June Tune Soon (Jitters)

 

Dear June,

Your song is this song, Please Be Still.  It will take some effort- please apply yourself.

Let's see...3 + 2 +7 is 12? Add another 4?

 

Dear Makers,

On the coffee table is a reading project.  On the side table, a stack of pencils and a journal; more books: a writing project.  The kitchen table has a bag of clay, watercolors, another writing project, a bag of knitting, a box of fixtures from the (in progress) bathroom remodel.  Another surface has a correspondence project on it.  An embroidery project on another.  That's just the main living area.  

In my studio, in the stifling heat, I decided to count up the art/craft projects that are currently in make mode (mood?).  I counted 12, plus 4 sub-projects, so 16, say.  It felt a little overwhelming, or manic, or loony, so like anyone would, I thought what about combining this project with that one?  What if I take these unfinished watercolor collage pieces and glue them onto the unfinished Cat Boxes?  I mean, eleven Cat Boxes is probably more than the market (ha!) will bear.  Although, to be sure, I have mailed away 4 and handed away one, so I am not up to my cardboard ears in them or anything.  Yet.

Well, of course I thought this idea was perfect!  The combinatory is my favorite dance move!  The "cumulative gestures" as Rebecca Solnit writes.  And, here is your song of the day, so we can all dance to it!

lilac cream

 

The Big Bright.

Dear Unhampered,


Matisse, I'd always been told, worked on these cut-paper pieces because he had diminishing eyesight, and it was easier for him to see these bold, high contrast forms.  I love this story very much, and I hope that no two-bit biographer ever comes along to tell me that he really made them because he suffered from schizophrenia.  Which isn't to say that I'd mind him having schizophrenia, but it is to say that the story of an artist continuing their work, no matter what was lost or diminished is a good story, a story that makes a person feel good about their paltry doodling efforts.  However, a story of making things because some kind of illness or hardship compels a person to, or worse, that the illness or physical reality is the actual 'creative' part of a person's output, leaving the artist/author as some kind of puppet dancing from a string of madness or disease, is just another one of those cliché tales of people who win things in spite of the odds.  I don't care much for those kind of stories, because it forces the listener into a distant corner of pity.

Enjoy this short film of Matisse wielding his scissors and may you stay unhampered by stories that explain and muffle, prove and trample, explicate and narrow.






Henri Matisse: Paper Cut Outs from DERTV on Vimeo.







PS

Here's another little something: The Big Bright.