While setting up this shot a passing fellow asked if I was trying to reproduce the look of the installation when it was first built, seeing as I was using an ‘antique’ camera from roughly the same era. I hate to lecture the pedestrians, so I said yes, but I’d have to add the orignal paint back in photoshop. [/rimshot]
Long day… After all the Rorschach paint blots I finally started seeing virgin marys in the efflorescence and calcium stains.
The painter I’ve been tracking seems to have taken to simply throwing cups of paint. I like the look- almost like some vintage ghost did a Wile E Coyote right smack into the steel door.
But I think I’ll park it on this note- something about the tall and skinny is keyhole-esque- a bit brighter, and a bit more optimistic.
Went back out to Rialto, a leaden hostile feeling most of the day- not unlike the sky here. I’m feeling pretty restless and impatient with all my current projects. Could just be the summer blahs, but I need a fresh kick in the ass to kickstart some new growth. The things I used to look forward to are becoming mere routine, chin furrows in the dirt farm, so to speak. My eyes are so close I’m seeing the same lines everywhere. In any case, this project needs to be deepsixed until I get some fresh perspective, before I become a caricature of myself.
We went back to Fort Worden yesterday, this time to the gun line proper on Artillery Hill. The first thing that jumps out is the random application of paint samples around the grounds- perhaps a minor municipal gesture against the overwhelming rust, or maybe it’s just official modesty over obscene grafitti. Nevertheles, the place is fascinating, a small stateside Angkor Wat slowly being reclaimed by nature and some guy with a paint roller.
Being a carpenter/woodworker, it is hard not to feel a bit of rapacity for forests like this, thinking of the fantastic woodgrain that must lurk in these deformities. Even the spalt on some of the decaying snags must be otherworldly. So I printed it a little dark, imagining a midnight trip in with the skewback saw. Kidding of course. Hmm, yes.
Another shot I’ve been messing with for far too long. The image almost takes on the shape and movement of implosion in cartoon space, each seasonal attempt a mutation of misdirected growth, and that goes double for me too.
Meanwhile, a brief interlude from a favorite-
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
– Wallace Stevens, from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird*