A View from the Wheelhouse

Ovoids and Northwest Coast Indian Art

Posted on June 9, 2013June 9, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

In my last post I cited Johnathan Raban’s observation in The sea and it’s meanings about the elongated oval motif seen in Northwest Coast Indian art. He said that the image was inspired by wave patterns on the water’s surface. Though I wasn’t that impressed by Raban’s book, I think of this idea whenever I contemplate the play of light flitting over the water.

Then I began I began reading The Way of the Masks by Claude Levi-Strauss.

The stories of the masks are about preservation of a heritage, the appearance, healing or perpetuation of the ancestors through drama. Since the drama occurs in the timeless realm, its artistic retelling is continuous with the original creation, and the cyclic rehearsal of the masks’ origins is part of a long process establishing it’s status as an ancestor.

Levi-Strauss, using structural analysis of Salish stories, claims the masks (and accompanying stories, songs and dances) originated on the mainland and made their way to Vancouver Island. During migration, the chthonic, submarine origin stories of the mainland are counterpoised by a celestial derivation. As they made their long journey to the islands the stories underwent a structural and thematic inversion:

“Having placed the masks’ origin at the beginning instead of the end of the tale, and having the masks fall from the sky-in contrast with the mainland versions where they are pulled up from the bottom of the water-the island versions literally do not know how to finish the story. They need a conclusion…”

He goes on to say how these contrasting origin stories were resolved:

“…as the story unfolds between the mainland and the island, it always adopts intermediate courses. Instead of falling from the sky or surfacing from the bottom of a lake, the first mask suddenly appears on the roof of a house: halfway between up-above and down-below.”

Another such midpoint is the surface of the water.

Many have remarked on the Northwest Coast artist’s capacity for improvisation within a limited set of design motifs. With this image of the oval, the artist invites us to see above and below simultaneously. The ovoid shape and surrounding areas are interwoven with a fluid dynamism that unifies various elements and vantage points. In addition to the simultaneous views of front and back, left and right, we see a fusion of above and below, uniting not only various views on the horizontal plane, but that along the vertical axis as well. The contrasting viewpoints are artistically realized on a higher plane-a broader prospect that transcends contradiction. Northwest Coast art is animated by the dialectics of height and depth.

In the two origin stories and their resolution we see how myths and art are co-extensive with the tribe’s history, and how the reconciliation of chthonic and celestial origin stories are reflected in the development of artistic styles.

Uncategorized

Wandering in Place

Posted on June 7, 2013June 7, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

A great post. He writes eloquently about the inability to write. Something I’m sure my blogger friends can relate to.

northierthanthou

There once was a boy named Dan. He sat down in front of his computer and thought real hard. But on this day, he had nothing really to say. Dan thought, and he frowned, and he even tapped out a word or two, but nothing much came to mind. The big bad delete button ate all his work. Dan pouted and said; “foo on you, bad button.” But the bad delete button just laughed and told Dan it was his own fault.

Silly Dan. Only a Dummy-Butt sits at a computer with nothing to say.

The blank page mocked Mr. Dammit as he sat in silence contemplating this new quandary. Where had the words made off to? China-town? The casino down by the back alley? Perhaps they were sitting right now with a hot dame having a laugh on Dan’s behalf? There may have been a million stale stories to…

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Musings, videos

A Goose Story-Dispatch from the front lines

Posted on June 5, 2013June 6, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

It’s a bright, sunny morning. The north wind freshens, sending diagonal ripples toward Old Hand’s stern as I gaze at reflected ovoid shapes meandering over the surface of Port Madison. The wavetops reflect the cobalt sky, while in the troughs, dark green falls into the depths.

Johnathan Raban, in his book, The Sea and it’s Meanings, says that the fantastic imagery of Northwest Coast Indian art is greatly inspired by this sight- their stylized abstractions emerged from long hours paddling through the Salish Sea Dreamtime. The ancient Northwest Coast artist first saw Thunderbird, Raven and Bear while in becalmed revery, gazing at the sea’s mirror. The bounded yet fluid shapes that contain and release their ovoid imagery are interwoven, like sinuous kelp, with the sea itself. The mythic Hamatsa (cannibal dancer) of the Kwakiutal was descried on that insubstantial realm between surface and depth where images flicker and vanish. This is the intermediate realm between wakefulness and dream. Some of the masks came originally from the deep, while others descended, exact prototypes of masks we see today, from the sky.

Things are quiet in Port Madison. I spend a lot of time watching the Canadian Geese. The other day I witnessed a flock on Reah’s bulkhead repel an alien siege from another group who also desired the choice spot. Perhaps a rabble-rouser was after a female that was serenely perched on one leg under the cherry tree. The invading bunch first tried to look casual as they eased up the old boat ramp. But the locals charged down on them, their beaks lowered aggressively. This was, of course, accompanied by a god-awful din. Always something. They should have a reality TV show.

Then there’s the goats. They would eat my studio if I let them. When I show up they give me this interrogative look, as if I had the answer for their goatish angst. Maybe I am projecting- anthropomorphizing. Try pronouncing that, goats.

Today is clean the goat-shed day, a task to rival Hercules’ distasteful trial.

But I shouldn’t complain. I am ever grateful for the blessed gift of this lovely place, thankful I have found a home in this peaceful harbor.

Here’s a goose video I shot of a diving lesson, a big step in the life of any chick. Sorry for the quality. You can see the little guy on the big rock below the woodpile. The parents on the right call to him with encouraging honks.

Takes me back to my own first leap into the sea. But that is for my next McWhirr story.

videos

The Ocean Refuses no River

Posted on May 30, 2013June 5, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

Here’s the video again. I had trouble posting before.

The words are Arabic in praise of the Great Mother. They also mean: Love, Lover and Beloved are One. Music by Lilah Flood and Zulika.

Paintings in Progress

Our Lady of the Kedge

Posted on May 25, 2013May 25, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

There are infinite possibilities in art. When faced with an empty canvas an artist can be stymied by so many alternatives. It requires a narrowing of focus to hone in on intention, that particular thing you are called upon to express.

One needs set the right environment, speak prayers of supplication to the muse, and open to what nature has to reveal in the exuberant flow of her endless manifestations.

The challenge is to maintain balance, and walk the fine line between conscious intent and receptivity to what arises spontaneously when paint hits canvas and colors bleed in confounding ways.

I take a break from the mental gyrations of painting to work in the garden.

Thatcher Farm is big, with more rows of fertile earth than I can plant. I take an 8 by 16′ bed and divide it according to the square foot gardening technique. I lay it out with sticks and line, and plant seeds so many per square depending on the plant’s requirement for space. I impose an ordered framework, prepare the ground and trust that Mother Gaia can take it from there.

It’s like the layout for my next painting. But here the grid is based on the mystic proportion, the Golden Mean.

It is a major precept of spiritual and artistic disciplines to work like nature. The ancients discovered that the Golden mean is the proportion that comes closest to the original unity from which the diversity of life forms arose. It is this unity to which, in spiritual practice, we aspire to return. The proportion is expressed in plants, shells and seasonal cycles.

I lay out a grid of charcoal lines and, with color studies, narrow the colors to a triad of blue/green, red/violet and yellow/orange.

The sculpture on the Vickers memorial abides by the golden proportion, and its mystic rule sets the measure for creative expansion into the space around her. She is a portion of that spaciousness which is the ultimate nature of reality and she bestows it generously upon the graves of Port Madison’s founders lying at her stone feet. Like a beacon, she radiates light far over the bay.

I recall what my Eastern European sculpture teacher told me: sculpture is, ultimately, about light and space. He talked about how Michelangelo distorted David’s head so it would catch light and project it upward. Maybe it had to do with chakra’s. But I did learn from him that the ultimate end of the sculptor’s work is emptiness.

It is the quality of spaciousness and light she projects that is the theme of my painting, and her expansive energy inspires a harmonious distribution of color and form on the canvas. For, in the end, it comes down to this: to call upon the muse of art (and gardening) to favor us with her bounty and use the brute material of the tangible world to evoke the intangible spirit.

Saturnius McWhirr stories

The McWhirr stories-An Afterword?

Posted on May 19, 2013May 21, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

Cormorants are huddled like a conclave of robed mystics brooding over lost fish. The wind blows from all directions in Port Madison.

I write windy dialogue that transpires between two contrary characters. I suppose the I of the story refers to myself, but even this first-person identity gets pretty tenuous at times. I am obtuse foil to McWhirr’s exacting command, and he is confounded by my poetic flights. This tension, this ever tipping dynamic, propels the leaky vessel of my prose.

In the voyage of this yarn to it’s “conclusion”, fact and fiction are interwoven to create a tapestry of associative episodes in order to express some ineffable truth about man’s impulse toward adventure.

But to what degree can I actually claim these adventures mine? Where was the line crossed between inspiration and plagiarism? All my powers of expression are called upon to render a fictional account of vaguely recalled events in the transient world of sensations and ideas.

I’ve come close to foundering in a fog of fantasy, relevant only to myself or to those souls fortunate enough (or unlucky enough) to be conversant with sailing lore, and experienced in the sea’s fickle ways.

Where has McWhirr gone? While his vanishing act seems a natural outcome of the narrative flow, it has left me without bearings-without a meaningful waypoint. He’s left me becalmed at slack water, transfixed by sunlight on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, with only an obscure missive from Virgil’s heroic verse: From me learn courage and patience, from others the meaning of fortune. Then again, maybe this is all the bearing I need.

Though the dream of finding a copy of the Aeneid happened some 20 years ago, it’s true import remains enigmatic. But I feel it has to do with carrying on a lineage, the bearing of the household gods to establish a new homeland or mode of awareness. It’s also about a mutual need, a pact made with the dead to honor them. My dad’s ghost comes and goes in the story, and recalls me to some forgotten bond. He says I should heed McWhirr.

The View from the Wheelhouse is a fluid one, and successful navigation depends on an ability to tolerate a constantly shifting perspective. The conclusion of this tale is as elusive as a Micronesian landfall.

So I trust this isn’t the last we’ve heard from McWhirr. The wily old coot’s vanishing act may be prologue to his reinstatement on a more believable level of fictional existence.

Wars are started by mistaking the thing in itself for the metaphor, and the inability to see through the symbol, as through a veil, to the symbolized. Scientists have recently discovered that the north wind doesn’t really have a beard and puffy cheeks. We’ve evolved beyond such nonsense. But this knowledge is of little use to the sailor driven on a rocky lee shore by a fierce northerly gale. For myself and everyone, I pray to the household gods.

Paintings in Progress

Monument for a Liverpool engineer

Posted on May 16, 2013May 18, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

I return to Kane Cemetery often to draw the Vickers memorial. A stone figure stands on a high pedestal with a great stone fisherman’s anchor steadied in her left hand, under the patchwork of golden light at the tree-lined harbor entrance. It’s a monument the citizens of Port Madison raised to honor a poor engineer on the Russian built, steam side paddle-wheeler tug, the Politkofsky.

I like to think Vicker’s went easily. That he never felt the shaft handle that fell on his head, delivering the humble British immigrant into the hallowed halls of Puget Sound maritime history. The good citizens raised a charitable fund to have this sculpture shipped from Italy. Here it stands, a century later, a moving gesture of honor for the bygone age of steam paddle wheel tugs and the men in them. I am heartened by knowing how loggers and mill hands paused from clear-cutting Bainbridge Island’s forests to pool their hard-won dollars to honor a humble seaman with a fond tribute.

It is such monuments that mark high civilizations. I hope that we are still capable of such moving, selfless gestures of magnanimity. For, often, it seems our culture has nothing to leave posterity but endless strip malls, business and theme parks and miles of consumer-friendly, soul-denying landscapes.

I’ve tried many times to capture the essence of this angelic figure in paint or charcoal, and her spirit has ever eluded me. She seems to rise by the power of her fisherman’s anchor, as if that very symbol of hope and faith had lifted her into the empyrean vaults by its dumb weight; and the toil of a Liverpool engineer is rewarded, finally,with the grace of an angel’s smile.

Saturnius McWhirr stories

The Rapture of McWhirr

Posted on May 10, 2013May 18, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

Stars vanished in the rosey dawn and the earthen red facade of the old seafront was reflected on the smooth water of Port Townsend Bay. I served up kippers and joe to Captain McWhirr as he plotted our course across the Strait of Juan de fuca, drawing arcs over a chart of the eastern Straits with an aged compass that might have demarcated the first measured globe.

“Best we are underweigh at 0800 hours.”

“More joseph sir?”

Smiling strangely serene, he said:

“Aye, That’ll do nicely, old son.”

We headed out across the flat surface of Admiralty Inlet with the last of the flood, keeping Partridge Point fine on the port bow.

“ Now lay our course 318 degrees toward the Romeo Alfa buoy. Call me at slack water.”

“318 degrees it is, sir.”

McWhirr went below, leaving the weight of command to me. The calm, blue surface of the straits reached far westward. The regular thump of the diesel engine set a rythym that wove songs of lost schooners into our widening wake, and drew us, with the swirling kelp, into deeper sound.

O our packet sails tomorrow…

We bore away northwest. An eagle soared in high cirrus where the great indraught of the sea swept past the headland into the inlets of soul. Gulls were flattened across the blue vault of sky. The bell sounded and the sea heaved in steady writhing swells from the Pacific Ocean as the torpid heat drove all energy from the weary face of the world.

Shal-low-O- Shallow Brown…

A blip on the radar screen moved toward us through the seven concentric circles like a wrathful diety seeking tribute-like an archon who held Old Hand in irons, bound to earthly time, and from which we yet nursed a forlorn hope of deliverance.

And it fills me heart with sorrow…

The waypoint cross of the GPS fixed the moment on the still sea. All space was enclosed in the mystic compass rose, and our voyage was but another leg in man’s perpetual departure beyond the world’s edge; to where the the sunlight’s descent crosses the horizon’s sparkling band, and time intersects infinity.

Shal-low Shallow Brown

I went below to find McWhirr gone. There was only a tattered copy of Virgil’s Aeneid. A passage highlighted in gold caught my eye:

From me learn patience and true courage, from others the meaning of fortune.

McWhirr has left for the far shore, cut his painter and retreated through the diaphanous veils that seperate worlds. In a realm between the offices of master and mate he floats supine, hands clasped over his white beard, in surrender to the ebbing stream where all noble hearts must finally hie. He was the true sovreign of the watery sphere which had long held me captive. He is the enlightened aspect of my inner Captain Bligh, Noah of my being, guiding me safely past malestroms where the faithless whirl forever amid skeletal hulks and drowned chain.

Here’s a beautiful rendition of Shallow Brown by Sting.