garden of the mind

Dream:  I lived in this place where a flood was coming, and we were preparing to leave. There were frogmen, who were diving to secure things underwater.

Thank you for your feedback, and I will look into the suggested readings and ideas for future postings. After six months, it is wonderful to receive comments and I am grateful for the conversation. I have been with my head in the classroom, as I mentioned back in spring. I am avidly working on drawings in the studio, writing up a storm, but nothing ready for publication just yet. Also, my website will be revamped this fall and new works added then.

At life drawing, I am losing interest in working the whole figure, and am curious about creating parts from parts, and working with transparencies.  I use a combination of glassine to make drawings that can combine with other drawings, overlap, and blend them. I am able to work smaller and in a portable way, using remnants of paper, and working quickly to create multiple works that operate like a puzzle without a specific fit.

I have been squirreling time between academic and other artistic endeavours to work on some new drawings using the shape of the brain and filling it with all kinds of things one might find residing in there.

I have been musing on gardens, gardening, and what that means.

I notice that the vocabulary of language and thinking is much like that of gardening: 

to seed, to plant, to grow, to cultivate, to root, to uproot, to weed out, to tend to, to stem, to blossom, to pick, to fertilize, to nourish, to thrive, to decay, to live, to die, etc. 

Our personal compost is often the greatest source of information about ourselves, fears and desires, and the compost we make for our garden reveals what choices we make, how we eat, and what we nourish ourselves with. I had a bad experience drawing weeds a month ago and got about twenty-five bad bites. I must be allergic, because I awoke with welts and don't recall being bitten while drawing. The weed drawings are nice, I'll post them later. In the meantime, i am preparing for an exhibit that revolves around the practice of archiving the garden. I decided that I really don't spend time in the garden, or outdoors much. Exactly because I get bitten, hounded by bugs. I do spend a great deal of time in the garden of the mind, where I romp, wander, look at the flowers, take in the sun, look at the clouds, and let myself roam in the bumps, nooks, and crannies.

The brain is a peculiar shaped thing. The mind is elastic subject to injury and growth at the same time, easily destroyed and so resilient. The Language of Flowers describes the sacrilege  of the flower and how flowers create their own meaning upon which we superimpose our own. We have developed symbolic gestures and rituals around the flower and its blossom, which Bataille asserts is the aspect of death, and its aroma, the scent of a cadaver. I think this is a perfect example of why Bataille is relevant and important; he exposes the contradictions and shortcomings of our hierarchies of preferences and locate the simple origins of our behavior and views, our codes and methods. Based on his premise, a gifts of flowers is the gift of death, so we are celebrating and loving with death, and our verticality is compromised by the plants deeply rooted in cow manure and crawling things in dirt.  I realized those garden plots are like living graves, the flower bed is a cradle of life and decay.