Dawn (Open (Guide))

I have an ambivalent relationship with dawn. For most of my life, I have avoided it, I have been one who smacks the alarm clock and sleeps in. Partly I justified that by my work habits, for I often found that my most productive time of the day began around 4 pm, and so I would stay up well past midnight, stretching that part of my day until my eyes could no longer stand it. To see dawn, then, was to have gone to bed earlier, was to have cut short my writing time, was to have got less done.

Was, was, was.

In the last several years, I have increasingly become a morning person. I have found, for example, that I very much enjoy waking up and knowing that I still have several hours before I have to be anywhere, or do anything, that the morning can be a quiet space of my own time with no demands upon me. I have found, also, that I can read far more and far faster immediately after I wake up, so that a paper that would take an hour to read at 4 pm would be only ten or twenty minutes at 8 am. Even my writing is better, for in that liminal space just before full alertness, ideas float freely in my mind.

But these are all simple practicalities. They are almost rationalizations of my mornings. I'm suspicious of rationalizations in general, from anyone, and especially from myself. There's something more at stake than the practical, for at heart human beings are not practical creatures. We are impetuous, instinctual, emotional, and contradictory at heart. Practicality? It is like rationality and reason: in the little things we exude it, but in the deeper motivations of our lives, we make of it an indifferent guide.

To sleep in is a luxury of childhood. It is the act of someone who sees the future as vast, so that the idea of rolling back over and sleeping a little more does not seem like a wasteful act. Somewhere along the way, between childhood and now, I have lost that ability. I can no longer look forward to life and see a great unpainted sheet of paper. I'm in the thick of it. My hands are covered in paint.

Dawn. Watercolor on birch plywood board, approximately 6 in x 6 in, 2016

Alcatraz Avenue and Racine Street (Bridge / Trust)

The days and nights have been beautiful of late. We are in transition—all of us, now more so than ever—and what comes next is anyone's guess. Yet let me repeat this—each morning has been beautiful. Wednesday? A day of purple-haze mountains, deep azure sky, with crisp air and warm sun, as if someone somewhere had flipped the switch marked "Autumn" and there we all were. Thursday was as grand, and Friday started with a gray that was not cold, perhaps in part because of the reddening leaves on the trees across the street from my apartment. These are days made for walking, for parks, for respite. I know it is just my imagination, but I swear that sometimes I can smell burning leaves, woodsmoke, and the sweetness of windfall on the ground, rotting gorgeously in the late season sun.

At night, when I go out, I tend to head eastward, because that is where the nearest stores, restaurants, and coffee shops are. I rarely go west of my apartment, because west of me is that lost portion of Shattuck that hasn't really been anything since probably the 1920s. It is, however, where my nearest laundry is, and so errands took me there Saturday night. The walk there was in gold, but for the walk back, the sun was gone. Instead, I was greeted by what the French call the "blue hour," highlighted all the more by a moon nearly full. Below it, in the distance, were the hills of Berkeley and Claremont and Oakland. Although the lights of the houses on those hills glowed, they could not compete with the moon, and the deep inky blue of the night.

Such scenes are in my blood. I grew up in a house that faced east, faced towards a range of low hills that served as the horizon of my life, a foil for the reflection of the setting sun as well as an entrance point for the moon and the sun.

I would like to take comfort in that, comfort in some cliche of the lunar and solar cycles continuing despite what we below do. Yet it is more urgency, not comfort, that I feel. Given my age, my statistical life expectancy, and the average of a full moon every 29.53 days, I will see this sight only 509 more times. (By contrast, according to iTunes I have already listened to Miles Davis and John Coltrane's Blue In Green 734 times.)

509 more full moons. Give or take. On average. And I want to savor every one of them.

Alcatraz Avenue and Racine Street, Watercolor and gouache on birch plywood panel, 6 in x 8 in, 2016

Anticipation (Love (change))

Driving through the vast spaces of the American West is sometimes like taking part in a road film. Yes, the horizons are wide, but they also obscure—even if only by the curvature of the Earth. What we see is constantly changing, unfolding, as ridge after ridge pass away, revealing in sequence ever more distant ridges, ever more distant peaks.

The lesson came home most on my first visit to Nevada several years ago. Sure, I knew from looking at maps and aerial photographs that Nevada was not flat, but having never been there I had anticipated it to be merely a rough high desert on the other side of the Sierra. Yet in person, I found the state to be series after series of mountain ranges, some just as high and just as dramatic as anything in the Cascades, Rockies, or Sierra, yet relatively unknown to the outside world. Pilot Butte, for example, stands more than 11,000 feet high—nearly as high as Oregon’s tallest, Mount Hood—and yet it is relatively obscure outside of the state. The West, then, is so large, and the ridgelines so vast, that it’s possible for entire monolithic peaks to be hidden from view.

But this work didn’t begin there. When I first set out to make Anticipation I had several experimental ideas in mind. First, I wanted to make something with more physical presence than my previous paintings. To have any piece of art evoke the idea of “love” is a near impossibility—such directness may in fact be part of the drive to make art at all—but if there was a way, size and physicality would be key. I was thinking a lot about icons, altarpieces, shamanistic objects, and other quasi-religious items, and how physical they all are. So for this week, I handled a lot of smallish wooden art panels at an art store, trying to find one that had the right feel. This was the largest of the three I picked out, and I ran with it because I wanted to try another landscape.

Second, I wanted to try a different color, in this case cobalt violet, first synthesized in 1859. I set out to find it without even knowing what it was, only liking the name and the date (for me, a sly reference to the year of statehood for Oregon). I wanted to use the piece as an opportunity to think about the mid 19th century as well as where I am from.

Lastly, I wanted to use the materials to guide the image. With watercolor on paper, this mostly comes from the way that washes are used, and playing with how the water interacts, but the paper itself contributes relatively little because it is so consistent, even when rough textured. The wood panel, however, would offer the grain at least, and possibly a unique way of carrying the water. as it turned out, this was true, but limiting—the grain provided opportunities, but it also prevented washes from spreading very far, and limited many of the techniques that I had developed over the past year. (I don’t think that “printer’s tears” are possible on this grained surface.)

All this is very technical, isn’t it? All of this is very cerebral—not particularly romantic or emotional. Yet the intense color, the way that it is so thinned through wear (helped out by a sanding block) speaks of handling, touching, intimacy. Is it love? Ambiguous. But as the mountains peak over the ridges—as the image is both barely clinging to the wood, and yet inscribed in a color halfway between the blue in the artery and the red spilt on the ground—there’s something of a promise.

Anticipation. Watercolor on birch plywood, 6 in x 12 in, 2016

Golden Gate in Red (Near)

It’s an apartment living problem—or perhaps more specifically an urban problem. To live in a building such as mine—built around 1915, three stories, 14 units—in a neighborhood filled with such buildings, is to live in a dense “community.” If my apartment structure is on a lot ¼ of an acre in size, then that means the equivalent zoning representing this density is R56—a very high density indeed, very urban.

Numbers, however, explain relatively little. Density—so vaunted by urban planners as a solution to so many problems—does not in fact produce “community” at all. Of the inhabitants of the other 13 units in my building, I know none of them. Oh, sure, sometimes I catch sight of someone in a window in the hallway’s interior light well—a woman one floor down who works on a laptop at a kitchen table, covered in yellow check oilcloth, another woman straight across from my unit who is cooking something. Sometimes, when I am coming home at night, I can see from Telegraph Avenue below some snippets of my neighbor’s lives—a television screen blasting blue a ceiling; a spice rack through a kitchen window; a set of festive holiday lights set up far in advance of any commonly observed day. For the most part, though, we are strangers to each other.

Now multiply that by the two-story building next door, or the sprawling Art Deco apartment behind me, or the odd, ham-fisted Spanish Colonial multi-units down Alcatraz Avenue, and the story becomes exponentially grown. Recently, in a class I am taking, the subject of where we live came up, and it turned out that one of my fellow students lived on Alcatraz, too, just a few buildings away—and yet I cannot ever recall having seen them, and I still have not encountered them on the street.

This is, of course, one of the benefits of urban living. For almost as long as there have been cities, there have been people who sought them out not because they offered more opportunities for interaction, but because they wished to escape the surveillance that comes from small town and rural life. Not knowing my neighbors means my neighbors not knowing me, means not having to explain or be consciously evaluated, means that home becomes a haven from the very sort of things that traditional homes, being bastions of family, are laden with—the expectations, the potential for disappointments, the possibility of guilt. While such pitfalls have been rare in my family—I am more fortunate than most in this, I suspect—the specter of such minor disasters is stubbornly present in my mind. Perhaps it is something deeply evolutionary, a kind of holdover fight-or-flight mentality once useful to organizing society? Certainly logic cannot defeat it, yet space seems to at least push this mental monster from immediacy.

In a strange way, then, we urban apartment dwellers do become a community, but a community that is defined more by a shared experience than by interaction. Put another way, we commune alone together. When the evening is near, and I look out my side window across the built landscape and out to the Golden Gate, I sometimes catch a solitary window lit at the back of some other house, some other apartment building, and I wonder who is there, and what they are thinking, and what they are like. I recall a story from E.B. White’s Here is New York, in which he recounts how many different people and different events had occurred within just a few blocks of radius from where he was sitting on Manhattan; perhaps such stories would not be as glamorous in a similar radius around this, the border of Oakland and Berkeley, but still I often wonder what they would be.

Golden Gate in Red. Watercolor and gouache on paper, 12 x 16 in, 2016

Field in Winter (Field)

Field in Winter. Watercolor and Gouache on Paper, 18.5 in x 30 in, 2016.

“The first event leads you to notice further events which may be consequences of the first, or which may be entirely unconnected with it except that they take place in the same field.”(1)

And I ask—who is this guy?

The Ocean, lately, seems to haunt me. I was never one for beaches. Until I was an adult, they seldom were a part of my life, and by the time that they came within easy reach, I was past the age of acting exuberant without self-consciousness. And besides, the beaches of my world are not places for laying in the sun or for frolicking—unless you are a dog, anyway. The coast of the Northwest is not warm even when it is sunny. It is a place of wet suits, pea coats, of sand in your gray woolen socks. Yet the presence of the ocean—of the Pacific Ocean—is a salve, even if it is only because I can look out over the hills and know it is out there, its magnificence over the next rise, or the rise after that. That invisible but visible sea compensates, somehow, for the Hokusai-like tsunami of books that have thrown themselves up against the walls of my apartment, ever more menacingly.

Funny, though, that every painting I have made so far this semester is a landscape in my mind, and not a seascape.

But Berger is talking about fields—unbounded, “continental” fields that offer “defined edges, an accessible distance… an attendant openness to events, with a maximum possibility for entrances and exits.” (2)

Again, who is this man? And how did he get in my head? There’s not room for more than two in there without it creating a right mess.

* * *

If education is about credentialing, about the gameification of leveling up, or about training for the specialization of a narrow discipline, then I’ve done it all backwards. I’ve been mesmerized by the dog, the butterfly, the horses, the woodpecker. I’ve chased them, too, following pools of sunlight through the field rather than cutting straight across it, touching upon the common-law path only now and then. My choices do not fit easily in that self-directed "narrative" that I am "continually retelling and developing...." (3)

You relate the events which you have seen and are still seeing to the field. It is not only that the field frames them, it also contains them. The existence of the field is the pre-condition for their occurring in the way that they have done and for the way in which others are still occurring. All events exist as definable events by virtue of their relation to other events. You have defined the events you have seen primarily (but not necessarily exclusively) by relating them to the event of the field, which at the same time is literally and symbolically the ground of the events which are taking place within it. (4)

Who is this man?

And I recall Joan Didion writing of Sacramento. It was an earlier effort, something from the mid 1960s: "Notes from a Native Daughter." And I recall, too, using it as a way of teaching students about that great river town. At least twice in the essay, without preamble or warning, Didion stopped and set, in italics, a block quote:

Q. In what way does the Holy Land resemble the Sacramento Valley?
A. In the type and diversity of its agricultural products. (5)

My students never "got" why she repeated this catechism.

* * *

Opening up the blessed Oxford English Dictionary online, I find the following:

discipline, n.
II. Senses relating to training, instruction, or method.
4. a. Instruction or teaching intended to mould the mind and character and instill a sense of proper, orderly conduct and action; training to behave or act in a controlled and effective manner; mental, intellectual, moral, or spiritual training or exercise. Also applied to the effect of an experience or undertaking (as, study, adversity, etc.) considered as imparting such training. (7)

…and:

field, n.1
II. An area of operation or observation.
12. a. An area or sphere of action, enquiry, or interest; a (wider or narrower) range of opportunities, or of objects, for activity or consideration; a theme, a subject. Freq. with of. (6) 

A wider or narrower range of opportunities. A catechism.

* * *

John Berger—who is this man?—had an ideal field in mind, and set out to delineate it. He prescribed grass—a field is wild after all—and a slightly sloped position on a hill. This field would not be “hedged in” on all sides, for entry and escape are always possible.

Berger was talking metaphorically of course, yet there's also a phenomenological aspect to "Field," his 1971 essay. The symbolic and the real are collapsed, telescoped into each other—after all, his book it titled "About Looking"—surely a play on the idiom "looking about." Just as events make sense only in the context of other events (and the "event of the field,") so too the conceptual is intertwined with the tactile, with the field "seen" best by the braille of walking through it and touching the tops of the grass.

Yet Berger also offers one proscription on the ideal field. “Not a field in winter,” he cautioned. “Winter is a season of inaction when the range of what is likely to happen is reduced.”(8)

But in the Phoebe Hearst Anthropology Museum stand two carved wooden statues that testify against this. Hewn from great cedar logs, these are ceremonial sculptures, meant to adorn the interior of a great chieftain’s house among a British Columbia native tribe. Their journey to Berkeley is long and convoluted, but one of the things that is most compelling about these statues is that they, being made from wood, have never died. Sure they were severed from their roots long ago, cut out of the forest to be converted into these great looming figures, but even such displaced wood continues to breathe, to shrink and expand with the weather, to age. They show a great deal of the latter. The paint that human hands once consecrated against their carved features is now but a whisper—and a subject of great speculation and investigation by art conservators.

Each figure featured heavy painted eyebrows; those on the female figure were noticeably rounder. Beneath each eyebrow, the carved socket was decorated with stippling in red pigment. The black outline of each eyelid framed a circular white iris, and black ovoid pupils were set within. On either side of the pupil, the eyes were filled in with red. (9)

Red—black and white and red, but with red the most dominant color, not because it was used the most, but because “although red is the first colour to be suppressed or ‘turned off’ as light levels fall, by virtue of the optical qualities of local illuminants it is also the easiest to activate or ‘turn on’.” (10)

The people who made these sculptures have a bone to pick with John Berger. These sculptures were made for the winter, and their winter was “conceptualized as a sacred time associated with the supernatural and its reenactment in song and performance.”(11) Summer fields like those Berger considered ideal are the place and time for gathering food, for work, for toil, for matters that while important are also earthly. It is in winter—with the seed heads of the grasses turned to bitter red, the hills to black, the sky white—when the known and unknown spirits took to the field. “The range of what is likely to happen”(12) does not decline in winter. The stretched shadows, the earlier twilight, and the longer nights are nothing if not opportunities for magical change.

* * *

Notes.

1.  John Berger, “Field,” About Looking, 1980 edition, 196-197.

2. Ibid., 195.

3. Ibid., 197.

4. Ibid.

5. Joan Didion, “Notes from a Native Daughter,” Slouching Towards Bethlehem. (Originally published 1965 in Holiday.)

6. "field, n.1". OED Online. September 2016. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/69922?rskey=mWK2eK&result=1 (accessed October 21, 2016).

7. "discipline, n.". OED Online. September 2016. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/53744?rskey=i9j6QC&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed October 21, 2016).

8. Berger, 194.

9. Jason Underhill, “Forensic visualization of two Kwakwaka’wakwḱiḱw,” World Art 6, 2, 298.

10. Ibid., 307.

11. Ibid., 303.

12. Berger, 194.

Bay Lights (Round)

Bay Lights, Watercolor and Gouache on Paper, 18 in x 24 in, 2016

San Pablo Bay (Reach)

In Oregon, where I grew up, wild emptiness was never far away. It might mean standing on a puzzle-like ridge-top in Coast Range, or it might mean being out among the reeds and grasses of the lower Columbia River, but it’s always there, always present in the mind, always an option. Heck, even the sheer number of Portland parks—almost 280 of them in just Portland proper—offers a sense of the natural.

The San Francisco Bay region, however, has more than seven million residents. Seen from the air—as I have experienced many times flying to or from SFO or Oakland airport—it appears to be a vast carpet of buildings surrounding a big blue lake. Calmness? Tranquility? These are not qualities I associate with the area. Rather I think of stuffed BART trains at rush hour, or the sound of car horns outside my window on Telegraph Avenue at 7:30 am, or the gaggles of tourists who block my path on any given San Francisco sidewalk. While there are many beautiful places—stand at Land’s End out by the Legion of Honor and just look around you!—there’s very little sense of the wild.

This may be why my encounter with San Pablo Bay was so memorable. Years ago, just before my move to the area, a friend took me down a narrow road just short of the Richmond bridge, out past the old wine and ammunition depots of abandoned Winehaven, out past the tank farms of Chevron, out even past the end of pavement and down into a weird bowl of land that hid in the northern shadows of Point San Pablo. Descending into it was a twisty little road, public but perforce of limited benefit maintained by the hand shovel of a private party at its end. There, a tiny marina sat, imperiously named the “Point San Pablo Yacht Harbor.” In fact it was home to a few good houseboats and several bad, a number of mildew sailboats and motorboats, and several unidentifiable hulls that had probably sunk at their moorings when Reagan was still president. Beyond a sand-inundated and disused railroad track stood a double-wide that was the harbor’s yacht club, its doors open and unlocked, its lights dimmed, its pool tables unattended to. Behind a formica bar sat a cooler case with beer—some of it swill, some of it good—and a cardboard sign: “$2, put cash in jar.”

Outside on the deck, beers in hand, I and my friend looked out at the twilight of San Pablo Bay. There we finally found the club’s one resident, more a keeper than a member, and learned a bit about the Sisyphean task of cutting up the jilted boats, of keeping the road’s potholes half-filled, of running off the floating meth labs that once haunted the docks. But mostly we were quiet, driven to this silence by the place itself, for out on the water there were no lights. In this one place—just on the other side of a hill from a freeway and a refinery and all that entailed—was a view of absolutely nothing. Water, sky, a thin strand of land on the opposite shore of the lower reaches of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers: that was all there was. Not until the sun had finally set was the dim glow of Vallejo visible in the sky to the east, and even then, only barely. We were surrounded by 7.8 million people, but all that reached us was the gathering night.

San Pablo Bay. Watercolor on paper, 7x10 inches, 2016.