Close To Home Artist Talk

Artist Talk today at the Tyler St. Cafe in Port Townsend, Washington. Several artists including Andrea spoke about their work. Sarah, the curator and Mark Stevenson, sculptor, bronze caster of the Haller Fountain told us outrageous stories about the Haller Fountain. In Port Townsend she is called Galatea although she is really Venus rising from the water. It was fun to find out that cups used to hang from Galatea because the fountain was the city's drinking water. I would not recommend doing that today.Another hilarious tidbit was how when the fountain was being recast, Mark was told not to uncover the layers of paint. It turned out that this was because using the term loosely, two gentlemen when doing an earlier repair increased the size of the breasts and did not want the story of their putty uncovered. Many more stories will be found in Sarah's upcoming book about the Haller Fountain.

Pictures here of Andrea at the talk holding a cup up to her ink and wash drawing of the cup of cocoa that is Galatea transformed for cold weather.

"The cold made me think about hot chocolate and somehow that led to a conversation about art in action. What would happen if we floated marshmallows in the Haller Fountain?"
It turns out that in light of the former cups dangling from her arms or wherever this ink on paper image was appropriate.

Sunrise Series

Sunrise, Port Townsend Bay

Today's Sunrise, February 5, 2010

Today was a silvery sunrise.Not all color and drama. This was a challenge to capture.
While painting a picture of the sunrise, it feels as if I am participating in a visual transformation not unlike the sky's own transformation.The clouds move, float and reform. The light changes. The picture evolves in the same way.

Today

Art and Poetry

In the poet,W.S. Mervin's conversation on KUOW this morning, he mentioned that to create poetry, we need every bit of our knowledge. We have our knowledge, but the poem is not made of knowledge, it is made of what you don't know.( I am paraphrasing what I scribbled down on a scrap of paper that I found among the books and snack dishes scraped up off of the floor of my car). A poem comes partly our of the unknown, what isn't really there. It emerges.He says that if you already know everything it isn't a poem.

To me, Mervin's description of poetry is a lot like creating a painting. If you know too much, its boring. The painting is born from an image however fleeting, but has to be discovered as one creates the artwork.