Contemplation within the Small Space of a Closet Library: Cardboard Flooring, Sculpture, Ivory Soap, Chinese Painting, Nature and Discipline, William Vaughn Howard, and the Gravitational Pull of a Drop Cloth

Closet Library with Window, Paintings, Sculpture and Shelves

The closet library is a 42 x 96 inch space behind a studio wall.  It is so small that walls lean in to grace the camera lens.  Because the closet had a window, I saw it as a space for contemplation.  

Cardboard Flooring, Table, Handmade Boxes, Chair, Paintings and Shelves

The lack of space made it difficult to move while remodeling.  Some sheetrock was removed; bookshelves were hung from inside the studs to save space.  Carpet was replaced with a corridor of cardboard.  The wall to wall cardboard strips are quite firm.  Though not efficient, the experimental floor was worth the undertaking.  Although art is often defined as nonfunctional, it is hard to image anything more useful.  There is no better way to change or rearrange the thought process.



Soapstone
soap, paper, acrylic, pastel, fabric, plexi-glass, cedar and black primer
28 1/4 x 17 5/8 x 14 1/2 inches

A few years ago I decided to carve rock.  Unlike some sculptors, I didn’t want to chip away at something that beautiful.  I seldom start from a place easily defaced.  There is little risk to squeezing paint out onto a palette.  Of course with quarried stone, much of the damage is already done.  But even so, crystal, layer and grain retain a beauty that arranged dabs of paint on a plate of glass just don’t have.  I settled on soap.  I remembered trying to shape it in grade school.  The great thing about it was it wouldn’t require the purchase of new tools to whittle away at a craft I wasn’t committed to.  I liked the idea of working in reverse.  While some make something out of stone, my aspiration was just to mimic rock.  Though the process may sound like a perverse curse hurled upon the faithful, I purchased a year’s supply of soap and stuck a stack of bars together.  The carved Ivory Soap was gradually wrapped in bits of torn print making paper and painted with acrylic, pastel and fabric.  Unsealed, it was encased to protect it from dust and handling.

Chinese Painting, Stir Stick, Handmade Boxes, Burl, Table and Chair

A door-less doorway frames a Chinese painting.  On a table stands a stir stick, a history of stain and paint sustain beauty without implication.  The Chinese painting and the stir stick correlate in an unusual way.  One was intentional; the other acquired natural saturation free from the slight of design.  We seldom pay attention to the unaltered, ignoring astounding beauty all around.  Instead we’re transfixed by tricks we control.  A composition is never free to let things be.      

I’ve enjoyed the freeness of the Chinese painting for many years.  Freeness may seem out of place when you consider that the painting is an exercise filled with all the rigor exercise brings, but freedom is the vigor of discipline.  By the time the bamboo was painted, it had already been painted so many times that the artist was free to feel bamboo in the breeze without thinking.  Through discipline, the painting becomes natural in the way nature shapes drainage.  Repetitive weather conditions come and go.  Canyons unfold.  The stir stick was stained, an implement of history designed to mix consistency back into a can of paint.  It was colored by time, a mind greater than any design ruled supposition.  Order is often too simplistic to consider an array of associations without a disposition for restriction.  Why should order mean the elimination of information?  Rules decide somewhat arbitrarily.  Couldn’t arbitrary justifications also be a form of chaos? 

At the start of a semester, my professor William Vaughn Howard hung a drop cloth on the wall.  When asked why by a friend, he said something like this: I want my students to have something to shoot for.  In those drops and splatters reality is devoid of self-consciousness.  Gravity speaks without flinching to see if it complies with or denies rules of design.  The paint like lichen takes hold where it will take hold.  Time is a designer without question.  Instead of trying to find ways to emphasize setting, it may be better to consider the beauty of always arriving.  Then hamburger stands are as grand as kitchen tables.



Table, Handemade Boxes, Stir Stick, Burl and Drawing