Find me a Forest

I've had a strange feeling lately. The one where the sound of a song puts a knot in the back of your throat, that you can't explain. Like something you heard hit a chord.

I used to come here for comfort. In the past my life felt like a series of books I shut 1/2 way through because the characters were too boring or the plot didn't sit right. You know it won't end well.

It's no surprise that pencils with intact erasers were a commodity when I was young. Turns out there aren't enough erasers around to fix the world's problems. If only we were better artists, writers, mathematicians... Is it wrong to hope your laundry will come out brighter in the wash this time?

Bedposts, Dimestore, Sour Lily

"The redundant design, which one associates with suburban lounges, together with the faded colours, suggests the sofa has done its time, as if stuck in a kind of limbo wherein images and objects from the recent past are at their most abject and invisible, invested with neither newness nor nostalgia. Now damp, the sofa has sprouted dozens of delicate white mushrooms from its folds and creases."
-Frieze Magazine on Richard Hughes

After the Summer of Like (2005)


It's an easy shot to miss. Something got in the milk, and spoiled it early. Certainly fair to say it's difficult and dangerous to swallow.

Turn Around, Tex.

Barrett Browne
April 4, 2010


The darkest corners of storage
are the corners that keep curling up
unsolicited, ever-present truths.
icy, infinite concrete.
Never warm, like that summer platform
where I used to go to clear my head.
Always the stranger in this, and every town.

La Prima Corsa

Maria Francesca Tassi- October 2009

Privacy

FRP2 (Filippo Roberto Piantanida Prosdocimo)

Conversations

"I’d drawn constantly since childhood: large drawings of every creature alive in the ocean; Spanish missions with Indians camping in the foreground, in the background Spanish men throwing cowhides over a cliff to a waiting ship; hundreds of Cinderellas on five-by-eight pads, all alike but with varying hair color and dresses."-Jennifer Bartlett

Always Stuck With Leaving

"I create chaotic drawings with elliptical narratives that are at once lucid and surprising. I use the narrative of failure, ambiguity, and discomposure to explore the obscure terrain between our internal desires and the external world."-Jeffrey Beebe

Hansel & Gretel

As Performed by the Austin Lyric Opera
I think I might buy season tickets, it was brilliant! So many talented singers, such a beautiful Opera!

As Long As I Live

Fernando Sanchez Castillo
2004

"That's why I wear my rubbers when it rains, and eat an apple every day, then see the doctor anyway. What if I can't live to love you as long as I want to?"

Death for the Vertical City

Let's focus on the ground for a minute.
That closest-to-a-solid, bone & joint
moves, though inaudible.

I can't work with this any longer.
This Rem-Koolhaasing of my life.
blocks only stack so high before tumbling.
closed in a clumsy slump
it looks precarious because it is precarious.

Ever Fallen in Love with Someone You Shouldn't Have Fallen in Love With?

The best way to get over someone is to run until you're too exhausted to think about them anymore.

Panorama at Pinnacle Peak

Hexomniscope Pinhole Camera

But when the woods were painted, He, too, did fly away

Regrets Only
Colin Tuis Nesbit

Top floor (private space) aspect of the installation Regrets Only. (Detail) 2009
Royal icing, food coloring, colored sugar crystals, paper streamers, styrofoam, floral wire, wooden benches Casket 23 x 28 x 84 (life-size); Installation dimensions variable. Floral spray contains over 300 royal icing roses piped by the artist.

I was one of Colin's students during his graduate studies at BYU. Consistently when I view his artwork (during various stages of completion) I have been overwhelmed with a sense of reverence for life, and a deeper desire to understand my place in this infinite scheme. It makes me feel there is much to profit from a vast human heritage. The delicate attention he imparts to each lithograph, and the hours of deliberation over subject and content has reminds me that many good, and beautiful things, sometimes have to be painstakingly sought after before they are obtained.

"The impetus for my body of work is my longing – brought on by near paralyzing fears of loss and death in my youth – to connect with something beyond my own mortality. Inspired by my own synchronistic encounters with people, stories, or objects from the past, both ancestrally related and wholly unconnected to me, my work serves as a reminder of inevitable death, yet also as a cautiously optimistic tribute to bygone entities that are allowed to, in a phenomenological sense, live on through the artwork..."

Image(s) are property of the artist, please explore the link to see more of the artists' work and statement.

I had a guinea golden;
I lost it in the sand,
and though the sum was simple,

And pounds were in the land,
Still had it such a value
Unto my frugal eye,
That when I could not find it
I sat me down to sigh

I had a crimson robin
Who sang full many a day,
But when the woods were painted
He, too, did fly away.

Time brought me other robins, --
Their ballads were the same, --
Still for my missing troubadour
I kept the 'house at hame.'

I had a star in heaven;
One Pleiad was its name,
And when I was not heeding
It wandered from the same.

And though the skies are crowded,
And all the night ashine,
I do not care about it,
Since none of them are mine.

My story has a moral:
I have a missing friend, --
Pleiad its name, and robin,
And guinea in the sand, --
And when this mornful ditty,
Accompanied with tear,
Shall meet the eye of traitor
In country far from here,
Grant that repentance solemn

May seize upon his mind,
And he no consolation
Beneath the sun may find.


By Emily Dickinson

Docile Bodies

Lewis Baltz
c. 1970

For you: Uninterrupted, constant coercion.
For you: Discipline, but mostly self Punishment
For you: An Edict against wasting time.
For you: A Pining, Slowly Borne
For you: Every moment of my unconscious thought

When will these 4 years quit becoming 5?

American Surfaces

Stephen Shore
circa 1973-1993