Bits of house keeping:

1. Yesterday’s published version of the blog somehow dropped the attribution of the poem to its author. It was written by former Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen. I apologize.

2. I will be back in hospital for the rest of this week for more surgery. Savor the dark blues of today’s musing until I’ll reach out again.

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One of the things I find truly inspiring are reports of people who have excelled in their fields and yet are suddenly trying something new and different, unafraid of failure or ridicule. So many aspects involved in that process, all of which I cherish individually: curiosity, flexibility, courage, plain old guts.

Take Brooklyn-based artist Lorna Simpson, for example, an accomplished conceptual photographer now in her early 60s, often included in the context of Carrie Mae Weems‘ and Kara Walker‘s work when it comes to conversations about strikingly innovative and successful Black women artist. Her body of work, making collages with found photographs, staged settings, script, and sometimes video elements, was defined by the way she juxtaposed language with image, opening entirely different modes of interpretation. And now she has turned to painting.

A description of her new approach and her thoughts around it can be found in an interesting Vogue Interview. The huge paintings (some are 9 feet in the largest dimension) consists of layers of screen-printed materials, still in collage mode, applied to some substrate canvas like gessoed wood or fiberglass, which she then paints with ink. The work was in progress before we were confronted with Covid-19, but after the true colors of the Republican administration started to reveal themselves, environmental consequences and all.

The underlying photo materials, found in old magazines and blown up to these extra large dimensions, are all about historical expeditions into parts of the Arctic. There are still elements of language (although undecipherable when you do not have access to the real thing and rely on photographs in art reviews,) but they recede against the background of magnificent landscape.

A sense of terra nova and seemingly glacial silence, combined with the dark ink shrouding the landscape, evokes an ominous tone fit for our times and, alas, planet. I associate Arctic expeditions with people willingly or forced to push physical limits, with a longing to experience the most alien terrain on earth compared to our usual habitat, and with territorial power grabs to exploit yet more of earth’s limited resources.

The paintings mirror the sense that darkness descends and eternal ice is no longer eternal. They remind us that extreme winter storms become frequent experiences, and vulnerabilities previously reserved for those living at the extreme boundaries of human civilization are now engulfing the rest of us. They strike me less as objects of desire for the adventurous, or seekers of solitude, but more like clarion calls to be alert to the ruthlessness of environmental degradation. The fluidity of the ink also triggers a sense that nature is lowering a billowing curtain, a curtain call next, signaling the end of a performance before the house empties for good. From Brooklyn to the Behring Sea – we are warned to batten the hatches.

And, sounding like a broken record, what is my next sentence? Yup, how I wish I could see that work in person!

Photographs today are miniature blue ice abstractions found on my tomato cages during the recent storm, photographed through a window.

Music is not my cup of tea, but the video was worth it. Check it out, to see how one pulls off a piano performance on an arctic ice floe.

Here is a better piece to combat all that darkness: Angel of Light. (We recently listed to Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus, remember?)