April 10: Gallery

art gallery window

framing a flock of pigeons

across blue sky

December 23: Musée National de Beaux-Arts

Musée de beaux-arts—

watching a single crow

fly through blowing snow.

November 10: Pecha Kucha

The ceramics artist

describes his simple cups

as three-line poems.

PS: Artist Simon van der Ven later shared the "cups" part of his talk:

"A beautiful, handmade cup is a three-line poem about consideration. 

The foot speaks about a relationship to its ground, about stability and how it will lift.
The body of the cup talks about a relationship to your hand, about separation and containment, about the definition of inside and outside.
And the rim offers its wisdom in its relationship to your lips, offering and delivering warmth, refreshment, stimulation and redemption to your body.

Making cups allows me to make hundreds of little useful sculptures, to wrestle with the intricacies of proportion, weight, and balance, to explore texture and color, to try new techniques and perfect and evolve established ones.

Making cups gives me a chance to be part of your everyday."

August 22: Gallery

shrill cries of an osprey

tourists perusing

paintings of the harbor

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August 6: Edison Studio

in the studio

she shapes in clay

what she imagines bronze

 

Sculptor Daphne Pulsifer, Monhegan

 

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June 5: Camden Harbor

Foggy harbor.

Couple buys a print

of the lighthouse they can't see.

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April 15: Asia in Amsterdam

Got a private tour this morning of the wonderful "Asia in Amsterdam" show at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. Saw some exquisite works of art, including textiles, books, paintings, ceramics, and decorative housewares, that reflected, in part, the influence of Asian arts and culture on the Netherlands during its Golden Age in the 17th century.

 

Four centuries later

Persian birds still vivid--

I want to touch them.

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February 21: Moonrise

Full moon rising

behind the stained glass window--

better than TV.

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February 9: Garden of Earthly Delights

A new interactive website allows you to take a virtual tour of Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch's famous painting "The Garden of Earthly Delights." A trip through his fantastical triptych is a "trip" indeed, especially when you can look at it this closely.

In Bosch's "Garden"
I'm distracted by the birds
but only briefly.

January 4: What we make of it

Some relief from cold:
a man's warm handshake,
painting of a polar bear.

December 21: Museum of Fine Arts

Portrait by Rembrandt--

her curls so clearly painted

with the end of his brush.

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December 2: Dutch Masters

I've been reading the catalog for the current show at the MFA Boston, "Class Distinctions: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer," which we hope to see in person in the next few weeks. I've also been engaging closely with several specific paintings from the Dutch Golden Age for a poetry project, soaking up the luminous light and rich colors, flirting with the complex symbolism of a past time and place, and becoming familiar with ordinary humans painted extraordinarily well.

Hours with Dutch paintings
transform the bleak afternoon--
chiaroscuro.

May 25: Scarlet Tanager

Artist's studio--

tanager in the apple tree

an unpaintable red.

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April 4: Hokusai

Visited the new Hokusai exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts * with my parents today. A Japanese artist who worked into the mid-1800s, Hokusai is probably best known for his wood block prints, including the famous "Great Wave off Kanagawa." We spent hours at the show and emerged blinking into the fresh air of early spring.

 

Even Prussian blue waterfalls

will fade in time--

this floating world.

 

 

 

* Check it out: http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/hokusai

 

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August 12: Art Opening

We expected rain
at any minute.
She sold every piece.

March 23: Litter

Sometimes on beaches we'll come across driftwood or dead trees bedecked with found buoys that washed up on shore. A "buoy tree" is a great way to clean up all the flotsam scattered across a beach and make something decorative, even sculptural, from the litter, especially when you don't have the means to carry all that trash off island. I thought of this today when I drove past a roadside brush pile in a grassy vacant lot. Someone had obviously put in some effort to clean up the lot, making a big heap of fallen branches and other detritus. What makes the brush pile distinctive are the discarded bottles and cans stuck on the ends of all the branches poking out. They make the pile somehow look both trashy and artistic at the same time. Someone must have decided that simply clearing the field wasn't enough, that creating such an installation (mixed media: wood, aluminum, plastic) was more interesting than simply tossing all those empties into a trash bag.

No longer mere trash,
these colorful cans are now
parts of a sculpture.

November 13: Dog at Rest

The Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection of 17th century Dutch and Flemish Masterworks is now showing at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and I was fortunate enough to see this exhibit on opening night. My favorite painting in the whole collection is this one:

Gerrit Dou 

Leiden 1613–1675 

Dog at Rest, 1650 

Oil on panel 

6 ½ x 8 ½ inches (16.5 x 21.6 cm) 

Notice how small this painting is. And yet you can see every hair on the dog, feel the bark on the twigs-- the brushwork is exquisite. And there's something about this little dog, curled up but with eyes open as if waiting for the owner of that little shoe to show up any second, that makes it incredibly appealing. It's more than a still life, capturing the essence of suspended energy and holding it for more than 350 years. I love this piece, and was very grateful to be able enjoy it one more time in this new venue.

Resting Dutch puppy--

eye open for centuries

waiting for us, now.

October 16: Belfast Poetry Festival

I spent a good part of today in Belfast as a participating poet in the Belfast Poetry Festival. This spring, I was paired with sculptor and mixed media artist Beth Henderson. She and I have spent this past summer sharing ideas and each other's work in order to produce something for the Festival. The work was hung on October 1, but everything finally came together today as various teams of poets and various kinds of artists (dancer, photographer, several painters, sculptor, glass artist, and metal artist) presented the fruits of their collaborations in four different venues around town for the Festival's Gallery Walk. The exhibit that Beth and I put together is hanging at Roots & Tendrils Gallery through October.

Beth and I realized early on that we both draw from the natural world for creative inspiration. She created several works based on images in my poems about Bald and Ragged Mountains, and I wrote or adapted poems to go with some of her pieces. Some of Beth's pieces:

Of the work she showed me, the ones that spoke to me the most featured owls, a personal favorite creature of mine ever since my mom collected owls when I was a very young child. I respond to their charisma as cool and beautiful birds, and they also resonate for me poetically as symbols of great significance in many world cultures. So in response to her owl art, I challenged myself to create a mixed media piece combining my poems, various images and icons I've collected, quotations from other writers' stories about owls, and photographs. The resulting work is called Owl Stories. I created ten different pieces, which I then strung like prayer flags and hung from a branch I found in the back yard. I think it's one of the most truly creative things I've ever accomplished.

This afternoon Beth and I talked about our collaboration, and then I read several poems to a jam-packed house. The energy was high at all the galleries, and I was reminded of the boundless creativity that we each possess. In several ways--today's Gallery Walk being one of them--I think the universe has been reminding me lately to keep tapping into that creative spirit inside me and remain open to the creativity of myself and others. Sometimes when I get too wrapped up in the more dry aspects of my professional life I shut myself off from this energy or don't make enough time for it.

Today's poem is an adaptation of one I wrote as part of Owl Stories in response to this image created by Beth:

Snowy owl waiting:

a pale stone on the tundra

with fierce yellow eyes.

February 18: Stained Glass

I attended a reception today for my friend, glass artist Janet Redfield, at the University of Maine's Hutchinson Center in Belfast, to celebrate the recent installation of her 49-foot stained and fused glass piece in the Center's lobby. The back wall of the lobby--what you see across the room when you enter the building--is all windows. Janet's piece, which took her six months to complete, borders the top of that entire section. The two interwoven wavy blue lines represent the two main rivers of Belfast: the Passagassawakeag and Little Rivers. The Passy opens into Belfast Harbor, while Janet tells me that the Little River was the City of Belfast's first drinking water supply. The circles within are abstract. Janet likes to play with color and shape, and wanted to create visual joy within the dynamic, organic lines of the waters that literally brought the city to life. Now, students coming into the Center for classes can't help but notice this incredible panorama of light and color and glass stretching in front of them. They're confronted by art, by something beautiful to brighten their day, perhaps even inspire them, whether they want it or not--you've got to love that.

Intertwined rivers

of glass, interplay of light--

vivid stuff of life.