It's been about three months since I submitted my graduate thesis and had the honor of wearing that puffy hat of a tam. I've come back home to Texas but will truly miss the red brick of St. Louis and the many minds and hearts that I had the privilege of knowing in my time there.

I've also come back to Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek after starting it and setting it aside a few years ago and wondering to myself why I didn't cite Chapter 2, titled "Seeing," in my graduate thesis? The title did come to mind at the time but was set aside (again) in favor of others. I suppose it's in its rightful place now on a list of several books I've been compiling since submitting my thesis, some of which were cited and deserve a fuller read but mostly titles which were not cited at all but which I came to in the writing process and after or revived from the past like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

I realize now that the thesis didn't have to summarize and investigate every single aspect of my work or every single relevant topic in art history, theory, and philosophy as I had wrongly and fearfully imagined then. And it didn't. Instead, it was more of an exercise in getting to the core of what I was doing in my art work at the time and putting that into a legible body of words and images, including my own and those of a small selection of kindred thinkers and makers, and in no way at all conclusive or final. A neat bow of a diploma was awarded at the end, but the thesis writing process and graduate school in general was quite messy. It was a cocktail of doubts and questions, exciting and sometimes scary experiments, failures, second tries, and little successes every now and then. One of our professors was quite right when he told us during the first week of our program that we would not end up masters of fine arts even though we were pursuing our Masters of Fine Arts. But what's really neat to me is how the whole process has served as a launching pad to new experiences, new thoughts, new ideas and books to explore for the years to come.

Which brings me back to Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and "Seeing." The idea of seeing, and "contemplative seeing" in particular, was the core of my thesis, and I spent a good deal of it in trying to define "seeing" in relation to my work. It seems as if I am perpetually defining and trying to understand the term for myself through the making of work, thinking, reading, reflecting, and writing.

With a friend I recently discussed the dilemma of seeking versus seeing, something I've been thinking about for a while. All of this thinking and reading and writing about seeing has led me to be much more conscious of my work and process, which has allowed me to grow but also made me dangerously aware of a creative process which seems to thrive on a certain un-awareness or naivete in regards to itself. In other words, I sometimes find myself seeking moments of seeing rather than being in an open state of waiting for them. Dillard describes this seeking kind of seeing and then she describes "another kind of seeing that involves letting go...The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut."

It's funny how moments of seeing seem to occur for me more often when I do not have my camera than when I do, and sometimes I have the option to retrieve my camera and go back and photograph what I saw later, like the sun shining through this pattern of holes eaten through a ginger plant leaf in my backyard:

And while the image is a token of the moment of seeing earlier, it is not one and the same.

Sometimes I'm lucky and happen to have my camera with me in the moment. And sometimes I don't. And sometimes it doesn't matter whether I do or not because while I hold my breath observing the crumpled paper napkin arranged just so on the sidewalk before me, it is blown away by the wind a second later, and it is in those moments that I swallow a disappointment of a missed image and smile to myself because I can revel in the split second of seeing when "my own shutter open[ed]."

Are the clustered growths of plants or the random arrangements of fallen debris on the ground reflective of the patterns of the stars in the sky above?

Dusk is one of my favorite times of day, and today I savored it from the pool on a slow and quiet summer evening:

I recently returned from a trip to Austin and West Texas to meet my new baby nephew, visit family and good friends, and see the beautiful countryside. I was struck by the beauty of a newborn child, old mountains, and the numerous stars of the night sky, so often forgotten when living in the city.

"It seemed as though he were never able to forget his ultimate purpose and goal --- he was going home; home to his own master, home where he belonged, and nothing else mattered. This lodestone of longing, this certainty, drew him to lead his companions ever westward through wild and unknown country, as unerringly as a carrier pigeon released from an alien loft."

-Sheila Burnford, excerpt from Chapter 5 of The Incredible Journey

Journeys West

I feel the weight of a one month old child in my arms.
Our eyes meet.
One looking at the other looking at the other,
And I laugh in amazement.

Night falls, and I run out the door.
Has it really been five years?
To remember again how very small we are,
And how we move within this vast space.
Only a sore, craning neck can separate my gaze from the twinkling pattern above.

Midday sun and triple digit heat.
Red faces and bewildered park rangers.
Shadows become sanctuaries,
Excuses for diverting one's path.
Little cracks and crevices become mighty strongholds
For fingertips and toes guiding hesitant bodies
Across smoothed and hot rock.

Clusters of wildflowers naturally divided into bouquets
Dot the field deliberately
Leaving spaces for walking.

In the desert wind,
Their varied blooms each orbit their own space,
But gather together into constellations
Into the ground
As one
To slurp whatever water is given.

Look up from the flowers and up at the mountain,
At the vertical thrusts of rock
In neatly angular rows.
Is it still moving?
Do you think it's still moving?

Her mother rides a bike down the dusty path
As we scrawl and liquidly glorify the silhouette
Of the nearby mountain on paper.

Look down at his eyes.
They may turn green or hazel or brown.
Right now they are dark blue.
He closes them, and so do I.

Looking over old photos of inspiration I have gathered mainly for drawings and paintings, I am reminded of my interest in the found. In seeing and recording these found shapes, forms, and compositions I discover in my immediate environment. Of not disturbing them, but letting them be. Reflecting on them. Their contours. Their placement in space. And marking these things.

The camera serves as a sketching tool for me, quickly documenting these shapes, these forms, and these compositions from a specific point of view. But do the photos stand alone? Do they fully convey what I see? Most often, I am compelled to reinterpret this visual data in some way; to sort and organize, to simplify, to re-document by hand. Eliminating information and paring down images to an essential structure, the origin of which is mysterious.

The American folk artist, Bessie Harvey, referred to these mysterious structures as divine designs. When visiting the Museum of Biblical Art in New York last February, I was struck by a quote of hers referenced on the plaque next to her piece: "I am not the artist. Nature shapes my work. And God gives me a vision to see what nature has done, and then my job is to bring it out so that man can see it."

I believe my photo/sketches document these "vision[s]" that I strive to make visible. Determining the best way to "bring [them] out," though, is a continual investigation. 

The beautiful spring weather these past couple days has inspired me to return to a video project I began experimenting with last fall where I document my bedroom curtain blowing in the wind. I'm very interested in capturing a simple movement created by chance and inciting a feeling of stillness and contemplation. I plan to include other moments from around the apartment taken during the same afternoon. Here is a potential clip:

I'm continuing to experiment with making drawings in the environment in response to found objects or situations. I have been thinking about the concept of circumambulation the past few months, or walking around something as a form of worship. Previously, I have been drawing lines as a symbolic "walking," but today I walked.

"The grace of a curve is an invitation to remain. We cannot break away from it without hoping to return. For the beloved curve has nest-like powers; it incites us to possession, it is a curved 'corner,' inhabited geometry. Here we have attained a minimum of refuge, in the highly simplified pattern of a daydream of repose. But only the dreamer who curls up in contemplation of loops, understands these simple joys of delineated repose."
-Gaston Bachelard from "Corners" of The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas

Image from Shower Drawings Project, 2013

to be a child again
to draw in the snow
to draw around
the found.

On a clear winter afternoon
Chalk lines were drawn
As markers of found contours
And specific moments
In time
Of a particular place.