Journal Excerpts
Day 1, 9/17/18
On my way to HJA, I spent a few days in Portland with my cousins and visited an exhibition of Richard Diebenkorn’s early work and the Japanese Garden. Both have been important influences in my work: Diebenkorn’s explorations in line, shape, and color, how he creates space and depth, a suggestion of landscape. Japanese aesthetics is likewise sparse, each element in a garden is carefully chosen—shape and texture, framing, drawing the eye from foreground to background.
How can I concentrate the elements of this place—the shapes, colors, textures, layers—to convey time/timelessness, the particular and the universal?
Day 2, 9/18/18
The night before my arrival at HJA I spent with Judy Li and her husband. So happy to connect with scientists who are interdisciplinary thinkers, who see the necessity of art to engage people in this living, complex, wondrous earth, our beloved who is threatened by our daily acts, large and small.
Yesterday, Fred Swanson gave me a tour of the HJA facility and nearby research sites. Of particular interest was the log decomposition site. I knew of and had envisioned it as antiseptic, an operating theater. To the contrary, it was beautiful, mysterious, and ancient; moss-covered logs evidencing the cycles of growth and decay, death and rebirth; a mossy, spongy carpet of living detritus.
Today I hope to get my piece done for an entry to a publication, a contemporary herbal titled “Becoming Botanical,” and gesso the wood painting panels I brought.
Day 3, 9/19/18
The Becoming Botanical project is a collaboration with a friend in India. We were to select a plant to discuss and depict, as in historical herbals, though the approach was our choice. Geetu selected rice and wrote about kolam: designs drawn by women on sidewalks and doorsteps using rice powder. I viewed a few videos. The technique is confounding—how someone can simply take a pinch of powder and draw a complex design. The process seems to take little time, whereas it took me the morning to work out a design based on a photo Geetu sent me!
I took a lovely walk along the Discovery Trail before lunch. The forest is alive with ferns, moss and lichens.
After lunch, I drew a rice stalk to accompany my kolam design. I used stippling for the kolam to give it an ethereal quality, like a watermark. I will ink the rice stalk this morning and send it off. I want to start on my forest work—take photos and collect samples of lichens. They are fascinating and beautiful.
Read more from Ann’s journal here.
