FineLine Letterpress

We are happy to be celebrating its arrival!

And we are looking forward to a wonderful year ahead.

murmuration

I like the way it feels in my mouth.

And I like that it means both the action of murmuring, and, a flock of starlings.

I suppose this video is old-news by now, but I have just now seen it, and I would like to share it with you, in case you have not yet:

I caught a little bit of ‘Fresh Air’ on the way to work today.  Terry Gross was talking with Marie Howe.

I hated to get out of the car and miss a moment of her reading her poems.

In my office, I drop my things and go immediately to the computer to look her up.  I find this excerpt so beautiful, I want to share it with you (posted on the NPR site):

Excerpt: ‘The Kingdom Of Ordinary Time’

After the Movie

My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.
He says that he believes a person can love someone
and still be able to murder that person.

I say, No, that’s not love. That’s attachment.
Michael says, No, that’s love. You can love someone, then come to a day

when you’re forced to think “it’s him or me”
think “me” and kill him.

I say, Then it’s not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.

I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word.
Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist even in the
murderous heart.

I say that what he might mean by love is desire.
Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what is it?

We’re walking along West 16th Street — a clear unclouded night — and I hear my voice
repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action, I used to say
to him.

Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to look at
someone you want to eat and not eat them.

Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby.

Meister Eckhart says that as long as we love images we are doomed to
live in purgatory.

Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight.
I can’t drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I’ve just bought —

again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck the stuff from
the hole the flip top made.

What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.
But what I think he’s saying is “You are too strict. You are
a nun.”

Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think these things
of me even if he’s not thinking them?

Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer and colder.
Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen,

we both know the winter has only begun.

From The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe. Copyright 2008 by Marie Howe. Excerpted by permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Co. Inc.

We visited the Legion of Honor this past weekend where we saw the exhibit of Dutch and Flemish works.  The details in some of these works are remarkable.  Details and tiny-ness.  These artists had patience that I would love to learn.

If you go to this exhibit, do not miss the painting of The Temptation of St. Anthony.  I cannot stop thinking about it.

I am also now thinking about technical skill, and although I wouldn’t always want to display it, I would like to have it when I need it.  To make a detailed, scaly tail peek out from a skirt hem, for example.    Like everything – practice, practice, practice.  Extended, deliberate practice.

So here I am, practicing with brown ink.  Does experimenting count as practicing?

Do you remember making invisible ink out of lemon juice?

You’d write a secret note that could not be seen on the paper until you held it over a light bulb, and the heat would cause the hidden writing to mysteriously appear.    It seemed like magic.  I might like to print with invisible ink; to come up with the chemistry of lemon-juice letterpress ink (probably not good for the rollers…)

This makes me think once again about chemistry, math, physics, etc. and the ongoing discussions around encouraging science in schools.  Especially with girls.  They even have an acronym for it: STEM, for Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics.  Why did they do that – as if it is some condition, like PTSD, or ADD.  Why is it that science is not viewed as more exciting in school?  Why do we have to have “programs” to encourage girls to study science?  How did it become the less-appealing subject when it is so remarkable and beautiful?

I love reading, and studying social studies, and learning languages.  But I do not understand why a child would love these MORE than pursuing the mysteries of science.  And the basics of math are somewhat like learning a language, I think, so I wonder why it got lumped in with STEM, rather than in with French or Spanish.  Just a thought.

Circling back to the idea of mystery – do you think that understanding how things work destroys the mystery, and therefore the excitement?  I don’t think so.  I think that to see a mystery, and then try to solve it is a thrill.  Maybe not ALL mysteries should be solved (like why does the picture hanging on the wall at the top of our stairs seem to end up crooked even though no one touches it (is it something about the spinning of the planet that causes it to lean on its hanger?), and why do cookies sometimes taste better as dough?).  But working to understand enough about chemistry and physics and biology so that we can understand the world around us seems so naturally exciting.  How did we get away from thinking about it like this?

MOMA.    Salt and pepper.

While at the museum, in addition to the cafeteria, I saw an exhibit of Francis Alys.  I like his work very much.

I am very curious about the meaning of art and the “artist statement.”  I understand that it is important to have an artist statement; to be able to explain and discuss one’s art.  But I find it a bit of a mystery.  I cannot yet file it in the realm of Things That I Understand.  I would like to better understand the purpose and meaning of art.  I went to the MOMA website to read a bit more about Mr. Alys.  In the description it said that he was “…one of the foremost artists of his generation.”

I had to look up the work “foremost.”   It says it is “the first in a series or progression.”  (Can you be one of the foremost?  By definition, it seems that you either are or you aren’t.  But that is sort of beside the point.)   What does it mean to be the foremost artist.  Is there some sort of ranking of artists?  Can someone be foremost in in a field that is subjective?   Does foremost mean that he produces the most work?  Or makes the most money?  Or is written about the most?

OK, I got a little off on a tangent there.   I was going to say that the photo above documents the small-scale enactment of art in everyday life.  Of everyday objects in a public space.  That in it I am investigating methods of re-enactment that reflect my ideas and process.  The simplicity of the message creates an impression of profound truth.  Embracing opaque means, I am commenting on the state of the world in the MOMA cafeteria, highlighting my existance in it.

No, not really.

But I do love the following, that Peter Schjeldahl wrote (August 8 New Yorker) about Lucian Freud’s paintings:  ”The best – notably “And the Bridegroom” (1993), which finds a slim lass asleep beside the dozing mountain of Bowery – are powerfully perfect on Freud’s truculently conservative terms, forcing raw flesh across an unguarded, because unsuspected, frontier of beauty.  At the least, they radiate the authenticity of something that no one would do if he didn’t mean it.”

forcing raw flesh across an unguarded frontier of beauty

something that no one would do if he didn’t mean it

This I understand.

It seemed to me, yesterday, that the oatmeal had sort of an Alexander McQueen feel to it.

Maybe it’s the light, and the oatmeal just happened to be there.

I love greys.