what am i doing here?
Place as palimpsest | A prompt for you
The building I live in, with its beautiful light, was built the year they sank the Titanic. This place I lounge around in polyester dropship pants, doing gas station cannabinoids and listening to 5-hour downtempo dj sets mixing indigenous rhythms with psychedelic sermons? This used to be a factory.
By 1915, the place I call my studio had produced more automobiles than any other factory in the country, rolling 32 shiny new machines off these concrete floors a day.
What am I doing here?
I’m painting flowers.
I look out our great industrial windows toward the river— a swath of green cut through with electrical cables. Underneath that canopy of trees & a cracked cap of asphalt seeps decades of unchecked chemical runoff into the soil — one of two Superfund sites within a mile or so walk from my easel.
I’m painting but I’m thinking about war and the next quarter of my business… and whether or not this is the last summer of any semblance of democracy in the US… and I put my phone on Do Not Disturb.
The cats have clocked in to yell at the mourning doves now. They bare their little teeth while they chitter at the window. I’m also slightly removed from the object of my attention— I’m painting from a photograph Neon took on one of our walks by the Superfund site…
I’m here, but there’s a voice in my ear…
Why make art that’s “just” pretty?
Really, Lisette, like…why wake up and insist you make poetry and banal little watercolors during the complete breakdown of our ecosystems and our communities and governments and of meaning itself?
Like…
Must be nice to get stoned off your ass while you stare at the sky and play with your little crayons!
And……it is!
But I challenge you to look deeply at a single flower for four hours and not experience at least the briefest moment in which you feel inextricably involved with a miracle .
A prompt for you this week…
Creating art by observation promotes an open, attentive receptivity— to both the tangible and the subtle worlds to which we all belong.
I believe this is a direct antidote to the reductionist/reactionist cycle which technology inflicts upon our nervous systems every day.
And I don’t believe this is a leisure activity that should be relegated to an elite class— but rather one that all of us (with the absolute luxuries of time and relative security) should actively pursue such that we are able.
Life is short. Let’s notice it all.
That’s my creative manifesto for the day.
This month I’m focusing on making art-with-place & sharing my process and prompts with you.
And, as you can see by today’s musing, it’s getting pretty heady over here!
But what I’m up to is pretty simple:
I’m going outside and painting/drawing by direct observation (“en plein air” if you’re nasty)
Or I’m taking reference photos while I’m outside then working from the photos back in the studio (aka automobile factory).
And I’m writing poetry in conversation with all of it, because that’s what makes me feel most alive.
This week: Can you spend an uninterrupted hour(???) with…a flower? With…a leaf? Or the whole tree? A corner of your yard or a spot in the alley? Letting your senses and attention tunnel in and spiral out: One hour of creative attention with pen-in-hand.
Record your experience in whatever combination of words/images/creative spirit that moves you. What do you see and feel and come to know in that place during that hour?
Be it poetry, scribbles, or song— I really look forward to seeing your work in this month’s convo thread:
Here’s one of the 10-minute poems I wrote in Ekphrastic Fantastic last Sunday:
Eve (in conversation with "Eve" painted by Mati Klarwein, 1963)
Eve was alone in the garden with her thoughts of death and how her face must resemble the face of the moon. Am I to be? Or not to be? She, Intoxicated by the scent of herself, her hair cradled in lace, tangled with the air. Auto-erotic entopic bouquet— As above, so below: Gone tomorrow, here today.
July 7th is the next Ekphrastic Fantastic on the Vision Train— To have your art featured in an upcoming gathering, upload your work here.
xo,
