Works in Progress
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Two of the new linoleum cut prints I'm doing for Fruition Restaurant. Both of these images are 18 x 24 inches. The prints are being done at Open Press.
The Image on the left is literally hot off the press. Offering a view of the press it is printed on and the linoleum block it is printed from. The imagery is designed for the dining room and reflects restaurant themes. The Large print was inspired by the east facing window of the kitchen. The cheese wheels by the sheep milk cheeses Made at Fruition Farm. Lastly the charcuterie references the new addition to Alex Seidel's restaurants, Mercantile, which will be doing these sorts of meats in the future. |
I am exploring the idea of landscape from several different directions. This is a drawing that is not yet in a "gallery" page but is representative of one of the directions that landscape is taking me.
My thought process in this is very much a stew. I am trying to understand the universal human inclination to stack rocks, sometimes quite spectacularly. There are ideas about sacred landscapes as well. I'm also interested in messing with combinations at very different scales, confusing scales, in an effort to get my thinking around this. |
Both of these images are drawings done in graphite, on somerset white paper.
About the ingredients of the stew......
When I was living in Japan I had the opportunity to visit a handful of the really old buddhist temples, in the courtyards of which are gardens of standing stones and raked gravel representing, as often as not, islands in the sea. These gardens are in my thoughts.
For the traditional Confucian scholar it would not have been uncommon for them to have had on their desks a stone set on a wooden stand. The stone would often been given the name of an actual mountain or equally likely that of a mythic one, either way sacred. The idea being that one could still pause and tracing their eyes way over the stone, journey.
Stones are often stacked to mark the way......pile to pile, this is the path.
The Tukiliit, who live above the arctic circle, in a landscape without trees, forest-stack stones for many different reasons -- sometimes to mark a useful river fording place. Sometimes a cache of food. Sometimes the place where something mytho-poeic and spiritually charged happened. For me personally was the idea of the barren headlands where human-sized stacks of stones were erected to "populate empty places."
The other series of drawings about landscape are about that topography -- how it is dug , mapped, measured and interpreted.
In the background is the neolithic. That grey place right before "history". Right before agriculture, before the domestication of animals, yet moving from the caves and a system of symbols that had lasted @30,000 years or so to something else that could only be represented by the moving around and arranging some very big pieces of stone.
New symbols? Or just some kind of gradual change?
I don't know. But by playing with these stones and topographies I'm making inquires into our past. I guess it's art. Certainly while drawing I am thinking still about composition and all of the "formal" concerns......always wondering though , moving those big blocks around that if in a way.......in the neolithic they were thinking about these things . After all the question : where does this go? might have been and always will be with us.
Lastly , somewhere , mucking about in the background are inclinations towards mythology. It could be that mythology is the umbrella under which all of the rest of this happens....
About the ingredients of the stew......
When I was living in Japan I had the opportunity to visit a handful of the really old buddhist temples, in the courtyards of which are gardens of standing stones and raked gravel representing, as often as not, islands in the sea. These gardens are in my thoughts.
For the traditional Confucian scholar it would not have been uncommon for them to have had on their desks a stone set on a wooden stand. The stone would often been given the name of an actual mountain or equally likely that of a mythic one, either way sacred. The idea being that one could still pause and tracing their eyes way over the stone, journey.
Stones are often stacked to mark the way......pile to pile, this is the path.
The Tukiliit, who live above the arctic circle, in a landscape without trees, forest-stack stones for many different reasons -- sometimes to mark a useful river fording place. Sometimes a cache of food. Sometimes the place where something mytho-poeic and spiritually charged happened. For me personally was the idea of the barren headlands where human-sized stacks of stones were erected to "populate empty places."
The other series of drawings about landscape are about that topography -- how it is dug , mapped, measured and interpreted.
In the background is the neolithic. That grey place right before "history". Right before agriculture, before the domestication of animals, yet moving from the caves and a system of symbols that had lasted @30,000 years or so to something else that could only be represented by the moving around and arranging some very big pieces of stone.
New symbols? Or just some kind of gradual change?
I don't know. But by playing with these stones and topographies I'm making inquires into our past. I guess it's art. Certainly while drawing I am thinking still about composition and all of the "formal" concerns......always wondering though , moving those big blocks around that if in a way.......in the neolithic they were thinking about these things . After all the question : where does this go? might have been and always will be with us.
Lastly , somewhere , mucking about in the background are inclinations towards mythology. It could be that mythology is the umbrella under which all of the rest of this happens....
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