Loxahatchee

Every time you go to the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, at the northernmost part of the Everglades  there's a very good chance of an alligator meet-and-greet. This is not an every day kind of South Florida encounter, but since there's water everywhere, it's never out of the realm of the possible. I've seen a gator near a swing set, by a stop sign, in a man made pond two minutes from my front door. I've heard the occasional story of an alligator that has gone through a door, a screened one, straight into a suburban kitchen. But this is because of us, because we're here, chewing away at their habitat. Every year, there's less of their home as we build more of our own. They don't want anything to do with us. At least here, at Loxahatchee, there's a kind of mutual understanding.

I did see one yesterday, pointed out by the park rangers, near the cypress swamp. It was so well hidden in the sluice that it looked more like a strip of truck tire.

But the reason I love coming here because of the distances.

I grew up in a place where the sky was pretty small. I don't mean that in a disparaging way. I don't even understand exactly why the skies here are so huge. Maybe it's the kind of clouds. It's not the flatness, my hometown was as flat as it gets. But I didn't understand what big sky meant until my first trip to New Mexico. I hadn't experienced the idea of being able to see where you had been an hour ago, or where you were going to be an hour from then. Growing up, time and space was episodic, each block literally blocked out the next, each yard was its own self-contained stage set. You had to go out on the bay to see what was far away, out of ear shot. Maybe that's why I worked summers on a boat.

I love how the paths here are not just trails, but turn into paint-strokes, 

or white lines pointing out possible futures. This picture reminds me of parts of the Wizard of Oz, my first favorite movie. You knew that the yellow brick road would lead you deeper into the story, but you also knew that it ended at the back of the set, a painting. The path rose up horizontally, narrowing to a point, an illusion. Maybe this one does too.

But if it's not, and you go this way or that, there's a future of possible stories, lined with very red sea grape and bugs and strange white marsh flowers, 

possibly leading to a cypress swamp

where the very tall moss draped trees look black from below and rock side to side and creak with exertion and the preoccupations of birds.

Repetition and Ritual

Opening tomorrow!

I'm part of a new exhibit, Repetition and Ritual, New Sculpture in Fiber, curated by artist Sonya Yong James, in the Fowler Gallery at The Hudgens Center for the Arts, in Georgia. The show concentrates itself on dimensional fiber works that 

"center specifically on the creative act as personal obsession. James states, “Some of the artists deliberately seek out the meditative qualities of repetitive activity to express their ideas, while the repetition found in other artist’s work is an aesthetic result of their process. A prescribed order of assembling, manipulating and presenting materials borders on ceremony for these artists.”

Yes. Exactly.

Red Collection will be there:

and Contagious:

Click here for links to the work of the fascinating artists that I'll be privileged to be showing with.

And a lovely mention in ArtDaily.org!

Repetition and Ritual

March 26 - May 25, 2013

Hudgens Center for the Arts

6400 Sugarloaf Pkwy Bldg 300

Duluth, Georgia

770-623-6002

Dreamt of...

Does remembering, which is all we can do with passing time, make everything and everywhere too much like a dream?

Some places are more like that than other places.

I don't think this garden, part of the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, was meant to be like this, it was designed and mapped and constructed and cultivated.

But it seems like something imagined from the real world, wherever that is, composed behind our eyelids from flowers seen and dreamt and reinvented.

Thump-thump Thump-thump...

Thank you to American Craft Magazine, for including my Red Blooming Biotope in the Collective Unconscious feature in their February March issue. It's never a small thing to see my work in a favorite magazine, ever.

My heart did go thump thump thump.

Dark Crystals

Dark Crystals, at the Art Gallery at Eissey Campus, Palm Beach State College

Finally, to show in South Florida, with South Floridian artists I love and admire, and to be brought together by Jacques de Beaufort, who connects us with the kind of attention to detail that I think we all have in common.

Leah Brown

Carol Prusa, wall installation

 with my three domed biotopes, foreground

My Climb, Cling, and Drift Away

Reinier Gamboa

Nune Asatryan

Samantha Salzinger

David Alan Sincavage

Freddy Jouwayed

Leah Brown

My Conjoined

and me

My Ocular Vivarium

Reinier, Nune, Jacques, (making sure that, for once, I'm not the lowermost face in a photo), me, andvid.

"The collective work of this particular group of artists, de Beaufort says, have qualities that are not only mysterious and indefinable—a “darkness”—but also possesses a radiance and beauty that qualifies them as “crystals.”

“What cannot be denied is that the works in question are indeed in possession of [a] vibrational energy,” said de Beaufort. “Each artist’s work remains a universe onto themselves, art that has been lovingly crafted into something so specific it cannot be shared by language. These ‘Dark Crystals’ are in possession of a certain quality that can be ascertained only through direct observation.”

Thank you Jacques, and Karla Walter, gallery coordinator extraordinaire, who somehow manage to do all this and make their own exceptional art at the same time. Don't me ask how.

February 19th - March 22nd

The Art Gallery at Eissey Campus

Palm Beach State College

3160 PGA Blvd

Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33410

My Solomon

I lost my beautiful Solomon last night.

My lovely boy, my best friend.

with the softest chin, and sweetest belly,

Who, in sleep, the deepest dreaming sleeps, looked more like an Abstract Expressionist painting than a cat

He was my watcher, my guardian of windows, fierce in ways that his mildness made you forget, gentle and curious, but never a pushover. He was my hero.

One afternoon, I heard strange scratching noises coming from the screened porch. It was winter, one of those beautiful low-lit winter days, and the sliders were open. I stepped out, and there was a raccoon there, it had come in through a loose piece of screen. And I thought, in a flashing burst of fear, there must be something wrong with the raccoon, it's daylight and it's in my porch, it's going to get into the house, it's rabid, it's going to attack me, it's going to attack my cat, ohmygod-where's-Solomon? 

And there he was, also on the porch, puffed up three times his size, his fur on end, his whiskers spread, his back arched, on the tips of his toes, hissing, spitting, starting towards the raccoon. And all the raccoon could do, not rabid after all, just scared to death, was try to figure out where it had come in, and remedy its very grave mistake. 

And it was gone.

My hero.

My catnip addict.

My muse.

My sunlight.

He lived 14 and a half years, thirteen with me. I brought him home when he was an adult, a shelter cat, fully formed, but from the very first hour he was mine, he rolled around and let me stroke his belly, something that happened every single night. We called it the jelly roll. He would make that little grunt of exertion he always made when jumping on the couch, that little feline "ugh", stare into my face and knead his paws and sniff and purr, then twist into a curve, pausing for a few seconds before rolling against my stomach. He never cared what position he ended up in, as long as it was close, as long as I could put my arm around him and send him off to sleep.

He lived for more than two years after his cancer surgery, always strong, always purring, always calm, always happy, up until the last day of his life. I promised him that if he were in pain, if he tried to tell me with his eyes that it was time to let him go, I would see it and I would understand. I wouldn't make him linger because I didn't want to lose him. And I set him free Saturday night. It was the hardest, hardest thing. I wound up saying things to him that I didn't know I believed, about where he was going, that I would see him there. He was warm and his forehead was as soft and shiny as it has always been, right there where the little white flame of light had always flickered. He looked straight into my eyes his last minutes, just as he had so many times in our life together, showing me he loved me, I was his, he was mine, my Solomon, every day, always. 

I love you so, my sweet, sweet boy.