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Appalachian Patchwork
Friday night I got to view some wonderfully meditative work by friend and former colleague Patricia Mink, Professor Emerita from ETSU’s Department of Art and Design. Her work can be seen at the Tipton Gallery this month.
Pat’s textile work is cutting edge in how she enhances old practice with new processes. She takes fibers and threads, fabric scraps, and tests with homegrown dyes, then layers in both hand and free-form machine stitching. She works up many of her ideas using the aid of advanced programs, huge color printers and looms. Her work has the sense of being both familiar, but also strikingly rich. Creativity can be defined as how anyone takes what is already given and then makes from the elements something brand new. This to me is the most exciting and dignifying work we can do! We start from where we are.
Pat’s givens, her own practice, roots deeply out from the rich Appalachian homespun craftwork that has emerged from these hills for generations. People here don’t bother knowing what “fine art” is, they just do what’s needed with their hands in extraordinary ways. Extraordinary ways.
This huge quilt is made from Pat’s long-term collection of samples, tests, studies and observations from old barns and country textures. It is a masterwork, a piece of extraordinary beauty as simply an aesthetic accomplishment. But this piece also is a powerful emblem to me of so much more. I stood and stared at it, looking closely and then standing back, taking comfort, and noting to myself that just by looking I was doing exactly that: taking comfort in the quilt.
Originally, I don’t come from these Southern highlands, yet it is a wonderful privilege to live among folks who respect their land and what it gives, who respect their families and where they came from, and the traditions from which they feel it is never necessary to apologize. There’s a freeing humility here. And when the givens get broken, the bits that remain, which came simply enough, can be pieced back together in ways more lovely than when they first were made.
We all are presently immersed here in the Southern Appalachians with sadness. The muck from over swelling rivers has settled, the huge masses of broken timbers are slowly being carted, helicopters are flying regularly up into the hills, mule teams and pick up trucks also, bridges are being crafted by volunteers, but the lives shattered will take more time. Here is just one drone view from 10 minutes where I live.
Please pray for the broken hearts. Mending has started for many. I heard this morning about a young woman who gave birth alone during the hurricane, and was on her last bottle for her baby. A woman, who somehow knew to bring baby things showed up just in time, and now momma and baby are safely in care with others.
Time and Treasure
Some things come home in your soul. Some things stick, like a stake in the ground that determines a trajectory towards the ultimate. Some of these things are surprising, difficult, even unasked for and therefore all the truer. How does any one of us even know what is really true? What will last that is significant? I have some musings today, which support why I made this piece some years ago on old brown paper using gesso, graphite and pastel. The making of this didn’t take me long, you can see the fast fat brush stroking. But the thinking that prompted this image has been lifelong.
Read More...Reflection on a Muddy Road
This is a simple reflection on a muddy road, late afternoon, close to Masai land. We were in a big jeep which could handle the terrain. Exotic animals could turn up anywhere and it was an adventure at this point which is part of the feel, and then the contrast with this sudden, common, quiet beauty laid out before us on the road. Often, I can’t get my iPhone out fast enough when I see the moment, and yes there were better glimpses than what I finally could catch. Maybe that is why I wanted to try to memorialize the vision in paint.
Read More...the bride who is waiting…
On exhibit currently at the Blue Spiral Gallery in Asheville, NC is the work of a Spanish painter, Rafel Bestard. If you are local, I highly suggest visiting or at least looking at his work and reading his statement. He is a philosopher painter and I don’t believe necessarily a Christian one. However, his work is touching on themes that I find deeply arresting and pertinent. Look into him and see what you think.
Read More...escalations
I had a rich conversation with one of my grandsons this past week. He’s on a campus where there is all the same clamor you’re hearing about. He was thoughtful about it, so I spoke of what the building take-overs were like when I was a student. How I was involved and what emerged as a result. There were boisterous chants then too, same rhythm different words. How robotic? Are we just in some kind of cyclical reiteration or are we heading somewhere? Time is escalating. Moments are consequential. And it has all been spoken of before.
Read More...Bread and Salt
It’s been years, decades, since I first heard an old Russian proverb. It latched into my head in some primal way, and I’ve never forgotten it: “eat bread and salt and speak the truth.” What could be more simple? What could be more valuable in any earthly life? Bread and salt are basic. Even the poorest in the tundra have bread of some kind to share. And truth? What could be more necessary, what could be more desired in a meeting of people at any table, especially in our times of fake this and that. I am so weary of all the fakeness and all the outright lies.
Read More...‘next level’
It’s an inside joke in our house now. ‘Next level’ stuff feels like sleight of hand.
Why? because all that went before has intrinsic value. And it not only remains but is the source for what follows.
Read More...palliative
The word came to me when I was working this week on some small pieces in my studio. I am familiar with the term “palliative” since conversing with a friend who is a hospice nurse. But I had not considered this term for me… until now. Palliative: n. an action that is intended to alleviate a problem without addressing […]
Read More...face to Face, or shadow for Substance
In a wooded area near the fields below, I was enchanted by the shadows and then the light
Read More...night soundings
This scene references a vivid memory I had when I was about 18, sitting on a log in Canada and peering up into the deep night sky. No one sitting around the campfire was speaking. I had no prior information about God which was at all meaningful, so I was not prepared with any assumptions or pre-conditioning. I just looked up silently at the dark vastness sprinkled with an array of stars. Soon, unbidden, I was covered with awe. The depth of sparkling bodies suspended way above me in the heavens was beyond beautiful. It was calling me in some kind of gentle way to awaken to what seemed suddenly obvious: that there was a Creator who was way beyond what I knew sitting there on the earth. I said nothing to anybody, but my heart gained something important that night.
Read More...Taking Root
The Maker of every soul and every seed is good, and He is at work. One of the very last Hebrew prophets, Zechariah (paralleling many signs which culminate in Revelation) assured the same, saying “Who has despised the day of small things?” for “the eyes of the Lord range to and fro throughout the earth” over all that He has made. Join Him in the planting and the waiting.
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