Wayward Artists

Seen and heard #133

2012-01-17T12:37:00.000-08:00

Overheard -- from a slightly allergic woman to a beloved cat:

"Go away. Just looking at you makes my eyes itch!"

Oh, those generational moments!

2012-01-14T05:37:00.000-08:00

I was working in a 5th grade class yesterday with a small group of students. The opening comment to me was this:
"You look like the old man in UP"
It started a buzz with the others, some defending me: "No,he was mean!"
My response was "What's 'UP'"? In my old man mind, I was just a big fifth grader.
I remembered that quote from Gertrude Stein, Inside we are always the same age
Oh, are there more s'elves lurking about the Pixar has yet to discover?:

Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in the closet when you were sure of finding shirts. - Frida Kahlo

2012-01-12T07:49:00.001-08:00

Why Collect Things. The Hopeful Spiritual Hoarder

2012-01-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

My friend David found this on a piece of paper blowing around in a parking lot several years ago.
INANIMATE MOMENTS
Concept in Design

Objects, frequently remain idle around us for a long period of time. After we have used them, they rest inanimate, there, in our living places waiting to perform their next task and sometimes gathering dust.
I call this idling, the object’s “INANIMATE MOMENTS”. A moment when an object can offer us the most expressive possibilities. Now the object is there alone and perhaps not functioning.
Its presence has to speak for itself perhaps now it is only something to look at. In my view, as an artist and as a designer, this can be the signifying moment available when a design statement can be made; a moment that permits us to design in the object a moment-story: a metaphorical moment, a connecting moment.

a new friend

2012-01-10T07:27:00.000-08:00

I recently met a Moroccan visitor to Warwick. Limna da Kec, has been visiting then United Sates for about 8 months and was told by a few different people she must visit Warwick. I met her at the Eclectic Eye, that always-open antique emporium on Railroad Avenue. We we were both looking through some paper ephemera. She pulled out one of those old paper milk bottle stoppers that had "Pioneer Farms" on it. Well, this is boring.
I did invite her back to my house, just a few blocks away to see an actual milk box with the inscription "Pioneer Farms" on it. Please, get to the point
Her great-uncle, it seems, was a Jesuit missionary to the Caroline and Marshall Islands and ended up as principal of the very high school I went to in Rochester in the early 1960's will this ever stop!
All right, forget the whole fucking thing. No more Limna da Kec for you.

"oh, the humanity of it all!"

2011-12-21T03:51:00.000-08:00

"In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator. In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting to come out of its cloud and lift its wings."
Mary Oliver

A Vernal Pool

2011-12-19T04:39:00.000-08:00

If we want to realize the truth, the first thing to remember is that we don't have to do anything. No sacred dances. No secret mantras. No religious conversion. We just sit quietly where we find ourselves and simply don't do anything. This is most important. Don't do anything. We look directly and see what is true in that moment without labeling or judging anything. Now we see the truth which is beyond our fantasies. We also see that our mind is a conglomeration of mental events, fleeting and insubstantial. At that moment it's impossible to become attached to any personal story line. This is a perfect moment. It lacks nothing. That recognition brings about a sense of inexhaustible joy. We might feel like we want to get up and dance wildly. If so, do it and call it sacred dance."
Anam Thubten, no self no problem (Snow Lion Publications, 2009), pp. 84-85."

Poem memorized as a child

2011-11-22T04:36:00.000-08:00

Lovely Lady Dressed in Blue

Lovely Lady dressed in blue ----
Teach me how to pray!
God was just your little boy,
Tell me what to say!
Did you lift Him up, sometimes,
Gently on your knee?
Did you sing to Him the way
Mother does to me?
Did you hold His hand at night?
Did you ever try
Telling stories of the world?
O! And did He cry?
Do you really think He cares If I tell Him things-
Little things that happen? And Do the Angels' wings
Make a noise? And can He hear
Me if I speak low? Does He understand me now?
Tell me ---- for you know?
Lovely Lady dressed in blue ----
Teach me how to pray!
God was just your little boy,
And you know the way.

Arts and Psyche in the City

2011-11-14T10:19:00.000-08:00

I've made a proposal for a presentation this summer at a conference on Arts and Psyche:

The Power of Fugitive Materials:
I have been working with ephemeral and fugitive materials for my whole life. The sacred is often hidden in the common and the fleeting. As a rustic furniture maker for 25 years I enchanted people with beauty and utility from “brush”. As a sculptor, now I whittle away at river-worn bark pieces to reveal the hiding s’elves within. I believe there is an old human need to know that the gods are within everything. It was the disgraced Gospel of Thomas that said: Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."

In the wound is the healing: a hands-on workshop in active imagination
Artist/teacher Daniel Mack introduces his notion of The Four Needs of the Imagination: Stories, Awe, The Carnal and Dexterity. He then uses a short trance/meditation to start an exercise to encounter other parts of our s’elves through fast collage work with natural and found fugitive materials making what he calls “Imaginal Trading Cards.” People make several visual ID cards, reflecting their preferred and deferred selves. These fit nicely in those plastic ID badge holders. One card starts with a bandaid to help visualize the wounds we all carry. Information on versions of this same workshop: http://www.danielmack.com/ITC.html

Bio
Daniel Mack is an artist with trees and other natural materials and has been studying the work of Carl Jung for over 30 years. He has been teaching at The Omega Institute since 1996 and is now carving hundreds of figures from bark he collects along the banks of the Hudson River. He calls them “anima”. He has presented at The Nature and Human Nature Conference at the Pacifica Institute and writes for various archetypally-oriented journals. More on all this at www.danielmack.com
Vimeos: http://vimeo.com/6177731 http://vimeo.com/6153333

Fugitive Materials

2011-11-13T07:52:00.000-08:00

A few nights ago, I met a friend I'd not talked with in a year or more. His opening question:
"Oh, hi Dan. Are you still interested in fugitive materials?"

I was a bit dismayed. ("Is that what he thinks of me!)
But mostly I was pleased.

My whole life has been engaged with the ephemeral, fugitive, fleeting.
As a child, my grandfather would take me out "nutting" in the autumn to collect fallen horse chestnuts and pig nuts. It was seasonal--fugitive--activity.

I collected stamps and coins and much preferred the worn, nearly obliterated coins to those in mint condition... again fascination with the unseen--- those long dead fingers that had worn these coins into their current condition.

I've started retrieving these coins from boxes deep in the attic and am looking for ways to re-present the still powerful energies of the worn. They will likely end up as crown chakras on my carvings.

Did I start with "fugitive"? hmmm

Pulpy Materials

2011-10-26T09:52:00.000-07:00

Re-Purposing pulpy materials

I've been looking at those re-formed cardboardy containers and spacers. They are green berry containers, shoe inserts, egg cartons, paper containers of all sorts. Really, they are papier mache. So, I've been rewetting and reworking them.

It's classic rustic: fast, from neglected materials... main vein into unconscious making.

This used to hold French Fries

This was the cover of an egg carton

Victory at Sea

2011-09-23T09:24:00.000-07:00

One powerful memory from the early 1950's is watching-- no, being entranced by--
Victory At Sea.

Oh that music, those huge ocean swells! A boy and the Unconscious!

See for yourself!

December

2010-12-08T05:54:00.001-08:00

The blowing leaf

the darting squirrel

my thoughts

the difference?

Stories from the Recycling Center part 1

2010-11-18T09:09:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I see what's in the bin before I dump my papers in.
This had been thrown away:

Dancing to the music

2010-11-02T07:14:00.000-07:00

Boomer Visions#1

2010-10-24T05:38:00.000-07:00

Art, Craft and Archetypes

2010-10-16T19:06:00.000-07:00

I was on an Open Studio tour today and enjoyed seeing the work and homes and studios of people I have come to know over the past ten years...
Oh boy, This may be more a book than a blog
I was struck by the attention to technique, detail, control, breadth of knowledge of these painters. There was something Heroic, Apollo-like about the detail and care of these paintings. Indeed, they looked very much like the person, the place the thing.
I'm moved by Saturn, the brooding one; and Hermes, the speedy one who turns things upside down. I like the Trickster who does several things at one: making order and disorder...

Do different archetypes inspire different "art"? Is one really any "better"?

Things a bit slow? Maybe its just that season of you

2010-09-29T14:12:00.000-07:00

"There are times to cultivate and create, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures.
There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding.
And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they begin to fade.
And finally of course, there are times that are cold and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream.
Those rhythms in life are natural events.
They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are."
-Chogyam Tungpa

Kurt Seligmann

2010-09-23T04:18:00.000-07:00

January, 2012 will be the 50th anniversary of the death of Kurt Seligmann. Here is his 1954 work, Exotic Garden, currently available from The Art Institute of Chicago

His farm-retreat was here in Orange County and was willed to the "Citizens of Orange County" after his wife's death thirty years later. It is now a welcoming and accessible community organization with beautiful land and buildings.There is a growing group of regional people interested in exploring and marking the presence of Surrealism in this rural area.

For the moment(whatever else is there?), I'm willing to help gather these interested people into some discussions on how to manifest surrealism, again in this County; how to recognize the presence and legacy of Kurt and Arlette Seligmann.

Here are a few of his unfinished paintings still around

2010-01-03T07:56:00.000-08:00

to close out 2009,
The Book I just finished --Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut--

The Movie I just saw
--Cherry Blossoms by Doris Dörrie--

Vonnegut has a character explain his notion of non-entity---those moments of joy, of Flow, when God is NOT controlling our lives.

Dörrie explores aging,
death and how memory lives on.

2009-12-29T10:21:00.000-08:00

On an island in Panama with family, resting and discovering similarities and differences

... like these boats cayucos, hand hewn from single logs...

and the front fence of the local police station with the rocks painted a defensive black.

2009-12-19T06:42:00.000-08:00

Golden Straw Light
for Solstice
by Laurie Seeman

2009-12-18T18:31:00.000-08:00

Two Views of Life...

2009-12-15T19:13:00.001-08:00

The Hudson River today looking from Newburgh towards Beacon

Is this art or healing?

2009-12-13T18:54:00.000-08:00

In Delaware/Lenape Tradition: East is male, red, life, day, right-hand
West is female, black, death, night, left-hand

from Jung's Red Book

2009-12-12T09:43:00.000-08:00

THIS DECADE'S ILLNESS

TO SEE:
Onion Report

THIS WEEK'S BOOK

Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White, Jr.
Examination of social changes as armed conflict shifted more to cavalry and hence the need for more land for to grow feed for horses... and more.
The point: we live in a very, very dynamic world. Snapshots of a the past are the best we can hope for and gawd help us if we use them as vision of the future.
I think McLuhan said: We look at the present in a rear view mirror

2009-12-02T06:52:00.000-08:00

December 2, 2009

Just four months since the last tortured entry. What is a blog? Even with dear friends, smart friends, brilliant strangers, I get uneasy being escorted through their thoughts, arguments, wonderings, and analyses. I resist. I even resist my own blog--- just my turn to put the eye drops into someone else's eyes! Oh my gawd, even this is sounding like a BLOG! STOP

So, what I intend to do is share ingredients. I find things.
I find references, quotes, words, images, videos... all of which have a charge of some sort. They are the atoms of the imagination. If I wait for them to all pair up into molecules, then into compounds and finally into Flubber, all that sweet early, primal charge will be gone. What a loss!

So. I'll use this blawg as a shoebox, refrigerator door, hydrator for charged particles of the Imagination, for me at least. If they have a buzz for you, good.

BOOKS
I'm rereading Sylvia Brinton Perera's Queen Maeve and Her Lovers: A Celtic Archetype of Ecstasy, Addiction, and Healing.
I'm revisiting Edmund Carpenter's work: Eskimo Realities, They Became What They Beheld and more.

WORDS/TERMS
Inherent Vice: The tendency of material to deteriorate due to the essential instability of the components or interaction among components

SOMETHING TO SEE
That SandFantasy You Tube

ELSEWHERE

2009-08-03T05:18:00.000-07:00

I'm still trying to figure out how a blog fits into the landscape of information. So here's this month's attempt.

Several Orange County (New York) artists met recently and found common interest in non-representational work... actually work connected to the roiling unconscious.

"So what!" you might be saying.

Well, Orange County is a rural, beautiful area-- home of The Black Dirt and luscious, seductive
vistas. After onions and apples, plein air painters are are biggest crop. So to, coincidentally, find a few other refugees from Landscape Painting was very exciting.

We are trying to find a regular time and place to keep meeting face-to-face. But until then and in addition to that, maybe a blog can help fuel and form all this. Here's my opening statement for this new/old group, Elsewhere:

I'm very interested in arts-in-action: artists composing areas in time and space, in color, shape and texture which beckon and entrance. These environment/encounters, when successful, are profound. People are not the same afterwards. They have recognized and welcomed home a wayward part of themselves. The artist is the helper/diviner of mildly lost souls. Artist as psychopomp.

For me, this is not done through traditional arts or crafts. That's why I left furniture for the world of Imaginal Artifacts. I want to use common materials, techniques and patterns as a way to elsewhere.

So I propose a "group" called, Elsewhere, which reflects and supports each others work in exploring the twilight and liminal areas. We can help each other devise ways to be bolder and braver about folding our murky works into the world.

The other two miscreants, at the moment, are Gloria Bonelli, Linda Richichi and John F. Simon, Jr

WELCOME!

2009-07-06T08:04:00.000-07:00

In the many years I have been collecting and writing materials for this "book" - The Wayward Artist- I have been waiting for some opportunity to work in community with others waywardly touched.
E-mails are OK, but so one-to-one; we meet at Woodlander Gatherings. This year is the 18th; but that's only once a year. I don't yet know how Facebook might relate to this; and I suspect that Twitter is the junk food of communication.
But perhaps this blog can fill a void of casual, accessible interaction.

Who are Wayward Artists?

Probably all of us. We each need times and places to behave waywardly, just so we can survive.
But some of us are a bit more public and expressive about our errant ways. Wayward is an attitude, a way of honoring the unconscious... This image is titled Walking the Three Worlds by wayward David Horton.

I invite you to take a look at the materials I am freely putting onto the web, The Wayward Artist aka Hair on the Shower Wall and other creative opportunities. In the MAKERS section, I've begun to collect names of people who who seem to be in the same tribe. What do you think?

Let's see what kinds of common grounds we can find!

Daniel Mack