one shape

[JAZ]

This isn't a sculpture per se because it's flat on a wall, but it is a shape that exists in space. I'll stick my neck out and see what you think about this. It is an "abstract" form I selected from nature. It is the footprint of a yellow birch tree growing by the side of a trail near a mountain stream in Maine. Abstract and representational at once.
Joyce

[rderr.com]

I see an Iroquois with one feather and wide open mouth in profile. Or, is it a protohistoric Chinese bronze? Or, could it be both? Or, some third, 4th , or some combination of one or more of the 39 odd symbols that we “artist” juggle.

Art is provocation.

Robert

[JAZ]

I see an Iroquois with one feather and wide open mouth in profile. Or, is it a protohistoric Chinese bronze? Or, could it be both? Or, some third, 4th , or some combination of one or more of the 39 odd symbols that we “artist” juggle.

Art is provocation.

Robert
An art history course in ancient Chinese bronzes directed us to the MFA where there are some gorgeous three legged vessels covered with symbology. The bronze was very dark. The leaders at the time were also shamans and used magic and dramatic ceremony to sway the peasants. I'm told they'd bring the bound mold out into the villages and start up this whole ceremony with smoke and incense and whatnot. Then at a crucial moment they'd break the mold apart and voila! a beautiful bronze object with mysterious symbols all over it would appear, amazing the masses. Art with political power.

[rderr.com]

Jazzz

There was here in Houston about 4 years ago a traveling exhibit "The Golden Age of Chinese Archeology with some really amazing pieces. I’m off to the foundry and will later try to find a link.

ART is provocative.

Bob

[Araich]

Was the tree cut down?

I struggle with the truly organic abstract myself, likely a personal defect. I want to put a straight line across it or a perfect curve, or fragmented text. The imperfect hand of the artist.

[JAZ]

Jazzz

There was here in Houston about 4 years ago a traveling exhibit "The Golden Age of Chinese Archeology with some really amazing pieces. I’m off to the foundry and will later try to find a link.

ART is provocative.

Bob
I went to your website and it looks quite different from what I think I remember before. It's cleaner and easier to see the range of what you do. The first image I clicked on (randomly) was a horizontal form suspended from a ceiling. Instead of a larger image I got an error message. Others I tried all worked. Just FYI.

[JAZ]

Was the tree cut down?

I struggle with the truly organic abstract myself, likely a personal defect. I want to put a straight line across it or a perfect curve, or fragmented text. The imperfect hand of the artist.

No. I make the patterns from living trees, at least so far. Although the yellow birch wasn't a big tree, its footprint is 68" x 62", an nice human-scale size. I hope to try making steel prints form tihis one and eventually make a 3D version maybe. This past summer I also made patterns from a red fir when I was camping with my daughter and some of her friends at Black Butte in Mendocino, California and another from an old growth hemlock in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee where we did a little hiking with my sister in law and her husband. I cut the patterns out of cloth, then later I've started making things with them. Attached is a drawing of the Old Growth Hemlock. I am mid way through making that one in steel. It is going to be fabricated with 3" sidewalls, so it should resemble a 3" slab cut in the shape of the footprint. Because the plate has to be pieced together since it's 87"x66" overall, I decided to use a disc that's the size of the circumference of the tree at 4' off the ground as a connector. And it will be vertical and wind kinetic. I made one like it once before (Maple Footprint en Pointe, which is also attached), but of sheetmetal and flat. Also wind kinetic. This time I want it to look beefier, hence the sidewalls. Anyway, it will be in the shape you see in the drawing.
Actually, these aren't so much about the trees as they are about the concept of footprint. I have been working on and off with footprints (much like that of a house), driplines and shadows as other ways entities are evidenced (besides their exterior appearances).

[rderr.com]

This isn't a sculpture per se because it's flat on a wall, but it is a shape that exists in space

Jaz

I came to sculpture through the shadows, footprints, of photographed objects. Your footprints have a long and glorious ancestry, from the Platonic “Cave of Shadow” too R. Strauss's opera “Woman Without a Shadow” (on the Materlik play) It will be interesting to see shadow with a third dimension i.e. a foot print And, that answers the enigma of the object/observer: a thing cannot be seen in “real time”, only in the past (foot print) or where it will be (could that be a shadow?).

Art is provocation

Robert

[jwebb]

Very interesting work, Joyce. And interesting discussion, Robert and Joyce. I have an affinity for the "figurative abstract". I've been asked (by family members among others) why I prefer that to "telling the truth" about the figure. And the answer, I think, is that it deals with a different kind of truth about the figure, like the truth your shadow tells. A shadow is almost always foreshortened, elongated, or "distorted" in some ways, but it is still generated by and truthful to the figure. I'm not clear about the "footprint". Is it the outline of the shape of the tree at the ground?

[JAZ]

Very interesting work, Joyce. And interesting discussion, Robert and Joyce. I have an affinity for the "figurative abstract". I've been asked (by family members among others) why I prefer that to "telling the truth" about the figure. And the answer, I think, is that it deals with a different kind of truth about the figure, like the truth your shadow tells. A shadow is almost always foreshortened, elongated, or "distorted" in some ways, but it is still generated by and truthful to the figure. I'm not clear about the "footprint". Is it the outline of the shape of the tree at the ground?
Thanks. (Interesting but not very practical.) "figurative abstract" is a great way to characterize it and that fascinates me too because there is the connection to the familiar, yet it is open to new ways to view the familiar (or ordinary). I agree fully with the "different kind of truth about" whatever the entitiy might be being more intriguing. I'd like to add that there is more to "figurative" art than just the figure, still life, or landscape triad. I have done all of those at different times in my life and can accurately draw something the way it looks and have a suspicion that I could do a reasonable job of doing the same in 3D. However, there are already so many people that do a good job with those and some that result in metaphors that I've been striving to find other unexplored aspects of the visible world for myself.
When you go to town hall to get a permit for an addition to your house they show you the plan/drawing they have of the footprint of your house and want to know how you intend to change it. The footprints of trees I've done are the same - the exact shape of the physical edge between the visible part of the tree and the surface of this planet. (I am equally intriqued by the proerties and possibilities of the edge between two planes or bodies - the surface of water, the edge between earth and air. but that's a whole other story.) It is a way to document its contact with the earth - its most elemental signifier of existence aside from its more obvious visual image. (I have painted trees and that does record one part of their existence, but not the only "real" part). Another aspect of each tree (or any other life form) is its dripline, though for now those of a tree are too big for me to use yet. But I do have a dripline of myself. I instructed my husband on how to trace it. It's really small compared even with the footprint of a tree, which is maybe part of the point. Just like with a man-made structure, a dripline shows the outermost vertical shape of an object - if it was raining out and not windy, the dry part of the earth would show where the dripline of your house (or of a person, etc.) would be. It is another example of a way to depict the actual existence of a 3D form.
Shadows also are examples, but are different in the sense that their shape can be distorted by the angle of light, as you point out. They are also example of the absense of something (light) rather than the presence of something. For example, a very different connotation would be achieved by tracing a long, late afternoon shadow from someone rather than a noontime one. (For instance, George Bush's long shadow would have to extend around the world now wouldn't it, as the people of Spain now know.) At home tonight I will post an image from a show I was in 4 or 5 years ago where I used two shadows and the footprint of a sculpture of mine to suggest its 3D presence when the sculpture wasn't actually there at all. the execution was crude and I realized later that I mispositioned the footprint, but the concept hit everyone who saw it, much to my surprise.
I am interested in exploring those physical evidences of existence. I have a hard time creating true abstraction (which people like Araich are admirably so good at). And I admire people who can do figurative work that inspires metaphors like ALH does (Caennmora, e.g. - hope I'm spelling that right). Somehow I can't come up to that level of purity, but the tree footprints I've chosen are for me like organically shaped abstractions until the moment when the viewer is told what the shape actually represents, then they become "figurative". That keeps both halves of my brain happy.
Joyce

[Gdog]

Was the tree cut down?

I struggle with the truly organic abstract myself, likely a personal defect. I want to put a straight line across it or a perfect curve, or fragmented text. The imperfect hand of the artist.


Speaking of an imperfect hand,I see a left hand that has been mangled in a piece of machinery,leaving the thumb and forefinger[I also see the Iroquois clearly!]blah! blah!,ouch!

[ALH]

"...abstractions until the moment when the viewer is told what the shape actually represents..."

I love mental vibration in art. What happens when an old stone torso is both a living thing and simply a lump of earth or the connection between a social pattern and a work of art. The pursuit of something indirectly through its wake, footprints, shadows etc. is something I've had in the back of my mind to pursue for some time. Maybe one day I'll find the right angle of approach on this because where you are, although totally opposite to what I'm up to, is really fertile ground for sculpture - the art of making 'an object'.

[jwebb]

"..the tree footprints I've chosen are for me like organically shaped abstractions until the moment when the viewer is told what the shape actually represents, then they become "figurative". That keeps both halves of my brain happy.." One of my mentors, who was totally abstractionist in his work, thought that there might be genetic memories in our minds, from ancient times when people lived in constant danger and had to be very aware of shapes and forms, to survive. People have varying degrees of sensitivity to this "vocabulary of form", and you can develop your vocabulary by working at it. On a basic level, a convexity speaks of vitality and positive life force, while a concavity is negative and speaks of the absence of life. Ripe fruit versus dried, desicated fruit; a budding breast versus a starved and dissipated one; an infant's face versus a wasted cadaver's. And of course the whole range of combinations and permutations of in-between forms, that comprise the language of sculpture. I think it's basically true, and a very rich way of looking at things.

[Gdog]

I apologize about the mangled hand interpretation, its just that it's not a bad thumb and it's a pretty good forefinger , I work around a lot of dust and when a dark piece of granite is on a table it immediately starts to accumulate dust producing a variety of different shades as the piece sits,and all kinds of factors disturb the dust and produce all kinds of images, i've sketched a few here n there , sillouettes in different shades transforming throughout the course of the day. I once had a piece up and hadn't worked it in awhile,when I got to it,I saw this tiny little detailed line winding all over the place, it looked like somebody spent eternity drawing this detailed map all over the entire 9ft piece, and at the very end of it,the line was still moving, I was blown away, it was a small flying ant. It traveled so far,a mega footprint made by tiny feet, traveling most of the time aimless!

After reading this thread about the footprints, I wish I would've jumped up on a can or something and took a picture of that long journey to nowhere, and see what could have been interpreted from that journey!

Wet sponges, round squirt bottles,steelwool tumbling ,sliding,or rolling across the surface, you can even make a damn good rendition of a baby footprint with the outside of a fist pressed firmly down add a few dots fer toes WALA! baby print try it! spooked a few rookies in the morn'in with that one :D

[JAZ]

This is the photo I said I'd post on Friday. It is the shadow/footprint of a sculpture of mine called Cultures Series: American Cherry. The sculpture is about 9' 6" tall.

[rderr.com]

Both left and right halfs of the brain should be very pleased with their owner, Jaz. The work, and metaphor, are beautiful.

Robert

[JAZ]

Both left and right halfs of the brain should be very pleased with their owner, Jaz. The work, and metaphor, are beautiful.

Robert
Robert,
You have made my day. I do get discouraged because I'm not so good as others at the self promotional and practical parts of this, so hearing good feedback makes a major difference to me. Sometimes I feel that because I'm sticking to what makes sense to me aesthetically in this (maybe because I'm getting older at fifty-five and feel I need to use my time wisely), an attitude that doesn't sit so well with the dollar and cents market out there, that I've been rapidly sliding downhill. But my fingernails are clawing at the dirt as I slide.
Yesterday my huband Egils and I climbed Mt. Monadnock. I brought the stuff to cut another tree pattern, but it wasn't the right day. Sometimes it's the time for seeing other things.Today I'm still working on the steel version of the Old Growth Hemlock footprint. It takes me a long time to do what a big guy could do more quickly, but I just love setting up a challenge for myself and then following through on it. And when I can surprise people with some idea i've had or some shape, I think I've justified my existence for the day. However, it's pretty hard to justify the studio rent.
On Wednesday I'm leaving for a few days (17th - 23rd) to go to Iceland to visit my son Eric and his family. I've been there three times before. He's married to an Icelander and they have given us one grandson and one step granddaughter. I haven't seen them in over a year, but during the winter the fares are quite reasonable from Boston ($385 round trip!). While I'm there I hope to go back to Viday Island to see Richard Serra's installation of basalt columns. They are sited all over the island. I hiked all over that siland with my family and the Icelanders in the pouring rain in 2000, but Serra didn't install until 2001. If I understand it correctly, the tops of all the columns
line up to the same level regardless of the terrain. The perimeter - and maybe all - of the island is basalt . I saw pictures in a book at the Addison and think it won't be as inspiring as some of his other works, but it is something that is within reach for me.
Also, there are a surprising number of sculptures (some traditional, but more contemporary) sprinkled around Iceland. Eric and Inga were married in a small town on the Eastern shore and we drove the entire ring road to get there and back. We saw an outdoor sculpture show at Thingvellir, sculptures in Reykjavik and several other places. Europe is way ahead of us in that regard. If I take any pictures worth showing, I'll post a few of them.
Also, while I'm there I'll see whether it makes sense to do some driplines of lavarock or something. One problem with the creative temperament is its unpredictability. It can't be forced and it goes in surprising directions sometimes (or most of the time).
Thank you so much for your positive input. It means a lot to me.
Joyce

[fritchie]

JAZ - I like very much this discussion you have started on shadows or footprints and their suggestiveness. I’ve been reading for a while and have intended to compose a reply offline, but have been too busy, so I’ll just say this now.

One of the things that originally attracted me to science is its ability (and the necessity) to provoke the imagination. Mainly through its principal language of mathematics and contemplation of the results, science can let the mind look at black holes, the centers of stars, whole galaxies of billions of stars, the inner workings and the nuclei of atoms, a whole array of subatomic particles, the vast and frigid vacuum of space, and generally the enormity and aw(e)fulness of creation.

And all of this about the physical world alone; the biological world is still a different universe .

To the point - maybe a dozen years ago, I was standing in my back room, one with two glass walls, in early morning, and something called my attention to the effects of light and shadow. Probably I turned off a light left on overnight and I watched the shadows disappear. At any event, that, and my frame of mind, contemplating the fact that neutrinos pass entirely through the Earth almost as though it were transparent, led me to realize that shadows always are present, even if our perception is too weak to see them.

If a room contains a hundred lights, each one creates shadows, though the illumination overall is so high we typically can’t see them. A digital image, though, of exquisite sensitivity, (or a God’s eye view, if you prefer) could show each individual shadow.

That led me to considerations of radiation fields, the unseen half of the universe. We see light, with wavelength between 400 and 700 nanometer, with our eyes. We feel heat, also radiation, with our skin. This heat has wavelength somewhat longer than 700 nanometers. However, it generally takes concentration to be aware of heat radiation. The exception is something like a sunny winter day, which is far warmer that a cloudy one simply because of the sun’s radiation field. And both light and human-perceived heat radiation are the tiniest part of the full radiation field, which includes microwave, radio, Xrays, gamma rays, and so on, with wavelength potentially from zero to infinity.

A reflection on your issue of shadows: In a room of a hundred people (or just two), each person as a source of heat radiation cast a glow toward every other one, and the shadows of every other person in the room, of furniture, possibly insects, and even of the air, alter the radiation field. How interwoven the world!

[rderr.com]

“When I heard the learned astronomer say …” Walt Whitman

All art is provokation

Robert

[sculptorsam]

Cultures Series: American Cherry is a very powerful work, JAZ. I can visualize an entire installation of this Series taking up a massive space. In my mind, it is giving me goosebumps!

And thanks for your thoughts on shadows, Fritchie. You have given me my meditation for the day.

Sam

[JAZ]

I finally just saw your posting, Fritchie (after returning from Iceland I've been scrambling to try to find funding for our little sculpture park here, so no time for fun!). Your comments are so good to hear. There are definite parallels between the concept of nutrinos and ancient ideas like chi, for example, in my mind anyway. Scientists simply find fantastic ways to define and categorize phenomena so that those of us who stand looking into sunbeams and seeing infinities there don't decide that we are insane. When my kids were babies I used to draw "maps" of their energy fields as they crawled around. In the colors and textures you could see the synapses as they paused and thought about something, then the drawing would get more linear as they crawled, or reached for something their curiosity took them to. Again, like shadows, evidences of their presence, but completely ephemeral like smoke... human "smoke" trails.

[JAZ]

Hi Sam,
I started this, then it disappeared, so if it shows up twice, sorry for the redundancy. Thanks for your good comment, especially today. I received a rejection from the Museum School's Travelling Scholars Competition and so you have offset the negative with something better. Thank you. I tried for the tree footprint idea with them, but the jurors didn't go for it. The slides I submitted weren't very good, because I haven't figured out the photography as well as Araich and am finding your experiments with your own picture taking and the discussions that ensue to be helpful. However, the Yellow Birch Footprint, for example, is 66" tall and wall hung.That's another whole can of worms as far as the lighting for photography.
But right now I have to do things for other people anyway. I haven't been able to go to my studio to work on my own stuff since I got back from Iceland last Tuesday night. I picked up two pieces from a show that ended and sent one set of slides out, but that's it.
I have lots of things floating in there between my ears that I don't have time for, but I'd really feel good about having an excuse to fill a room with things like American Cherry.

[sculptorsam]

Welcome back from your trip, JAZ. Hope it went well. I can appreciate the difficulty of photographing those pieces. I just posted a shot of my make-shift photo setup over in my Sculpture Photos threads. I don't know that it will help you any but you may find it amusing.

Sam

[fritchie]

This isn't a sculpture per se because it's flat on a wall, but it is a shape that exists in space. I'll stick my neck out and see what you think about this. It is an "abstract" form I selected from nature. It is the footprint of a yellow birch tree growing by the side of a trail near a mountain stream in Maine. Abstract and representational at once.
Joyce

JAZ - This may appear in a strange place, because I found it by a search, and it’s not obvious at first glance how to get in the normal trace of things. Just today (June 5), I saw a local art review of some work by a conceptual artist which is very reminiscent of your tree shapes. The artist is Ryan Burns, and his exhibit seems to consist of rubbings on paper of very old tree stumps. Featured was a rubbing of a Sitka Spruce stump about eight feet across and about 600 years old, by count of annual rings. This one is nearly round, but with some of the edge irregularities of your tree shapes.

He appears to be a conceptual ecological artist at present, and the review spent some time describing his transportation, a fifteen-year old, diesel-powered ambulance which he has converted to run on recycled and filtered vegetable oil from restaurants. His background mentioned includes Indiana and the Pacific Northwest.

It struck me as odd at first that the two of you should have come up with such similar, yet unusual subjects, but then I remembered that slices of treetrunks like these were common in National Parks and similar sites as long back as the 1950's. Locally, slices from large cypress stumps were commonly formed into tables during at least the 1950's through 1970's. It just took artists like the two of you to see the potential here.

This work is presented on the wall, but is sculptural in feeling. The rubbings are done with large sheets of paper he recovered from trashbins along the way - maps, architectural drawings, children’s drawing sheets, and so on - all glued into one sheet on the spot for the purpose.

Thought you’d like to hear about an alternative, but similar, approach.

[JAZ]

Thanks for this information Fritchie. I think I've read about his journey with the bio vehicle, but didn't realize that he was an artist. Interesting. I'll have to see if I can find images of his work.
One very significant difference between what he is doing and what I have been is that he is recording the death of trees, memorializing them probably to make a point about human intervention and loss, whereas mine involves living trees that have not been impacted. I make a pattern from the base of a living tree without harming it in any way. The footprint is a form of evidence of life, of existence, just as the shadow of a person is evidence that the person exists as a living entity. And I have been focusing on trees as metaphors for longevity, stability, strength, vigor and so on. Once my husband and I spent two weeks in the Pacific Northwest, during which time we drove around the Olympic Penninsula. There I had the stunning experience of seeing the Ho Rainforest with its gigantic trees, surrounded by miles and miles of clearcutting, and also drove to Mount St. Helens along a fifteen mile roadway where every tree for miles around had been flattened by the eruption.
As you pointed out, I also have seen many of those stumps with the tree's history recorded in rings, but I will happily leave that category of work to Ryan. I'll continue to focus on the abstract shapes generated by living entities.
One of the things I am doing with the Yellow Birch Footprint that I had posted is to make steel prints from it. I bought some floating rowcover, this filmy white stuff farmers use to protect their crops. I put the steel cut out on a table, lay the rowcover over it and then use a brayer and printer's ink to make an image of the steel cut out. In this way I can do multiples and the prints will be very light and mobile.
Yesterday I spent all day installing a temporary outdoor sculpture/installation at a local artist organized show (Maudslay Outdoor Sculpture Exhibit). Instead of using steel as I did last year and the year before for this show, this time I used 10-12 foot reeds I took from a local marsh, painted red, and inserted vertically to delineate the dripline of a big White Pine. They are spaced two feet apart. It's like a fence of tall thin red lines going all the way around the tree. In this way I've explored one aspect of the form of this tree without impacting it in any way and at the same time my actions call the attention of others to this element of this organism.
Most of the people walking by asked about it and discussed the idea. One of the problems with working with nature in this way is that everything is so big. When I was in Iceland my son helped me make dripline tracings of three little saplings he has planted in his yard. They represent to me his hope that someday he will have a tiny forest like the ones we take for granted. Doing that dripline was technically easy because I just used a plumbob to follow the perimeter of the branch tips. They were small trees. (The only real difficulty was that it was so darned cold out!).
At Maudslay, the tree I used is about ninety feet tall. How to accurately gauge where the outer edges of the branches end? I planned to duct tape my husband's laser pointer to a four foot level, then use that, held vertically, to pinpoint the tips of the branches. Unfortunately, that bright little laser light is not visible outdoors in daylight. So, I ended up just looking up and guessing, then I'd insert one of the reeds, look up again, etc. I wasn't too happy about that, but there's a deadline and so no time to experiment. One woman passerby suggested I do it at night, which is a good idea, though not there because that park closes after dusk. An Indian guy asked me why I didn't just use radar. Heck, why didn't I think of that? I pointed out to him that there is no financial help given for this show so everything is out of pocket. At first I thought maybe he was joking, but no. And so we discussed it a bit and he gave me one clue that showed me that I actually might be able to do that sometime for one project. So who knows, maybe sometime that will work out. It's actually a really good idea for a way to get the shape right. The reeds are quite irregular so visually it isn't so important to be accurate, but conceptually I would have preferred a more scientific approach than what I ended up using.
But that's a long explanation of just one more way that I'm using natural forms. I have in the past done paintings of trees (and of plenty of other things), but lots of people paint trees.
Anyway, I'm fascinated with other evidences of life forms and intrigued by the idea of finding abstract shapes in nature.
Thank you for the lead. I will follow up on it when I have a chance.

[rderr.com]

"...though the illumination overall is so high we typically can’t see them. A digital image, though, of exquisite sensitivity, (or a God’s eye view, if you prefer) could show each individual shadow...." quote fritchie

Jaz and Co

I've revived this because,"A footprint by any other name is a footprint."

I really do find strange things on my floor. Today came a callin’ the manger of the warehouse where I have my studio, askin’ “ You have holes in the roof to repair?" How do you ‘xplain, “Yea this dude flew to close to the sun about 2,500 years ago and fell into the bay of (need help Rod) and now has broken through the floor of my STUDIO. Do somethin’ about the stupid bird that keeps circlin’.”

[rderr.com]

Have you ever lived in the landscape of a paining? I first became aware of Brueghel the Elder’s Fall of Icarus and Magpies in the Snow while preparing for an Interscholastic League contest. I was in the 4th or 5th grade, 11 or12 years old. We were to remember an image, painter, school of painting, and dates to be regurgitated on being flashed the image. Later, in high school English, Brueghel’s Plowman was used to illustrate a poem whose title I do not remember by an Englishman (or Irishman) whose name I do not remember.

From the age of 21 to 53 I lived in Belgium, the country of origin of Brueghel. Not far from the village where I lived is the small city of Gembloux where the iron plowshare was invented in the 12th or13th century. Brueghel ‘s plowman is a product of the revolution in agriculture brought on by the ox drawn plow, and Brueghel himself would have know the region as Bruxelles is only 30 odd miles north of there. The landscape of The Fall of Icarus is reminiscent of the Belgian Ardennes, the landscape from Gembloux south to Luxemburg. At Tembloux, south of Gembloux, there is a small private airfield used mainly for sport aviation; ultra lights, delta wings, and parachutes. One early summer’s day in the 90ies I heard the familiar noise of a piper cub climbing in a spiral to off load what turned out to be a known Belgian gendarme parachutist Il est descendus en flame, literarily he went down in a flame. It is strange to watch a man die. I feel for the sailor of Breughel’s ship. He and Daedalus, Icarus’s father, are the only witness to the death of Icarus, as were the piper cub pilot and I witnessed the death of the chutist.

The legs in the photo are destined to be those of Gabe. But here have the form of form of Icaus's legs sticking out of the water in The Fall of....

All art is a permutation of the 30 odd symbols. Art is provocation.

Robert

[jwebb]

Some very pretty musings, Roberrrrrt. I think the poem you refer to is the following, by W.H. Auden. Though others have writ about this too.


About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

[rderr.com]

Thanks Joe

Yes of course Auden. And the old Masters really did understand so well.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrroberrrr rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr(t)