jump to navigation

Tree Bark November 22, 2009

Posted by thedeeperwell in change.
Tags: , ,
add a comment


© Elsah Cort
This is a new collage from photos taken in Crescent Meadow last week,
visiting the monarch Sequoia tree that burned on my birthday in August,
which now has 50% of its original substance fallen to the ground.

More ABC’s November 12, 2009

Posted by thedeeperwell in ABC's.
Tags: ,
add a comment

googleearthalpha
from Google Earth taken over the Netherlands
via boingboing

Poetry: the land speaks and a cowboy listens November 10, 2009

Posted by thedeeperwell in living, reading.
Tags: , ,
2 comments

John Dofflemyer, another  “stream” from the Kaweah Land and Arts Festival, steward, rancher, poet living on Dry Creek in the Kaweah River Watershed:

This poem was posted September 21, 2009 on his Dry Crik Journal

IDLING

I grope in the shadows, run my hand
along the familiar and feel the soft
moss on forgotten piles of granite.

Surely a thread of grace appears
here in the half-light, illuminated
between the stone-cold dead

and the musty smell of living –
surely there is some solace
missed by the genius of science

in these scattered, fractured ruins
where I may rest my head and relax.
Off in the valley, bright head and

red tail lights stream urgently
to the churning wind above me,
the wings of ravens returning

from the fields, a squadron strung
high for miles to the oak trees
beyond the ridgelines we never see.

IMG_8432
©John Dofflemyer

Do you want some Dry Crik poetry books on your personal library shelf?
Find them here.

More from the land and arts festival… November 9, 2009

Posted by thedeeperwell in living.
Tags: ,
add a comment

Paul Buxman: painter and farmer from Dinuba

At the Kaweah Land and Arts Festival, Paul talked gently and reverently about his work and life.  He told us to live our life and then paint it, so that the art-making really becomes secondary to the actual living itself.  Many artists “live” for their art, instead letting the art emerge from the simple living of the life.  I loved having the wafts of oil paint scent come across the air at Kaweah Oaks Preserve as Paul painted on Saturday.

When you meet Paul one of these days, ask him to tell you about lazy susan on his kitchen table.

07nov19_a_105_edit_large

07nov19_a_119_edit_large

07nov19_a_107_edit_large

About Paul, from his website:

Farmer and Artist Paul Buxman has been farming and painting the San Joaquin Valley for over 40 years. His dedication to discovering sustainable farming methods have influenced people world wide. He has been the subject of many documentaries including National Geographic, PBS, Sixty Minutes, Bill Moyer, CBS Nightly News, California Heartland, Canadian Public Broadcasting, Australian Public Broadcasting and many local news broadcasts.

His art has had a strong impact on many people in America, not just collectors, but on other painters as well. He teaches and “preaches” simplicity and honesty as key to great art. He encourages others to paint what they know. “Painting should be a visual autobiography. Paint those subjects with which you are the most intimately acquainted.”

Paul works primarily in oil, but he also works in pastel.

He has held exhibits at the Fresno Art Center, The Hanford Art Center, The Haggin Museum in Stockton, The Bakersfield Art Museum, The Modesto Art Museum, The Great Valley Center in Modesto and the beautiful Villa del Sol d’Oro in Sierra Madre, California.

His works have been displayed in the Senate Chambers in both Washington, D. C. and California. His paintings are in small and large, public and private collections throughout the United States of America.

The palmistry of mountains… November 6, 2009

Posted by thedeeperwell in mountain, the juice.
Tags: , , , , , ,
add a comment

There comes a time…

when you see something that pretty much sums up everything,

when you are gifted a glimpse, ever so feebly, of your life from so broad a perspective you may as well be looking down from the moon,

when poet people from the past show up in today, and the past is changed, like time moves backwards instead of forwards (which it does sometimes),

and you know the place where you live so well that you can point to the exact spot, on a map with no road signs, no town names, no boundaries of any kind…but just fine black, delicate lines, tracing the wrinkles, like in a human palm, of mountain and valley, where water has had the audacity to rush and drop over rocks and sand, seeping into roots of willow, sycamore, and mugwort (used by local Native Peoples as the equivalent of holy sage.)

Tonight I pin-pointed exactly where I live, on such a map, offered as “art” in a 12 foot, or more, by 6 foot, or more, lithograph quilt of the Kaweah Watershed, “hung” on a gallery wall.

Headliners for the Kaweah Land and Arts Festival on November 6-8, artist Matthew Rangel and writer/photographer John Spivey are exhibiting lithographs and photographs throughout November at Arts Visalia Gallery, 214 E. Oak, Visalia CA, open Wed-Sat 12-5 pm.

10DueEastfromMoroRock-largeStronghold – Due East from Moro Rock, lithograph
©Matthew Rangel

John Spivey
“We are part of something so profound that to call it random acts of chaotic probability, or to alternatively call it God, simplistically reduces this profundity to a shadow of what it really is. The ultimate answer to this environmental question is that we all have to learn how to live in relationship with this profound nature of life.”

13832_1241840053711_1460616667_691783_313145_n
©John Spivey, from exhibit at Arts Visalia “Luminosity of Stone
see also, johnspiveyfurniture.com

Spivey is author of The Great Western Divide, CrowsCry Press 2006.
“Is your mind abundant? How has it come to its present state of being?  Is is full of the nuance and fluidity of life or is it rigid and barren, painful and lonely?  It is never too late to come back to the fullness of who you really are, to come back to knowing.  Are you willing to restore the abundant landscape of your mind, maybe restory it? Is there an original story, one without words, only just knowing? Put another log on the fire if you wish to go further into all of this.  You need to stoke the fire a little for yourself.” page 45

_____________________________________________________

New work ©Elsah Cort one of nine images finished today
in the form of 5X5 inch cards in a series called Square One.

makeart-forweb
Digital collage
from original mandala painting
and photograph of Kaweah River at my favorite swimmin’ hole
at the home of friends who live on Dinely Drive in Three Rivers.

Out on a limb… October 5, 2009

Posted by thedeeperwell in kitties, present.
Tags: ,
add a comment

Addendum image for previous post called
Dreaming up art…always in the long now

page0000001_0

cover of The New Yorker, October 5, 2009
called “On the Edge” by Gürbüz Dogan

Kinetic Photography: something new to try? October 1, 2009

Posted by thedeeperwell in yikes!.
Tags: ,
add a comment

Here is where I first came across the notion of kinetic photography, also known as camera tossing.  This is very intriguing to me.  Not sure if I have the guts to try it yet. May just try shaking, bouncing, moving the camera without the toss.  Could call it camera-dancing!

mtnrockdhh_5 mtnrockdhh_9 clickykbd_1
photo sources, left to right El Ray, Matt Gorecki, Quinet

Read a blog totally dedicated to camera tossing by Ryan Gallagher.

How to do it from his instruction page where to see more details: “My best tip is to start indoors, although there are many opportunities for great tosses outdoors, indoor tossing enables you to create a safer more controlled environment in which you can start to experiment. Find a simple light source such as a lamp or TV, about 5ft away from this place cushions (or anything else soft) on the on the floor then kneel down, holding the camera just above them. Toss the camera about a foot into the air and press the shutter as late as you can before letting go, being careful to toss the camera straight up. Then let the camera do all the work while you concentrate on the catch!”

Living walls…green art September 28, 2009

Posted by thedeeperwell in flora.
Tags:
add a comment

Getting ready for the Three Rivers Environmental Weekend this Saturday and Sunday with the Green Home Tour, where I will be hosting a booth for the California Native Plant Society…..and also looking forward to the cooler temperatures coming in tomorrow and this week and knowing that soon I will be able to work out in the garden again without the stifling heat….plants are on my mind.

Here is my latest “foundling” online
from artist EDINA TOKODI who paints with plants:

moss1

her succulent wall in Brooklyn originally seen on designboom.com

Dreaming up art…always in the Long Now September 24, 2009

Posted by thedeeperwell in present.
Tags:
1 comment so far

Just some notions to share from a 9 year old essay by Brian Eno, one of the founders on the Long Now Foundation.

Humans are capable of a unique trick: creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in their minds. When Martin Luther King said “I have a dream…” , he was inviting others to dream it with him. Once a dream becomes shared in that way, current reality gets measured against it and then modified towards it. As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world, we begin behaving differently – as though that world is starting to come into existence, as though, in our minds at least, we’re already there. The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward. By this process it starts to come true. The act of imagining something makes it real.

This imaginative process can be seeded and nurtured by artists and designers, for, since the beginning of the 20th century, artists have been moving away from an idea of art as something finished, perfect, definitive and unchanging towards a view of artworks as processes or the seeds for processes – things that exist and change in time, things that are never finished…..Artworks in general are increasingly regarded as seeds – seeds for processes that need a viewer’s (or a whole culture’s) active mind in which to develop. Increasingly working with time, culture-makers see themselves as people who start things, not finish them.

Read the full essay on the long now website.

(Here is a ted talk video about the long now 10,000 year clock from Stewart Brand)

Contemplation of the long now reminds me of this image:
(I use this image in my burnout retreats as a vision of learning to deal with burnout in ways not always clear or easy to follow–a lesson in trusting.)

2200455484_4bce99b39b

art by Quint Buchholz, see his website (in German)

Saturday afternoon grazing… September 19, 2009

Posted by thedeeperwell in reading, take a break.
Tags:
add a comment

Visiting some of my favorite blogs….resting and keeping cool……waiting for summer to be truly over……and for rain to soak the earth again….(talked with bed and breakfast guests from New York the other day and we were contemplating the practicality of building an aqueduct from east to west to carry all the rain water they don’t want to my back yard)…reading more blogs like but does it float? and Hello Bauldoff and the design blog where I failed the cheese/typography test wishing I could eat the cheese and see the typefaces…all this while the cat, Milly, licks my leg for a brisk cat tongue massage (sorry to get so personal, but it is part of now)…while Sleepless in Seattle, on TV for the 1027th time, provides a background soundtrack and keeps referring to magic and tierra misou which I don’t think I can spell, but also would like to eat, even though I’d rather have chocolate…telling myself that my break is almost over and I need to get back to sorting and sifting the studio stuff all fluffed up with the new floor going in……
and finally, here’s this:

tumblr_kprwi6Wez41qz4s48o1_500

folded paper typface by Daniell Spint via Hello Bauldoff

_________________________

**tweeting this stuff @Cort_art
while the TV sings to me “give me a wink and a smile.”

and a break isn’t a break without a visit to @badbanana