Dedicated to My Mother

It was Easter Sunday.

No family around to celebrate

The rising of Christ from the dead.

No eggs planted anywhere.

My breakfast French toast was dipped in eggs though,

Drenched in syrup, where berries and cinnamon also floated.

The dishes were washed.

The reading of the news was done.

I was sufficiently terrorized,

Thrust into hopelessness and gloom.

Some say we will survive.

Others say nay.

I have no reason to believe in anything but myself.

So much trauma in my own life caused by those

Who were meant to love me unconditionally.

As parents, as lovers, as friends, as a husband.

I was alone.

And intent on finding another place

To merge with the natural world.

Down the state highway going south

Is the entrance to a road that parallels

The river I visit on Sundays.

I have never been down this road.

It was a good day to give it a try.

Discovering this path by the river

For the first time on foot, I was eager

To see where it took me.

I parked where a closed gate blocked going any further by car.

I parked beside a truck bearing New Hampshire license plates.

A sign on the gate said FLOOD.

I walked past the gate.

The road descended gradually.

The river was on the left of the road.

The river was full and rollicking over rocks.

Eventually, the rushing river disappeared from view

And changed into a stream.

I passed two couples and one dog from New Hampshire,

Going in the other direction.

I wished them Happy Easter.

I passed a crevice on my right side, the side of the main road above,

Carved out by a temporary charge of water in the past rainstorms.

Grasses lay across the road in the direction in which the water had taken them.

The stream flowed into a flood plain.

When I reached the open flood plain,

My body was seized with an anxiety

I have not felt since I was a toddler.

I stopped walking.

I stood looking out

Over acres and acres of  three foot long grasses

Laid flat by water.

In the distance was a short cement bridge.

Do I walk that far? I said to myself.

It was not raining.

My steps carried me several hundred yards

To the bridge.

The bridge passed over the stream that was the river.

I was standing in a flood plain bordered by a dam wall.

I turned around 360 degrees.

No birds were singing.

Nor could I see any flying.

No sound.

Not even from the flow of the water.

I could not detect the breeze.

The water had receded from its flood stages.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been standing there.

On the bridge.

This is how the end of the world is going to look,

I thought.

The clouded gray sky foretelling of more rain

Provided a cyclorama against which the silhouettes of the trees

Atop the hills, which cupped the valley, grew.

I took pictures.

I sought out where the road would lead

If I were to continue walking.

The road disappeared around a hill.

Because I had hurt my knee,

And I would have worsened how hurt it was,

I decided against continuing.

Besides, the drops of a drizzle began

To hit my cheeks.

I turned and started to retrace my steps

Back to the entrance

Where my car was parked.

Experiencing this place measured an inkling

Of acceptance of imminent death.

My death.

The death of the earth.

The death of all.

The irrevocable final transformation of all.

In five billion years,

The sun explodes.

I have known that the sun will explode

For my entire adult life.

I saw moments before the end time

In that flood plain. On Easter Sunday.

Scientists say that the sun will explode in five billion years

From the time they declared it.

From now.

Less, of course, the number of years I will have lived.

Copyright 2019 Lyn Horton

As Seen on ARTEIDOLIA: Peter Pincus's Finesse

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Peter Pincus’s

Finesse

Lyn Horton
January 2019

               Peter Pincus, Ewer, 2018.

Artists live in a tight world of history and influence. The medium an artist uses often points to possible penchants for attractive pods of that network. How an artist assimilates those areas of interest is complicated and eventually translates into what the artist ends up doing in both apparent and undetectable ways.

Peter Pincus is a contemporary ceramic artist. He has in his own practice evolved a means to unite history and influence to create his signature vision. Although he speaks of ceramics as being “too material specific to be classified as fine art,” he has produced an array of objects that walk a fine line of defying that statement.

As a teacher, husband and father, he and his wife have bonded to establish a vibrant working environment. Their studio is organized and stocked plentifully with materials exemplified by shelf after shelf after shelf of color-infused liquid slip clay. Twenty hours of studio time per week unfolds not only the fabrication of utilitarian objects that helps to fund their livelihood, but also the unique inimitable pieces that constitute Pincus’s oeuvre.

Pincus is an intense, dedicated master of his craft. His work speaks a restrained yet exuberant enthusiasm for those visual artists and ceramicists who have come before him. This article hinges upon an exhibit, at Ferrin Contemporary in North Adams, MA, entitled “Peter Pincus: Channeling Josiah Wedgwood.”

An English potter of the 18th century, Josiah Wedgwood impressed Pincus in more ways than the obvious. Bringing to light Wedgwood’s integrity in regards to how pottery was manufactured intertwined with the dissemination of his views on social justice and labor practice, Pincus distinguishes Wedgwood’s scientific methods as “obsessively” studying materials and their characteristics and “feverishly” creating “bodies of work in a way that was unparalleled in the history of ceramics.” The invention of Jasper, a white unglazed porcelain often colored with metallic oxides, “… altered the way the world viewed porcelain and white ware …” (Pale blue jasperware denotes Wedgwood’s brand of ceramics.) Pincus also believes that pieces coming out of Wedgwood’s factory at Etruria, Italy, are “perhaps the finest work (he) has ever seen. Excellent proportions, gorgeous forms, subtle transitions. It is sculpture about pottery, created before sculpture about pottery was a thing.”

Peter Pincus, Kalyx Crater, 2018.

Pincus has adopted and pushed through the most interesting aspects of Wedgwood’s work for his own purposes. He exaggerates, bloats or elongates the predominant curvilinear forms, the details of the handles, the shapes of feet that support the vases and the lips and the spouts of vessels. “There is an endless potential to develop more succinct form. The more I make,” he says, “the more sensitive I become to proportion, scale, and relationship.”

Distinct to Pincus’s interpretation of visual art is the multiplicity of geometric designs superimposed on the surfaces of his pieces.

The interaction of multicolored and/or monotone stripes and parallel-line or triangular shapes that appear on the silky-smooth skins of the ceramic works are created from colored porcelain veneers layered laboriously into the mold. The last layer of material which completes the final three-dimensional form is poured into the prepared plaster mold. The resulting chemistry that occurs in the process of slip clay casting through the multiple firings of the pieces in the molds produces the end product, which itself is washed and treated to its peak condition

Peter Pincus, Vase with Handles, 2018.

How materials interact, merge and blossom is crucial to the impact of Pincus’s ceramic art and to how the forms are read: from the top, the side, the other side, or around. These forms are exquisitely detailed and finished. They are not necessarily confined to expressing their utility. He plugs vessels with a gold finish so that the “dead”-ness of their interior disappears: “…closing the form is a fantastic way to add significant structural integrity.” But closing the form also allays the question of function, and directs the context of the object to its inherent sculptural beauty.

The work of Peter Pincus is more than a hybridization of historical and visual forms: it represents the impending dawns of conceptual realization from the shaping, sanding and construction of the plaster molds, down to the infinitesimal distance between the chosen porcelain veneer color arrangement coating the inside of a mold and the slip clay to which it adheres. Within that distance lies the metaphorical spark that births the art.

His work crosses the bridge from “pottery” to “art” in the same way he has described that the work of Wedgwood did, only three centuries later, when art survives in an isolated slice of culture that is paradoxically perpetually prevalent.

Installation view, Peter Pincus: Channeling Josiah Wedgwood, Ferrin Contemporary, North Adams, MA, Fall, 2018.

 

As Seen On ARTEIDOLIA: Swifts & Slows: Four Markers: Lyn Horton and Frand Ward

http://www.arteidolia.com/lyn-horton-frank-ward/

As Seen On ARTEIDOLIA: Power Boothe's Instinct

http://www.arteidolia.com/power-boothe-instinct-lyn-horton/

The Dance

Learning new image languages

Is the same as inventing new words.

How do we know their derivations?

We view them in the context of history.

Does the history matter?

When the ‘present time’ is so trendy?

History looms large in consciousness.

Yet what happens right in front of our eyes

Can be held in disbelief and ignored

Or understood through study.

To study can be instinctual.

Rather than built into the rapidity of button pushing.

The digital age has always existed.

Instruments implementing the parts are different yet correlated.

So why can’t we study and understand?

As opposed to scan, send and share?

We can tap the larger, denser, more information picture.

We can learn about derivations and history.

The potential of discovery underneath the keyboard is vast.

To take advantage of it is even admirable.

Sometimes taking things apart and putting them back together in unpredictable ways

Allows for unexpected perceptions and learning.

How could we forget?

What did we learn in school?

Did we pay attention?

Did we take hold of the process of the discipline of learning?

Or did we just memorize to pass?

In Time:

The derivations are built in.

The present tense is built in.

The understanding is built in.

The kind of truth that we want to know

Is ready to be revealed.

Waiting and wondering when it will be apparent

Are wasteful.

Truth surprises us.

It is real.

It is without question.

It surrounds us.

It guarantees our safety within ourselves.

Truth is the nirvana state.

It either is or it isn’t.

It does not exist.

It happens.

Who we are becomes a stack of truths.

No one can tear the stack apart.

We breathe, we walk, we see, we feel.

We do all that.

Each aspect of being alive supplies a torrent of information that integrates itself into our being.

Being aware of that integration is a gift to ourselves.

A means of taking steps outside of a comfort zone, outside of a norm, a habit, a routine.

Later on, we do no walking, breathing, seeing, feeling.

The information input dies.

The relics proving our lives happened remain.

In a box, on a computer, in the dump.

Somewhere on earth.

Copyright 2018 Lyn Horton

The Art Salon Presentation

These images and words were delivered at a meeting of The Art Salon in Cummington, MA on September 21, 2018.

As you listen to the words, scroll down to see the images. 

The images represent one for each of the last 20 years.

Time Trial

copyright 2015 Lyn Horton

A live Tanglewood performance is on the radio.

It was my intention to be outside, sitting in the chair by the table on the terrace while the music was on. I have pictured myself there all summer.

The minute I went out to do this, my neighbor started up his mower. He is probably 40, divorced and has a penchant for machines, which has been transferred to his son, who, at 8 am this morning, revved up his ATV to travel around his yard for a while. That stopped quickly much to my surprise. It was difficult to meditate with noise pollution, which accompanies living across the street from that neighbor and the other ones, too.

In my email Inbox, every morning is a "feel good" newsletter. Most of the time, the subject matter is timely. Today, it had to do with doing something that pleases me.

So, the aforementioned placement of myself popped into my mind.

I tailored my day to make it happen.

At 6 am, the cat came into the bedroom asking to be fed. Which I did do. Afterward, I got back in bed, wanting to remain there for three more hours. I couldn't lie there. The covers made me too hot or too cold. I took them off and put them back on. I got up at 8. That is early for Sunday.

Depression seeps into my day slowly as I fix breakfast of French toast and coffee. I read my email while eating, most of which is all news or pleas for money from progressive, environmental, or political groups. I delete the political email and read the news from the New York Times. Gradually my mood becomes darker as I scan the headlines. Incessant spirit deprivation. Incessant triggers of hopelessness.

By the end of breakfast, a full pot of coffee later, and maple syrup poured lavishly on my French toast, I could be on a high. Yet, I find myself with my head down, tears rolling down my cheeks, debilitated. My anger kicks into gear, sadness follows. No thoughts about how incredibly fortunate I am come to mind. Instead, I worry. How am I going to leave this funk?

Today I thought about the subject of the newsletter though. And grabbed the dishes off the dining room table to take to the kitchen to wash.

And then I decided to clean up the terrace by weeding and raking. This activity carried over into the area under the trees where there is nothing but stone. Branches and leaves were strewn around, a result of the heavy rain breaking the dead wood off the maples. I dragged an old sheet full of everything I had raked across the lawn to the edge of the wildly overgrown field and flapped the sheet free of its contents.

It was simply too hot to run today. I decided to do three miles on the stationary bike instead. This took place by 2. I did my post-exercise yoga routine, drank coconut water and ate some salted roasted cashews.

Oh, my God, I had almost arrived at my outdoor destination.

But, no, I had to distract myself and hang an eight-foot-long piece of art that had been resting on the floor in a spare room for months. This won't take long. I took accurate measurements and marked the wall for the placement of the hangers. The hangers did not support the piece when I started to lift the piece onto the wall and it fell to the floor. The drop was short, but the impact dislodged the art from its hinges within the frame. Another thing to fix.

I ignored it, put away the tools and left the room.

Maybe I can use screws instead of hangers. So I did. The piece is on the wall, straight, but the art is sagging from the hinges being jarred and there are a few extra holes in the wall that are covered by the piece.

I left the room again, half successful at what I had accomplished. But embarrassed that the thing had dropped off the wall in the first place. It is a two-person job.

The laptop was downstairs ready to be turned on so I could write.

Pleasure. Self-fulfilment.
How many times do I have to aspire to either. Or even be reminded that both can be achieved internally.

I am tired.

The neighbor's lawnmower ruined my moment.
It was running for ten minutes only. By that time, I had set up the computer on the dining room table.

The concert from Tanglewood is continuing. It will be over in twelve minutes.

Will I be finished?
I smell the odor of fresh cut grass, yet feel the wafts of heat carried by the ever so slight breeze coming through the screen door that opens out to the terrace.

No, I will not be finished.
With this article, perhaps.
With other stuff. No.

It is hot.
I am going to take a shower.

The point is that I am not counting the results of my intended purpose.
This is the result. This.
These last words.



copyright 2018 Lyn Horton