breaking of the larger ones sound like gunshots barking over the hardened glaze of snow-cover. Then from my bed I hear the shhhhhhhhhhhh of shattered ice falling like the slide of small stones down the polished steel bed of a dump truck.  I tense, waiting for the deeper crack of the trunks.  There's a large ash tree that arches over the southeast corner of our house.  If it falls it will crush the south roof directly above me. With that thought, I get out of bed and head back downstairs.

It goes on, this night, until morning light slivers in through blinds and I am awake and outside checking the damage.  The yard is littered with branches small and large but to my relief there are no fallen trees except for the mulberry on the north side of the house, which has been bowed to the ground in my neighbor’s back yard.  It's a tree that I love, but its nearness to the house has caused us annoyances over the years:  Its fast-growing stems leverage their way under shingles and slap and rattle against the siding in the wind and the stark, street-light shadows of its bare winter branches on my son’s bedroom window shade used to frighten him when he was a young boy.  But in warmer seasons birds loved the mulberry and sang cheerily from her branches of a morning. Now her spine is curved and cracked, broken branches like bedraggled hair matted on a cold floor.

In the afternoon I take a drive around the town.  Others are out like me, looking around, all a bit dazed, glazed, dazzled by the sun shining on the translucent ice.  With all the broken tops of trees jutting into the sky, the town looks like it has been shelled.  There isn’t any electrical power, but the houses are all intact and so are the people.  The trees, too, will survive—those that haven’t fallen. New branches will grow.  The leaves will return.  In the measure of things, we’ve been inconvenienced, that’s all.  Nature took most of the punishment.

I return home and stand in my back yard, looking around me, waiting.  In this pause before the rumble of electrical repair trucks and the snarl of chain saws breaks in there is a silence that is at once both ordinary and profound.  This is Advent, after all:  A season of waiting--of anticipation--for the coming of the Christ child.  I like this time.  Silence seems right for it instead of the frenetic noise of December in America.

But this afternoon under an ironically brilliant sun it is the silence of destruction.  Two weeks before Christmas, in the midst of Advent, it is the Destroyer who has come to us first in the killing ice with its relentless gravity like a gently descending boot crushing everything to the ground.