Workshop in Ann Arbor + art update

Also Annie Dillard

I’ll be teaching a paper workshop next Thursday, April 23rd 6:30-800pm at the Cluster Museum in Ann Arbor. We’ll get into curve folding, pleating systems, and paper mechanics. It’s $75, there are a few open seats left, and you can register here.

---

This week, I’ve found myself down a rabbit hole. Something vessel-adjacent, circling what I can only describe as strange, tentacle-like appendages.

Oh hello

I’ve cautiously started calling them “Mononoke Symbiotes,” a nod to both the forest spirits of Princess Mononoke and the alien symbiotes of the Marvel universe. At nearly 46, I’m clearly regressing.

You see it, Right?

But I’m also doing something else: I’m following the work.

One of the most underrated skills for artists is paying attention. It’s crucial to not know the exact destination, but to pay attention and hold on.

There is a dialogue with the work. I’m watching what’s happening, noticing what holds, and pushing it further. Judgement is not part of the process, relinquishing control is.

Do my galleries know what to do with these? Do collectors want them? Is there a market? Do I even like them?

These are questions I can’t afford to ask right now. Logistics come later.

A better set of questions emerged this week:
What is the pattern on a nautilus called?
Am I in cephalopod territory?
Are Turing patterns found in nature and how do they occur?

I’m at a point where I want to make only things I’ve never seen before. Paper shouldn’t be able to do this, but it will.

As I prepare for our upcoming class at Penland, I’ve been revisiting a few books on process. This passage from The Writing Life by Annie Dillard stayed with me this week. Maybe it will stay with you, too.

Xoxo

M

Paul Glenn was a painter, a strong-armed, soft-faced, big blond man in his fifties; every summer he lived down the beach. He was a friend of the family. One summer morning I visited him, and asked about his painting. We sat at his kitchen table.

His recent easel painting, and his study of abstract expressionist Mark Tobey’s canvases, and his new interest in certain Asian subjects, his understanding of texture in two dimensions, and possibly the mistiness of the Pacific Northwest and its fabulous, busy skies—something, I do not know what, had gotten him experimenting with dipping papers into vats of water on which pools of colored oil floated. He had such papers drying on the kitchen counters. Some of them looked like a book’s marbled endpapers, or fine wallpaper—merely decorative. Some others were complex and subtle surfaces, suggestive and powerful. Paul Glenn was learning which techniques of dripping the colors on the water, and which techniques of drawing the paper up through the colors, yielded the interesting results. He had been working at it for six months. How he was going to use the papers was another matter, and the crucial one: he could cut them into collage material, he could fold them into sculpture, he could paint over them and into them. He was following the work wherever it led.

The next summer, we returned to the island. Paul Glenn had spent the winter there. I visited him in his house on the beach in late June. He was tan of face already, and perfectly sane-witty and forceful, if a bit soft of voice.

I asked Paul how his work was going.

“You couldn’t have known Ferrar Burn,” he said. We were sitting at the round table by the kitchen window. There were white shells on the windowsill, and black beach stones. “He died twenty years ago. He was a joyful man, and a calm and determined one. He brought his family out here-June Burn, who wrote books and newspaper columns, and two little boys, you know North and Bob out here to this island, where there’s nothing but what you can find on the beach or grow.

Evidently Paul did not want to talk about how his work was going. Fair enough.

“Ferrar was striking: he had that same pale, thin skin his sons have, and their black eyes and hair. He and June built that cedar shack up on Fishery Point.

It was her study. Their house was near the woods— nice timbers.”

Paul knew I knew all this, except what Ferrar looked like. Paul’s hair had grown long; he kept moving pale strands of it behind his ears. I was fresh from the mainland, a little too bright and quick. He laughed openly at what he could easily see was my impatience; we had been tolerant friends for a few years.

“One evening,” he went on, “Ferrar saw a log floating out in the channel. It looked yellow, like Alaska cedar; he hoped it was Alaska cedar. He rowed out to get it.”

Everyone on the island scavenged the valuable logs, for building. If the logs did not wash up on the beach, it took a motorboat to get them in; they were heavy in the water.

“It was high tide, slack. Ferrar saw the log, launched his little skiff at Fishery Point, and rowed out in the channel. Sure enough, it was that beautiful Alaska cedar, that pale yellow wood—just a short log, about eight feet, or he never would have tried it without a motor. I guess he thought he could row it in while the tide was still slack.

“He tied onto the log”—such logs often have a big iron staple hammered into one end—” and started rowing back home with it. He had about twenty feet of line on it. He started rowing home, and the tide caught him.”

From Paul’s window, I could look north up the beach and see Fishery Point. One of Ferrar’s sons still used that old rowboat-a little eight-foot pram, now painted yellow and blue. Paul’s blue eyes caught mine again.

*The tide started going out, and it caught that log and dragged it south. Ferrar kept rowing back toward his house. The tide pulled him south down the strait here”—Paul indicated the long sweep of salt water in front of his house—”from one end to the other. Ferrar kept rowing toward Fishery Point. He might as well have tied onto a whale. He was rowing to the north and moving fast to the south. He traveled stern first. He wanted to be going home, so toward home he kept pulling. When the sun set, at about nine o’clock, he’d swept south the length of this beach, rowing north all the way. When the moon rose a few hours later—he told us—he saw he’d swept south past the island altogether and out into the channel between here and Stuart Island. He had been rowing through those dark hours. He continued to row away from Stuart Island and continued to see it get closer.

‘Then he felt the tide go slack, and then he felt it coming in again. The current had reversed.

“Ferrar kept rowing in the half moonlight. The tide poured in from the south. He kept rowing north for home—only now the log was with him. He and his log were both floating on the current, and the current was bearing them up and carrying them like platters. It started getting light at about three o’clock, and he rowed back past this island’s southern tip. The sun came up, and he rowed all the length of this beach. The tide brought him back on home. His wife, June, saw him coming; she’d been curious about him all night.”

Paul had a wide, loose smile. He shifted in his chair. He raised his coffee cup, as if to say, Cheers.

“He pulled up on his own beach. They got the log rolled beyond the tideline. I saw him a few days later. Everybody knew he’d been carried out almost to Stuart Island, trying to bring in a log. Everybody knew he just kept rowing in the same direction. I asked him about it. He said he had a little backache. I didn’t see the palms of his hands.”

Paul looked into his empty coffee cup, pleased, and then looked through the window, still smiling. I started to carry my coffee cup to the sink, but he motioned me down. He wasn’t finished.

“So that’s how my work is going,” he said.

What?

“You asked how my work is going,” he said. “That’s how it’s going. The current’s got me. Feels like I’m about in the middle of the channel now. I just keep at it. I just keep hoping the tide will turn and bring me.