MILL ROAD STUDIO 2013 PROGRAM DATES

JUNE: 17-21, 24-28

JULY:  1-5, 8-12, 15-19, 22-26

AUGUST: 5-9, 12-16, 19-23

SEPTEMBER: 2-6, 9-13, 16-20

Weekend workshops are available on request.
Five day programs can be custom designed for groups with
common or specific interests.

All queries can be made to: szeifman@millroadstudio.com

Lunch October 20, 2012 at The Bonavista Social Club, Upper Amherst Cove, Newfoundland.

The day was beautiful and I didn’t want to stay in the studio and work all afternoon so I decided to drive to Upper Amherst Cove and have lunch at The Bonavista Social Club. It is a restaurant with a wood fired oven, imported from France, that was started this May (2012) by Katie Paterson a young trained chef who was born and raised in Upper Amherst Cove in Newfoundland. I took the two Cd set ‘The Ultimate Soul Collection’ and cruised with the windows opened and the music playing looking at the gorgeous landscape with its hundred lakes and forests along the route and also kept an eye open for moose who might wander onto the road. There are seven hundred moose-auto collisions in Newfoundland each year and they can be fatal. The drive takes about half an hour, about as long as it takes me to walk to Patachou from Highbourne Road. There was only one other couple at the restaurant when I arrived and they were sitting inside. I was torn between sitting out or in thinking it might be cold outside but decided to try it anyway. It was about 2:30 by then and the sun was already low and directly on the terrace and I was able to find a place to sit and bathe in the sun’s warmth. It was October 20 on the Bonavista Peninsula, four hundred and fifty miles out in the North Atlantic, and the sun was bouncing off the water and the sea was surging and the sound of waves hitting the rocks was audible and there was an eagle flying around and at one point during the meal I noticed a group of dolphins blowing and moving in the middle of the bay. I always have pizza at BSC and it was the pizza I was thinking about when driving to the restaurant but when I got there and read the menu I saw Katie was offering a pappardelle with a moose ragout. It was a dish I couldn’t resist and so ordered that and a pizza to go there-by taking care of dinner as well. At the BSC there is always a daily salad and today it had roasted beets and crumpled feta and mixed greens all from the garden. The gardens around the property are extensive and Katie’s family grows everything from garlic to asparagus. It was delicious and where I was sitting and being the only one in a place that is usually so crowded made it taste even better. I drank water and just relaxed in a way I hadn’t been able to since I got back to Newfoundland on September 27^th after spending a few weeks roaming the corridors of various hospitals in Toronto following the progress of my father who had taken a turn for the worse.  With lunch the breadbasket today had an onion focaccia. Katie is an outstanding baker and in the morning before the restaurant opens a variety of breads - baguettes, multi-grain, sourdough, focaccia, and bagels – are baked in the wood oven. When the pasta came it was a thing of beauty. I am partial to pappardelle and this dish with it carrots, mushrooms, and fresh parmesan accompanying what could best be described as pieces of pulled moose did not disappoint. Katie makes her own pappardelle with eggs from their chickens, flour and olive oil. This was the best dish I had eaten in a restaurant in Newfoundland since June and it may have been one of the best pastas I have ever eaten and the eating experience was enhanced by the warmth of the sun, the clarity of the sky, the expanse of the sea and the sight of the water splashing up between the rocks further along the coast. Goats were grazing as well in a pasture overlooking the sea. A meal like this, perfect in every way, is always a surprise. A meal like this cannot be planned and one cannot even have an expectation of enjoying a meal so intensely and especially in the middle of an autumn afternoon in rural Newfoundland. After a coffee when I paid the bill I thanked Katie for the experience. Earlier we had talked about how she could develop a reputation amongst people who love to eat by serving dishes like this moose ragout and other things that are all locally sourced. She had fish cakes on the menu as well today and we talked about crab and lobster and scallops and squid and of course cod. She now has a license to serve game and will have grouse and rabbit on the menu. How locally sourced was the moose. Well it turns out her brother, Denzel, shot it a couple of days ago and she prepared the ragout for him. Sitting there was like being on the Skerwink trail in the morning an experience I didn’t want to end but there were some chores to do and I had to make sure I got to a grocery store before they all closed. Most are on winter hours now and not opened on Sunday.

October 24, 2012 Dawn

October 23, 2012 Afternoon

In The Studio October 12, 2012

Three New Paintings, Port Rexton, NL

The Landscape

A series of recent paintings (see Recent Paintings) that were exercises in pure painting and an attempt to free myself from Newfoundland architectural iconography are now looking like they emerged directly from the landscape that surrounds me in Port Rexton, NL. I have never considered myself a landscape painter but the landscape is what holds my attention in Newfoundland and so I think it is only natural that it would influence the work I have been doing in a subtle and unconscious way.

Here are a few photographic examples that can be juxtaposed with the paintings as a way of measuring the impact of the representational on the purely abstract.

Some Recent Work in Port Rexton, NL

Port Rexton, NL 10_7_12

2 Rooms Contemporary Art Projects

Spoken Word At Two Whales Coffee Shop

THE LAST SONG OF RENATA JACKSON TANNER

Renata Jackson Tanner moves in silence

after a restless night

through the hotel hallway’s muted light

to the foyer from her room

careful not to catch a heel

the rugs woven once in Persia

where civilization is rumoured to have begun

colours faded and  fabric worn

desperate men line the corridor

drinking shoe polish

distilled on a hot-plate

another way of taking a boot to the mouth

without provocation

I saw a man walking on three legs

bent over like a piece of cardboard

cast off beside the road

and had to avert my eyes

how much punishment can the aging body

accommodate

the Renata Jackson Tanner Trio

plays basement bars

jam packed against the exits

Taj adrift in the crowded room

wearing spandex and chiffon

a billowing blouse buttoned once

‘The Swede’ Bergstrom

beats the bass drum and brushes

the snare

Sy the sax player

who lost his wife to cancer

never blows a note swaddled in cheap sentiment

his music a swollen river

broke free from its banks

between sets she smokes

a cigarette in the laneway

it is a warm night hazy

and threatening rain

Sy comes out after

talking to a woman

who’d seen him play in Denver

he prefers to smoke a joint

a life-long habit so

difficult to break

and ‘The Swede’ with a beer in hand

shudders and nearly trips

damn those concrete stairs

goose dogs roam free

a basset hound with wings

graffiti lit by a single bulb

above the cellar door

the disconcerting rustle of rodents

scratching at the dumpster

down the street

it’s time once more

to perform and take requests

Micky Quinn the comic MC

and now ladies and germs

back for a second set

the Renata Jackson Tanner Trio

let’s have a big hand

I first heard this song

from Ric Von Schmidt

baby let me follow you down, baby let me follow you down

well I’ll do anything in this godalmighty world

if you just let me follow you down.

can I come home with you, baby can I come home with you?

yes I’ll do anything in this godalmighty world

if you just let come home with you.

it was a different world then

Renata Jackson Tanner thought

where bonds were forged of steel

not lace so flimsy and uncertain

how she longs for

a proper friend

just then the server

drops a tray of drinks

that stain the garments

of the patrons at the table

tan suits on tan bodies and dresses

made of silk and feathers

all thrown into disarray

a thigh uncovered

a blonde woman

statuesque and tall

like Anita Eckberg rising

awkwardly from the floor

and the server if she’s seventeen

takes a slap across the face

and a man at the next table says

what the fuck are you doing

and from a tan suit wet with rum

and coke across the groin

a gun appears and a shot

rings out and the exit doors are blocked

and there is pandemonium in the cellar

with fists and furniture flying

and limp bodies fallen

NO EXIT

no shit

a social network of someone else’s making

baby let me follow you down, baby let me follow you down

On Drawing

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Learning to draw…remains an activity of enormous importance and potency for education as a whole. Learning to observe, to investigate, to analyze, to compare, to critique, to select, to imagine, to play and to invent constitutes the veritable paradigm of functioning effectively in the world.

Deanna Petherbridge, THE PRIMACY OF DRAWING, Yale University Press
Photograph, Life Drawing at Mill Road Studio

San Francisco Bay

From Steiner (top) and Filmore (bottom)

SF MOMA May 3, 2012

 It struck me that the rooftop sculpture court at SF MOMA was looking a little bleak
during a recent visit like a prison yard for exercising creativity or contemplating other
means of escape.

Recent Work Continued

Red Hill, April 2012, mixed media on archival paper, 13"x19"

Recently I have been working on a series of small paintings that combine photographic and painterly elements. I am interested in the juxtaposition of texture and image and in isolating those aspects of a photograph that embody colour or tonality that can be incorporated into an abstract composition. With this work I am also trying to loosen my touch and work spontaneously and intuitively and not spend time refining and reworking the compositional outcome of a given piece.

Ice In Trinity Bay

The ice came in for the first time in two years and filled Trinity Bay. It happened on Thursday April 5, 2012. When living there over the winter I remember waking one morning to the sight of the bay full of ice. It stayed around for a few days and then just as mysteriously as it appeared it was gone a few days later.  It then returned and again disappeared. It didn't melt but moved away with the currents. These pictures were taken by Janice Vivian.

Village Life

Today the island is shrouded in fog and looks mysterious, something tropical that a ship off course might discover near Mozambique. It would be an island inhabited by creatures never before seen unlike the bleak rock it is in reality supporting a few shrubs and the gulls that on occasion line the shore in anticipation of capelin or herring or mackerel. The barren island is the note that makes the composition of the coastline complete. It would be static without the island, quietly receding. The island makes it resonate.

The fog hangs above the bay, a curtain blocking the view of the other side, wanting to be drawn opened with the sun. The other side is a black wall of hundred foot rock cliffs half a mile away.

The curtain runs from the open sea to the beach at the end of the bay. The bay is still, no ripple on the water except for the wake of the gulls that wait below the fishing stage for the cod ghosts thrown to them by the fishermen who keep the dense fleshy fillets for themselves. The gulls are happy for what they can salvage from the bones and they fight each other for the remains.

There is only one fishing stage in the bay now when there used to be fifty.

The fishermen are at work after a few hours securing their catch. It is a period of grace, the personal fishery that lasts for ten days. They are men who worked with their fathers fishing throughout the year until that practice was brought screeching to a halt by the federal government who deduced the ocean was running out of fish and we would do our part to save what was left. Other countries have paid the depletion of fish stocks no heed and continue to fish merrily off the shore giving the finger to all these men who once lived only by what they caught at sea. They stand up in the boats and there is not a life jacket in sight. The posture of the men improves each time the food fishery is opened.  It is like their genes realign and there is a unity of purpose in their being. The fish is better in the autumn. Too soft and well fed on capelin in the summer. Cod is the only meaning of the word fish.

The routine of the fishermen takes them into the little shed at the end of the stage. It is where the filleting is done. It is their clubhouse and it is exclusively a man’s place.

A knife cut of sunlight slashes through the fog. The curtain thins and becomes more translucent.

The women read the weather and transmit their wisdom. Getting a line of laundry out is a sign that the day will be clear. They know this by the feel of the breeze against their skin, by the smell of the wind, by the force of it.

A line can be twenty yards long supported by a forked stick in the middle that allows it to move with the wind. Jeans hang from the belt loop, shirts from the collar, solid darks then colours, public garments then things more personal closer to the house. 

Little has changed in the village. Three new houses is all and more decay of the old ones that have been abandoned for years. Lovely old wooden houses with mansard roofs and bay windows caught up in family feuds. They are worth money now but there are quarrels to be won with siblings and with the village that shaped the mind. Land had no meaning and now it does. Land had no value and now it does. The traditional two storey houses, saltboxes, sixteen by twenty-four feet are a rhyming poem unto themselves, lyrical in the way they sit so firmly on the ground  amongst buildings that have been truncated, cut from two stories to one, the modern bungalow, clapboard replaced by aluminum siding and wooden windows now plastic instead. To the white one on the shore the owner added a twelve/twelve pitched roof and made her house larger instead. A single woman undaunted. She lived away for many years in Ontario where you can never have too much space.

There is no order in the village, no design, no plan. A house here another there, fence posts running randomly like the pencil lines of an infant on the kitchen wall. There is no burnish, no glamour. It is just a remote village on the sea where people have lived for three hundred years.

The crows are calling, screeching, hags all of them but comforting like the hag that fed the wild cats in France and called them with her scarred vocal cords, Minou, Minou, Minou and put a bowl of gruel on the ground and their tails shot up and waved and they rubbed against her legs and purred as she sang, Minou, Minou, Minou.

The cats here are not wild.

Dogs are everywhere in the village. Half of them descended from the same black Labrador and none of them care for strangers at all. The once fierce beagle is horse with age and can hardly move but still manages to bark, an ancient diner chocking on a piece of meat.

The black one runs with barred teeth and tries to come from behind and tear some flesh from the rump, a snarling irrational package, fifty pounds of determined white fanged darkness barreling down the street, like Gericault’s horses, with all four feet in the air at once.

Weekday mornings the school bus, a yellow dragon in a Chinatown parade, winds through the village scooping up the children, barely coming to a stop. The bus is as wide as the road. The little stand to keep the kids dry and out of the wind, an outhouse without a door, blew over in a storm and has been lying on the ground for weeks and the kids just stand beside it oblivious to the rain.

The roads adhere to the landscape. They are of the landscape. They are a dark outline on the landscape flattening out the illusion of depth. The yellow school bus races along the dark line of the road. One road is paved. It bisects the headlands. The rest are all gravel. They wash away with the heavy rain and require constant grading. One man has the job of grading the roads. His work is like Sisyphus, or The Woman Of The Dunes.

The fellow in the white bungalow facing the cove moves his cars around. He has a pickup truck and two sedans with another parked across the valley at his brother’s place. He changes the direction they face according to the weather. He is not the only one. It’s the male version of the weather forecast.  If the car faces the house things are calm, if the car backs to the house a storm might be coming and if the cars are all parallel to the house and lined up on the lawn all hell is going to break loose. The fellow in the white bungalow facing the cove owns the once grand house next door. It has been for sale for many years. He doesn’t want to sell it is just a way of having strangers come by for a visit to engage in conversation. There is an upstairs bedroom that he won’t open when he shows the house. He always conveniently forgets the key. The Tony Perkin’s moment on the tour. Either this fellow’s mother is in there under glass like Santa Catarina of Asisi or his alternate personality is blocking the door. It’s a real deal breaker for those looking for a house with an ocean view.

The sea rolls into the cove not in waves like other places but in an undulating curl that advances and retreats meeting the rock wall with a roar.

The sun pushes through the clouds above the cliffs on the far side of the bay, the black cliffs angled striations of rock and a thousand individual plains. It’s Cubism a billion years before Picasso, a stark beauty risen from the sea.

The Alchemy of Change

that pebble placed

so thoughtlessly

like a chain letter on the brim of your cap

cannot be dropped

for fear of death

be still absolutely still

on the edge of the cliff

holding tight a grass tuft

on the ancient head

while pouring out the accumulated

regret of time lost and self doubt

broken dreams and misplaced emblems of success

an empty vessel

a hundred feet above the ocean

a scratch mark on the cobalt stain

of the open sky

rejected as a roost for gulls

the squawking crows wanting more

than they deserve

remaining still in the midst of all

this after sixty frantic years

fighting to stay awake and not perish

tasting the wind now

that carries trace portions

memories of the sea

over which it sailed

the eternal sea in perpetual motion

rolling and breaking against the black rocks

the shaman’s rattle hissing

the ritual dance soft moccasin

shoes in the wet sand

the alchemy of change

pain to love

the aching heart rocks against

its cage looking for a way out

Devil's Cove

The Wind

It starts out as a conversation

and ends up raging

in a voice beyond reason

a courier of unease

jabbing a finger

into your chest

crossing a line

it began as a walk

with talk in whispered

tones sharing moments

of embarrassment and regret

like in the early

throes of love

then something

about the painter

at the party

who made a clumsy pass

in the kitchen

touching your breasts and ass

what painter

it was nothing

he was drunk

you never mentioned

this before

in a voice pushing against

the velvet

curtain of the night

the wind is like that

it starts out as a conversation

and ends up raging

stealing the air from your lips

and slamming it against the side

of your face

and the bed shakes 

in the pounding gale

in the house built

on a hill overlooking the sea

and the roof struts

hum in dark tones

the wind plucking hard at the clapboard

and the shingles as it races

in and out of the trees

like a lover in a game

of hide and seek with

no intention of ever

being found and the child

within is rattled by the force

parents in another room

raging and mean spirited

conjured by a B movie medium

the wind is like that

it starts out civil

and ends up with its shoes off

its stockings torn at the toes

kicking against the door

having forgotten the keys

An Excerpt From THE WAY OF ART

There is a painting we stumble upon in the National Gallery by Giovanni Bellini called Doge Leonardo Loredan. It is a stunningly lifelike portrayal of a man dressed in an exotic silk brocade jacket with a high neck. His posture is absolutely erect and his gaze is off to one side, avoiding the viewer. He wears a hat of the same fabric as the jacket that has a wide band of another fabric circling his head, and the hat rises into a point at the back looking almost as if a duck was resting on his head and we were seeing it from the back. Under the hat his head is bound in a white fabric that covers his ears and has two threads dropping to his shoulders under each ear that look as if they could be used to tie the head piece under his chin should there be a strong wind. He looks to be between 45 and 60 and has a thin, well-chiseled face with a strong nose and mouth set in an expression of confidence but neither smiling nor frowning. Bellini was a master colourist and in this painting he uses a stunning shade of blue for the background, a flat blue not meant to imply the sky or anything other than maybe a wall in a room, but even that might be a stretch. To me, it is Bellini choosing the blue because of its colour and the way it helps to bring the painting to life.  One is immediately moved by the skill of the artist in creating this image, and capturing the specific nature of the Doge who was the leader of Venice. A serious man with great responsibility. I had seen the painting in reproduction, in an outstanding reproduction of the highest quality and framed in a subtle wood frame with a grey tint to the wood. The reproduction had hung in a hallway at the school where I taught for a number of years and once when they were cleaning and painting the walls and the reproduction was taken down I picked it up and took it to the art studio and hung it there. I had put up a few pictures, another sketch in conté by Bellini, a self-portrait, and a study for one of the children in The Virgin of The Rocks by da Vinci. These pieces were at the pinnacle of draftsmanship and the ability to represent the subject, and they stood as an unspoken challenge to the students working in the studio to always strive to do their best work. Seeing the painting made me think about the years I spent working in the school, the years I spent teaching in the art studio, the students I had taught and where some of them are now. One was in London having just finished a Masters of Fine Art at Central St. Martins; we were scheduled to have dinner together the next evening. She is now a friend and a fine artist. Over the course of my career there had been the joy of teaching and of seeing the work the students were producing and the way in which they were comfortable and in touch with their real selves in the studio. A number had gone on to careers in art or architecture, design, photography, fashion, film, curatorial, or academia as art historians. When I taught I tried never to think of the implication of what I was doing, of the way I was working, and the impact it was having on a student’s life and the direction that life might take in the future. The atmosphere in the studio was my creation and my gift to the students, allowing them to develop their abilities without fear of being attacked or belittled. Now that I no longer teach young people I have begun to take some pleasure in thinking about what I accomplished, the direction taken by so many of my students in their lives and careers, and how art is at the core of so much of what they do. It was a revolution of the personal —the personal is political as they say. It was focusing on the individual and having the art-aware and art-positive individual go out into society as an art-citizen, and become a force in their own right for the place of art in the broader culture, for bringing art to the forefront and having it recognized as essential in a culture that for so long has relegated art to the periphery.

Newfoundland Coastline in Late October

Ellsworth Kelly Sculpture at SF MOMA

Jasper Johns and Ellsworth Kelly

A great quote by Robert Storr, Dean of Yale's School of Art, comparing the two artists both of whom are still working today; "To a great extent Jasper is a literary artist. His work is coded with secret messages. Ellsworth is purely a visual artist.  With Ellsworth there is no message, just an experience."

That experience can be so rewarding in terms of the aesthetic pleasure but it is difficult for some people to achieve when confronted with visual art that is purely abstract.

Big Sky NL

A Portrait of the Artist (SZ) as a Young Man, with apologies to James Joyce for borrowing his most perfect title

At the age of 21, certain that I wanted to become a poet, I went to Europe on a solitary journey—not self-consciously in search of myself or of experience, but as a way to put myself in the moment and remove myself from the cultural context in which I had been raised, and against which I had been fighting for three years. With a little money, inherited from my paternal grandfather, I flew to London and bought a motorcycle and crossed the channel by boat arriving in Oostende, Belgium (since France was closed because of the May 1968 upheaval by students protesting in Paris, who were joined by the entire French labour movement—effectively shutting the country down for a few days).

I had no agenda for my journey, no plans, no proscribed destination but there was a family friend in Vence, near Nice, and it was on my mind to stop there and say hello. The idea of going to Vence then influenced the route I took, heading south through Europe.  From Geneva I followed what was called The Route Napoleon through the mountains to the south of France. I should mention that while I was in Geneva, there because the French borders were closed because of the student revolution, Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles and with his death the last politician I had any respect for was gone. Martin Luther King had been killed earlier in the spring and then Robert Kennedy. I was devastated by his death and sat in chair for a day hardly able to move. It was unusual for me to invest hope for the future in the words of a politician but Kennedy had elicited my trust, more so than his brother John, and when he was shot it seemed like there was no possibility of change or a social upheaval in America, no shift in values, no respect for differences inherent in people. The bigots and the racists and the defenders of the status quo continued to assert themselves on the culture and continued to win. It was a suffocating intellectual environment for someone like myself, and where went America at that time, Canada would surely follow. In terms of narrow-mindedness, and repression of arts and ideas, though, Canada was well ahead of America at that time. I managed to get focused and get up and get out of Geneva after making a few dumb jokes about various conventions and striking out with a gorgeous American woman who was working there for the summer. The ride south was spectacular, one of the most dramatic and physically beautiful routes I have ever travelled and in my ignorance I didn’t quite comprehend the distance I had set out to cover in a day. It was over five hundred miles of climbing mountains and descending the switch back turns and racing through valleys only to come to more mountains. The mountains never ended until I reached the sea. I didn’t know that going in and each time another rose before me after thinking I was in the clear my heart sank as was the light of day sinking and I was in the middle of no where between towns like Gap and Sisteron. Around 7:00 p.m. I reached Vence and riding down the road to the central square I saw the daughter of my family doctor who had asked me to visit her and say hello. She had left Toronto to live with her mother in France and was about 17 at the time finishing her high school education. It was pure coincidence to see her like that on the road and we talked and she told me her mother was away and she was staying with friends and why didn’t I return and stay with them when her mother was back in town. That sounded like a good idea and we said goodbye and I continued on my way to Nice. During the next few weeks I was in Rome, Florence, Pisa, Genoa. In Rome and Florence I saw art and architecture I did not really understand but appreciated some of it. I was more interested in being out on the streets and looking at people than being in churches and museums. One piece I had to see, though, was Michelangelo’s Moses. There had been a framed photograph of the Moses in our cottage as long as I had been going there. It was a gift to my uncle from a friend of his when my uncle graduated from high school. My uncle, who left Toronto and ended up in Paris where he studied medicine and then psychoanalysis, landing eventually in New York to practice as a psychoanalyst, along with his wife, my aunt who he married in France, were the only people in my family with whom I felt comfortable and who seemed to understand and be sympathetic to the vague path I had laid out for myself in life. I spent a great deal of time with them through my teenage years talking and absorbing their cultured way of life. They were intellectuals and they were sensitive and caring people. For that reason I had to track down the Moses and see it and it was a revelation. Carved flawlessly from one piece of stone. How could someone do that? How could someone even conceive of that? I didn’t know anything about art but I knew what I liked. In time I rode back to Vence and Gloria had returned to the villa she shared with her boyfriend Eddy and Nonni, the daughter I had seen on the road.

Gloria was a dynamic, beautiful, red headed woman. She was the first of my parent’s friends to just get up and walk out of the comfortable bourgeoisie life she was living with her husband, the doctor, and her three kids, in Forest Hill Village, an affluent, tree lined neighbourhood in the middle of Toronto. She had been acting in theatre and on TV and wanted to train and pursue a career as an opera singer. Where better to study than Rome. One day she just left her family and her possessions and the city where she was born and headed to Rome. It had been five years since I saw her and when I arrived at the villa she welcomed me warmly and invited me to stay. Eddie was an artist, of Irish Brazilian decent. The villa was not large but it had a beautiful garden and Eddy had created a studio in the garage by removing some of the clay roof tiles and replacing them with glass. I felt at home with them and was reminded of how I felt with my aunt and uncle in New York. Gloria knew everyone and everyone knew her and through her I got to know some of the artists who were working in the region at that time. It was my first exposure to artists as people and I had dinner and drinks and talks with many of them during the ten days I was there. Everyone had a working schedule, a regime, as they called it that was roughly like this: wake early have breakfast and work until around 11:30 then head to the café Regence for a before lunch aperitif and talk with friends then lunch at home and a siesta and then work until 5:00 and return to the café for drinks and talk with friends before having dinner with some friends and most likely after dinner returning to the café to socialize further. It seemed like a perfect way of life and I got into a routine of writing for part of the day when I wasn’t out exploring the region on my motorcycle. Gloria and Eddie introduced me as a poet from Canada and that’s what I was and there were times during the stay when I read new work aloud to people at the café. It was the first time in my life when I felt at home and alive and I wanted that to be my life forever. The people I met were from France, Canada, Poland, Australia, Belgium, Britain, Ireland, Sweden, Hungary and in this galaxy they were all forces, individual planets, spinning around the arts. The arts were the centre of the world there in southern France and there were some beautiful galleries and museums and artists like Man Ray, Chagall, Picasso, living in the region. I was very happy working as poet. It had been a few years since I started writing and had edited a literary magazine at U of T and had published some pieces so felt legitimate and in my milieu. There was nothing else I wanted but there was the question of money and it was running out and I had to live and poetry at that time was not going to suddenly support me so I headed back to London to sell the  motorcycle and wait for  my girlfriend from Toronto with whom I had planned to meet up in early August.

In London I lived in a small room in Hampstead. The room was about seven feet wide by ten feet long and was on the top floor of an old residential hotel. The bathroom was down the hall and the wall separating me and my neighbour was paper thin and she had a boyfriend, an older man, who visited frequently to watch TV and have sex and there was not a sound that emanated from that room that I didn’t hear. I had a friend with a typewriter who lived a few blocks away and during the day I would go to her place and write, using the typewriter while she was at work. We became good friends. London was not the south of France.

When my girlfriend I arrived we did return to Vence and she loved the region as much as I and we stayed with a sculptor I had befriended through Gloria. The region was physically beautiful and the nuances of that beauty, the arid soil, the shape of the trees and the plants, the rolling hills, the rocks and the sky as well as the nature of the architecture, the stucco house with tile roofs, and the age of the buildings in the towns,  were all appealing and made it seem like the most beautiful place in the world. It was essential too that if you were going to be an artist you should be in a beautiful place. Not having a great deal of money was inconsequential in a place of such beauty. What was missing from life that money could buy?

In time I finished school and worked as labourer building swimming pools and my girlfriend who I married worked as an editor and we saved some money and moved to France and were able to stretch the time out from one year to two and our son was born in Cagnes-sur-Mére around the corner from the house Renoir once lived in. I worked with a sculptor on a large project for a few months and learned a great from him about process and patience and thinking in the long term, also about creativity and about living life as a full participant. When the project ended we were living in Tourrettes-sur-Loup a small village about six kilometers from Vence in a building that had once been a donkey barn and was renovated into a two story two and a half room house on the rampart of the village over looking the descending hills of the Alpes Maritimes with a clear view all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. I wrote a novel and a collection of poetry and lived the bohemian life I had sought. Then the money ran out and there was no way to make money in France and we had to return to Toronto. After working as a pool builder again for a season I took a part time job teaching art at a private school in the neighbourhood.

Being with artists and writing had given me the ability to articulate processes and techniques that were often complex. While teaching in the studio I began to try things that I had avoided for years and slowly developed an idea of what it was I wanted to make becoming a visual artist while continuing to write.

Why this story? Had I formulated a mental image of the way I wanted to live, one that was contrary to the way I was brought up. In some way I think this was true and finding myself in France brought a kind of harmony to what I had imagined my life to be and what it had become. Moving back to Canada then and taking a job as a teacher in an old established independent school put me back in a more conventional way of life, especially since I was a parent and responsible for earning a living and taking care of my family. I could handle that and did for many years but the fit was never comfortable, the role in the institution was not a harmonious one, though I never short changed my students and continually pushed to expand the program and the options available to them in studying the visual arts. Having been a terrible student I instinctively understood the challenges to keep people engaged in difficult processes and to help them develop confidence and skill. It was the reality of what I was doing that didn’t fit with the mental image I’d always had of what I had done but could no longer sustain for economic reasons. Ah, money! Does the need for it ever go away?  Returning to The Way Of Zen, yes—in the monastery with the complete surrender of all things material.

No matter how difficult the job became, how irritating the fit with the institution, how taxing sometime the perpetual pressure of working and earning, there was always art and the pleasure to be had in the immersion in the world of visual art. I had no personal agenda, other than ensuring my students worked to the fullness of their individual ability, and was able to take great pleasure in the work they sometimes produced. The days were spent talking to people and helping them solve creative problems and dealing with the results of their efforts, the successes as well as the failures and in offering encouragement to continue and accept the setbacks as well as enthusiastically praising the successes. I was making art as well and teaching the history of Western art and re-visiting that story many times and seeing that it was evolving and not a one track arc permanently etched in stone and determined by the words and thoughts of a few thinkers who had authored all the standard texts. Challenging those notions through exposure and experience opened up the subject and made it a continuous source of excitement.

Just because it is mid-February a shot of the studio on a sunny day in July.

Riffing on Franz Kline

A month after seeing the Ab Ex show in Toronto I was back in the studio in Port Rexton. The room with three or four Klines in the exhibition made a real impression on me. I had always liked Kline and have seen great work of his in San Francisco at SF MOMA and other places but there was something potent about the pieces in the Ab Ex show taking a room of the their own and rubbing up against each other to create some real heat. There was an essence of the idea of what abstract expressionism could be that was contained in that small space. Gestural and spontaneous and bold the Klines came at you and didn't sit politely on the walls as some kind of background decoration or argument for some thesis.

After being at MOMA in New York a few weeks ago I was reminded of how narrowly the argument for modernism has been presented over the years by curators there supported by their own collection and the works that keep appearing over and over again in art history texts like Jansen and Gardiner. Granted the Klines in the Ab Ex show were from MOMA but Kline has never received the attention that Pollack, Rothko, de Kooning, and Newman have received. I think the show went a long way to changing that for me. Especially because I was underwhelmed, I think because of over familiarity, with the late Rothko's and the the Pollacks. There were some early Pollacks that I loved like Stenographic Figures, C1942, but the later drip paintings, at least the ones in that show, that I used to find so muscular, left me cold.

Franz Kline Stopped By... was created as a response to Kline but one using the materials and the approach to image making that I have been practicing in Newfoundland. The following poem is an integral part of the piece and would be on the wall beside it.

Franz Kline stopped

by the studio today

we drank a cup of tea

and listened to Jimi Hendrix

Live at The BBC

what’s with the driftwood

says he,

yiss bye, says I

A little more time in heaven

And you’ll knows why

A Seal Out Of Water

on the shore

the water was cold and dead calm

and even there

in the ancient sea

his old face gave him a jolt

how did he reach this threshold

what is the upside he asked

struggling to find the words

looking hard into the eyes

of a seal with a belly full of capelin

stranded ten feet up the beach

no hands or feet

just a blown up shape

ten times the size of a rugby ball

with a small head

and deep brown eyes and

little whiskers

would it stay there all night

or find its way back

into the water

a seal out of water

a man in late middle age

there is no upside

no easy way to move

the man walks on his feet

but feels no grace or ease

and may as well be flipping

like an undulating U

dragging his belly down the road

the seal was designed to be efficient in the water

a miracle of buoyancy and speed

like a man of nineteen

Happy Valentines Day

The Virgin Of The Rocks continued

On hearing an artist friend was in London and had spent time at the National Gallery with the two paintings called The Virgin Of The Rocks (see below) I asked her which of the two she preferred, the one in The National Gallery or the one visiting from the Louvre. This was her response;

You posed an interesting question. Since I had a wonderful opportunity to compare I was able to really gather the nuances of the works. The London painting, recently cleaned was very crisp and really showed Leonardo's mastery of light. There was much more evidence of the floral details as well. I also felt that he had rethought the piece and I preferred the tilt of the head of the angel in the London work. It and the glance were much more evocative and sensuous as was the madonna's glance. I could certainly have done without the symbolism of the cross and the halos in the piece which I believe were an afterthought put in after Leonardo. The first painting (Louvre) however still had the freshness of inspiration that evoked the mystery...
 

Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon, 1907 by Picasso

Still brutal after all these years.
Challenged every notion of what a painting was supposed to be.
Considered the fulcrum on which Modern Art balances.

Agnes Martin Stops Time

Appreciating a work of art is in some ways like an act of meditation. One has to stop before the piece and observe it without the distraction and the noise of the day to day. One has to see the piece fully in order to experience it fully and this requires time, the stopping of time or the ideas of taking the time required for the experience. I am in a museum wandering through the rooms looking at the collection liking this and not particularly liking that, gazing, grazing visually and the experience is pleasurable and then I enter a large room with perhaps ten Agnes Martin paintings all in white with lines marking the picture space, subtle, quiet, understated lines, but lines that impose themselves on the picture space, lines that become the picture itself, and there is something so understated in what she has done, something so unaggressive, something so not calling out for attention. The ten paintings put their hands on my shoulders and make me sit down in the middle of the room and observe and open myself to the experience of what I am seeing. The work is so minimal and so authentic and personal and there is a purity of intent or purpose that makes so many other things I have seen feel like tricks of the trade, feel like product, feel like they were created to garner attention or to seduce. There is none of that with the Martins. They just are and they simply exist as a physical manifestation of the artist’s vision or the artist’s own argument with “what is painting.” And in their purity of purpose make me consider all that I have seen before and all that I will see for the remainder of the day. It is a great experience for me and one rife with surprise because it is really the first time in lets say twenty years of looking that I really got Agnes Martin or was moved by the work she did.

Giotto's Expression of Grief

Giotto was the first artist to actually try to express emotion through the gestures of his figures and the Lamentation Over Christ is one of the saddest pictures ever painted.  As artistic skills were developed and perfected over the course of the Renaissance and into the Baroque the capable artists could all depict grief or sorrow in the expressions on the faces of the characters in their painting as well as in the physical posture and gestures of the these characters. But there  is a difference between depiction and expression and Giotto with his nascent technical skills, struggling to invent the language of representational painting, expressed grief in a most powerful way, creating an image that resonates with emotion. In that picture, one of a number of panels on the wall of the Arena Chapel, Christ has been taken down from the cross on is lying dead on the ground his head cradled tenderly in the hands of his mother Mary, his feet help by Mary Magdelaine and around him some of his disciples and some elders from the community, and all this on a stark and barren landscape with some of the mourners making broad gestures of grief, arms outstretched and body bent over or hand curled and face tucked into the hands, sadness pervades the scene but looking up from the body and the mourners into the blue sky there are a number of angels and the angels are distraught and  their flying has been effected by their grief and their flight paths are on colliding courses and some seem to be falling out of the sky and others are crying wringing their hands and there is this wild, erratic energy in the sky embodied by the angels that reads in an abstract way like wild painterly gestures of raw emotion. This is where the true expression comes in and there is an added dimension to this in its contrast to the solid forms of the figures below who appear to be carved from stone and who could not be moved by the force of a hurricane.

The Virgin of The Rocks, Leonardo da Vinci

A current exhibition at The National Gallery in London

features two version of Leonardo’s painting

The Virgin of The Rocks. One lives in Paris at the Louvre

and the other at The National Gallery in London. I had been lecturing

in art history and didn’t learn there were two paintings

until last year when I visited London and the first thing I saw

walking into the National Gallery was The Virgin of The Rocks.

I was confused at first because I had last seen the painting in Paris

and this one, though similar in pictorial content was quite different

in tonality than I remembered. The Paris version has always been one of my

favorite paintings. Done in 1483 by Leonardo as an alter piece for a church

it is thought upon completion it was taken by one of the Sforza Dukes to be given as

a wedding present. Hence another was needed to fulfill the obligation of the commission.

In Paris there are always huge crowds around the Mona Lisa while other masterful

Leonardo paintings remain practically unseen. It is a shame. But one could stand

in the quite empty salon where this paintings hangs and study it at one’s leisure.

The babies alone, Jesus and John, are worth seeing for the brilliance of

the chiaroscuro rendering of their bodies. It was a young Leonardo at the height of

enthusiasm for the process of painting who created this work. The London version, done probably with the threat of a law suit, understandably lacks some of the

sparkle of the original.

A brief article in Art Forum magazine by Martin Kemp, January 2012, shows both pictures.

The Paris version can be seen in detail at Mark Harden’s Artchive, http://www.artchive.com, a fantastic resource for looking at art and art history.