Design Inquiry

I just returned from Design Inquiry. I feel very lucky to have learned about an opening in the collaborative design seminar that takes place several times a year around the world. The little engine that could - it started right here in Maine by a couple of neighboring designers Margo Halverson and Charles Melcher. It is a brainstorming deep dive into all things making and design. This fall seminar had a theme of Solid • Liquid • Gas and the idea of entropy. This is what I read in the prospectus that appealed to me, especially in this time of flux:

“Life reveals the underlying principles of matter and energy — the progression of a seed to harvest; sketch to product; draft to essay; hum to composition. Changes of state are by nature examples of transformation and entropy. 

Entropy lowers as systems conserve and rest. As summer's maximum biological productivity draws to a close, autumn will bring cooler temperatures and shortening days. It measures disorder, and randomness; in the context of climate and seasonal change, it can be seen in patterns of weather, degradation of ecosystems, and transitions through seasons. As early winter sets in, we will witness a palpable shift in our surroundings—trees shedding their leaves, temperatures dropping, and landscapes transforming. 

Solid/Liquid/Gas will explore and respond to these transformations, encouraging participants to reflect on and interpret the increasing unpredictability of our environment. We invite participants to delve into the liminal space between the natural world and their own creative research, exploring the potential that lies at the intersection of the two. As water transitions between solid, liquid, and gas states in response to its environment, participants will be encouraged to embrace change and adapt to the people and ideas around them. How does entropy manifest in beauty and chaos and how can design respond to and interact with these changing conditions?”

The other ‘carrot’ by which I was led that it took place at High Meadow above Fallingwater in Mill Run Pennsylvania. Frank Llyod Wright’s FW house designed in 1935 and built during the depression is a design that has become iconic. I am not one for a bucket-list per se, but I have been rubbing elbows with architects and designers my entire life. Of course when I worked for several over the course of a decade in the 2007-2017, and served on the board of Architalx & before that at Cranbrook where I studied.

Most recently visited the Gropius house and realized architects/designers and artists homes are really important to me. Upon visiting the famous Lincoln Massachusetts home I was struck with all the coincidences I have surrounding Gropius and the legacy of the Bauhaus. I was friend’s with the son of his first biographer and in fact met Reginald Isaacs at the time he was working on the first edition translated into German because it was two volumes (perhaps needed a little editing). Just last year I visited the campus of Black Mountain College realizing the porch in his Lincoln home was echoed in the porch of the building at BMC in NC. I suddenly saw the artwork of Gyorgy Kepes and his wife Julia on Gropius’s desk in the home and in a flash remembered being in the Kepes’ home back in 1986, meeting both Julia and Gyorgy, when he called me a “rare bird” for wanting to go to Hungary. Through the pursuit of that study & travel I came to meet a gallerist in Szentendre Hungary and spent three weeks with arhcitecture students from all over East and West Europe which eventually brought me to both Berlin and Weimar. As with Wright I had already visited Taliesen West, so it seemed apt that visiting Fallingwater was an opportunity not to be missed. I have similar coincidences and connections to Buckminster Fuller.

My research while at High Meadow was to be a bit scattered and “research-lite”. I was not quite sure how to plug myself in with the workshop or others that might have met or collaborated before - so for me it began with walking, observing and collecting and eventually in dialogue with others. What I think took me in at first was the meadow. The plant and seed variety before me was hard to ignore, so I began with collecting and drawing plant natives. No surprise there. In just four days it was hard to fully realize anything, my cyanotypes were far from glorious, my painting was unfinished, my attempt at a quick zine was far from elegant or even complete. However my take-away was the new relationships. I met some new and very diverse makers and thinkers. I had amazing and enlightening conversations about time, in the practical sense but also in the more philosophical sense. Conversations about technology, about drawing, about algorthyms & about the pressure and sometimes off-putting gap between idea and result. Further conversations about food systems, relationships, about the third act, about teaching and so much more. In fact in re-reading the description above I think this theme will carry me through the winter in my thinking. Eno too has been an inspiration of late.

I have also been reading his diaries that were recently reissued as a 25 year anniversary of the first edition in 1994, when I graduated from Cranbrook. He lists pages of words that came to exist only since 1994, he has surprising insight about politics, human nature, music and worthy pursuits. He is a true polymath and it has reminded me that daily notations of our thoughts are important and for me the glue that tethers my thinking with my work that can in fact feel cavernous in their separation. So it is here on November 30th, actually now December 1st that I will begin in earnest - marking time and my thinking with language on a page..

Only now I am realizing this blog needs a slide show feature for a visual diary as well. stay tuned…

Reflections on a loaded brush (of paint)

When it comes to our skills and abilities as artists we often hear things like “I am just not talented.” or “I could never do what you do.” And while I am not the person to wax poetic about what skills are innate and which are those that are learned, it is an interesting thing to reflect on. Some skills come more naturally than others.

Recently while staying at a summer cottage I own jointly with my numerous siblings I came to look more closely than usual at some of the “art” on the walls, much of it belonging to me, but some hanging since the earliest days of our family inhabiting this space. A compact footprint of a log cabin which my father built only with the assistance of my older brothers, uncles and grandfather, decades ago but yet I have some memories of this time. This summer one morning I looked up from the bed at the two paintings my father completed the year he succumbed to cancer, only months after the relative ‘completion’ of this cabin. Because I was only six at the time I have no understanding whether he knew he had a terminal illness when he set out to build this cabin in the woods on a small beautiful body of water. I honestly don’t know If he was pursuing a dream of his own, or if he was doing it to fulfill a dream for my mother or if he foresaw a legacy for his six children to enjoy long after he was gone. I don’t know and at this point there is no need to know.

In any case as I studied the surface of these warped paintings on paperboard surfaces, I saw something that struck me as familiar. I may not have registered this familiarity until after-the-fact when I came across the close up photos I took of the two paintings. One painting is of a heron, another an egret, the compositions not original, these are paintings from a kit. Yet these painted scenes reflect similar sightings we have from the dock there at the camp, complete with reflections of weeds and trees in the waves and lilies. I took some close photos because I was worried my sister’s steamer (for her clothes) was damaging or mildewing the surface. It was not - they are worse for the wear in that they are a bit warped from temperature and humidity swings and their oak frames cracking in the corners. These frames my father also made with the very same oak boards he crafted our home’s kitchen complete with fabricated copper ventilation hood which he also fabricated from sheet and instructions.

You see my father was material savvy. After studying and graduating from Worcester Commerce in 1936 he worked in machine shops, he had wanted to study engineering at WPI which at the time was unreachable for a family with immigrant parents. He had always loved photography, he bought his first camera in 1934. During the war his brothers had served and although he had two children at home he too wanted to serve his country. It was then he served in the Marines as a Military Police photographer during the occupation in Japan just after the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Some of the photographs I have in my possession are beautiful personal images of the women with their children during the reconstruction. He also had a painters eye.

First and foremost he was a maker. He enjoyed tinkering in a shop and learning new things. He also loved books. He believed whole heartedly that education and expanding our ideologies was important for society. We had encyclopedias, national geographic magazines, history, art and how to books on the shelves. He was curious, and that feels like a dying art in and of itself.

In our basement in central Massachusetts he had a workshop, and my mother had a beautifully crafted laundry room, complete with industrial roller iron and slate sink- these would be akin to their studios if they would have considered themselves artisans, which in some way they both were. My mother, sewed, baked, painted and or/ refinished wood surfaces, working on our home’s wood moulding or sometimes refinishing furniture or shutters. My dad taught his older sons and their friends how to develop film and fix lawn-mowers and cars. But my father was not afraid to “cheat” a little, get a leg up. By this I mean, when he wanted to build a camp and either knew internally or externally that he did not have much time, he bought a log cabin kit- so the house was delivered by truck- just in pieces. Construction was just a matter of time and following instructions. When he later wanted to paint (needing something to distract him in his weakened state when he was sick) he took up painting by number. Thus the quotation marks when I mentioned these “paintings.” But his own flourishes of brushstrokes or customizations are visible in his efforts and skilled results.

I have been talking around what my reflection is about here. What I saw when I circled back to the photos of the surface of these paintings- yes they are just paint by numbers, but I saw something familiar. These were painted 1971, I was merely six or possibly seven years old. I had spent precious few hours of my with my father in those fleeting years, so it is not that I had much time to have learned anything directly from him...Other than by proxy (what I feel to be akin to osmosis at a cellular level).

Five of seven days a week he was at work. I have maybe a few vague memories of holding his hand, being carried or sitting on his lap. In fact just a couple years ago I found a reel to reel recording and I heard his voice (and mine) for the first time (it felt) in my lifetime. It was so foreign to me the only thing I connected it to it was recordings of John F Kennedy’s voice on TV, with it’s thick recognizable Massachusetts accent. The short conversation he was recording with me was also very telling, his asking me what kind of things I liked- and funny enough I blurted out (at six!) “I love flowers” this was again so telling, so known to me, yet totally NEW! It was kind of shocking How was this love for flowers so in tact fully within me at age six. It only took me some 30 plus years to take a botany class. How soon is what we become evident within us? My love of plants (and drawing) has been a part of me all along.

So as I studied the surface of these two paint by numbers, I saw some 55 years later, a familiar way of mixing colors, of loading a brush with paint, applying it to a surface, that felt like my own. Is this something innate my father had, that then genetically or through osmosis became also my way of handling the same materials? So much is transferred with our DNA it is nothing short of both mystifying and somehow miraculous. I can see it now in my minds eye, his hands, my hands, the same, like time travel within my body. Gravitational waves colliding to bend space time. I only picked up oil paint and a brush for the first time at age eighteen in art school, I had not used it or mixed paint on a palette before my first class. In fact I went to art school early, before even graduating high school, now that I am recalling it I was only 17 at the time (due to Reagonomics - I applied to and was accepted to Clark U/WAM college over holiday break). In hindsight, painting actually came incredibly naturally to me.

So much of my life now is looking back over time. I see evidence of my father within me, not from knowing him, but being a part of him. His love for cut flowers around the house, writing neat lists of everything needing to be done, his photographs or the objects he made in metal, playing with copper-chasing & repoussé, fashioning brass into a lighthouse, his love of tools and mechanical drawing, his bookshelves and his sense of justice and fairness. I also remember learning that there was a book at our library that had a dedication plate to my father. I believe an entrepreneur Mr Borgarti who started Spag’s (famous if you are from central MA during that time), bought a book or World Paintings and dedicated it to my dad. Funny enough I later sold a painting (much too inexpensively) of Spag’s to Mr B around 1983. My dad also loved museums, he was a member of both the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Worcester Art Museum and my older siblings remember going to the museums with him. I don’t have those memories but think now he would be thrilled that I attended my first year and a half of college at the Worcester Art Museum and now I also boastfully have possession of a lifetime membership at the MFA Boston (my ID expires in 2099) because the museum has a piece of mine in their collection. I think as much as I owe much of what I know to my various teachers and mentors, I owe much of it to my DNA which I share with my father and of course my mother too.

Kent Island Residency and more

It is November now when I am writing this and it is hard to think back to early days of summer, to the unknown events to unfold ahead. These days I think about writing more than I actually pick up a pen, but accounting for this year here seems like an important milestone. The skeleton of this “blog” has been in place for a while, this year I did not send my usual newsy newsletters because things have been happening in ‘onion-like’ layers in my life. Work opportunities both splinter and dovetail into life, sometimes it is hard to make sense of it in a linear descriptive fashion when the present is whirling by.

This summer I did curate and co-curate the exhibitions at Zero Station’s gallery- there were highs and lows, a quiet sense of slowness and emptiness for all the effort that goes into each exhibition, but I expected this going into the season, hence my itinerant travels. That said we are always grateful when people do stop by the gallery to see the shows, because we feel our wealth is in the people we get to meet and interact with on a daily basis. Owning the gallery/frame shop for now 25 years we feel fortunate to have met both unknown & well known artists, patrons, inventors, collectors, designers etc. We have the best conversations and have a network of some amazingly smart and wonderful humans.

Much of my summer was accounted for as I moved from a list of commitments that had me travelling around the state of Maine and at one point to a remote island off Canada. Technically as the crow flies, Kent island is pretty close to Maine- but as they say - “You can’t get theyuh [there] from heryuh [here]”. For the sake of brevity, I will just focus on this one residency that was the most rewarding ten days getting to and staying on Kent Island . In brief (the link has the detailed info) or watch this which will summarize it efficiently.

My experience was focused on a couple things. For one it was thinking (and ideally writing ) about how scientists and artists/poets exisit in the world to extrapolate meaning from close observation of nature or phenomena. It is a powerful thing and a gift to be called to this work, because we know it is not economics that draws us to be artists (or poets or scientists for that matter). The second was to create work for an exhibition at Zero Station. Originally I wanted to dive deeper into some thinking about how sound might affect the shape of structure or more specifically seeds however, I also knew my time was pretty short there and I wanted to leave with physical work. Most of what I painted at Kent was shared in the gallery as part of Floating Worlds, however while it was a very productive short stay, my experience was more wonderful in that I got to explore the plants in a remote place that has been botanized before but so few people have inhabited this place it feels special and more like an island would have felt a century ago. The tides here are extreme, the Leach’s Storm Petrels make otherworldly sounds and the students are hard working and largely unplugged and therefore extremely thoughtful, cognizant of community and filled me with a lot of hope that with a little effort all is not lost to technology. The third thing was the gift of sharing how I work with the students, first in a presentation, then in a couple demonstrations. One was to paint, not scientific illustration rather to paint the life before you, to feel the vibrations of all the colors in the greens. They worked hard and had wonderful results. I no longer consider myself a teacher. I have had wonderful experiences over the years teaching metalsmithing, but of late I am less interested in that work, yet this was a lovely experience.

I will circle back to add some photos of Kent but for now I will leave you with this painting of an expired storm petrel- a small bird that can live almost 40 years and flies tens of thousands of miles a year. They are a tiny force.

botanizing & drawing

Botany has taught me to recognize the intelligence of plants; their spatial movement following light, gravity, water, the intricate design of their reproductive mechanisms, how they coexist in community. The wonder expands as I continue to learn. How a transverse section of a plant ovary, mimic formations of sound vibrating grains of sand on a membrane  as in cymatics. The Blashka brothers’ glass flowers and seeds first seen at Harvard’s Peabody Museum: magnified and vitrified specimens continue to inspire. I like this family of artisans aim to reproduce the unspoken sense of wonder in each work that I complete.

The act of painting a plant is one of quiet observation; taking time to sense its habits and patterns of growth. I understand a plant with a gesture of my brush, which becomes more portrait than scientific document, yet exists in parallel. The painting documents time and place, seasonality. Is the plant currently in a stage of budding out, setting fruit or withering in cold, from insects or disease? Each stage is a period of magic transformation on a cellular level that we see with light moving through our optical nerve, sensing the vibration of the varied spectrum of greens. How does what an artist creates correlate to how a scientist works? I grapple to understand. My work and my questions, are not unlike all those that came before me; beginning with the initial step of wonder. The second step, to observe. The third step is less visible, it is pulling thread, interweaving what we see before us with things we have learned or read.

to curate:

cu·ra·tion/kyo͝oˈrāSHən/ (noun)

the action or process of selecting, organizing, and looking after the items in a collection or exhibition.

The word “curate” comes from the Latin “curatus,” the past participle of “curare,” which means “to take care of.”

As the curator for our gallery space, Zero Station which is now in its 25th year I have learned a great deal not only about caring for and presenting artists work, but also we take to heart caring for our artists. I had curated shows back in the early 2000s in Zero Station’s original space in SoPo, but returning to curation this time in 2020 took on new urgency and importance and reminded me of my original calling to being an artist. I take a great deal of pride in the exhbitions I have presented at Zero Station. Please take a look at our curated flat files as well as our exhibition archive.