Notes

 BALZAC to appear @ AZ Clay Annual Exhibition 29 March at Shemer Art Center. This Balzac is in his younger day. He later became Rodin’s crag of corpulence in age and La Comédie Humaine. Diurnal Balzac wore his “willful nature,” on his back, but had not that smirk when Rodin sculpted him. I met the marbles at the Rodin Museum outside Paris where I sketched days in succession before being expelled for sketching Orpheus.

 Gazundite - When the Body Touched Elisha's Bones

Don't know the name yet. Loaded a fan brush w cobalt wash and blew over edges of the gown. This will show in bisque and final fire. Then easy to clear glaze.

 An Aleutian Pegasusian. First in a series of flying horses I imagine circling the city of Troy.

 Faint image above the altar, side door basement of the Lady Chapel, Glastonbury Cathedral. Another time zone. The Tor, IRA, Glastonbury. Blessing and danger.

Pegasus, Fox:  David said it was an astronaut. He could see the helmet and the capsule! Mom said it was a horse. I had no idea. It won't photograph because the wings, winds (?) extend around the sides and back of the vessel; there is also a foot back there. When it fires the cobalt traces blue. Sometime maybe a better pic.

Egyptian zodiac:  You may say to the elders of Egypt,
that's what the life of a father's about,
act on foresight with face singed
if the top is exploded and the bottom goes out.
If the head at the top and the people at bottom
are both lost to exposing,
It leaves us worse off than we thought,
walls still standing but the vessel won't hold,
Do not turn up the fire too high we're told,
Foresight get out of the way!

Sometimes too hot, sometimes not believed,
self doubt is the last thing it needs.
With all the crowds going it's easy to doubt,
The prophets seem sure, but not sure enough.
Go back to protect family. Require foresight to act,
Constellations on all sides of this vessel come out
and the worm Ouroboros eats itself,
What new top and bottom to historic walls?
Forces are opposed, and like tyrannies.

Death, creation continue. Top and bottom create.
This is a reading of fate.

 Pile of Bowls. These bowls are transparent held to the light. He wants a permeable membrane between the clay and light.In his last years Cezanne was so blind his landscapes abstracted until they were only colors.

 'A divine tortoise', said Confucius, 'can appear to prince Yüan in a dream, yet it cannot escape the net of Yü Ch'ieh. Its wisdom can yield seventy-two faultless omens, yet it cannot escape the misery of being cut to pieces. Truly wisdom has its limits; spirituality, that which it cannot reach.'In spite of the highest wisdom, there are countless snares to be avoided. If a fish has not to fear nets, there are always pelicans. Get rid of small wisdom, and great wisdom will shine upon you. Put away goodness and you will be naturally good. A child does not learn to speak because taught by professors of the art, but because it lives among people who can themselves speak.'

 

 Stormy, later in the day. Andrew took this out the window on return from a tournament in New Mexico in '08. An incredible piece of luck.

 

An Aesthetic of Rescue

from About -Word Press

Telling the truth has saved me but I know there are several varieties of truth about the same act. This particular site was intended to tell the truth while other sites I manage  argue different kinds. All play to their own music within me, turning fiction into poetry and poetry into fiction. Riddles native to the telling of renaissance poetry drew me early and distilled with personal experience. The distance is great between thought and words, trying not to think, but thinking.  I took a green pumpkin to the shop to remake it ceramically, but after preparing the skin and  molding it to the pumpkin the clay  tore in several places. The final effect of the tears was appealing, and after several layers of impasto and lamination fabricated with oxides and patterns implanted by tools, palm fronds, it turned into not a pumpkin at all, but a bag tied at the top with a piece of clay string. On a second try it was an open bag of torn, weathered carpet, which in extension became a series of "bags".  The broad strokes have some kind of general image but no plan, like the best fiction writing on this site constructed in hearing the music, which came little by little in aural accidents and continual seeking of the ear,  or with a visual. image.Another flowing context is the submergent heart you are born to, if you are, and then find in the linens retrieved from the attic, as clear an image as needed, but what it means has to felt in the life, in the body, in physiological changes in the psyche that when triggered go all on on their own to completion. Like the clay.  Internalized these become what they will, but the image in all the linens and frakturs make the fact plain. 

 

That these are concomitant with mystical Boehme letters is irrelevant  to the fact of the experience of the air clogged with spiritual beings, so take it for granted that the study of texts can produce such effects, it rather defeats them, like the dark brow head shots of the patrons of the Weiser bookstore. Why do the rich and the royal seek alchemy? Because they have no other means of life while the seraphim swirl everywhere in invisible air.

Many of the effects of the skeins of clay take long to appreciate and do not translate well in a photograph of their subtlety, like the grey effect of the strip of Dave's porcelin on Mr Rushmore next to the white figure that so sets off the white shino.

 

 Transcendence. The pathos of form in a world of color and figure in action, smooth surface and  rough unglazed stasis of the natural. Both action and stasis express the transcendent the way notes and rest, inhale, exhale, start and stop. These may coalesce where they emerge into identities of their surroundings, tree, air, water earth.

Some explanation for the method can be given. The idea generally is to give form to the formless, the invisible, the unknowable, meaning the spiritual world. Many of the ceramic murals explore this by bringing but not quite bringing a picture of what really exists that cannot be seen. The writing does it by posing linked identities, one in one world one in the other, that have similar names but are unknowable to each other except from some third narrative view.This teasing the brain tries to make sense of unknown patterns by making them into the known even though the two worlds exist untranslatable to each other.

The digital substitute of a screen for the face is like the perfect pot on the wheel made symmetrical without tears, idealized, for the wheel destroys imperfection before the fact of its existence, or means to, the way the digital substitutes the individual with the crowd. The wheel, the perfect balance is untrue to ourselves. We are disproportion and torn and this  is our glory-- it is our redemption in more than symmetry.

All of the ceramic on this site presupposes the precariousness of life, the parable of being human, the highest created being, once realized. Writing seeks the same, as empathetically as clay. That's because thought is the highest art and poetry its best expression. Reflections that occurred in the course of this year lag behind the works, but in the Duties of the Heart of Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda of Spain, c. 1080, the last and tenth gate on The Love of God has many instances of precognition, serendipity and synchronism with the Preparation of the Heart that the "gates” constitute human spiritual life.

“Constant consciousness that He contemplates your secret and your open life, that which is hidden within you and that which is seen. [Always bear in mind] that he guides you, has compassion on you, knows your deeds and thoughts—those concealed and those revealed, in the past and in the future, that he reassures you and shows friendliness to you.” Duties of the Heart, tenth Treatise, 33.

“When you arrive at such a stage that you remove Him from your thoughts and senses (ie, give up the possibility of conceiving or imagining His essence) because he is not thus to be apprehended, and you realize Him in the evidences of His activities, as though He were inseparable from you, you will have reached that limit of the knowledge of Him which the prophet exhorts us to attain in the text (Deut 4.39) “Know this day, and lay it to thy heart, that the Lord, he is God in heaven above and upon the earth beneath; there is none else.”

-- If a piece is not precarious why should it exist? She is precarious and he is too, but what other reason do they have to be? We have long since fallen away from the norm and even the paranorm. They have become the same. The precarious balances the edge. First it was solid, stable, but taken to where it began to fall, just intervening in its collapse, it was shifted and pulled, for remember it is a hollow cylinder when all is said and done, and while the photograph may not show it, because the work is not a photograph, the cylinder, some 27" tall in origin, can collapse from the various strength and weakness of its sides in the imprecise pressure of its stretching, and most from the need for it to totter there and be pulled back from the brink. Reduced from its origin by even a third, which will be further reduced by the fire another tenth at least, it is a rescue.

Look at the stars to bring them to the earth, this is that knowledge of the worlds, a kind of medieval  quantum, all stories told with Breugel, Giotto, spiritual beings everywhere which  would not identify until looked with the thought, the figures are seraphim.

 

2.

--

Archie Johnson and The Las Vegas Seraphim Collection
Archie Johnson stopped by and produced pics from the Las Vegas Seraphim Collection. He came to the apartments below where the paintings were but then said he should tour the upper three stories, unfinished, rickety, dangerous with catwalks but traversable. The house had never been properly finished off, just enough so it wouldn’t get too wet in the rain. Visited many times in these venues, it had been acquired but never improved much, so to view The Seraphim Collection in situ is a challenge. I Had been up there myself so it was more or less possible. There are so many more parts and pieces he didn't photograph. It's a little like the old Barnes, the only other place I saw pieces crammed and crocked together, crowds milling shoulder to shoulder to pass them. Obviously they they can’t do that in Vegas. Without apology the name tags are also missing. As for the photography, if was a variable cloudy day when Archie passed through.


This approach to life and art is experimental. One book I took out three times before I understood its importance and found the part that mattered to me, Vanuccie Biringuaccio, Pyrotechnia, where the roots of mines were compared with the roots of trees and the golden age a material form of them. This document is unbelievably  now online in a PDF, although the translation I used was Richard Eden's of 1540. With the serendipity applied to hundreds of instances that inform these searches, always remembering the search term is most important.My search terms are supplied by continual reference to the first moment of my being when I was formed by Messiah.
This site is unadvertised. It is sometimes like a journal. Perhaps the writings form a loose assembled inquiry. Since I have just been reading Either/Or, liking the Preface and the very first part, this could be an assemblage of some ideas about faith and the self. Kierkegaard's takes on Don Juan and Tragedy strike me as pedantic and dull, but he has a lot to say about the poet in that first section before he abandons him. Of the ceramic creations that have occurred in the last decade, some at Forms of the Formless, one piece at a time for critique, these show a part of myself not otherwise seen.

 

 

 The Oxford poets in Weimar c. 1929 and following, Spender, Auden, etc. prefigure  our visit to Weimar-America materialism and its later censorships of oppression about a hundred years later. Hence, other that saying so, we traverse  with ALL THE FIGURES WALKING HERE AS MEDITATIONS OF THE STATES OF HUMAN SUFFERING AND INTERCESSION FOR THE SUFFERING OF THE SINS OF THE WORLD.

Some Examples of this aesthetic occur in guided accident, prophetic dialogue, privileging of surface, native/alien interface, double coding, narrative subversion, hijack, cross-column reading translation. It’s there and 1) I write it down as best I can.  2) The image  of the finished piece of the vision of Pisceus Piano Rhinoceros is like the translation of a text, it’s arbitrary, edited. The finished Rhino is too big to fit on the piano but time and space are not particularly important in vision landscapes. What if somebody writes or makes something that’s not a vision? what do we call that. Invention? Imitation.  But a baby is not a vision, a baby is real and it embodies all its future like a seed that grows into a tree. A vision is indeterminate before its expression, but when it emerges it chooses a style, or one is chosen for it by the man. One attractive style is the playful-weary tone and almost-spoken element. This occurs by divining it from the words through which are sought the spirit of the writer--and hence the spirit of the original author we translate. To reproduce the original, particularly with a first-person narrative, it becomes very important to find the right voice, so it is said, refrain from making a translation dead by missing out on all the texture and drama of the text.

 

Raisonne 2018 The Aesthetic of Rescue. Parables of Human Life. Artistic statement and catalog raisonne

Some texts don't translate. They are only symbolic, as with--Anselem Kiefer, Remembering the Future, borrowing stalks of wheat and grasses, tall sunflowers on single stems above with patches of paint as rock or mud patched brown and greens and blue swirls, all grained rhythms of the natural in motion, collage pieces of foil, silver, gold, glued, painted, stuck on, peeled off recurrent color notes are black, white, gray, and rust; and their surfaces are rough and slathered with paint, plaster, mud and clay.

 Old and new clay with porcelain interiors, but exteriors of lava, gravel and cobalt specks pressed into the new, that stretch above two feet, stretch into cylinders with shoulders and mouths, cut, then compressed, the shoulders lowered into the body, the base informed for the climacteric event (Robert Lowell) of its vulnerability, the weak spot we see, shows  its mortality, prevented as much as possible, but inevitable in all, hence the tear, the slump, the complete collapse of the shell. In composition the shaping hands are full, and need braces, later extracted, remnants of two by fours, sponges and props to support the landing. If the tower lands hard it needs to be put back up on its base, made double and triple to support the weight which now in diameter can be as wide as the tower was high, but it has to touch the ground too, so an edge tilts down, otherwise it will fall in the heat of the fire.

There is a measure of scale. If big they are a measure of ourselves. If we were big they would be small, so big or small are a slight measure. If we photograph the small close up we make it big. These works are the scale they are from the point of view of what will carry wrapped from the studio to a car to drive to where the real work is done in a garage, not by machines, but by stretching, for if, or when it falls, it can’t be moved until it drys. The scale is the car and the weight carried to the car. Exiting the building they extend above the head. There are no associates or helpers, hoists or lifts or pulleys or rollers. The work is not a part of any social situation.They are speed dried though after 48 hours and are ready to go. The skin skein, the onion simultaneous all happening at the same time comes many into one, one into many, expands and contracts separately and together.

The compositions being performed at a studio some miles from their finishing point at another studio, where they are finished and bisqued, are limited to what will fit in the back of a car after composition,, Another limit on size is the weight. One, Boxcar,  molded around a 35 lb. cement block 8-inch by 8-inch by 16, was double that in weight. At end however it sagged and broke and and had to be put back Humpty Dumpty style and made a good Boxcar.