January 11, 2011
December 6, 2010
Best Grove Presentation So Far: 2003/4-10
So I presented my Mentor’s Grove Project to Dr. Kay Fowler’s Death and Dying class (thank you, Kay!) for the second and last time for the fall semester of 2010. It was the first time I got spontaneous applause! Twice! I rearranged my presentation from last week, starting this time with a concrete description of the actual project and then moving into the “why this is so meaningful” part of the talk. Much more sensible order.
It wasn’t perfect but I liked how it went. I introduced the project as a use of art and image making as, for lack of a more compelling phrase, one way to suffer grief as a process.
I talked about a danger of working with images and meaningful objects: Forgetting the significant way of looking at them or telling the wrong stories about them when presenting them. (Ask me about the swimming with dolphins story I told at one of Brady’s memorial services. Perfect example. But I don’t want to spend all night on the computer.) But of course there is a virtue hiding there, the possibility of the process: images unfold, their meanings dance with you as you go through the steps, as you twist and turn, wriggling to get free. What seemed like a perfectly sensible, perfectly satisfying, permanently settled understanding can explode into whole new vistas simply by asking a different question of the image. The images wait through our ignorance and persist through the changes that allow us to see them more fully.
The picture above is a two page spread from a notebook from 2006. It’s a bit outdated and definitely from a time when I was asking the images the wrong questions (or at least less developed questions than I have now) Still I like the way the sequence of views(participations) the grove presents are represented by these six illustrations. And my cartoon of the scorpion people from The Epic Of Gilgamesh may just be one of my favorite drawings ever.
Tonight I finished with the idea of the image not as an illusion or a depiction but the image as a part of nature, a remarkably human part of nature. I will continue to develop that part of the talk though who knows where my thinking will be next semester.
December 1, 2010
One Day In The Maze…
… The Rat ran into The Minotaur.
This cartoon came to me while I was working on a film for a general illustration class. The assignment was to make a film meditating on the relation between place and character. What I came up with I called, “A film on location.” Funny, right?
Hi Kenya! Write me a comment when you see this!
November 30, 2010
Presented the Grove Today
I added some new stuff, shifted my presentation around. I think it went well. I have another shot next Monday so I’m hoping it goes even better.
One of the things I added was an introduction on Brady’s philosophical concern for intentionality. I showed some of the classic illustrations and then I tried to suggest how this concept influenced his methods reading and interpretting events and narrative. I started with this drawing:
Which illustrates a part of Utnapishtim’s sleep test for Gilgamesh. Whereas today we would say, “Gilgamesh fell asleep” the text asserts that “sleep poured over his eyes like a mist.” I think both descriptions are available to us as sensations. Learning how the original readers of Gilgamesh understood sleep adds to what I can notice about sleep. Still though, sleep itself is known to us or at least something we are familiar with in our own way. I then moved onto this cartoon, dealing with another familiar subject, this time a bit metaphorically (?) and I asked the class, “And then what happens?’
November 26, 2010
2 pages from the 2nd grove notebook
Here’re two consecutive pages from one of my grove sketchbooks. They depict some of the last episodes in Gilgamesh. Trying to design the relief sculptures for the grove, I cartooned the whole story to see which events were most visual. I wrote slightly more on the design questions here.
November 20, 2010
Two Sketches for Relief
I’m still working on a page and another post about my Mentor’s Grove project, which I designed in response to the death of my mentor. I’m writing mostly about my struggles to realize the relief sculptures. I wanted to capture the entire epic of Gilgamesh on the interior walls of the grove. These two sketches depict Gilgamesh and Enkidu dancing through their heroic adventures, dancing in the joy of their strength. You can see pictured the killing of both Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven.
But these things are pictured, depicted, rather than narrated through the pictures. The pictures require captions. My hope had been that the pictures would replace — stand in the place of — the master storyteller who had been lost. It took me a long time to realize that this task was impossible. Like so many other parts of this experience, my own story reflected the story I was attempting to retell. Wasn’t Gilgamesh forced to the same conclusion at the end of his long journey to resurrect his friend?
November 18, 2010
Time to Present
These three images are from the archive of my Mentor’s Grove Project.
They represent two distinct efforts at design of the relief sculptures. I like how different they appear. I have learned a great deal thinking about that difference and still have a lot left to learn.
The relief sculptures were to surround the visitor once they had reached the center of the labyrinth. The two distinct design processes can be related to one another once you know the conception of the reliefs: the whole story of Gilgamesh was to emerge from the walls like the images seen in clouds.
Imagine that: lying on your back, gazing into the sky and, instead of picking out a duck or a snowman in an individual cloud, you see surrounding you over the whole horizon, linked cloud by cloud, an entire coherent epic story. This was intended as a metaphor for the naturalness of human life as story. That is, to suggest the way human life relates to the rest of nature.
(But think what changes the world would have to undergo to witness such a spectacle. How is human life like and unlike that? That question was central to my process)
But, two efforts: 1. To tell the whole story of Gilgamesh and 2. to tell it in sculptures that appear in the same way that images appear in clouds.
First the cartoony sketch — I have, over two sketchbooks, the entire epic of Gilgamesh messily sketched out as sequential art, in an effort to see what was visible (most visual) about the events narrated in the story.
Second, these ambiguous photographs: My idea for the visual look of the reliefs was like “images seen in clouds” — except seen in stone, fieldstone and mortar. I wanted viewers to see the sculptures the same way they see images in natural formations, clouds, rocks, trees. I wanted the images to be invisible until viewers pulled them out of the undeclarative surface with their imaginations.
I have hundreds of photographs of rockfaces and treebranches — particularly oaks for some reason — which I took in an effort to learn the style by which natural forms suggested images. The photographs here relate to a later stage in that process: trying to catch the repetition and interruption of such forms, I incised a grid into a piece of plastic and then photographed images reflected in its divided surface.
Included in the computer slide show of images I reflected were pictures from Ankor Wat. The Kmer sculpture and architecture from Ankor Wat has always struck me as a sort of hallucination occuring in our perception of natural forms. It is far more visible and declarative than the sculpture I intended for the grove but still I like it.
November 17, 2010
a study for a relief sculpture
I’ve been thinking about my Mentor’s Grove project today. I’m in the process of writing a page about it to post here. The Grove was a very ambitious sculptural-setting I designed (but was unable to sell) in honor of my mentor, Ron Brady, who died suddenly in 2003. It was/is a very rich piece but in brief it was an experiential sculpture, half labyrinth, half outdoor classroom. The student’s experience of the sculpture began as navigating a maze that then opened into a quiet interior space — a grove – where the journey just taken was depicted in relief on the walls. The whole piece was intended as an invitation to other professors to take on the full role of mentor (conveyor of life wisdom).
The main motif was the grove in the underworld where heroes in stories travel in times of trouble. There they meet a wise soul who helps them untangle their difficulties. My mentor’s mentor, Paul Piehler, wrote a book on this traditional literary occurence. The book was called The Visionary Landscape. I used the specific imagery of the journey to the other world from the Epic Of Gilgamesh because that was the subject of the most stunning lecture I ever saw Brady give.
The picture above was an an early concept sketch I did of one of the planned reliefs. It was to represent the moment in Gilgamesh when Enkidu realizes he is a human being: his identity (here represented by his face) contracts from the rest of nature.
