Tag Archives: meaning

Dream of Light

Posted on by under Art, Life

I attended the opening of Antonio Lopez Garcia‘s retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts – Boston back in April of 2008. It was a wonderful trip. I was thinking about it today. How momentous it felt to be there. Seeing so many friends from all over the US who were there for it – even Rackstraw Downes was there that day! Tim Lowly was there. Tim Kennedy and Eve Mansdorf were there. David Gracie was there. Sangram Majundar was there. A few low-quality photo pictures are below.

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The best part for me was at an early point in the day before the crowds arrived. I found myself standing next to the master, looking together at one of his paintings. It was nice to see him looking closely, finding a contemplative moment in a masterwork he’d painted many years before. There was a leveling there, an equanimity – the master must look, just as the audience must. We both see and take in what is before us. In that space and time of perception we try to understand. In those wavelengths of light we dream of a unity and order and meaning beyond ourselves. We dream of light.

Working It Out

Posted on by under Life, news

There’s my daughter Miranda doing some complex equations on the chalkboard. She’s working out something profound there.

I’ve been trying to work things out, too. We’ve got a new daughter in China – Madeleine Cai Qun. We just found out yesterday. I’ve been thinking about it, trying to work out how it feels this time – this time being a dad. In some ways – between all the different sorts of work that I do, and trying to be a good dad, and trying to be a good husband – I often don’t know how I feel. My mind is usually full of research, various readings, lesson prep for 4+ classes, a whole range of concerns with my graduate students, community projects, church stuff, family stuff, house maintenance stuff, following up with friends stuff, the logistics of just being-where-I’m-supposed-to-be-when-I’m-supposed-to-be-there, and on and on… Often I don’t know what I feel or if I feel things at the proper proportion because I’m not being reflective enough – not being present enough, really – to have full awareness.

I know this is a season of my life and I know it’ll pass. But when I think about Madeleine and Miranda and Alison, I want to be totally clear.

When I see Cai Qun’s arm raised – little Madeleine Cai Qun Ballou – I’m perfectly clear. Let’s go get her now. I’m ready. I want to be her dad RIGHT NOW.

I guess that’s all I feel: let’s get this flight planned and the paperwork filed and roll. It’s transition time. It’s life-change time. I thank God for my awesome wife who has had the passion, dedication, intelligence, and intensity to follow through and pull this off. This is the sort of adventure we looked forward to a decade ago when we decided to get married. We never knew the specific character of the challenges or what particular form the dreams would take, but we worked it out. Sovereign movements indistinguishable from chance and incomprehensible without faith.

Prometheus

Posted on by under Life

I’m rating Prometheus a 6.5 out of 10. It was enjoyable but misses in a few main ways:

1) Asking the “big questions” is good. Reducing them to patricide and “hulk-smash!” moments is vapid.
2) Ensemble casts are good. Cluttering up a pretty straightforward plot with idiotic asides and incidental scenes is lame. The ballet David goes on to lace Charlie’s drink with Alien-spawn is great. Charlie’s mood swing is instantaneous and weak. Just way too many off-the-point, less-than-meaningful scenes. The entire dialogue between Vickers and the Captain leading to their tryst “in ten minutes” was groan-inducing. Sometimes too many people is too many people; they could have halved the cast and cut out weak scenes.
3) If you’re going to have an old guy, have an old guy, don’t use horrible face make up. Would have been a PERFECT chance to get super-meta with Peter O’Toole playing the old guy while David watches Lawrence of Arabia to get grooming/speaking tips and be “the good son” to his ailing, deathly maker.
4) Let’s stop hiring Lost writers, ok? We don’t need more “wow, there’s some cool tech” shots and attempts at hip jocularity (wink-wink, nudge-nudge, cue the laugh track, etc, etc); we need potent, meaningful images that resonate with us.
5) When you talk about Ridley Scott making a movie, you have a right to expect at least a 9 out of 10. So while I did enjoy this movie just as a fun sci-fi thing, it’s really hard to be happy with this when we’ve got the man behind Blade Runner and Alien making it. It really should have been so much more.
6) If you want a movie to stand on its own, make it stand on its own. This film requires our knowledge of the Alien franchise… and that makes it thin by itself.
7) It’s awesome how some psycho-sexual fetish paintings from the 1970’s basically made this entire series of movies possible. Go 2D!

All of that said, I enjoyed my time with the movie. The visuals and ships were great, and there were nice moments (almost all of them having to do with David). I did like the attempt to connect with deep yearnings that have motivated humankind for our entire history. It’s not a mistake that we seek to grapple with these issues culturally and personally. We want our art forms to deal with them, too. Those questions and concerns deserve our strongest, best efforts as artists.

And here’s a great review of the film… and another.

Inspiration – Laurie Anderson

Posted on by under Art, Life, Teaching

Above: Anderson singing with a luminous microphone inside her mouth…

“I don’t necessarily think that political art is any better or more worthwhile or more relevant than making a giant blue painting. We need giant blue paintings and they can sometimes be more about freedom than works of art that tell you how to be free. Giant blue paintings can show you.” – Laurie Anderson, at the SVA commencement ceremony, 2012.

Watch her whole speech here. Be sure to watch through to her “pillow recorder” performance at the end – fantastic!

And here’s a (mostly) “giant blue painting” – Ocean Park #129.

 

“Both Sides of the Brain” Mezzotint

Posted on by under Art, Life

I was invited to be a part of Aaron Coleman‘s traveling mezzotint exhibition. The show, scheduled to travel to at least 4 institutions, will begin its run in August of 2012 at Northern Illinois University. I’ll keep everyone posted as more information about these shows becomes available. Many thanks to Aaron for including my work! Here’s a peep at the finished piece, titled Agathokakological. Click the image to see it larger.

Mezzotint (Charbonnel ink on Zerkall paper), paper size 10.5 by 13.5 inches. 2012, edition of 21 (19 numbered and 2 artist’s proofs).

A Powerful Vision of What Love is

Posted on by under Life, Writing

“Your love should never be offered…”

by Hafez

Love sometimes wants to do us a great favor: hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.

Your love
Should never be offered to the mouth of a stranger,
Only to someone who has the valor and daring
To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife
Then weave them into a blanket
To protect you.

Stay close to any sounds that make you glad you are alive.

Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.
I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in the darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.

There are different wells within your heart.
Some fill with each good rain,
Others are far too deep for that

Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.

Even after all this time the sun never says to the Earth, “You owe me”

There is no pleasure without a tincture of bitterness.

ballou - towardessential - two nautillus

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Thanks go to Catherine Armbrust for bringing this to my attention, and Paulo Coelho for posting it here.

All These Remainders

Posted on by under Art, Life, Writing

“The creation of legend is never known at the time of its genesis. Only displacement can imbue the past with the aura of sentimentality. Oh, to yearn, to stretch back with every fiber! To feel again that desire; the shrouded figures that play still on those lost, faded shores. Seeing ever so faintly the afternoon sunlight through old windows and recalling the impression of newfound knowledge in those dusty old books. Oh, to squeeze the eyes tightly, if only to glimpse for one moment that gone-ness – to feel it in the pit, to be in that pit, to stay: impossible. Knowing that it all exists only because I can’t stay there. Oh, to regress into my own idealization, to see myself again as I did then…”

“All these remainders have a keening tonality, a tinnitus of sounds, which we are unable to hear outwardly but which our hearts intuit. They are the silent sirens of what has gone before, and they call to us with accolades and accusations.” – from A Mnemonic of Longing, an unpublished essay, 2002-2009.

So ends my remembrance of Ox-Bow, ten years after. So much more could be said, be shown. I’ll leave it at this for now. The text I have shared in these posts is, perhaps (if only to me), my best artwork. It evokes for me the feeling of remembering and the instances that remembrance serves equally well. The words I’ve shared are as present to me as the times they transform and recreate. In turning them over, reading and re-reading them again and again, I sense anew so many true things. In them I know again the many secrets I held all those years ago. The creaking of the Inn, the internal affects of grasses and trees, and the whispers of the wind – which even now (this VERY second!) are stealing across the Lagoon and through the meadow, past the Mary K and over the dunes – are all as true now in these mnemonic words as they were when I wrote those words down. And they rest in me, speaking in me as to one who has glimpsed a deep but unnameable majesty. Darkness sits near (deathly close to) light.

– Matt Ballou, September 1, 2011.

Images from digital photos taken between May and August 2001.