In response to, Lunch at the Shop by Peter Miller, and moving past a place setter. The space between creating a meal and consuming the meal, the napkin ring stands to separate these two practices. Holding the continued conversation from one meal to the next, the napkin ring marks "the time to relax, savor, and commune."
#petermillerbooks
Plants have attitudes, too you know.
I collect them in short hand.
They prefer shapes and colors to your words
I have this discussion they have been having.
I'm here to tell you the outcome.
It wasn't a group decision.
The forest has more to say on the topic.
I have begun to build canvases that bend and shift with the drawing, instead of the drawing bending and shifting with the architecture.
Past her debut.
The common bush is still tied
alone
to the fence. With a
blue tie down ratchet strap
that was on sale for $7.99.
Binding her
to show her
white round snowballs.
The water hides our hands
as we cut and pull.
The plants wave in exultation.
We come under the cloak of pleasure
and rain.
Geez. Where did they go? I have decided to pull them back into my lair. They will make apperances here within the writings formally know as amusing musings. Parsing out my thoughts, as paintings, as words, as insight.
Side stepping ferns in my garden, I checked on my peonies and lupins in the moonlight.
The tender leaves have been eaten without mercy. It is a battle of the wills, established roots against the invading insect.
The spring will proceed, regardless.
Sometimes a response is delayed longer than is wanted. A sadness grows, because there is room to fill. Until I remembered she was one of the few who saw me, when I did not.
With anticipation. Now reread that as if it's from the Rocky Horror Picture Show- all drawn out, hissing the syllables, and you are 13 again, and with your best friend Molly, and you are reciting what you think you know and you most certainly do not know.
Here. At age 41 I am revisiting these feelings. Waiting at the Walla Walla airport with a trigger painting that goes to Seattle. Construction for its future home is not complete, so this is just a preliminary conversation that will set the stage for a someday drawing.
Then onto a voyage across the eastern seaboard. The universe is collaborating to support and overwhelm. I'm traveling across the country to walk into another round of the "are you prepared and do you really know what your talking about?" game.
You know how it goes. It always starts with a nod that says, yeah sure, I know what your talking about.
Do I know Terry Oconor, the nineties dancer... Oh yeah, of course I do.
Wait, do I? Then racing home to triple check that I'm not crazy...
....Even though the nineties is definitely 20 years ago, you actually never forgot the night you sat there with your fathers childhood bestie. Timothy Smith, he who went from hairy hippy who played the tuba to be the slender, dancer/dance enthusiast book editor. Back when you were 20 living in NYC... it was really actually the entrance to Harlem, upper west side Manhattan - these things do make a difference to an city life's perception you know...We sat at the promising show in question. It was an important moment, this was "the" important young choreographer. Remember this, remember this. Store this. Let's be honest, does an impressionable forget the dance performance where Mikhail Baryshnikov sat validating the moment, and the dancer's promise?
Timmy clarified by a late night Facebook conversation:
"Tere O'Connor
Misha sat right behind us, with Rob Besserer who was in Misha's and Mark Morris's White Oak Project with my friend Katherine Graham.... "
Misha's? The ground breaking that was Mark Morris? Good grief that was many moons ago. None the less, I won this round, I did know the answer the nod was in truth. From the days of when I thought dance would be a part of my life and before it was a family joke. Back before now.
The engines are starting.
Here is the nagging feeling about the winter's preparation for the week's coming game. My work is not all equal. There is promise, and I am building my own place to stand. And yet, looking at the walls last night as I repacked, in my bedroom, in the room that serves as my winter studio, as the room that serves as a giant closet. There was a reason the paintings and photographs have found their way back to my hands. They often fall in two categories. First, when a artist, better then I, saw a simple work, she called me out. "That is an ease for you and as a result, it's not interesting. It leaves me with no questions." Or second, the shrill horror I feel when I realize a piece's immaturity. Looking at a painting that refused to be bought. Those strokes look like middle school, like I was 13.
The plane is lifting.
Here is what I do like. The process of the trigger drawing or painting, as I am travel with today. The project embodies both the moment of conception and the passage of time between the first install to the second or even third. A trigger piece is an investment in the future. And a relic of the past. My mark, almost always, is getting better. It gives me a chance to rebuild an idea.
This trigger painting that is sitting in the cargo riding over these snow capped mountains is part II of the Welcome to the Garden Party series, from last fall's show at Studio Two Zero Two in Walla Walla.
After spending the last two winter weeks on Welcome to the Garden Party, part I, installing it in a guest house, I am very familiar with the curves and lines that were started last summer. This coming summer the drawing, that will take place, will be the third and maybe final time I construct my walk under the water birch.
The lights of Seattle are in view, and I'm still journaling like I did in my teens and twenties on paper for what I thought would be private. In fact those pages became amusing fodder for my sister and mother, as they stored the boxes that held my youth. Tears of hilarity, as they read my scribbles trying to make sense of my love affairs, and my growing mind.
Now I insist in marking my passage, posting my progress and checking my facts for anyone and in particular, my children. Maybe it will help them in their games to come. My week to come, I will be checking facts in bathrooms between conversations, forgetting important people's names, nodding to things that I know nothing about - as often as I absolutely do know everything about. Hm, I will play the game, and document the voyage into the fog that lays between me and where I am going "with annnnticcccipaaation."
I know you. I have see your kind, with soft edges holding the sweet kiss of light.
I am not fooled.
I love you, and I am under no confusion about who will win.
I am thankful for this.
First, I asked for a photo of my new brother in law. A new one, in the water, where he is often found surfing. I waited here in the desert, imagining their burgeoning life by the sea, with ducks, and chickens and a baby and a trampoline.
“… How’s my picture of Aaron in water coming?”
“Umm, yeah.” My sister, Elizabeth said. “No.”
“Rainy, stormy here. Three people pulled into ocean this week to their death. We are hanging out at home.”
I sent hope to them instead.
Here, I built a place to stand. We can each look a different direction that is wholly ours. Docks for sitting, or for diving and swimming away.
Here, fear and exhilaration is so close. Wound together, I made one for you. For now, the posts sink into the earth, and respond to the terrain.
The water is not particular, it overtakes regardless.
Something to build on.
February 4, 2016
Docks, where I have sat or leapt. They reside in my dreams as a place to go, to dive into the water and swim away. Swift raised walkways climb over the marshes, and wind past wild Rhododendrons, and hover near a cross section of leaves. On the edges of cliffs, the first nations’ fishing piers continue their reach out over the water into my abstract allegory.
Fear and exhilaration are so close to these places. Wound together with what is on hand, the posts touch the earth for stability in response to the terrain. Additions to the landscape are designed by emotion. The ground is populated without our footsteps, only our shadow. Water is not particular, it overtakes regardless. Skirting the elements, the platforms give chance to pluck out subsistence. Collecting as I go. To give as I go.
Press Release: New Works: Something to build on.
Thursday, Feb 4, 2016 5-7 pm
Closes Saturday, March 26, 2016 7:00pm
Group Show with Penny Michel and Squire Broel.
Studio Two Zero Two 202 Main Street Walla Walla Washington 99362
After last falls Welcome to the Garden Party, Studio Two Zero Two has asked Augusta Sparks Farnum to continue her residency for another season. With a new installation and works on paper, Augusta Sparks Farnum establishes her current theme. Come see what Tex Cox is talking about in his latest community email. “I am sure Augusta will surprise us again with something totally, outstandingly original.” As the Studio Two Zero Two guest artist, the work will be up through March 26.
To see more work and Augusta Sparks Farnum’s writing consider her website. www.augustasparks.com
She not only looks like me, but she is with her friends, and they are all my age.
Mary, my 90 year old grandmother who just moved herself into a retirement community, is looking at my grandfather through the 16 mm film showing herself, without pretension. The eye brows and lips belong to a woman who has yet to leave the home front. She sits in her bathing suit, in the sun. It must be the early 1960s, the Sail Fish Club at its peak. This century’s sexual revolution is coming, civil rights are starting. Women have short hair, short shorts, and maintain the family structure. Independence is not without permission.
Late night, I am waiting. I wait by watching the 16 mm films made by my grandfather, sent to me by my father, on my phone. In the film, the men, the women, and the children play. My grandfather Bill, sees the synchronicity and it is beautiful. My grandmother Mary, my genetic doppelgänger is mesmerizing. Her future husband is there, with his wife Rusty. She, like my grandfather, will die of cancer. In this film, Rusty is still the avid sailor. Everyone is glistening. I am reminded, we are all living the same lives, only improved….? By what? By invention?
Sheer joy of participating is the goal of the films. The stars of the film, people I knew when they were grey haired, and dying, are racing around in shorts with wind blown hair. There is the same pensive look fleeting through their faces, amid swigs of water, or gin and tonics, and laugher. There is the same management of food, and fun, and function.
They are gathered, moving in and out of tiny sail boats, jumping off docks, sitting on rock ledges. Conversations are continued, are stalled, are shared at the water’s edge.
At the edge, the families submit to the winds, and the community. Everyone is submitting to the day. Submitting to the water. Except for those that are waiting. The time has yet to come. To go. To be. To leap. To shake it all off. Watching and waiting. And watching, for a turn.
When I look at Mary, looking at me sideways, through my grandfathers films. Her face says “there is so much more than this.” In my repetition of life, equality, and inventions speed up life’s functions. ok. ok. And yet, I have longer to live. By extension, my daughter will have even more time.
My grandmother, in my grandfather’s white oxford, outrageously beautiful, and ready for her own terms. She was my age when she built something to stand on.