Last Wednesday, January 29,

Shannon Haupt stopped by the Fiber and Paper Arts Club

to lead everyone in an ARM-KNITTING workshop.

Come on, everybody's doing it. . . . .

Over Winter Break, we traveled far and wide (north, mostly).

We touched down in Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Brooklyn.

Neil touched down in Manhattan, but I stuck to Brooklyn.

Kentucky

I cannot stand the thought of posting Christmas pictures in February,
and Kentucky this time was allllllllll Christmas.
So instead, I give you, "On the Road", featuring Shel Silverstein:

Ohio

There is much to write about this visit, but for now, some pictures.

Jaden and Finn in the kitchen with Audrey:

Saturday

Finn and Jaden:

Left to right:

Seated: My mom, Phyllis, Brooke, Al

Standing: Jaden, David, Paul, Didi

Left to right:

Rodney, Paul, Laura, Chelsea, Amanda, Shelly:

 Al and David

(Kathy and Laura in the background):

Neil and Rodney

(Chelsea and Hannah in the background):

Finn's portrait of Hannah:

And Hannah's portrait of Finn

(she has him standing in a banana split):

Late in the day

(Finn and my mom):

(More on Ohio later!)

Pennsylvania

No pictures, but I can tell you there was a lot of
art talk, swearing, and Thai food with our dear friends,
Josh Azarella and Tiffany Calvert.
Lots of art talk. Lots of swearing.

Brooklyn

Yes, stick bugs in Brooklyn:

And camp fires:

It always feels as good to leave as it does to arrive.

Students reading in my studio/office space:

One Night Only!

Flying Jellyfish. . . .

www.nytimes.com/video/science

A red radish from the Haupt garden.
A red elephant on its way to Colorado.

Southern Intarsia

Part I

The gap between “don’t” and “look” isolates “look” so that we experience it as a subliminal positive.

Memory is a current event, not a recall. We poetically situate memory as a tendril reaching backwards to yesterday, but in fact it is a construction in the present. This is not to descend into relativity. The present does not erase past realities, but it also does not conjure it. What we conjure when we “re-member” is a collection of current sensations.

In “The Liturgy of the Dominican Constitutions: Frescoes in the Cloisters of San Marco,” William Hood writes that there are no “story-telling” scenes in the paintings, that there is no attempt to “integrate the past with the present.” The Mocking of Christ is remarkable in this regard as intentionally disembodied hands and head spit at the blindfolded seated figure of Christ as though the not-Christ does not warrant more than implication. Here, not even the present integrates with the present.

In my art historical naiveté, I thought that the missing fragments of torso and limbs had been lost to time and that the visual information had been irretrievable to contemporary restorers. In fact, Fra Angelico omitted the material from the beginning so, in this context, the notion of “being lost to time” seems a saccharine self-indulgence. I was mourning the deterioration of a master’s work when in fact no one had died. But then, The Mocking of Christ presents a kind of death. The death of the beginning, middle, and end. The death of narrative. Fra Angelico may have been the first Modernist. God in the figure of Christ (here seated in a royal pose with orb and staff, not humbled on the cross) is situated as the great “I am”, as most immediate.

The Meeting House

Pleasureville, Henry County, Kentucky

 Saturday, November 30, 2013

While JoAnn teaches a newcomer to knit,

my mother reads Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America:

". . .if we conceive of a culture as one body, which it is, we see that all of its disciplines are everybody's business, and that the proper university product is therefore not the whittled-down, isolated mentality of expertise, but a mind competent in all its concerns. To such a mind it would be clear that there are agricultural disciplines that have nothing to do with crop production, just as there are agricultural obligations that belong to people who are not farmers."

  Raise high the roofbeams!

 

Angie, JoAnn, and me:

 

This past Saturday, I went back to Henry County, KY

to see JoAnn, the Meetinghouse, and the sheep.

I went with my mom and Angie Davis:

The Indigo Rabbit