Tag: literature
Thus spoke the Man of the Sea
A Tale of Two Houses–a secret history of Port Madison
The rains have let up. I scan Port Madison’s northeast shore through binoculars to see the Farnham house, built above the old mill-site, where much of Bainbridge Island’s forests were milled in the mid-19th century. The house looks the same as when Judge John Farnham leaned on his hoe under his prize apple trees.
He first signed on the General Park Hill at the age of 12 and spent 3 years shipping cotton between South Carolina and Liverpool before trading in contraband silk between Shanghai and Hong Kong. He rounded the Horn in the rush of ’49 and headed north to Port Madison when loggers, ship builders and land speculators were rapidly displacing the indigenous Suquamish people. He commanded side-wheel steamers, worked as shipwright and, in an odd –if not downright ironic–turn of fortune, served as keeper of the Seattle Pest House.
This was when the Old Man House still stood; where creation was annually sung into being in the Winter Dances. It was the lofty, cedar temenos of the Suquamish tribe that was demolished by Albion’s brass-plated cannon of imperious might in 1870.
This is was the home of Princess Angeline.
After reading Jerusalem, I’ve come to see Blake’s Gothic, sweeping poetry entwined with the shadowy firs of Port Madison. A rummy wastrel turned Urizenic guardian of self-righteous law, Farnham became the very image of man’s fallen spiritual state, laboring eternally in the Satanic mills, separated from his Sophianic emanation and closed to the Divine Vision.
And I hear fair Angeline as the banished Jerusalem, still weeping over the bay for her lost and tender children.
Farnham’s end was tragic. He had begun exhibiting signs of odd behavior and was forcibly dismissed from office. He held out against the deputy sheriffs in the Port Madison courthouse (then the County seat) with a shot-gun for 3 days before being led away quietly–a man forsaken by his adamant God of Reason.
Ballasted with river rock, he boarded the Seattle ferry, planning to jump into the deep soundings off Elliot Bay. But the emergency crew fished him out and he died shortly after.
I honor John Farnham, respect his adventuresome spirit and outrageous character; whose salty yarn and prize apples are the true golden relics of another age.
Otter Weather
Rain hammers the deck as the wind roars over the high bank of the south shore. Like big, blue wings, the tarp on the derelict boat rafted alongside billows in the gusts and shoots spray high onto Old Hand’s wheelhouse windows. Windward is a sorry sight–the once proud Herreshoff racing sloop now lies rotting through the long Northwest winter rains. I used to pride myself on my tarpological creations, but now they are blown to blue tatters before the furious onslaught of the Pineapple Express.
A kingfisher chatters high over the rigging as the whole boathouse sways above Old Hand’s starboard rail. At times like this, I wonder if I should have used 10″ lag bolts to anchor the posts onto the dock. But it seems to be holding fine.
This is the weather the otter likes. One slithers onto the float and lies momentarily atop my inverted Livingston dinghy before again vanishing into the green depths of Port Madison. It’s good to see them 
again–my pals the otters–if I could only get them to use the cat box. But they scoff at such refinements, and prefer to poop all over the lines I’d so artfully coiled on the dock. Such is the life of those who toil at sea.
After all the work creating my art exhibit, I went through a depressed phase, exacerbated by a lingering cold. This down time usually accompanies the completion of a project. It’s just part of the process. It’s only natural that we feel emptied out after such an expenditure of energy, and the empty feeling, far from being bad, is just what I need. Rather than feeling washed up, it’s better to make friends with the emptiness and spaciousness in order to be filled again with the creative spirit.
So now I roll and split great oak rounds near the old Ed Monk workshop, repair Old Hand’s diesel heater and go over current tables–making long, Springtime passages over the Salish Sea of my imagination.
Building Golganooza-an artwork in progress
Strange. For all my efforts to loosen up, I seem to be heading in a more classical direction. When solid form threatens to vanish in an atmospheric haze, I recall Blake’s admonition to delineate everything a solid line. William Turner advised enclosing all shapes with a glowing red line that can move easily from cool shadow into warm, brilliant light. Gauguin used this technique to unify his compositions and bind his luxuriant forms to the picture plane.
Here, I use it to construct Blake’s towering edifice of Golganooza, whose:
…stones are pity, and the bricks, well wrought affections Enamell’d with love and kindness & the tiles engraven gold, Labour of merciful hands..
This Golganooza is built with primary colors on a scaffold of charcoal lines set along the Golden Mean proportion. The challenge is to integrate illusory depth with the shapes on the flat surface into a dynamic, interwoven whole. This is what makes it so complicated.
Painting doesn’t proceed only with big, creative leaps by the likes of a Picasso or Pollack. There is also a slow evolutionary process at work, and painting, like any other discipline, moves toward ever higher levels of complexity.
The dichotomy between abstraction and realism is a false one. It’s all abstract in a sense. What is bad is intellectual, materialist abstraction devoid of feeling and humanity–removed from art’s most exalted purpose:
To open Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity ever expanding in the Bosom of God: the Human Imagination!
-William Blake
A Studio Reading of Jerusalem-an artwork in progress
Ziggurat-an artwork in progress
My commitment to chronicle the art making process requires I relate all, from the most difficult stretches, to my modest successes. The muse is fickle and I am negotiating a dry spell. Here is a belated post to let you know I’m still hanging in there
So far, only one image came through on the lucid dream channel. Here it is.
I had been working the raw umber, paynes gray and burnt sienna into a web of interwoven strokes. That night, in a dream, I saw an ancient ziggurat carved in natural sandstone and honey-combed with caves. As I looked at its golden, weathered form rising into the vivid, blue sky, I realized it was a dream. It was a fleeting glimpse of profound emptiness–the ultimate ground of reality. In that insubstantial image I apprehended the Heart Sutra’s most essential teaching: Form is Emptiness/Emptiness is no other than Form.
I don’t claim this as a great accomplishment, but I do like that the process of painting inspired dream imagery and the dream, in turn, redirected the painting.
The image was also inspired by a program about early Christianity I’d seen that night. The film showed the mountain, hermit caves where the Nag Hamadi collection of early Gnostic writings were found.
The Gnostics taught that soul is imprisoned in matter; that Gnostic experience is a return to the pure light of Divinity through overcoming demonic forces (Archons) whose job it is to hold humanity in bondage to the dense spheres of matter.
While I may not share this belief in the malign aspect of the natural world, I do believe these teachings form a part of our spiritual heritage. They have left psychic imprints upon the collective unconscious. It is not so much a matter of belief as that of experience–Gnossis.
These imprints permeate William Blake’s work. Benjamin Walker talks about the fall of Sophia (Wisdom) in his book, Gnosticism:
Various reasons are put forward for the fall of Sophia from the upper spheres and her plunge into the world of matter…(in one version) the tragedy occurred when she mistook the false light she saw below for the ‘light of lights’ for which she aspired…
In some texts she represents…the stricken city of Jerusalem.
Vala-an Artwork in Progress
Sometimes painting is a real struggle. But I press on, slap the obdurate material into shape, as if my worn brush might push the paint into actual space–into the 3rd dimension.
Art often requires tactics that subvert one’s own assumptions in order to create the one image that is to the point, heartfelt, and true.
This one is a mess. The possibility of failure is always present. It is a perpetual letting go– of tricks, habits and even those pretty passages that no longer serve the whole.
This exhibit started with an idea about altars or memory stations. It is an attempt to combine my art with an interest in Blake in a way that helps me understand this eccentric genius and gives my own work greater depth.
The painting shows a stone wall with a niche in which is placed an image inspired by one of Blake’s Persian looking Angels. Carved into the stone wall is a willow tree that arches over the niche and breaks into space. The sun, etched into the wall, spreads beams of light over the canvas. 
The next painting is of Vala, Jerusalem’s shadow, whose veil obscures the celestial light, and seduces Albion away from Jerusalem’s pure spiritual beauty.
She is a complex figure. Kathleen Raine has likened her to Psyche.
Know me now, Albion: Look upon me. I alone am beauty. The imaginative human form is but the breathing of Vala. I breathe him forth into the Heaven from my secret Cave, born of the Woman to obey the Woman, O Albion the mighty. For the Divine appearance is Brotherhood, but I am love.
Particulars-an artwork in progress
William Blake stressed the “particulars,” how the details of daily life are continuous with cosmic totality. In Blake’s expansive vision the two perspectives interpenetrate and this all-inclusive vision animates and unifies his art in way that is unique in the history of art. In Jerusalem, the local village scene merges with vast space and opens on the mythic city:
Pancrass & Kentish-town repose
Among her golden pillars high,
Among her golden arches which
Shine upon the starry sky.
So my Black Friday visit to a Port Angeles fabric store acquires new significance. This particular Clallam anchorage is where the angels weave this narrative into the fabric of myth. Or maybe it was just a place where I could score a good deal on the canvas I need for my February art show.
I am imagining some large canvases painted in the muted, earthen tones of the gray, English landscape overlaid with an architecture of arches and pillars of insubstantial, golden light.
At the same time I continue the memory practice, learning Jerusalem “by heart” and using the mnemonic imagery of the memory stations as a starting point. These stations continue to evolve as I memorize the text and work the paintings. In this way I hope to in infuse the paintings with some of Blake’s generous, all-encompassing spirit.
This process may sound cumbersome, but it works well in maintaining a broad perspective and helps avoid a myopic fixation on details. This fixation is far from the non-dualistic attention to particulars Blake writes of. I hope my art may be as expansive and generous as his.
If you look closely at the background, some ethereal light forms emerge; vague figures who begin to emerge from beyond a misty veil. Or maybe the turpentine was just going to my head.
The Memory Theatre-Idea for my Febuary art exhibition
My next art show is coming up soon. My idea is inspired by the Memory Theatre. This is an ancient mnemonic device used by actors and rhetoricians to commit long speeches to memory. The memory places are niches, or altars that contain imagery (the more outlandish the better) that facilitate recollection of the text. In ancient times, these features were incorporated into the design of theatres.
My idea is to make this part of the process of creating the work for my show. I’ll start with the basics: clean up my studio and create a series of 10 altars which I will decorate with whatever imagery will facilitate recollection of a long poem. At the same time I’ll prepare 10 canvases which will correspond with each of the memory stations. These paintings will comprise the exhibit.
I haven’t decided on a poem yet but maybe one of William Blake’s medium-length works will serve. This memory process will be concurrent with the creation of 10 paintings inspired by each of the memory stations. The art show’s theme will be continuous with the theme of the poem.
The whole process from straightening out the studio to “completion” of the paintings will be documented in this blog with photos, text, video and recordings. Stay tuned.
A View from the Wheelhouse 