Another sketch. Same thing, different day. Keeping at it, with aimless purpose. I wonder if these inclinations will start to take on more shape and suggest something else. I wonder if they need to
I read Sally Mann’s Art Work a few days ago. It’s engaging in part because of Mann’s forward, propulsive style, her raw, ranging perspective, and her (seemingly authentic) humility. And of course it is filled with ideas suggestive of roads: traveled and not. A theme that recurs is the tendency of many artists who can (must?) harvest the same fields over and over. They tend to those things that continually captivate, for decades. Endless return to unshakable presences.
Like Williams’ red wheelbarrow, in that it depends on so much. Dependare, to hang down from. Like a chandelier depends from the ceiling. We are the chandeliers attached to the ceilings of our imaginations.
Take, for instance, the poet Peter Gizzi’s repeated contention in interviews that the human face serves as our earliest primer:
“But what is ultimately the first text that we actually encounter? The face, the human face. That’s the original text and we read it for survival, for emotional content, for safety, for context. The face is a very complicated text.”
And:
“What’s the first image? What’s the first thing we learn how to read? It’s the human face. That’s the first text that we all experience. And we learn how to read it for all sorts of signs and meanings and understanding. It is the text—it’s the ur-text.”1
We have our proclivities, and they come from within and without. In dark moods they can feel like ruts and dead ends but they are also waypoints on an evolving map in constant need of reinvention, drafting paths towards terra incognita.
A lot depends on how we see things.
