SHARON KINGSTON

The Four Seasons, Twombly and Rothko

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 20:22:00 +0000

Sharon Kingston studio with Four Seasons in progress

I've always wanted to paint a Four Seasons Series--large scale and immersive--like Cy Twombly's Quattro Stagioni that I was fortunate enough to see at the Tate Modern in 2008.

I bought the canvas long ago and they've been hanging around the studio. I began Winter in Winter (see at left and titled Passage) and am still contemplating its completion. On Friday I began Spring with the intent that the cloud layin will move back behind layers of views--through the willow buds and cherry blossoms...abstracted of course. Painting each season in season is an important aspect of this series. And connecting each painting to a Rilke poem is an important part of my process.

So, it was a bit coincidental with the Four Seasons so much on my mind, to attend a local production of the play RED last night. This play is an homage to my art hero Rothko (my painting technique and many of my philosophies about art are consistent with this great man) and a peak inside the studio and decision to take and then retreat from the famous Four Seasons Seagram Building commission. I felt like I could have been on stage speaking his words, so connected is my process. The layering, the spending the time contemplating and looking and the desire to have the viewer spend the time there also.

Working title spring, 60 x 72, oil on canvas, in progress

Passage, 60 x72, oil on canvas Sharon Kingston

Paintings Placed - Digitally

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:08:00 +0000

I can imagine that it is hard for people to conceptualize a painting placed in their home, office or reception area. I do send a lot of them out of the studio for try outs. However, now, thanks to Houzz ideabooks, it is so much easier to "imagine" them in a setting.

My husband's company has been importing modern furniture for some time now, and since it was yet again another rainy Sunday, I thought I'd try my hand at pairing what he offers with my paintings, digitally, to give collectors a better idea of how the paintings will look in situ. I think the presentation of these works are so much richer here than on a gallery wall or as a thumbnail on facebook.

Here's a tasting of Paintings Placed. Furniture and paintings available at modernclassics.com

Surviving the Parting and Nature in the Balance Exhibit

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 03:16:00 +0000

Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,
like winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.

Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.
Climb praising as you return to connection.
Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,
be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.

Be. And know as well the need to not be:
let that ground of all that changes
bring you to completion now.

To all that has run it course, and to the vast unsayable
numbers of beings abounding in Nature,
add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The Whatcom Museum is holding an open exhibition in conjunction with its upcoming Vanishing Ice show titled Nature in the Balance. Artists are encouraged to submit pieces which speak to the topic of our changing climate. This is my submission, titled Surviving the Parting.

Change

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 20:22:00 +0000

Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist when sketching loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start and with ending begins.

Every happiness is the child of separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne becoming a laurel
dares you to become the wind.
~Rainer Maria Rilke

--------

"When you are in doubt, be still, and wait;
when doubt no longer exists for you, then go forward with courage.
So long as mists envelop you, be still;
be still until the sunlight pours through and dispels the mists
-- as it surely will.
Then act with courage.”
― Ponca Chief White Eagle

--------

“When you are in a state of deep internal stillness, you see the truth of change, the truth of impermanence that’s constantly in flow moment by moment. So that becomes a kind of insight that liberates you from the futility of the kind of grief that disallows our own humanity to emerge."

~Roshi Joan Halifax from "Compassion’s Edge States"

Want the Change, 30 x 40 in, oil on canvas ©Sharon Kingston

These past few weeks have been most enlightening to me. Extremely unsatisfied in my job, I mustered the energy and professionalism to execute a major event which I had been working on for an entire year. I delivered an "innovative and extremely successful event which was executed flawlessly" despite the inner turmoil. And then I resigned from my job. Trying to be still and contemplative among the voices of doubt and anger that have existed in my head was a difficult endeavor. However, conversations with strong and capable associates as well as these wonderful words gave me the courage to not only speak out and stand up for myself, but to move forward to realize a different vision of my career, one more consistent with who I truly am.

Just make art

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 01:13:00 +0000

Of Ourselves and of Our Origins: Subjects of Art

Art Criticism

Can we speak sensibly about what we like about art?

Peter Schjeldahl giving a talk at the Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis (1999)

This essay is an edited version of a lecture given at the School of Visual Arts in New York on 18 November 2010, as part of a series organized by David Levi Strauss and sponsored by the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department.
At a time when art is being publicly gamed to exhaustion, can we speak sensibly of what we like about it, deep down? The short answer could be: ‘Well, sure, why not?’ Thank you and goodnight! But put it this way: can we make any significant difference by speaking of what, deep down, we like about art – a difference in the world or even just in the special purlieus of art? And to do it ‘sensibly’, meaning both reasonably and in a way that others can feel.
Franz Kafka was asked if he saw any hope. He replied: ‘There is infinite hope, but not for us.’
The long answer to the question is: Not really, things being as they are. People talking in public about art today may speak from their bleeding hearts, begging indulgence from their listeners, or else make chess moves with the clichés of some or another academic discourse or prevalent babble, intimidating or benumbing possible dissenters. But it seems to me – I won’t try to prove this, so you can agree with me or not – that our culture’s bridges between individual experience and shared meaning are pretty thoroughly blown up. We can look at the river – current things, current events – from one side or the other, from the heartfelt or the rational. In between, we’re all wet. Some of us try to enact exceptions to the rule, and maybe sometimes we do. But they never seem to catch on or to go anywhere.

However, we can always do our best with what we’ve got. I suggest starting with a pronoun that I’m throwing around: ‘we’. It’s a dicey word in a democracy. It presumes an agreement where none is proven or can be proved, without taking a vote. In critical writing, it is a rhetorical stratagem, a seduction with aspects of being a fantasy and a trick. But when a writer gets away with it – that is, when readers don’t think to object – it is kind of sublime. It has interesting powers. I’m going to talk about it.
Pronouns are the little locomotives of rhetoric. As an ‘I’ type of writer, I model my experience, inviting you to try it on and see if it makes you feel slim and attractive. I use ‘you’ a lot, too. Some writers still use the politely formal pronoun ‘one’ to rope in the reader. But most of us prefer the pushier but bouncier ‘you’, at least here in pushy, bouncy America.
When a writer folds ‘I’ into ‘you’ to make ‘we’, he or she projects a world of common values. Call it civil love. (You’ve noticed that I just used the politic ‘he or she’. Call that civil justice.) The ‘we’ is make-believe. We – if you’ll pardon the expression – do not inhabit a world of civil love. But guess what? We can pretend that we do.
An educated common sense of the last three decades holds that all art is rhetorical and thus a game of pretenses and/or of exposing pretenses. This view is basic to the gaming of art. In fact, all art can be seen that way, but not usefully, if anyone’s experience matters. It ignores the fact that good art happens to us in ways that knock us out of our educations. Good art evicts intelligence from its left-brain command centre into other parts of the brain, and of the body. It does this by some or another touch or twist of beauty, which can’t be conceptualized but only undergone, like a beneficent seizure.
However, all art criticism, tagging along behind art, inevitably runs on pronoun-driven fantasy. That’s the fun of it. The seriousness of it, as of art, is its difference from the misery that engulfs most of the non-art, non-make-believe, actual world, most of the time. Art criticism, like art, should furnish something more and better than we can expect from life without it. What might that be?
Henry James isn’t among my favourite authors. I like his brother William a lot more. However, a mysterious short story by Henry with a wonderful title, ‘The Great Good Place’ (1900), is peculiarly apt here. An overburdened man is somehow transported to an unremarkable, even rather dull, but friendly hotel or club; it’s a little monastery-like, at an unknown location. It refreshes him. His life back home improves. Was it a dream? It’s not clear in the story. It doesn’t matter.
I love James’s phrase, the Great Good Place: I think everyone has one. Yours is tailored to your particular sorrows and contradictions, which it soothes and resolves, and mine to mine, which it soothes and resolves. The humour, and the wisdom, in James’s story is that the protagonist’s haven has nothing in common with an Arcadia or a Utopia, nothing orgiastic or exalting. No dreams come true there. That’s in the nature of Great Good Places, I believe. They are not projections of our wishes. They are registrations, perhaps quite humble, of what we lack. They aren’t exciting. They are, however, greatly good.
Every religion propagates a corporate Great Good Place, open to all by means of special avowals and rituals. If you’re irreligious, you don’t escape wanting that. Only, your want tends to be lonesome and blind.
So maybe you end up in the art world. There is no shortage of lonesome wanderers around here. We are not exactly lost sheep, because we probably ran away from our original flocks on purpose, but you can hear the bleating in every bar and Starbucks in town, not to mention online, night and day. You might even become an art critic who hankers to hopscotch from an ‘I’ and a ‘you’ to a ‘we’ on the occasion of some perhaps communicable epiphany. The sound of ‘we’ can be that of someone’s Great Good Place bubbling to the surface. There it may display a pleasing iridescence before, very quickly, it pops and is gone.
The ‘we’ that I envision is not political. All politics mobilizes the word ‘we’ in tandem with another word: ‘they’. It has been said that politics begins with the naming of the enemy: an opposed party, nation, class, tribe, race, religion, sex, age cohort, movement, coterie, or body of opinion. Politics feeds on identities.
Identities start fights, whether we assume them ourselves or impute them to others. Assuming and imputing are the same move, logically. To say that I’m such-and-such has no meaning unless somebody else is so-and-so. Maybe we get along and maybe we don’t. If we get along, it’s often because both our groups agree in hating another group. Naming the enemy isn’t just the start of politics. It’s the daily drill.
Identities jam signals from Great Good Places. They forestall the best kinds of art and writing. Gertrude Stein wrote a terrific lecture on this point, ‘What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them?’ (1936). She said roughly that art’s ideal, its spiritual engine, is entity, something that exists not in relation to anything but as its own sole thing. Entity occurs, she said, ‘while identity is not’. If any ‘we’ could form around that occurrence, it would be one that likewise stood on its own, with no corresponding ‘they’. I am here to say that such a ‘we’ does occur. I bet you’ve experienced it, and that probably you’re not sure what happened when you did. It’s kind of crazy, this ‘we’. It is as fleeting and mysterious as certain subatomic particles – maybe the quantum kind that can be in two places at once, as I read somewhere. (Art and science might be parallel lines that converge in stupefaction.)
Now I’m throwing around another pronoun, ‘it’ – indicating something that is not a you or an I, but that could indicate personhood or anything else, absolutely anything at all, that is taken to be real, including unreality. It-ness is what we want, if we want masterpieces.
I expect arguments against my disparagement of politics in art. The arguments will prevail – I will surrender – if they make it a matter of politics being more important than art. In fact, a moment’s thought will confirm that most things in life are more important than art. Art is only and merely wonderful, sublime, terrific, joyous. Useless.
Months ago, when I started to think about the question of what we like about art, I immediately decided that the answer would entail a reading of Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ a great old Modernist warhorse of a poem that was written in 1934. I didn’t know why. A friend of mine said the idea reminded him of the Andy Kaufman stand-up routine where Kaufman reads aloud, at hilarious length, from Ernest Hemingway, in the persona of a nerdy immigrant kid who has just been turned on to literature. That made me mad, and embarrassed. But then I thought, Hey, I’m that kid! Who isn’t that kid, if a lover of any art?
I also thought of my hero Charles Baudelaire, more than 150 years ago, advising everybody to always be drunk: drunk, he said, ‘on wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you prefer’. Wine is dangerous to some of us, and I for one live in terror of people who are drunk on virtue. That leaves poetry.
Besides, it’s nice when discussing art to have an actual great work of art at hand to remind us of what we’re talking about, if we are talking about anything. So here’s one:
The Idea of Order at Key West by Wallace Stevens
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
I think it’s safe to say that nothing in recent writing or art reaches this level of beauty and intelligence, so confidently, let alone with such total mastery of form: iambic pentameter laced with dactyls and intricate webs of rhyme, but almost conversational in tone. I wish that more artists and writers were still, or again, actively envious of greats like Stevens. But it seems that creative envy at that altitude is beyond anybody’s capacity now. Artists and writers are not at fault. You can’t play a hand of cards that history hasn’t dealt. Stevens, like his contemporaries William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane and Marianne Moore, was dealt kings and aces: an imperative to Americanize modernity and to modernize Americanness – full blast, right away. The Beats and John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara ratified their success. Abstract Expressionism and then Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein did the same with painting, and jazz and blues and then rock and roll did it with music. Watershed moments like those don’t happen very often.
An abundance of good art is being made today. It’s just not good for a lot that matters, in the reality-altering way that great art seems to. This is even more the case with criticism. The present sheer quantity of smart art writing is unusual, in my lifetime. But, similarly, the writing is not smart about very much. Critics now are good at answers. We’re short of good questions. This is a matter of how the world is. The world isn’t raising questions in forms that individuals can very well lay hold of. We might conclude that the world hates individuals, but that would be to flatter ourselves. The world doesn’t care.
I would like to be proved wrong tomorrow, when I come across new writing that is brilliant in itself, compelling in its comprehension of our lives in common, and suggestive of fruitful attitudes and actions – a game-changer. But I won’t bet on it.
Our part of the world is droopy these days, isn’t it? Prevalent are moods of frustration, senses of insufficiency and piled-up disappointments. The worst thing about this is that it conduces to despair, which conduces to bullshit. Bullshit is a time-honoured way of disguising voids of meaning and of getting by in life by getting around people, because who cares? I would like to think that some of us care or, at least, might act as if we care and see where that goes. Call it moral make-believe. Make-believe has nothing in common with bullshit, by the way. It requires absolute honesty. Ask any little kid.
Here I shift gears from philosophy to rant.
You know great poetry by how it sounds. You recognize bullshit the same way.
Among excellent younger critics now is Ben Davis. He recently diagnozed a tell-tale language in the style of today’s run-of-the-mill art criticism. It’s a reflex to characterize, and even to congratulate, new art in terms of what it is ‘responding to’, ‘being interested in themes of’, ‘reflecting on’, ‘being concerned with’ – and I would add, ‘interrogating’, ‘challenging’, ‘subverting’ and so on: mental monkey tricks. Then there’s that horrible word – I wince every time I read it, and I read it a lot lately – ‘practice’. Artists don’t make works any longer. They maintain practices. Like dentists, only less honourably. Or like musicians trying to get to Carnegie Hall. When do you stop practicing something and do it?
These lines of bullshit perform obvious social functions. For example, they posit tidy professional communities – identities based on job descriptions – in which everybody is busy with his or her little practice, or with commenting on each other’s practices, in little ways. Cynicism has gone so far as to come back around as weird innocence: nobody here but us practitioners! Invite us to your parties. Hire us. Extend our grants. Give us a kiss. Amidst the industrious hum and chatter, it’s unlikely that anyone contemplates someone singing by an ocean, unless during a rock concert at the Jersey Shore. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
To beat up on a specific example, we live in the age of an educational abomination from hell: the Artist’s Statement. An Artist’s Statement is a batch of required thinking which purports to be about the inspired doing of something, but which replaces it. The art-schooled art world is mad for intellectual hooks. These leapfrog from an idea, sail clear over the sweat and bother of actual creation, and land in forensic analysis, which some dismal pictures or objects have been devised to illustrate. A hook may get you into the art game. It will also digest you. You will then be excreted out, at best as fertilizer for next year’s crop of Artists’ Statements. More likely, you will have been just another silly fart, dispersed on the breeze.
Attention artists! Perhaps you employ language in your work. You may be highly literate. But you don’t have to say what your art means or even is about. Furthermore, don’t do that. It’s my job. You make the stuff. Let critics talk about it. Making is superior to talking, so you have the better end of the deal. I try to be big about that. For your part, keep your eye on the ball, which is not a ball of talk.
I’m thinking of those of you who are on the young side. The future is yours. I’m on the old side and running out of future. This slackens my interest in what’s new. When I go to look at art for pleasure now, it’s to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Frick Collection. My ‘we’ is yellowing around the edges. Any ‘we’ that has near-term potential must be one that tastes right in your mouths, when you say the word.
To conclude: ourselves and our origins, the origins of a ‘we’ that is worth some dedicated pretending. I am not speaking for artists here. Any artist who makes a difference constellates a ‘we’ but doesn’t belong to one, except in the occasional, lightning-strike way that I’ve argued for. He or she skips past personal pronouns to it-ness, to entity. A test of success in a work, in the mind of the artist who has created it, is that it feels strange. It is a new fact in the world, whose value, if any, other people will decide. Perhaps they will still be deciding when the artist is dead.
I saw recently that Bob Dylan was buttonholed by a fan who enthused, ‘You changed my life!’ Dylan replied: ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do about it?’
That was bad manners. It wouldn’t kill Bob Dylan to say thank you, fake it a little. But his point is impeccable. If you’re an artist, you don’t start the morning by saying to yourself, ‘Hey, think I’ll change some idiot’s life today’. You work. To be really good at anything, assuming that you’re talented, is to work harder and longer, with more ruthless honesty and discipline, than other people could do without bursting into tears. Your secret is that, hard as it may be, it doesn’t feel like work to you. It feels normal, like eating and sleeping. You are not about to hand your own life over to anybody to change or to not change, though you might wish you could. And you positively do not accept responsibility for the lives of your audience. That’s not good for them, and it is a day-spoiling pain in the ass for you.
So as an artist you’re lonely. You know the fragility and vulnerability of your Great Good Place but you lean your whole weight into it anyhow. Along with wanting fame and money and sex, like everybody, you want to slip that place into the map of the world, to make the world a little less wretched to you. You will even go without the fame and money and sex parts, if necessary. You will be misunderstood, often enough by people – darling dumbbells – who praise you. (Be kind to them if you can.) That’s the deal. No one said you were an artist. You said you were an artist. You asked for it. No whining.
Peter Schjeldahl is the art critic of The New Yorker.
Peter Schjeldahl

The Shape of What You Lived

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 03:04:00 +0000

And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is—
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.

In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.

Book of Images

Rainer Maria Rilke

I do believe that I spent a lot of my life wishing for something more. Expecting every year to deliver more "success"--like an upward trajectory towards some undefined pinnacle. There may have been an appreciation for how unbelievably fortunate I really was--but that nagging expectation for more was always present and quite overshadowed the moments of my life. Rilke and life experiences over the past few years have sparked a shift in how I view the life I've lived and am living. The old adage that everything happens for a reason becomes ever more clear the more open minded and reflective you are when looking back at the journey of your life. That choices--concrete as they seem at the time of making them--are really quite fluid. The world really does conspire to take you along the path you were meant to be on if you let it.

The Shape of What you Lived series is my tribute to recognizing and embracing these moments of my life that are here right now--and how they are enough and plentiful and wonderful in how right they are for me right now. The paintings are inspired by my morning moments, the mistiness of the mornings which symbolizes to me how we know not what our day holds for us, but if we pay attention there may be an inkling of suggestion about what it means as we move through it. The paintings are a way for me to contemplate these beautiful words by Rilke, words that continue to affect my responses to my life.

Sharon Kingston, 36 x 48 in, oil on canvas

Sharon Kingston, 20 x 24 in, oil on canvas

Sharon Kingston, 24 x 24 in, oil on canvas

Sharon Kingston, 24 x 36 in, oil on board

Making Books

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 02:24:00 +0000

http://www.mypublisher.com/index?e=OHm3Q8zJl3SnvK9yg-DELSmT4JrVn3lD&showForm=true

You may view and purchase this book at the link above. $14.00 plus shipping.

I've used MyPublisher for the past few books, but I'm thinking a migration to Blurb is in order. The user interface is okay for creating, but the sharing and ordering process is cumbersome and old school. Not impressed this time around.

So, until I can figure out a way around their system, you'll have to just enjoy the little view allowed with this link.

Studio Makeover

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 04:59:00 +0000

My brain has been consumed with DIY and the Home & Garden Show (I am the event director) and motivated by the fact that 30 of my paintings are out on exhibit, I gave my studio a make-over today. One stop shop at Lowe's for paint (the color Empire by Valspar), a gnarly woven jute rug, lamp, plants and screening curtains completely transformed the open space into an inviting sitting/conceptualizing area (can't wait to get my art books in there), a drawing area, a space to hide all my shit and the ugly sink and a really great space to paint with enough room to really back up from the paintings or adjust to the light. My works look fab on the warm grey wall, so this will provide a good backdrop for showing and photographing. My hubby says he's got a painting cart for me (the Bertoia chairs and Exhibition bench are courtesy his company www.modernclassics.com). To complete the look I'm dreaming about getting a cabinet built around the sink with a not-mauve counter and not-mauve formica backsplash. All in good time.

Art in Context

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 03:15:00 +0000

I'm really enjoying seeing so much of my work hanging in such a fabulous setting.

Lake Whatcom, Downtown, Bellingham Bay and Paintings

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 03:15:00 +0000

depths that would reveal you to yourself, 24 x 36 oil on board

(New year, new day) untitled, oil on canvas, 36 x 48

Hiltons Shoes, downtown Bellingham

Edgewater Place Condo, Entry with We may find

Edgewater Condo, master bedroom with Nimbus Grey

This week has been an eventful art week. The talented designer Blair Hunt used a few of my paintings for window dressing at a local shoe store. I am just so impressed with the presentation! The black back drop, the lighting and the graphics on the window are fantastic and professional. More people have visited my website today than any Saturday on record. Coincidence? So what--dearth of gallery Bellingham that you are--we artists are finding ways and working with talented people to get our work out there.

Also, another unconventional method of exhibiting my work came into fruition this week. A friend and admirer of my work is the agent for a luxury condo on the waterfront. We're collaborating to showcase both my work and this beautiful space. I hung 23 paintings (there are still empty walls, so I'm working on some new pieces) there on Thursday. In the bedrooms, bath, office and even pantry. They look fantastic. It is fabulous to see them hanging in an actual living environment and non-gallery lighting. Loving it. The condo is open on Fridays and Sundays from 11:30 to 2:30 at 472 South State Street above Boulevard Park. It is the open house unit.

And finally, with my studio empty of finished work, I'm getting down to painting some new paintings for the new year and conceptualizing what I'm going to do on the large blank canvases that have been staring me down for a couple of months now. The year has been exciting and collaborative and I'm really thankful to know both Mimi and Blair--both who have embraced and promoted my work.

Another layer of Mist

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 20:48:00 +0000

Memory's Gesture, 36 x 36 in, oil on canvas, 2012 Sharon Kingston

Yesterday, a friend came into my studio bearing a tearout of this "inspired" writing by John D'Onofrio--a most talented photographer. It fit so well with what I was working on at the time--the addition of another layer of mist to one of my atmospheric landscapes. I have always considered the mist on the hills as comforting and conducive to a productive artistic life. Blue skies and fair weather offer too many distractions to outdoor activities and cast too many shadows on my studio walls. Long grey winters are the perfect atmosphere for my work and works. I'm thankful for our "morning mist and widespread weeping" and the mood of my days.

My favorite part of his writing: The rain gives us time to think and room to breathe. It slows us down—a good thing.

Meditations on Liquidity

The rain, the dark and other things

Story and photo by John D'Onofrio · Wednesday, January 2, 2013

“Rush out in the rain to be soaked with the sky…”
—Rumi
In these parts, at this time of the year, the weather forecast is poetry: Rain today, turning to showers. Morning drizzle followed by afternoon sprinkles, giving way to late-night squalls. Morning mist and general, widespread weeping.
Welcome to winter in the Pacific Northwest.
We are bathed in a thousand varieties of precipitation; softly brushed by rain as light as prayer, veiled by sheets of liquid wind, and pounded by the drum-roll staccato of storms that swoop down like galloping horses. It whispers and it roars.
To live here and be happy, to endure the long, slow-motion winters, it is mandatory to embrace your inner drizzle. Without the rain we’d have the population of Los Angeles. If the sun shone, we’d be crowded, hemmed in on all sides by refugees from the south and their situation comedies. Think of the smell.
Instead we enjoy the cleansing, rain-freshened incense of wind in the cedars, a balm for these dark days that surround the solstice. The rain keeps the landscape green, energizes our splendid rivers, and rejuvenates the Salish Sea. The puddles reflect the tempestuous sky in pleasing abstractions. The clouds, roiling overhead like time-lapse photography, remind us of the ephemeral nature of our tenure on this rolling planet.
We enjoy excitement, sure, but the rain keeps it subdued, the way we like it. Visitors from other parts of the country bring their umbrellas. They do not understand. The rain cannot be thwarted or opposed. One simply must go with the flow.
The rain gives us time to think and room to breathe. It slows us down—a good thing. Plans are plans but the weather always holds the trump card. As it should be.
Winter is a good time for introspection, for gathering around the hearth. Time to tell stories. Rain—in its own peculiar way—builds community. There is warmth and light in sharing the long evenings of midwinter with kindred spirits. Our unique human light shines brighter against the darkness.
When you get right down to it, precipitation is more a state of mind than anything else. Factually speaking, Bellingham averages a little less than 35 inches a year. Seattle gets 37. New York gets 47. Forks gets 107. There, now don’t you feel better?
So let us celebrate the liquid delights of winter and revel in the wet. Don our Gore-Tex and jaunty rain hats and expensive waterproof shoes. Let us dance in the drizzle and sing in the showers. And then, when the clouds scatter and the pale northern sun shines on the puddles and gleams on the water-addled trees, let us offer incantations and praise.

More Joan Mitchell

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 05:02:00 +0000

I like this review of the Joan Mitchell Biography Lady Painter--especially the italicized section below-- more than I liked the actual book, which was too much about the foibles of Joan and less about the work. The book did turn me onto some new resources to better understand Joan's inspiration from poetry, however. More about that later.

From
Lance Esplund is an art critic and columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

OFTEN CLASSIFIED AS a second-generation Abstract Expressionist, Joan Mitchell owed as much to the School of Paris as she did to the New York School. A card-carrying member of the Eighth Street Club and a regular fixture at the Cedar Tavern, she considered her friend and lover Willem de Kooning her father and her Freudian analyst Edrita Fried her mother. But her abstract paintings are indebted more to the early abstractions of Kandinsky—perhaps even to the pastorals of Giorgione and Claude, and the atmospheric tumults of Turner, and the shimmering edges of Titian and Bonnard, and the engulfing light of Sainte-Chapelle—than to her friend Jackson Pollock, to whom she is often compared, and from whose work Mitchell said she experienced “enormous generosity and lyricism of feeling.”
The New York School artists—breaking rules, breaking ground, and breaking ties with Europe—opened Mitchell’s eyes and gave her the language, the confidence, and the freedom to develop her voice; but it was the Europeans who taught her just how rich and poetic painting could be. When Mitchell swooned about art, she spoke not of Pollock, de Kooning, and Franz Kline, but of Cézanne, Matisse, and van Gogh. They represented the highest standard of painting, to which she emphatically aspired.
Mitchell, who was born in 1925 in Chicago and died in 1992 in Paris, was an expressionist and a romantic. But she considered herself to be an intuitive, rather than an “action” painter. She had an astonishing memory—a picture book storehouse of clear multi-sensory images collected from her childhood onward that, Mitchell said, “[frightfully] roosted inside me.” She drew upon her recalled sensations and memories of places and people and transformed them to produce abstract paintings that are often landscape-informed. “I carry my landscapes around with me,” Mitchell once told an interviewer. Her inspirations ranged from the Chicago sky over Lake Michigan viewed from her childhood balcony, to the expanse of the Brooklyn Bridge, to her feelings about Parisian light, to the sight of a linden tree, to a Billie Holiday tune. She kindled to the poems of her close friend Frank O’Hara.
Of all of the painters of the New York School, Mitchell is the most poetically rigorous. Like the sculptor David Smith, she is a metaphoric artist. What Mitchell wanted from her painting, she told the critic Irving Sandler, was “the feeling in a line of poetry which makes it different from a line of prose.” “Music, poems, landscape, and dogs make me want to paint,” she confided to a friend, “and painting is what allows me to survive.” Mitchell, who loved to quote Eliot, Rilke, and Verlaine, was not using the term “poetry” loosely. She grew up in an extremely literary environment. Her mother, the poet, critic, and novelist Marion Strobel, had been an early force behind Poetry magazine. Thornton Wilder read Mitchell bedtime stories; and other guests at her childhood home included Eliot, Pound, Carl Sandburg, and William Carlos Williams. Later Mitchell, who was as involved with the New York School poets as she was with its artists, would illustrate—visually transcribe and interpret—the poems of James Schuyler, among others; and she would inspire her husband Barney Rosset to take over as publisher of Grove Press. A published young poet herself, she had wanted to pursue both painting and writing, but her father forced her, at the age of twelve, to choose one or the other.
You can sense in Mitchell’s comment about poetry a need to set herself apart from the New York School herd. Representational art (traditionally a form of poetry, not prose) has often been misunderstood to be merely mimetic, not metaphoric—to be concerned primarily with getting a “likeness.” And abstraction is often mistakenly thought to be merely an act of paring down, simplifying, or emptying out—“abstracting” from—representational art’s recognizable features. A number of Abstract Expressionists, taking their cues from Surrealism, practiced abstraction as a process of reduction, distortion, and riffing off of “reality.” Often, as in the work of Arshile Gorky, they put “abstract” forms in representational or three-dimensional stage-like spaces. Mitchell understood that abstraction in its purest form, separate from representational art, had its own spatial constructs and its own language.
Mitchell wanted her art to be expansive, not reductive. She wanted her paintings to stand alone as pure abstractions and to be as specific and redolent as the best poetry. She saw the trap in Abstract Expressionist gestural painting that could devolve from “action” painting into mere acting out. Although her paintings are abstract, their forms and their titles easily welcome associations with the natural world—even specific places, people, poems, plants, seasons, weather, times of day. But they do not require those references to be effective. Where Pollock’s titles only sometimes suggest the world outside of the canvas (the Gothic reach in “Cathedral,” for example), Mitchell’s paintings—exacting yet elusive, never one thing—immerse us in the layered experience of particular qualities of place, whether actual or emotional. Releasing us into the realm of metaphor, her pictures, like poetry, bridge the painted and lived worlds.
Expressive and precise, Mitchell’s paintings can be as bruised and pounding as a hard rain; prickly and densely tangled; ecstatic, infernal, airy, and fragrant. She breaks the world down into elements and stirs them into a flurry of brushwork, which she keeps, miraculously, weighty yet aloft. Sometimes she throws us into a furnace or roots us in the soil; at other times she brings us fleeting memories or sensations in the palm of her hand. Physically frontal and calligraphic, her abstractions rekindle our experiences of nature without ever feeling illustrative or derivative. Still, their specificity can be startling. When Jaqui, the daughter of Mitchell’s psychoanalyst, first saw Mitchell’s twenty-six-foot-wide abstraction “Edrita Fried” (titled after Jaqui’s mother), she literally jumped, “because,” she said, “it was as if my mother were standing there… [the painting] was really my mother!”
Among the liberties Mitchell inherited from the Abstract Expressionists was an expansive and decidedly American approach to paint handling and scale—the painting as big, full-frontal assault. Art critic Harold Rosenberg called the New York School tactics “heroic”—an arena in which to act. But in Mitchell’s great symphonic works, especially the diptychs, triptychs, and quadriptychs that spread twenty feet wide or more, we experience not a sense of theatricality or of manifest destiny but, rather, of intimacy, specificity—expressed color by color, mark by mark. Her paintings are dynamic, immersive. But in Mitchell’s best pictures, as in those of van Gogh—in which the whole composition aligns as a force to be reckoned with—each brushstroke has an individuality and a delicacy of attack; each mark, although it contributes to the overall interwoven web, purposefully builds toward a larger metaphor. Most consistently among all of the Abstract Expressionists, Mitchell is closest to achieving that sense of organic vitality, of life-force—that sense of an organism made up of bone, muscle, tendon, fluid, spirit—evident in works of Asian calligraphic verse, in which, to paraphrase Confucius: if the calligrapher does not fully comprehend, internalize, and express the true substance of his poetry, his ignorance will leak through every brushstroke.
No matter how large Mitchell’s best paintings get, their immersion is as much about depth—as it is breadth—of feeling. Mitchell, elevating haiku to operatic proportions, took Pollock’s all-over swashbuckling bravura—with its explosive, hard-boiled, lyric intensity—and internalized and distilled it into something close, secretive, clear.
Typically, a great Mitchell painting or pastel will be evocative of a full range of nature and of nature’s dynamics: bouquets of flowers writ large; brambles and thickets; cloud and ocean; fire and ice; striving, falling, ascension. Amid her paintings’ often bruised and gritty haze and congestion, sharp color notes and blinding white cut through silvery smoke and darkness with the precision of a flashing blade. We may not always know exactly what Mitchell meant to convey—exactly where she hoped to take us within each picture—but bolstered by her titles, such as “Trees,” “Sunflower,” “Hemlock,” “Chicago,” “Evenings on Seventy-third Street,” “Harm’s Way,” “No Birds,” “Faded Air I,” and “Ici”—we always feel exactly and deeply what she succeeded in conveying.
Mitchell, unlike many of her cohorts, did not regard Abstract Expressionism as a break with European painting traditions. A break would imply that the New York School was a bridge to Rauschenberg, Pop Art, and Conceptualism, all of which she detested. Mitchell regarded Pop as “all money and no cathedral”; she accused a friend who owned two cats and a David Salle painting of animal abuse. And when, in 1988, her retrospective arrived at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and had to be truncated due to lack of space, Mitchell gave the museum hell for having simultaneously granted an exhibition to Conceptual art-stars Doug and Mike Starn, whom she scorned as trendy and shallow. Mitchell understood that the New York School could be a fresh and decidedly American way back to European modernism and beyond. Although there were many reasons for her abandoning her home in America for one in France, which she did in her thirties, one of the strongest had to be her artistic connection to European painting—her artistic roots in French soil.
Patricia Albers’s book finally retires the legend of Mitchell as just another in a long line of gestural abstractionists, and as second-tier. Albers has conducted diligent research into nearly all areas of Mitchell’s life. She is especially good on Mitchell’s father, mother, childhood, and early adulthood; as well as on her connections with and use of poetry and remembered landscape as subject matter for her paintings. Albers’s mention of the connection between Kandinsky’s painting “Black Lines” (1913) and Mitchell is apt; and her discussion of Mitchell’s affinity with the Romantic poets—especially Wordsworth and his view of lyric poetry (“the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”) in relationship to Mitchell’s approach to abstraction—is engaging and insightful.

Albers does certain things justice in Lady Painter, among them Mitchell’s girlhood in her affluent and cultured family. She conveys Mitchell’s strained relationship with her physically abusive and emotionally absent father, a Sunday painter from whom she got “Spartan courage,” and who helped her to develop the fierce competitiveness that allowed her to become a champion at diving, tennis, figure skating, swimming, running, and horseback riding; and her mother, who instilled in her a love of literature. Albers gives us a strong sense of Mitchell’s early education at the progressive Francis W. Parker School, and of her relationships with her teachers. And she portrays Mitchell’s budding cruelty and loneliness, as well as her experience of synesthesia, with concision. Albers is also good on portraying Mitchell’s ambivalence about her wealth, snobbishness, station, and privilege, as well as her education. (Mitchell spent two years at Smith.) Romanticizing poverty by wearing tattered clothes, Mitchell would have her chauffeur drop her off blocks away from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, so that fellow students would think she was a starving artist.
Unfortunately, Albers’s thoroughness tends to give equal weight to every guest she brings to the table. Her biography, the first on Mitchell, is fleshed out with anecdote after anecdote about her subject’s personality and personal history—her alcoholism, her emotional outbursts, her quarrels, her sexual relationships—which are interesting only up to a point, and quickly become tiresome. Mitchell’s personality was so strong, and her drinking so prodigious, her sex life so rampant, her belligerent and volatile personality so well known (John Ashbery observed that she turned simple conversations into something like “embracing a rosebush”), that Albers’s endless stories about her behavior begin to take on a life of their own.
We learn from Lady Painter that Mitchell, always on the offensive, was nicknamed “Bullethead” as a child; that she cursed like a sailor one minute and quoted Eliot the next; that she often sported black eyes and bruises from lovers’ quarrels; and that she brought her guests to tears or drove them, shamed and humiliated, running out the door—that is, when she wasn’t trying to bed them, male and (occasionally) female; married or not. “Joan would prove, by turns,” Albers writes, “tough and judgmental, flirty and girlish, or bald and provocative … If she was bored, she’d make trouble, sometimes with casual cruelty: ‘So how’s your fucking mother and her fucking cancer?’ she inquired of one young man who had just flown to Paris to be with his dying parent.” And Mitchell could be physically, as well as verbally, abusive. Once, while chatting in her studio with a Beaux-Arts professor, Mitchell resorted, Albers writes, to “beating him, hard, with her cane.” As “he fled … a low, demonic cackle rolled out of the depths of the atelier.”
What starts out in Lady Painter as a seriousness biography about the development of a gifted artist eventually takes on the quality of a titillating tell-all. (Mitchell “wore holey underwear” and “peed in her cold-water sink and offered the same to visitors who asked for the john”.) And Lady Painter often wanders off into banal introductory profiles of its colorful characters and synopses of artists and art movements that feel lifted directly from encyclopedias. Consider this canned description: “An internationally known and admired Italian Swiss artist who had worked in a Surrealist style during the 1920s and 1930s, Giacometti created emaciated walking figures that evoked existentialist solitude and portraits that recorded his struggles with the mysteries of appearance.”
At nearly every turn, Albers highlights Mitchell the out-of-control wildfire at the expense of Mitchell the painter. Albers seems to have been seduced more by Mitchell’s personality than by her art, and while reading her book certain questions emerge. What, exactly, is the purpose of an artist’s biography, if not first and foremost to illuminate the art? When does a biography stop being personal and pertinent and become simply an invasion of privacy? And when does a biography, in the service of being provocative, leave its subject behind? Despite Picasso’s complicated personal relationships, I have yet to come across anything in John Richardson’s ongoing multi-volume A Life of Picasso that, through its explication of Picasso’s personality, did not further my understanding of Picasso the artist. In Lady Painter, by contrast, Mitchell the artist and Mitchell the person feel like separate, at-odd themes that never quite gel. Lady Painter does not rise to a larger argument or idea. Albers lacks something essential in her connection to Mitchell’s painting, if not in her actual understanding of the nature of abstraction itself. In the end, Albers’s biography leaves it to the reader to discover the magnificence and mystery of Mitchell’s art.
Lady Painter—the title refers to Mitchell’s oft-used sarcastic comment about her own work, “not bad for a lady painter”—is in some ways a case study of, and a psychological justification for, Mitchell’s behavior. According to Albers, Mitchell felt abandoned by her father, who made it clear to his daughter that he wanted a “John,” not a “Joan.” And when Mitchell moved to New York, she had to compete against the promiscuous, hard-drinking, sexist, macho boys’ club of the New York School, evident in examples such as Pollock’s standard greeting: “Wanna fuck?”, Clement Greenberg’s remark to a New York gallery dealer that he shouldn’t represent any women because they would just get pregnant, and another dealer’s response to Mitchell’s overture for a show: “Gee, Joan, if you were only French and male and dead.”
According to Albers, Mitchell wanted to erase the distinctions once and for all between male and female artists. In art, gender does not exist. Certainly Mitchell, along with a handful of other mid-century female artists, cracked what we now call the glass ceiling. But Albers’s hindsight argument and psychological explanations for Mitchell’s alcoholism and abusive personality can be taken only so far. Even if Albers’s armchair diagnosis is correct, none of her insights alter our experience of Mitchell’s paintings, which—as with those of van Gogh—feel completely sane and under control. Indeed, it is Mitchell’s sanity—evident in her studio practice—that is most apparent from her work.
Art and artists are usually handled poorly by Albers. “For Joan,” Albers writes, “those very streets, the flux of gritty, steaming-manhole-cover, glaring-morning-light, dirty-brick, din-of-construction Manhattan, were inseparable from de Kooning, the man and the painter.” Mitchell and her longtime lover, the painter Michael Goldberg, did not make art, but rather “together the two lived and breathed the urgent and dangerous adventure of painting.” And art history references, both too specific and too vague, are forced into places they don’t belong. At one point we encounter Mitchell’s “fetchingly Braque-like stove;” and at another time her terrace is “Mondrian stark in winter.” In an attempt to let us know just how difficult it is to make a good abstract painting, Albers delivers this insight: “Color … is an exacting discipline: one cannot simply slap down one color after another and expect a painting to work.” Lady Painter is peppered with self-consciously florid, adjective-laden descriptions of Mitchell’s paintings, including this typically vague portrayal: “‘Ladybug’ not only vents the scintillating excitement of painting but also impeccably carries out [Mitchell’s] ideas about conjoining accuracy and intensity: rigorously built, it achieves the ineffable.” Sometimes Albers portrays the act of painting as inseparable from those of fighting or sex. “Everything about [one series] of luscious chromatic canvases speaks of [Mitchell’s] all-consuming lover’s quarrel with oils.”
Perhaps the book is at its best when Mitchell speaks for herself. “There is nothing like loneliness when a head doctor has made you less detached,” Mitchell said. “You know what has hit you.” While drawing along the Seine, she observed that “the barges squat with wonderful fat asses and [have] names like Charmine and Adolphine;” and she spoke of Paris—“less ghastly than the false glitter of East Hampton”—as effusing the “ghostly decadence of mistresses and lovers and sadness.” Comparing cities, Mitchell said that New York was male and Paris was female; and that Paris’s bridges resembled dachshunds, while New York’s bridges looked like Great Danes. At mid-century, Mitchell described has-been Paris as “a small town—half the Cedar running on half its fuel.” “Not much art here,” she told Harold Rosenberg, “except the kind sauces are poured over.”
Near the end of Lady Painter, Albers writes about a four-day visit from cultural critic Deborah Solomon in the summer of 1991 at Mitchell’s home in Vétheuil, a tiny, quiet village on the Seine about thirty-five miles northwest of Paris. In 1968, Mitchell settled permanently there on a two-acre property with a stone house on a hill, a view of the Seine, gardens, and a small house once owned by Monet. Solomon had come to write a New York Times Magazine profile on Mitchell, who, suffering from cancer, depression, insomnia, arthritis, and a second hip replacement surgery, was at the height of her career and nearing the end of her life.
In her essay, “In Monet’s Light,” Solomon writes that immediately upon her arrival, she complimented a painting hanging in Mitchell’s hallway, “only to hear her blurt derisively: ‘You’re trying to show me you can feel?’” And at one point during Solomon’s visit, “Mitchell,” Albers writes, “feeling that Solomon didn’t ‘get it,’ worked herself into a terrible state.” According to Solomon, Mitchell snapped: “I’m still an Abstract Expressionist. And I still feel. I have feelings about water and sky. I like a view. I don’t like to look at a wall. My painting has nothing to do with what’s in and what’s not. I do it. I’m not hurting anyone. I’m not selling Palmolive soap. I’m not asking you to look at my art, and I’m not asking you to buy it. So leave me alone. Let me die in peace. I’m not a story.”
She was right. In the end, Mitchell’s “story” is much less compelling than the work she gave us. Taking Mitchell at her word, we should allow the personality to “die in peace,” and focus our attentions on the remarkable paintings.

Rilke's Poem Entering

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 04:50:00 +0000


The last before the far-off, 36 x 36 in, oil on canvas


Study for the last before the far-off, 12 x 12 in, oil on wood Making a World, 36 x 48 in, oil on canvas

Making a world, 12 x 16, oil on canvas

Lately I've found the experience of creating a study--a small scale work--prior to the large piece quite liberating. Without the intimidation and fear inherent in a large scale work, these small pieces afford the freedom and looseness and experimentation I was seeking to break the stagnation of my studio experience. My mantra has always been to notice what I notice--to dig deep when something catches my attention or causes me to pause. Similarly, when I became "unenergized" by what I found myself doing on the canvas--making safe paintings that are successful time and again--I knew it was time to pay attention and get back to pushing myself.

The abstracted nature of these paintings are thrilling me. The nuances, the happy accidents, the layers, the mystery and most of all the process. I'm engaged, I'm lost, I'm dancing back and forth from the canvas, I'm creating a world. My worries seem unfounded that the translation from small to large would falter in the change of surface or that I would lose interest in the painting the second time around. The large works are so much more physical and demanding, but with the composition and palette loosely determined from the study, I can engage with them at the same level as I did with the smaller works. Of course there are particulars of the studies that cannot be replicated, where something unique to the medium and paint occurred. And I can appreciate that and let it go.

Again, it is important to recognize the profundity of Rilke's words to what's happening to my process and the act of creating art itself.

Entering.

Whoever you may be: step into the evening.

Step out of the room where everything is known.

Whoever you are,
your house is the last before the far-off.
With your eyes, which are almost too tired
to free themselves from the familiar,
you slowly take one black tree
and set it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made a world.
It is big
and like a word, still ripening in silence.
And though your mind would fabricate its meaning,
your eyes tenderly let go of what they see.

Dirge without Music

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 22:35:00 +0000

Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

edna st vincent millay

Joan Mitchell, Rainer Rilke and me

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 23:33:00 +0000


Memory's Gesture, 36 x 36 in, oil on canvas

After viewing the Elles exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum last month, I ordered up a recent biography of Joan Mitchell. I know many of the Joan Mitchell stories: poet mother/controlling father, her abrasive manner, long stint in France, lovers and source of her work, but wanted more. There had been a scattering of references to her love for poetry and Rilke in particular, but I was floored when in the first few pages of the biography by Patricia Albers this writing from Rilke about memory as source...

You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguised from ourselves--only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

I had only just weeks before come across this writing for the first time and inscribed it onto a canvas.--translation from Joanna Macy & Anita Barrows. I really do pay attention when these linkages and overlaps happen. Makes me feel like I'm on the right path and the definition of who I am as a painter and artist is ever being narrowed and refined.

More about this Alber's biography in this NY Times Book Review.

River Thames-ish

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 20:17:00 +0000

the last before the far-off, 12 x 12 in study for making a world series

Artists employ many tactics to break through to the subconscious and get themselves in a place where they are responding to the process and what the paint is doing on the surface. To get to where they're painting not what's in their mind or where their mind thinks they should go, but tapping into something, someplace else. A "trick" I use, especially when I'm hoping to express the abstract with the abstract, is to take a starting image (anything, photograph, image of another artist's work) which has a successful composition, lay in some forms from that composition, and then flip the painting. I then have a starting point from which to explore paint on surface. No more references, just me and the work.

This painting began with looking at an Elmer Bischoff painting (I love the backgrounds in his figurative works). I layed in some dark areas and then flipped my board and went from there. A lot of paint on and wiping off went on in the process of creating this little painting. When finished, I returned the painting to its original orientation. Love that bit of moonlight peeking through in the mid left (accident, didn't paint that). Seems very Turnerish, River Thames-ish, I agree.

The last before the far-off. 12 x 12 in. Study for larger work.

Concept Statement

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 05:13:00 +0000

This is what I told a gallery I'm doing, and I guess I'm going to stick with it. Never worked this way before. Always just a general idea, the body of work defined the statement...this might be good for me. Parameters/limits are good for creativity, I believe.

In the words of Richard Diebenkorn: My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful, the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles.

Concept Statement:

Making A World is a body of work which explores a single poem by Rainer Maria Rilke titled Entering. The poem extends an invitation and challenge to stand on a threshold and approach the mystery of life. Desiring to express this encounter between self and nature, I'll take the poem's imagery, metaphor and symbolism inside with memories of my own relationship with the natural world. The result of this challenge being a transformed poetic space that offers the viewer both the sensory and subjective allure of abstract painting along with the emotional draw of landscape painting.

Whoever you may be: step into the evening.
Step out of the room where everything is known.
Whoever you are,
your house is the last before the far-off.
With your eyes, which are almost too tired
to free themselves from the familiar,
you slowly take one black tree
and set it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made a world.
It is big
and like a word, still ripening in silence.
And though your mind would fabricate its meaning,
your eyes tenderly let go of what they see.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Images

tis the Season to be Spirited & Social & on Sale!

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 05:14:00 +0000

My studio will be open Saturdays, December 1, 8 & 15 from 12 -4. Yes, there will be spirits to warm you.

The paintings below are 12 x 16 in, framed in clear maple or black floater frame

~~Gallery price $500~~ now $250 through the end of December.

Stimmung VII

Stimmung II

Stimmung VI

Stimmung V

Stimmung IV

Stimmung III

Stimmung I

Also on sale...

Elemental, 36 x 36 in, unframed, ~~$1400~~ $700

Many other paintings available. Hope to see you.

Feelin' a Transition coming on...

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 03:59:00 +0000

Change is in the air. I've been experimenting in the background for a few months now, and had a breakthrough in the studio over the holiday weekend. Most certainly due to TIME--no exhibits for a while so studio time is plentiful, relatively speaking--and the viewing of Elles at SAM. All empowering and inspiring. Concept in mind, I'll be working on a few smaller studies (show below, Secret Beach) before embarking on some really large scale pieces with the idea of showing them all as a body of work sometime in the Spring. It is really quite wonderful to feel re-energized. It is the painting season. The skies are grey, the light is perfect in my studio, the radiator works and there are funds from recent sales to pay for surface, paint and brushes. Thankful for everything!

Secret Beach I, 12 x 16 in, oil on board

Secret Beach II, 12 x 12 in, oil on board

Waterfall Paintings

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 01:48:00 +0000

Flow, 30 x 40 in, oil on canvas, Sharon Kingston 2012

After, 30 x 24 in, oil on canvas, Sharon Kingston, 2009

I have only been inspired to paint two waterfalls in my painting career. The first, titled After, was quite numinous and created for an exhibit which raised funds for breast cancer research. With its palette of flesh and pink it stood as a symbol of hope after the storm. Many people remember this painting--oh yeah, the pink waterfall artist-- and it was designated a best in show at a local group exhibit. The man who purchased the painting (his first original piece of art) did the chart on the painting with information I gave him about the date I started and completed the painting. All kinds of anecdotes surround such a simple painting.

I have not attempted--or desired--to paint a waterfall since. Until that is, I visited the Whatcom Museum and viewed the John Cole waterfall hanging in the front hallway. His composition, the vertical nature of it, the dark borders on three sides and the looseness in which he painted were all inspirational. I vowed when I left the museum that I was going to approach the waterfall again.

This most recent attempt at flowing water resulted in some fantastic undertones in the mist, juicy marks in the falls themselves and the deep dark color has a wonderful green gold cast--none of which you can really appreciate from the photograph. I lost myself in painting this, which was a welcome place to go after so many weekends filled with framing and moving and exhibiting my works as of late.

I don't know if it'll take me another 3 years to paint this subject again or if this is the beginning of a flirtation with the idea of flow.

From Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Listen to Joanna Macy, the translator, read this poem.

Art's Alive La Conner Exhibit

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 01:45:00 +0000

La Conner’s Premier Northwest Art Event
November 2, 3 & 4, 2012
Friday, November 2:

Invitational & Open Show Preview 12-4pm
Opening Art Walk, Merchant Hosted, 4-7pm
Spotlight Concert Bottom Line Duo 7:30pm Maple Hall

Saturday, November 3:

Invitational & Open Show Exhibit 10-4pm
Merchant Hosted Exhibits & Demonstrations
Reception of Artists, Maple Hall Exhibit 5-9pm

Sunday, November 4:

Yoga, graced by art, Maple Hall 9-9:45am
Poetry Series w/Sharon Kingston, Rainier Rilke poems,
Maple Hall 10-10:45am
Merchant Hosted Exhibits & Demonstrations
Invitational & Open Show 10-3pm

Thinking about the works I'll be taking to La Conner's Art's Alive Invitational Exhibit in two weeks. Been prepping for reading Rilke and so excited to display the Stimmung series along with the 5 Rilke Paintings. For reference, the large square paintings are 3'x3'. Visit Art's Alive here.

An Artist Talk

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 00:45:00 +0000

I will be giving my first official artist talk tomorrow night at the Whatcom Artist Guild Meeting. Source and method being the subject of my talk as they relate to the Rilke Paintings. A bit about those who influence me and how the poetry has informed my practice. I've had ample opportunity at all these art walk openings and exhibits to chat about the same informally, so it is fun for me to add visuals to create a more formal presentation.

Caressed by Ever-Moving Air

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 23:58:00 +0000

Caressed by ever-moving air, 36 x 48 in oil on canvas

A musing on this painting's significance. It is inspired by my actual view from the home to where we've landed and holds in it the gratitude of coming through to the other side (selling our house to fund the business, finding a good job, moving the kiddos--twice, mourning the loss of Curt's father--all in one year). It carries in it my desire to put aside a grievance that is affecting others and to take my resentment out of my attitude (an example of how hard it is to separate from the work what is happening in my heart and head). It is a humbling to the beauty that is in front of me every morning when I wake up. It is a new appreciation for the sunrise and how having this experience gives me pause onto the possibilities of the new day.

Here are a couple of Rilke's writings which share this sentiment.

Here in this vast landscape, swept by winds from the sea, I wonder if there is any person anywhere who can answer the questions that stir in the depths of your being. For even the best miss the mark when they use words for what is elusive and nearly unsayable. But nonetheless, I believe you are not left without a solution, if you turn to things like those that are refreshing my eyes. If you ally yourself with nature, with her sheer existence, with the small things that others overlook and that so suddenly can become huge and immeasurable; if you have this love for what is plain and try very simply, as one who serves to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, perhaps not in your conscious mind, but in your innermost awareness.
Worpswede, July 16, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

and

I am learning to see something new. In addition to sky and land, a third thing has equal significance: the air.

Things usually appear to me as finite and limited in comparison with the great body of Earth. But here there are many things that seem like islands—alone, bright, caressed on all sides by ever-moving air that makes their forms stand out so clearly.
Early Journals

Patron extraordinaire

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 00:57:00 +0000


Dare to become the wind, 36 x 36, oil on canvas, Lydia Place Collection

I have been blessed with some extraordinary friends and supporters formed through my art. One of the dearest is Jeni Cottrell, who is a kind & generous human being and happens to be a quiet philanthropist and patron of the arts in Bellingham. She buys art. She tells others to buy art. She creates art happenings. She champions us all.

I have been involved with Jeni on a couple of art transactions that have touched my tender spots and reinforced the meaning of making art. We recently were able to coordinate a project that we've been talking about for quite a while--getting original, meaningful art into spaces that really need it. Not the bank wall or the hotel, but those spaces where people may actually be transformed by it. But Jeni takes this further than just asking an artist to donate--she believes with her whole being that artists need to be paid for their work.

Jeni's been volunteering at Lydia Place for some time. She has yearned for a way to bring some art energy into the dreary walls of one of the rooms. She and a few donors have stepped up and contributed more than 1/2 of the 1/2 price I'm offering the painting at (Jeni's still out there working to get me the full 1/2 price). I selected a wall color and Jeni again found a donor to purchase and paint the space.

And everyone wins here. The Artist. Lydia Place. The Patrons.

Cheers to this Bellingham art supporter who does these acts of goodness in her own fabulous way.

These words are quite appropriate for the women who will come in contact with this painting.

Dare to become the wind.

Want the change. Be inspired by the flame

where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.

Sonnets to Orpheus
Part Two, XII
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Tempests of storm-filled delighted feeling

noreply@blogger.com (Sharon Kingston) — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 18:39:00 +0000

Tempests of Storm-Filled Delighted Feeling, 30 x 40 in, oil on canvas

Detail

Every Angel is terror. And yet,
ah, knowing you, I invoke you, almost deadly
birds of the soul. Where are the days of Tobias,
when one of the most radiant of you stood at the simple threshold,
disguised somewhat for the journey and already no longer awesome
(Like a youth, to the youth looking out curiously).
Let the Archangel now, the dangerous one, from behind the stars,
take a single step down and toward us: our own heart,
beating on high would beat us down. What are you?
Early successes, Creation’s favourite ones,
mountain-chains, ridges reddened by dawns
of all origin – pollen of flowering godhead,
junctions of light, corridors, stairs, thrones,
spaces of being, shields of bliss, tempests
of storm-filled, delighted feeling and, suddenly, solitary
mirrors: gathering their own out-streamed beauty
back into their faces again.
For we, when we feel, evaporate: oh, we
breathe ourselves out and away: from ember to ember,
yielding us fainter fragrance. Then someone may say to us:
‘Yes, you are in my blood, the room, the Spring-time
is filling with you’….. What use is that: they cannot hold us,
we vanish inside and around them. And those who are beautiful,
oh, who holds them back? Appearance, endlessly, stands up,
in their face, and goes by. Like dew from the morning grass,
what is ours rises from us, like the heat
from a dish that is warmed. O smile: where? O upward gaze:
new, warm, vanishing wave of the heart – :
oh, we are that. Does the cosmic space,
we dissolve into, taste of us then? Do the Angels
really only take back what is theirs, what has streamed out of them,
or is there sometimes, as if by an oversight, something
of our being, as well? Are we as mingled with their
features, as there is vagueness in the faces
of pregnant women? They do not see it in the swirling
return to themselves. (How should they see it?)
Lovers, if they knew how, might utter
strange things in night air. Since it seems
everything hides us. Look, trees exist; houses,
we live in, still stand. Only we
pass everything by, like an exchange of air.
And all is at one, in keeping us secret, half out of
shame perhaps, half out of inexpressible hope.
Lovers, each satisfied in the other, I ask
you about us. You grasp yourselves. Have you a sign?
Look, it happens to me, that at times my hands
become aware of each other, or that my worn face
hides itself in them. That gives me a slight
sensation. But who would dare to exist only for that?
You, though, who grow in the other’s delight
until, overwhelmed, they beg:
‘No more’ -: you, who under your hands
grow richer like vintage years of the vine:
who sometimes vanish, because the other
has so gained the ascendancy: I ask you of us. I know
you touch so blissfully because the caress withholds,
because the place you cover so tenderly
does not disappear: because beneath it you feel
pure duration. So that you promise eternity
almost, from the embrace. And yet, when you’ve endured
the first terrible glances, and the yearning at windows,
and the first walk together, just once, through the garden:
Lovers, are you the same? When you raise yourselves
one to another’s mouth, and hang there – sip against sip:
O, how strangely the drinker then escapes from their action.
Weren’t you amazed by the caution of human gesture
on Attic steles? Weren’t love and departure
laid so lightly on shoulders, they seemed to be made
of other matter than ours? Think of the hands
how they rest without weight, though there is power in the torso.
Those self-controlled ones know, through that: so much is ours,
this is us, to touch our own selves so: the gods
may bear down more heavily on us. But that is the gods’ affair.
If only we too could discover a pure, contained
human place, a strip of fruitful land of our own,
between river and stone! For our own heart exceeds us,
even as theirs did. And we can no longer
gaze after it into images, that soothe it, or into
godlike bodies, where it restrains itself more completely.