seeing softly

john henry twachtman and peter henry emerson both worked in the same time period, the 1880s and 90s. twachtman was an american, and emerson, though born in cuba, spent his life in england.

emerson is said to have been the first photographer to insist that film, beyond its documentary potential,
was an appropriate tool for making art as well.

in these positions, he became well-known, and stieglitz credited him as being his first important influence.

twachtman was a painter, often of the landscapes near his home in connecticut, though he travelled in europe and lived for a bit in paris.

so how does one discuss the wonderful similarities in their work, and, not to put to sharp a point on it, that too of hiroshige? quite simply: both were tremendously influenced by whistler, and, obviously, by whistler's own inspiration -- the japanese prints.

both were known to appreciate the tonal subtlety and asymmetry of the prints; additionally, stark composition, flattened spaces, and japanese-like embellishments were employed by both.

both felt that by fashioning familiar places with unfamiliar elements increased one's consciousness of the place, and perhaps revealed elements inside what meets the eye.

see twactman's work in context until october 19 at the clark (and read more here and here), and see emerson's work in context until september 8 at the mia (and online here).

and then while you're at it, go to the met to see the turner show and wonder how the man could have been so prescient having died several years before any black ships appeared in the edo harbor.

a poem as long as California

PSYCHOANALYSIS: AN ELEGY

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled
in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down
from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?










I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain
California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now?








I’m thinking that she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways
Traveling up and down her skin
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them
On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And I a rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas
Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California
That I have never seen.
Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,
Send them.
One of each breast photographed looking
Like curious national monuments,
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway
Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging
In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?










I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated.
How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

Jack Spicer



Forthcoming from The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer
from Wesleyan University Press.

saturday evening girls

as a response to unem- ployment, lack of education, and dismal living conditions amongst north boston immigrants, a local library organized a group for jewish and italian teenaged girls. for at least one night a week it got them off the street, and it got them reading.

as the women running the program began to recognize the girls' real needs, a program was begun wherein the girls were taught a trade: pottery making. and thus paul revere pottery was born.

today at auction a lovely SEG bowl might fetch $21,000.

[In the above example, the artist] interpreted Queen Anne's lace in a stylized manner with a heavy black outline [as in japanese prints] from several points of view and at varying stages of bloom. Broad bands shift from white through three shades of blue to a grayish yellow-green, which merges with the plants' foliage. This effect reveals the influence of color theories espoused by tonalist artist Arthur Wesley Dow. [and as seen in the japanese prints] 1

and, wonderfully, somehow, i think, this was not an anomaly. newcomb pottery, marblehead pottery, arquipa pottery, and others as has very similar circumstances as their beginnings.

oranges

i am very lucky, living in california, for many reasons, including its having been an area of great creative activity during the 'arts and crafts movement.' i put that in quotes because there is a tendency to block off all of these 'movements' into separate parts, as though they were truly distinct, without their tendrils and roots all tangled together, which of course they were.

in barcelona, they were called 'modernistas'! whatever they were called, an exhibition honoring them will be happening at the cleveland museum of art from october 15th 2006 until january 7 2007 (and from march 5 2007 to june 3 2007 at the metropolitan museum of art in new york). on the cma webpage i found this vase.

created in 1907 by antoni serra, one of catalonia's leading 'modernista' ceramists, this vase reminded me of something.

at the oakland museum in california is perhaps the world's best collection of california arts and crafts from this era. while they have an extraordinary tonalist painting collection (due in part to the work of harvey l jones, just retiring), they also have the largest collection of the work of arthur and lucia k mathews, and will be exhibiting it this year, october 28 2006 to march 25 2007. (pomegranate is putting out a mathews calendar as well.)

i think this is a huge and wondrous coincidence, because when i looked at that vase, i immediately thought of arthur and lucia mathews! the colors, the oranges, the leaves, these are exactly what you see on some of the work of the mathews, and i realized again how strongly what you find on these arts is what you find where they are made. this is why there are individual temperaments in the "different" movements, not because they are different, but because they are so wonderfully diverse.