WHY OBSESSION IS A GOOD THING
3/09
During a recent flight I had time to reflect about my artistic process and particularly the nature of artist obsession.
The truth is, having a great idea for a body of work just isn’t enough. The trick to making really good art is bonding truth with illusion so seamlessly that the viewer believes your image. If the seams show – if there are gaps – then the image isn’t going to be compelling to the viewer.
They might smile and whisper knowingly about your intent – but they’ll end up walking away.
Artists need to be able to solder together all the elements – if we can’t, we have to re-think, shift perspective, or take a different tack altogether.

The challenge is that each idea can have a thousand motivations - all equally valid – and each image can be derived from a thousand ideas. Which to choose? The artist must pick one, cling to it, sleep with it, interrogate it, and turn it over and over to discover all its dimensions. Then - when the idea, its motivation, and the image have all expanded to fill every crevice in mind full of possibilities – then the artist begins to draw.


Yet at any moment in time, the full multiplicity waits at your elbow – look away from your realized idea for a moment – get distracted by the shabby state of your finances, your child’s unemployment, or the demands of a lover, get distracted by any one of life’s minutia and your focus becomes diluted, porous, and riddled with whispering new possibilities. Picking up the threads of your carefully woven concept requires a commitment to obsession.

Each time I enter my studio I’m confronted by my inadequacies.

A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO DIARY FARMING: NOTES FROM PANAMA
2/09
Recently, Lyman Orton asked a group of Vermont students if they could envision their world without the familiar scenes and smells of dairy farms. Then he posed the question to us AOA artists and it occurred to me that my time in a Azuero Peninsula of Panama allowed me to describe an alternate vision.

Hybrid solutions to life’s challenges intrigue me and I find they’re particularly interesting in rural societies because subsistence living requires constant attention to low budget and practical innovations.
The Azuero is cattle country . Life is conducted on horseback. There are more horses than cars or trucks and more cows than people. It feels like a land completely at home in the last century – except for cell phones and Internet. So I was totally thrilled and intrigued by their approach to dairy farming. There are no barns – no need - no smell of manure, and no milking parlors. The cows are milked in the field where they’re found each morning and evening. The ‘free range milk’ is collected in the standard milk cans, tied them one or two at a time to the farmer’s saddle and ridden out to the nearest main road where he makes a cell phone call for collection. (Since both cell phones and Internet are critical to the rural economy, there are NO debates about the unsightliness of communications towers within the communities)

He leaves the cans on the road and returns to his chores. The cans are emptied and returned to their spot on the side of the road for later collection by the farmer.

The two questions I have – and my Spanish wasn’t good enough to get answers - were:
Why didn’t the milk turn to butter as it was jostled and churned on the ride out to the road?
And, what was involved in cleaning the cans after several hours in the 90 degree heat?


Life continues to be a mystery.

Blog 1/24/09

Cultures of Change

Hola, Que pasa? Como estan ustedes?

Salaam wa allakum! Sabah en noor, Kiif halkum?

I’m leaving a land rich in fresh water that has no green technology and entering a water poor land that's trying to be one of the leaders in new green energies. Both have long standing love affairs with the plastic bag and disposable water bottles. In Panama I see them both floating along the shoreline or blowing on the wind. In Amman, Jordan they constitute another life form. Every color bag is seen resting in the treetops at night and floating through the air by day. I’m afraid to ask to where they’re all migrating.

It is impossible to ask shopkeepers in either country - in either language – to put groceries in a consumer provided bag. They look at me insulted, as if the plastic bag were a symbol of the shore’s credibility. And this – in Panama – from a country who’s indigenous tribes make the most GORGEOUS ‘bolsas’ (bags) out of local jute. In Amman where water is SOOOOOO scarce, squashed plastic water bottles line the roads, some still half full. No one has communal drinking fountains – this from a region where communal basins for washing your feet before entering the mosque is ubiquitous.

Sometimes cultural behaviors makes me crazy.

GETTING A HAIR CUT IN ST. ALBANS -12/08

Valblog

12/08

GETTING A HAIR CUT IN ST. ALBANS

Is it true for the rest of you? Once assigned a topic of research it becomes the only thing you want to talk about when out of the studio. That’s why I found myself listening to the halcyon musings of a former Goddard College professor of photography and a former student at Goddard who were serendipitously having their hairs cut and dyed at the same time I was.

It’s a curious thing about Vermonters, whether they’ve newly settled in the state or have been around for centuries, whenever a visitor asks them about their resident home they always talk about how good it used to be – before now. Before the way of life they loved growing up or moved here to enjoy – changed.

The present always seems to be an imperfect work in progress and the future a patchwork of their remembered past and a few technical improvements, like internet connectivity, functional bus service, and less than three jobs. Yet ‘their Vermont’ of almost any decade, continues to have a mythically successful image among non-Vermonters leading, I suppose, to repeating the cycle just described above.

However, this particular set of memories concerned Vermont’s former branding as the commune capital of the East and a former home of the Weathermen. And, interestingly, although their tales were fascinating - images of Weathermen conducting military drills (how did that work among this most anarchistic of groups? Was the cadence, “left, left, left?”) and slogging through mud season while freezing your ass off during the ‘back-to-nature-decade - made for great stories, neither of them wanted to integrate those memories into an envisioned future for the state. Possibly because they - in their present lives – were fully integrated into the lifestyles they had rebelled against in the 60’s. They both owned their own homes, had mortgages, and credit cards. They’re protests took the form of buying organic produce and using ‘green grocery bags’ – a lifestyle available to those who can afford to choose where to shop.

Both told me their vision for a future St. Albans would be minus Costco, minus the ‘prescription’ drugs that drive the crime rate in town and more community activities on the town green – like band concerts. Asked about ‘branding’ they talked about St. Albans’ past as a railroad town – here we go again, I thought. Proof that progress seems to be a lot more cyclical than linear in its development.