MOUND

Ballad of 박은빈: Father I Will Take Care of You

2024-02-21T21:41:00.004-06:00

Father, I Will Take Care of You is a sitcom that attempts to deal with serious issues alongside common soap contrivances. For a glimpse of suds, watch (with the sound off) a short clip on Youtube to see the soapy up-close facial expressions, pauses, and love triangle melodrama. If that turns you on, great -otherwise this is a very long series I doubt anyone would choose as an entry point into the world of Korean drama.

The narrative hangs on so many things unsaid and the many misunderstandings it creates. Too often the dialogue is what we'd rather not hear: complaining, wailing, arguing or the whiny stammering of the character Sun Sik. Why won't these characters just say what is on their mind (except for Sun Sik)? Because each protracted pause, each missed opportunity to explain, carries one episode to the next.

This silence is an agony of past mistakes -of which little can now be done. As everything comes to a head, forgiveness can be sought, but may not be given. The show works as a warning, or reminder, that one never fully escapes past actions, however well-meaning, and to be mindful before acting or speaking. This theme is consistent across several series I've watched. It's a compelling hook because who among us hasn't acted inappropriately, or sinned, or hurt another? All to often our actions have consequences that, had we understood them before acting, we likely would have made another choice.

As the title suggests, this is a soap opera exploring parenting -are dads (Oppa!) and moms (Eumma!) required to be biological, can children choose their parents, what of surrogate caregivers, what responsibility do children have to their parents (or grandparents) and to what can parenting failures lead? What responsibility do we have as children to our parents' reputation? A line of dialogue from one episode shares that children are rarely better than their parents -a warning to parents; one that counters our western, individualist point of view (which, in one U.S. mass-shooting case, is about to be tested).

Entwined into this long series is a long act of revenge taken by the character Lee Hyun-Woo. His revenge was instigated by a wrong suffered by his father and brother at the hands of the community years prior. Unfortunately, little time is given to exploring the people who've chosen to lie in order to protect themselves and their loved ones at the expense of the innocent.

I have to remind myself that I am watching TV, a genre where there is always an appeal to a lowest common denominator. In Korean dramas, this is often romance, or always romance, along with a current of moral didactics. In Father I Will Take Care of You, as we watch elderly and middle-aged married couples, we chart the course of two young romances. It is almost too complicated to describe...let's see...okay -one young woman (actor Park Eun Bin) who aspires to be a soap opera writer who falls for the producer (actor Lee Tae Hwan, in above photo, center) of such shows, who also happens to be related to her by marriage. Or did he fall for her? Does that even matter?

What matters is there is a love triangle and, ever so familiar, it pits the innocent-hearted, creative, and something else I cannot spoil against the snotty, privileged, entitled woman (actor Lee Seul Bi, in above photo on left) who also is said producer's employer. The second romance is between the man (actor Kim Jae Won) who aims to take revenge and a woman (actor Lee Soo Kyung) who is the niece of the family he aims to destroy. Oh -is that complicated? And yet, there's so many more plot twists that I wouldn't think of getting into it -after all each episode is an hour long with 50 episodes. It takes conviction to see it through.

To watch Kdrama is to get comfortable with the wrist grab

A few other thoughts: This was the first program I watched that had hair-pulling fights among the women characters -I've seen it since, but was taken aback by it this first time. If you are new to Korean dramas, be forewarned -you might be disturbed by the slapping, pushing, wrist-grabbing, and aforementioned hair pulling.

Although handsome, the leading character Han Sung Joon (actor Lee Tae Hwan) was quite tall, with a neck so long and beefy that he was hard to look at for the first few episodes. He didn't say much either, in fact had very little personality whatsoever. I mentioned this problem with male leads in another post. His character also had a mild aggressiveness toward his love interest that came off a little strange. Spoiler...There was a moment, deep into the series, where a teen, played by actor Son Bo Seung, is shown to have quite the lungs for song and it was one of the few positive moments for this family. Although one might expect Park Eun Bin's leading character to deliver, whether it was the directing or writing or both, she comes across rather flat. It was the other romantic lead actor Lee Soo Kyung's character who showed greater complexity and an arc of change across nearly 50 episodes. Actor Shin Dong Mi's Kang See Hook was over the top, teetering between comedy and melodrama as she caricatured a mom obsessed with her child's success at school.

What else can I say about a show jam-packed with plot, grief, mishap, misunderstanding, conflict, and more. I will say this -it doesn't end the way it appears it would, delivering the emotive scene K-drama is known for, but only after too long of a commitment.

The Ballad of 박은빈: The King's Affection

2023-12-05T20:00:00.007-06:00

*spoilers abound...

The heart of most Korean drama is a love story. To those trained on Hollywood or European cinema love, Korean romance will seem light -friendship, conversation, helping, hands touching, plucking an eyelash off a cheek, and catch on a fall does some heavy lifting. Too often there's a love triangle, among lead and supporting characters, sometimes driving the narrative tension and, other times, only background noise.

A parallel story line is spiraled around this love story, like a rope that leads, as expected, to a knot. This parallel story may tackle contemporary social issues, engage fantasy or historical Joseon-period narratives. As with all shows, the writing, acting, and production value are the weak or strong fibers entwined in the making of this rope, but it is the love story that pulls us along (I know fellas, it's the sword fights).

Yet, I am surprised how often the male leads lack personality. Cool, stoic, yes, and occasionally even tearful, but rarely interesting, rarely lively. I have watched Park Eun Bin as the love interest of a ghost, twice a coworker, a pianist, a faux-cousin/supervisor, a royal tutor, and now, in Castaway Diva, a reporter or TV producer (still in ♥ ▵). Although these male lead roles trend toward stiff, personality-less characters, they do support the lead woman's ambitions and remain "by her side." As in our own culture, overcoming generations of patriarchy and gender roles is represented and, one may reasonably guess, valued by the presumed demographic for these shows.

Fortunately for 연모, aka Yeonmo (Revised Romanization) or, as on Netflix - The King's Affection, the male lead, Ji-un, was animated, smiled frequently, showed confusion, solemnity, doubt. Given the restrained portrayal of a woman concealed as the male Crown Prince, the romantic narrative would have suffered without Rowoon's, aka Kim Seok-woo, lively royal tutor. This reversal carries the show through several mid-series episodes, until, at last, the Crown Prince is revealed to Ji-un as the woman she is. Unwavering, the two navigate the challenges of concealing her identity and Ji-un's love for the Crown Prince.

That she is also Ji-un's childhood first love -the princess cum maid-servant Da-mi, becomes largely irrelevant, and is passed off with a shrug in a later episode. I presume this plot line is necessary primarily because fate is always present among lead lovers in Korean dramas. The King's Affection appears to use fated love to drive the narrative -how else to explain such circumstances? But then, how can a woman Crown Prince sire off-spring with the unknowing Crown Princess? Fate, here, appears to lead toward tragedy, as in the scene below, where they cannot be together, or worse -that one, or both, will be executed for the treason of concealing the true identity of the Crown Prince.

The Crown Prince Lee Hwi and Royal Tutor Jung Ji-Un approach each other. He bows.

Prince Lee Hwi: "I was wondering why you did not come by today. You did not deliver the royal reports. Do you have any idea how worried I was?

Tutor Jung Ji-Un:" I have something I have to tell you, Your Majesty. [pause] I am going to get married."

"Why, though? If it's because of the rumors going around; don't go through with it. We knew this was going to be difficult and ‒"

"This is the choice I have made."

"Then..if that's what you really want, how can you just lie to me like that? Why on earth are you going through with this? Please just tell me, why all of a sudden you have a complete change of heart? We've been able to stay strong through so much until right now. [pause] So, why? Is there a reason, then, why you cannot just tell me?"

"I do not want to lose you, Your Majesty. And this is the only way I can make sure that happens."

"So what are you saying, then? If you don't wish to lose me, why ‒"

"This is... [pause] I think this is where I should say goodbye, Majesty.

He bows and begins to walk away.

"Stop! Don't you dare leave!"

He stops.

"I did not say... [pause] that we were finished here. You can't leave."

Clenching his fist, he begins to walk away.

"Stop, now!" Music begins to play. "I order you!"

Holding back his emotions, "Forgive me... [pause] Your Majesty"

The scene ends with the Crown Prince, isolated, alone -as in the beginning.

If her use of Royal authority in a pitiful attempt to command him to stay by her side does not tug at you -perhaps you've no heart. Of course Prince Hwi isn't aware that Ji-un is loyal, acting only to save her life. Despite this well-worn, soap contrivance, the low-key lighting punctuated by cyan and orange, dewy eyes, and shallow depth of field beautifully package this culmination of twenty hours of nearly-suspended disbelief in two characters who have walked together and now cannot. Fate, it seems, is coming to its own conclusion.

Although the show is framed, largely, by royal palace courtyards and royal quarters, and sometimes landscapes or villages, it never feels suffocated by them. The cinematic wide-screen format, variety of compositional devices from perspective lines to boxing in, and closeups punctuated by catch lights and shallow depth of field provide room to breath; separating the feeling of The King's Affection from a swath of overly sharp, 4K productions. The wide screen format also offers an abundance of space to be filled with period details -stone walls, flowering trees, architecture, and even sharply differentiated topography. Color is grounded in muted tones punctuated by intense cyans, magentas, reds or white. The dark of night is produced with an eye for limited sight under low light instead of artificially brightened scenes (see above photos).

This visual appeal is met by Park Eun Bin's effort to inhabit the character as wholly as she did Woo Young Woo. Few of the actor's expressive mannerisms, often visible in her other work, including Extraordinary Attorney Woo, were seen in The King's Affection. In portraying a girl surviving as a boy, she chose restraint rather than masquerade, and as the episodes progress, stoicism becomes displaced by an un-constructed, un-gendered entity. As their relationship grows more comfortable, the repartee between the Crown Prince and tutor Ji-un is smile inducing. One episode is memorable for a scene in which the petite Crown Prince Hwi physically assaults a visiting, and intolerable, eunuch. One can hardly believe that Da-mi is playing the role, self-consciously, of a young man, but is motivated by something beyond gender -a rage fired up by unjust circumstances.

Moments like these run interference against the kit of scenes all too commonly drawn upon in Korean drama: romantic leads bantering about jealousy, fall and catch scenes, or unexpected rainfall met by a kind umbrella. It also adds a touch of humanity to the character, Da-mi, whose complexity is generated only by the concealment of her identity, not by any flaws such a life may have realized. When Da-mi/Crown Prince Hwi makes a poor choice, she knows it, owns it, and is forgiven by an audience that already understands that she is not truly at fault. Such writing caricatures good and bad behavior to a point beyond question. This becomes an oppressive construct that, in its modelling of ideal behavior, is rather conservative. Of course, none of this is restricted to Korean dramas, but is noticeably absent in several contemporary U.S. productions like You, Breaking Bad, Ozark, The Sopranos and more.

The peasant or noble-born peasant with a heart of gold is a narrative trope common to Park Eun Bin's characters, whether in The King's Affection, Father I Will Take Care of You, Ghost Detective, Judge Vs Judge, and now, Castaway Diva. To be fair, The King's Affection manages to succeed despite this limitation -the Crown Prince, after all, was born a princess to be killed at birth, and purportedly so, but for the grief of a mother that whisked her unnamed daughter away in defiance of the King. Where the humble orphan meets her royal origin, there is nothing so kingly as kindness and truth. Where kindness and truth face ambition, we find sacrifice and tragedy.

The tearful, desperate end.

For a show which, from the very beginning, moves toward tragedy, I thought it would have finished more memorably if it had only followed its tragic logic to the end. Wouldn't a fitting, trope-bucking end sacrifice the twin sister of the real, but dead, Crown Prince Hwi to save the kingdom by perishing alongside her familial adversary? Early on, we were primed for the deadliness of this poison as the Crown Prince's father, the King, was also poisoned this way by her maternal grandfather, who she now sat before, tea cup in hand. Although the situation was desperate, it may have been hard to accept Crown Prince Hwi ingesting poisoned tea, if only to ensure that her grandfather also drank it. We did not know her plan, yet we understood the stakes, the risk, and were in a position to accept her self-sacrifice.

The Crown Prince after ingesting the poison

If the narrative had her die alongside her ruthless grandfather, all outcomes would have remained the same with one exception -this tragic love story would have remained a tragedy. The viewers may not have forgiven the writers and the writers may have struggled with modeling the hero's path toward sacrifice, but instead, they chose to take the audience to that precipice, dangle us, and then pull us, improbably, back to safety. Inevitably, we find that model characters require model endings and we are left untouched by the significance of tragedy.

The Ballad of 박은빈

2023-11-23T07:43:00.004-06:00

Character Dong Hui (Hee), in a bus station, foreshadowing Young Woo's obsession with whales

As June approached, under the long days of a northern solstice, nursery work kept me going until 8pm, sometimes later. At last light, I crashed, exhausted, in front of the TV -the first half-hour lost to a continuous scroll through endless Prime or Netflix possibilities. I had just re-watched Babylon Berlin, a show I savored, in preparation for the possibly never-airing 4th season. I watched the auto-trailers of top-left suggestions like Suits; I then scrolled across and decided to give You a go. I lasted two or three episodes before quitting. It's possible Netflix algorithms calculated that, based on watching a trailer for a lawyer program plus a foreign-language series plus turning off a serial killer romantic not-comedy, I might watch a Korean program about an autistic lawyer. I had seen a few Korean films over the years -The Host, Snowpiercer, Parasite, and most recently Train to Busan -all dark films, most dealing with class and moral attitudes, but I enjoyed Snowpiercer and Parasite, and Busan was a zombie flick, so it was okay, too.

But Extraordinary Attorney Woo? It's auto-trailer presented like a comedy, a fish out of water story. Was it difficult for me to separate my experience of a brother-in-law's Asperger's from my imagination of this portrayal? Was this actor, herself, on the spectrum? If not, was this okay? The program's intentions could only be sussed with an investment -each episode over an hour long. So I watched that first episode and what I recalled the next day was a supporting character asking Attorney Woo "are you an idiot, are you stupid?" On the other hand, there were other characters in Young Woo's orbit that were endearingly supportive. So I gave it another shot the following evening. And then again.

Part of the what kept my attention is the freshness of a culture's new-to-me media. Also new was the program's emotivity. In my forty-five plus years of watching television, how many shows, or movies for that matter, have brought on tears? I do not recall many, with the notable exception of Dancer in the Dark, Lars von Trier's film starring Bjork about an impossible murder conviction and death row sentence that brought an entire theater audience to tears thanks to the humanity of the corrections officer who escorts the prisoner to her execution. I think of the film Wit by Mike Nichols, with Emma Thompson -dreadfully sad, yes, but no tears. Ted Lasso had scripted emotive moments like those in Attorney Woo, and after watching several Korean dramas, I see how much Lasso borrowed.

But Attorney Woo pushed it to a new level. Once or twice per episode, tears streaming? A time or two, having watched the night before, I woke ready to sob. This can't be right. Is it that I am not okay? Is it this show or was it my life in that moment? Had I lacked access to my feelings, or suppressed them, and this program's earnest expressions became a channel for processing emotions for which my daily life was providing little opportunity? Had I been spending too much time alone? Possibly. My wife had recently landed a new job in another state and in a very short time I found myself suddenly alone.

Woo Young Woo introducing herself to her new colleagues.

So, I watched Attorney Woo and then, sure that I had missed things, re-watched it. Charmed by the lead, Park Eun Bin, I decided to seek other shows on which she was cast. I also did a little research -I had known about the K-pop phenomena, but I was ignorant of two decades of addictive episodic programming coming out of Korean entertainment industry. I am not the intended demographic for this industry, but I suspect it captures some who consider it a guilty, maybe secret, pleasure. While visiting my wife, I spoke with a Korean woman who watches. She said her husband does not watch, but sitting beside her, she often looks over, only to find him tearing up. Does he not watch?

Over the warm months this past summer, I've seen several series -sometimes multiple times (Do You Like Brahms) and one where I struggled to push through its 50 episodes (Father, I Will Take Care of You). Another (The Ghost Detective) I watched with a fair amount of indifference after what I imagined was an interesting premise became a pedestrian script. I was sure there would be nothing for me with Hello, My Twenties (aka Age of Youth) -a show about four women in their 20s who share an apt and grow, together. This program quickly revealed itself to be outside the common bounds of Korean drama (or anything in the young friends genre) and an inflection point for Park Eun Bin's career.

As Netflix drops new episodes of Castaway Diva, starring, of course, Park Eun Bin, this November, I am watching. There's talk of a season 2 for Attorney Woo, but I don't think a second season is necessary or a good idea, as the first ended perfectly and second seasons often suffer under high expectations and low resolve. Meanwhile, at the risk of taking these dramas too seriously, I am sharing my thoughts about them -as a way to understand my investment and as a way to distance myself from them. Beware: spoilers lurk in each post, yet, if you would like to jump into Korean dramas, but are unsure where to begin, these posts may be useful anchors for your choice.

Don't Go Into The Light

2022-11-05T10:47:00.002-05:00

It's been a very busy year, and the last three or four months didn't disappoint. After wrapping up a fairly busy nursery season at Shelterwood, managing or teaching 35 photography classes at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, teaching landscape painting for three weeks at Chautauqua Institute, photographing at several sites in far northern and southwestern Minnesota, yesterday I opened my exhibit, "Don't go Into the Light," at my Minneapolis gallery Rosalux.

Reflection of artwork in the plate glass window.

The gallery is open 12-4pm Saturdays and Sundays through November and I will be on site for Sunday hours. We are also hosting a couple of special events on climate change and native plants:

Radical Resilience: Climate Change, Habitat & You

Saturday, November 19^th, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Native Plant Clinic

Sunday, November 20^th, 12:30 PM – 4:30 PM

Has news of a changing climate left you feeling anxious? Has the current drought changed the way you feel about your home landscape? If you want to irrigate less, help pollinators, feed birds, and see thriving life, this free program was designed for you.

Rosalux Gallery and the artist and owner of Shelterwood Gardens, Frank Meuschke is hosting an event on Minnesota-specific climate changes and what you can do to build resilience into your home environment.

Radical Resilience: Event Schedule

Seats are limited. To help with a headcount, please register using this link.

1:00pm: Frank James Meuschke introduces the event, gallery, and artwork

1:15pm: Past, Present, & Future Climate in Minnesota -climate scientist Sam Potter, PHD

2:00pm: Q&A with Sam

15 minute break

2:30pm: Bird & Bat Habitat (in Your Yard) -Hennepin County wildlife biologist Nicole Witzel

3:15pm: Q&A with Nicole

3:30pm: Planting for a Changing Climate -Shelterwood Gardens’ Frank Meuschke

End of Program: Free Bird & Bat House Raffle!

To limit spread of the Omicron Covid in our community, we encourage masking at this group event and please stay home if you do not feel your best. Thank you.

EBlast From the Past

2022-04-16T21:04:00.003-05:00

A post by Marie on her blog sent me to Google street view and I was close, so I went to look at what had changed in my old neighborhood. The school, a block away is open, big, and then closed for Covid, but open again. It was still under construction when we left. J&L nursery is still there -almost surprising! The corner has a bump out, a traffic control measure that may have been finished before the school -I do not remember, it has been 7 years (what?!).

The first thing I noticed is how the Russian (why is that loaded now?) Zelkova trees have come to completely change the street feel. The former gardens would have been completely shaded and changed to shade loving plants, had those plants remained. They do not. All is gone, bare soil probably steeped in feline urine and poo, among other nasties.

A closer look indicates that my slate "patio" still stands. I mean they have not been moved at all -even the individual slates nearer the sidewalk. If it weren't for someone's outdoor accessories resting against the wall I'd say few, if any, have stepped over that ramshackle iron fence. That fence supported a never flowering, but lovely climbing hydrangea; it held my camera that walked away one morning as I clipped. I wonder if the Mayapples, removed from the trash heap of trail clearing, up in Van Cortlandt Park, still thrive under the last corner Yew. Likely not, but fun to think so.

It is nice to see the block hasn't changed all that much despite the restaurants and bars popping up. Neighborhoods have a way of holding when owners are your neighbors. Thank you Google Tours, Google Memories, Google Nostalgia for a touch of the old world witnessed from the farthest reaches of the eastern deciduous forest.

An Interview with the Painter Joe Noderer

2021-04-03T11:00:00.002-05:00

I first met the painter Joe Noderer on Instagram -then, after a couple of years, on a Google Meets for this interview. Social media creates an environment where finding interesting artists is easier yet also may have you wading through a massive amount of less interesting art. Joe is one of the most interesting landscape painters of our day. An idiosyncratic painterly language, links to artists working long before him, and work untrammeled by judgement or environmental despair are key to this distinguished painter. Read on to find out how Joe came to practice painting near Pittsburgh, PA, how he forged his career early on, learn about his influences and what concerns him today.

Joe Noderer in his Pittsburgh studio

How would you describe your work to someone who has never seen it?

I usually say expressive landscape paintings; that is the easiest way to cover a lot of bases in my work.

Tell us something about where you live?

We’re part of the city [of Pittsburgh], it’s called Brookline. It’s just a few miles to Pittsburgh, although we are within the city limits. I am south of the Monongahela or Allegheny River, I can’t remember. They come together to make the Ohio River, which then goes down, west, through Kentucky to the Mississippi. We’re south of that and it’s pretty green. Brookline has a lot of houses that are eight or nine feet apart. Older houses that are a hundred years old. There’s a lot of green, a lot of tangly stuff popping out all over the place. It’s very hilly. Looking out my studio window, across the street, I can see the telephone poles and houses that are at the top of the next hill. It’s an urban neighborhood, family oriented, folks that have been here for awhile; Pittsburgh locals.

Lonesome Sue 'Pon Turd Hill (For Big Sue), Oil on Canvas, 36 in x 36 in, 2017

It sounds like an early 20th century, working class, single family home neighborhood.

Yeah. Pittsburgh used to be a pretty big manufacturer of steel but there are also a lot of coal mines in the area. Pittsburgh is one of those places where there’s the north and there’s the south, not in terms of their…

Not the Civil War.

Yeah. People in the south don’t like to cross the river and vice versa. So I grew up in the south and my experience with the north is only since I have moved back. The further south you get, the closer to West Virginia you get; there’s more and more coal, more mines in this area, and there’s more mills in the north.

Did you grow up south of Pittsburgh?

Yeah, even further south. I live in Brookline, now, but I grew up a little bit further south in a suburb called Bethel Park. Those houses were built in the sixties and seventies, housing development kind of thing. At the time we had a pretty big wooded area behind our house that kind of stretched parallel to our street and at the top of our hill, which was a dead end street, a big patch of woods that I could easily walk through to get to my friends.

So you grew up in that in-between space, between total urbanity and the hills of southwestern PA.

Yeah, it wouldn’t be too much further south to be where you would consider it truly rural. As a family we would go on walks or bike rides on the Montour Trail. As a teenager we’d go creeping around the woods, trying to smoke weed, and hide from the cops. You can easily have that experience of being out in the woods, but then come home to sleep in a nice house in the suburbs. Or just go to the city; Carnegie Mellon is here, three or four different schools, and especially CMU, bringing in lots of interesting people around the city [which] was truly a good place to get interesting, alternative thought.

I think people still don’t think of Pittsburgh as a place of thought so much as it will always have this working class association, which it still hangs on to very, very much. Not hangs on to, but is. I mean it is a very working class city, for sure. But there are also some really smart people here, and really creative and really interesting people too, and they just coexist somehow; it’s great.

Screenshot, Noderer IG Post, 2020

Before the pandemic, what was the nature of the art community in Pittsburgh?

There are a few galleries. Historically, they have had a hard time staying open. There are a lot of people here who are intelligent and sophisticated and appreciate shows, but there are only a few people here who buy [art].

How is the community of artists? Do people support each other?

Yeah, I think so. People are serious about making work and seeing work. A gallery recently opened up that is concerned with showing local artists. That helps a lot. There are a lot of really talented people here and Pittsburgh needs to showcase that talent. Zynka Gallery is doing that, which is cool. There’s a first Friday. The city does support a lot of arts organizations -there’s the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh and things like that. I can see it moving, incrementally, toward getting richer.

You do have to make an effort to meet people and maintain those friendships. My friend, Pete, who is a painter as well, we met when I was renting a studio space from an organization called Radiant Hall. They own three buildings converted into studio spaces and they are really affordable and in the city. They have open studios and a number of people came through.

You might go to openings and see a few people that you know, go out and have drinks and talk. That was the experience in New York and Chicago -we’d go to openings, accumulate people, and you’d end up in a bar, somewhere, talking about art. That doesn’t happen as much, here, but I am okay with that. [Laughs]

Have platforms like Instagram substituted for a local, in-person art community?

To some extent you can get around the exhibition experience, but that social aspect? You find out that a big part of it is the social aspect - and the work is a part of that. Talking to people, meeting new people and all the ways that kind of thing can turn into new relationships and foundations to be built.

But this [pandemic] is happening, It seems like people, in art, are saying we’ll do an online exhibition instead. That’s good, but I would hate for that to replace things, though, because it is so much easier to be able to be on your phone, to be able to hold onto an exhibition. Plus the format is so different, it being so small really changes [the experience]. It’s the equivalent of walking across the street and then turning around to look at your painting on the other side. A lot of times it looks really great when they’re two inches by two inches. Or different, at least. I feel like we still have a lot of visual stuff we can get out of having an online interaction and we can be somewhat sociable on it too.

Lois Johnson Memorial Daycare Center, Oil on Linen, 11 in x 14 in, 2020

I like artist interviews because I feel like I can better understand what artists are thinking. I think a lot of artists are interested in that, maybe because it gives some insight into something that is largely private.

Yeah for sure. In the interview you pointed me to, with Jim Hittenger, it was neat to read about things that I consider influential for me also influencing him and see how he visually dealt with those things. You can have a similar influential experience, say film, and we’ll both put out different things maybe based on our age or how our environment was filtered through seeing these films when we were younger. Sometimes it makes you feel a little bit better about what your influences are, if you are embarrassed by somethings here and there, when you find out that everyone has got geeky things they like.

You have to come to terms with the things you were raised with.

My parents had mostly family photos around the house and they still have this artist hanging up, the artist Bev Doolittle. She makes nature based, believable looking stuff. They are all prints at home, not originals, but they’re of some Native American, frontier stuff, a lot of natural stuff. What she does is kind of gimmicky; she’ll hide things in the underbrush...

Oh, yeah, I know her work.

Yeah, like a wolf! It’s funny because I liked them when I was a kid. Bev Doolittle paintings are rugged, frontiersy, but with this hidden element that is only revealed the longer you get lost in staring at the image. Saying this out loud, it is absurd to me that I never realized that until right now [laughs]! So yeah, those Bev Doolittle things were more influential to me than any art I saw at the Carnegie as a kid.

Because you lived with it -it was there, in your vision, everyday.

Yeah, it was similar to looking out the window. Like the Bev Doolittle painting, the longer you look, the different kind of animals you can see in the tree branches -you can kind of do the same thing just looking out the window of the kitchen.

A way of bringing in the idea of the painting as a window.

Night of the Horse Fire, Oil on Panel, 24 in x 30 in, 2016

Would you share something of your formative experience of the land that has so strongly influenced your work?

I had a positive experience with being outside, in Bethel Park. As a kid, playing outside, we had a large patch of woods, behind the house. I spent a lot of time outside with friends or by myself having experiences with what seemed like “real nature” at the time. Not just a tree in the yard, but the woods with the creek, where I happened upon a dead deer and that kind of thing. It’s a visually striking place. It’s pretty dramatic.

There’s hills, sometimes very steep hills. The weather is temperamental; I always think of it as kind of moody. I think this nature lends itself to painting because there is a lot of texture here, a lot of movement, it’s very dynamic. It’s an older place; there’s still quite a bit of old buildings and some of them are occupied and falling apart. I’ve been a visual daydreamer ever since I was a kid. It was easy to get lost in staring out the window, in elementary school, at the trees because there were so many trees right there. The sky and the leaves on the ground -it’s easy to get lost in all those things. I started doing that when I was a kid and haven’t stopped.

Would you say that the window is more important than an actual engagement with the outdoors?

Now, for sure. When I was a kid it was probably equally split. I played outside a lot. Now the balance is little off. You had more time to do that when you were a kid. You can just play.

Without a sense of time.

Yeah. It’s harder to do that as an adult.

Housplant Display with Painting, Noderer Home

The work isn’t necessarily informed by your day to day, now, but is informed by early experience?

In a lot of ways, yeah. If I think literally about my day to day, seeing it through my car windows, through the work windows -I’ve wondered about that. How can I make my work more about my day to day experience? But then, all I can think about is making paintings essentially of work, which I do not want to do.

When I moved up here, my dog and I would walk multiple times a day throughout the seasons. That, up until about two or three years ago, was the extent of my daily experience with nature. Now that primarily comes through plants. My girlfriend and I have a lot of houseplants. It’s a big part of our interior worlds. We have these beautifully composed areas of lots of different types of plants that she has cared for amazingly.

I think the suburbs has conventionally gotten a bad rap when we talk about nature, or even when we talk about the city. I’m thinking that the suburbs is sort of a window upon the world outside the city. It exists as this place between the internal city space and the external, raw nature experience.

Right.

It has a lot more to offer than we have ever allowed it in terms of our experience of nature. It's counter to the narrative of wilderness, where there isn’t a human in sight, and its opposite, the urban experience and it being nature-less, which we also know is not true. The suburb is a unique vantage point and if you open up to it, it allows you to see that narrative differently.

I can see it from other perspectives as well. Folks out in the country can look at the suburbs as a window into what’s happening in the city in a way that maybe they can relate to more than just looking directly at the city. It’s a window; it’s a middle ground. Yeah. That’s interesting. Paintings as windows is definitely a thing.

It’s not even something I care to walk away from or challenge, strictly.

Yeah, I’m pretty much fully invested in that idea.

Shortcut To Wabash, Oil on Linen, 11 in x 14 in, 2020

How do you go about creating a sense of place, or more on point -the feeling of place, in your artwork, if you even feel you are doing so?

I want to. I find this area very beautiful. Formative experiences, in terms of interacting with the world, those were all had here. It’s important to me, but since I’ve been back, I have trusted that the character of this place would come out if I work intuitively because I’ve had so much time, even when I wasn’t here, being saturated by this place, or wanting this place back.

My goal is to capture how I feel about this place and I just assume that it comes across to people looking at my work. Whether or not they know, by looking at a painting of mine, that I live just outside of Pittsburgh? They can see it, maybe even the group of paintings, as a region because of the consistency there, in terms of subject matter, color, composition, specificity. I want there to be specificity in my work and of course, an amount of ambiguity.

I looked at your work and I’m not sure I knew you were in Pennsylvania, but it suggested it. I don’t know if it matters to viewers of your work that they pick up that regional sensibility or not, but to me it is specifically there, I see it based on my experience [of Pennsylvania].

I’m glad to hear that. Because to some extent it confirms that it’s not me subjectively thinking that I am capturing the place, but being way off-base, objectively, for someone else. I am really just painting what I see here. I know that it is not representational in the conventional sense, but I think it’s reflective of my influences, they’re right out this window. What I do with those influences, I don’t put them all back together so they look like the view out the window, because I need more than that. I think some people don’t realize that I am painting what’s around me. I haven’t constructed some sort of world, or if I have, it’s based on the world that I live in.

Monongahela, Oil on Linen, 16 in x 20 in, 2019

There is a sense of decay in your work that, to me, speaks of the region as well.

Yeah, it’s here. There’s a lot of old stuff here and a lot of it is not repurposed. Some of it is plowed over and something is built on top of it. But there’s plenty of stuff that is left alone to fall apart. At the same time, it doesn’t exist in an economically depressed area, it’s not an indication of a ghost town. You can appreciate it that way and not look at it as an indicator of some really dark thing that is happening.

I’m reminded of Caspar David Friedrich -his interest in painting the gothic ruin. I don’t look at that ruin as a matter of fact, but that he is creating an entire ethos or mood around an environment that looks partially rendered, accurately, and partially made up. I feel like your work has an American...I was almost going to say gothic!

Caspar David Friedrich, The Abbey in the Oakwood, 1810

I know you’re not talking about this [gothic] literally, but, it’s funny, as a teenager, I was very goth, liked al the goth music, but also gothic fiction, films, and some artwork -I didn’t see a whole lot of that in high school. You know, I am a seventeen year-old with black hair and nail polish and my teachers weren’t like, “Oh, you should check out Friedrich!” No, they were like, “Do you need help?” [laughs]

That sensibility, that awareness of mortality, with Friedrich, is something that has always been built in with me. I don’t know if that has to do with the region, or what. With Friedrich, his work is reflective of mortality, of spiritual wealth versus earthly gain. Those things aren’t explicit, in my mind, but I am aware of loss, the transitional nature of things.

How much of that speaks to being in a rust-belt city that has seen a significant end to a certain kind of life or work life?

It could be the collapse of the steel industry or it could also be genes. I’ve just been drawn to that stuff for so long. When I lived in Austin, Texas, that’s a very different city than Pittsburgh. I think that how Austin’s culture deals with progress is a lot different than here. So I feel like, if I had grown up there, I might not be as affected by the things that I am here.

Horse Hill Burner, Oil on Canvas, 24 in x 30 in, 2014

Was there a particular exhibition that had a profound impact on you as a young artist?

Earlier on I mentioned going to the Carnegie. There’s the Museum of Natural History and then the Museum of Art; they’re connected but also distinct. As a kid, I don’t remember going to the fine arts aspect, but I remember going to the natural history part quite a bit. Because, like any kid, I liked dinosaurs. Anything else there -the hall of minerals, the geologic stuff, the dioramas there, are out of sight. They are from the golden age of dioramas. Those contained worlds were very influential to me and that makes a lot of sense [when] looking at my work and that idea of a window.

When I was in undergrad, I really liked figurative painting. I really liked Lucien Freud, Jenny Seville. Who I loved the most was Odd Nerdrum. I remember going to New York and seeing a show of his work at Forum Gallery. I was just beside myself with wonder -it was great, but I have a different opinion, now.

He was popular then [nineteen nineties].

Oh yeah, sure. He was writing all that stuff on kitsch. He’s a goofball, but he could definitely make a handsome painting. Seeing them in person was important because he was essentially doing Rembrandt-type stuff. It was like, wow, these paintings have all this depth, on top of the content. At the time I was being a little reactionary; I was into academic figurative painting and almost everybody else was into more avant-garde stuff that I didn’t feel comfortable doing myself because I didn’t know enough.

Screenshot, IG Post, Joe Noderer, Carnegie Museum of Natural History Diorama (Detail), 2020

That Burchfield show, at The Whitney, about ten years ago. I love Burchfield. He’s so Midwestern. There’s an undercurrent of darkness to his work that I think exists in regions like this.

He was in Western New York. Gloomy -lot of clouds from the Lakes.

Yeah, and he lived in Ohio for a long time before that. Seeing that show in person was great. I don’t think, prior to that, I had seen any Burchfield in person because they are famously sensitive to light and they stay put. So that was just mind-blowing for me. I also saw a pretty great Lucien Freud show in Ft. Worth -that was pretty eye opening too.

Do you think about this work when you are making your own work?

Burchfield I do. I have plenty of his books around. The Burchfield Penny Museum is only about three hours away, in Buffalo. I think about Burchfield in terms of I don’t what to be derivative of, more so than anything else. I think my paintings are pretty different from Burchfield.

Hell's Hollow, Oil on Panel, 18 in x 24 in, 2018

Freud I don’t think of, consciously. One of the things I was blown away by, at that show, was how the closer you got to those paintings, they completely fall apart into material but you do not have to get to far away from them and they feel as real as you. I still have a hard time understanding how that’s possible, to be honest. I don’t really like Freud as much, anymore. Once you find out about people, you’re like, “These people aren’t that great.” [laughs] But that was one of the first times I had that experience.

Viullard -there’s a few of his paintings at the museum in Chicago where I would go pretty frequently. That’s a similar thing, but his stuff is way weirder than Burchfield or Freud.

What contemporary artists are you looking at now?

Alessandro Keegan is an awesome believer in painting. He’s into the occult and spirituality. He’s up front about it and makes really great work that is connected to that. It’s not corny, cheesy, sensational or anything like that and I think that’s pretty impressive.

Alessandro Keegan, Inky Bloater, Oil Over Walnut Ink on Wood, 24 in x 18 in, 2017

Where did you study art, if you did at all?

Undergrad school was in Pennsylvania. I went to the Tyler School of Art.

In Philly?

Yeah, near Philly.

Did you go to grad school?

Yeah, in Chicago. Although, before I went to SAIC, I lived in New York very briefly.

What year was that?

It was February, 2002, and I probably left in 2003 [Laughs]. It was one of those...a really rude awakening. I really did not like it there.

Why did you go to NYC?

Before I graduated from Tyler, I did the Yale Norfolk Residency and met a lot of people there that lived in New York and we got along really well. I decided I was going to save up some money and move to New York. Went to Philadelphia, got my stuff, and then moved back to Pittsburgh. I lived with my folks, worked and saved money. I saved about two thousand dollars and then I moved to New York in February.

It was the winter after September 11th. It was probably the worst time to move to New York for lots of reasons -that being the primary one. It was a complicated time. I moved from Pittsburgh, from a relatively ideal setting, to New York. It was a lot of anxiety, really stressful, on top of the fact that there was a miasma of total terror and fear and anxiety -all those things left over, just still hanging. Not even left over, just hanging in the air from nine eleven.

I visited some friends in Philadelphia while I was living in New York and they were living, to my eyes, just the best life and I didn’t see them as making any kind of huge sacrifice, artistically, by living a more comfortable life. I realized that part of the reason I moved to New York was that I thought, you know, that this is the place -the center of the art universe in America. And you know, I really don’t like my day to day life, I feel terrible all the time, but it’s worth it because I am in New York and it’s going to lead to something. So that trip to Philly made me see that I didn’t have to live in New York if I didn’t want to.

Night of the Demon; Friend to Beast and Bird, Acrylic on Panel, 24 in x 30 in, 2004-05

Part of my reason for moving to New York is that I wanted to get into grad school and I thought it would be a great place to be making work to then apply to grad school. I assumed that I would get into at least one of the grad schools that I applied to. Didn’t get into any grad schools because the work wasn’t true to my nature. I was making stuff that I thought would fit into Yale or even SAIC or...

The “important” schools [laughs].

Yeah! Exactly, the important schools.

Everybody applies to Yale, whether they want to go there or not [laughs].

Yeah [laughs]. That’s the truth.

So I got all the rejection letters and that was tough, but what happened was that I kept making work; I kept painting. But then I started making these paintings that I really, really felt connected to and that was a pretty formative experience. When I am making a painting I am trying to be relatively intuitive; I’m trying not to think too much about what it might mean or what I am trying to say with this painting. I’m trustingthat I’m making it and I’m influenced by what’s going on and that influence will come out and will show in a way that is more saturated than if I were to set out with the idea of this or that. That practice of just sitting down, painting, listening to music, getting lost in a painting -that’s where that started, actually.

I wasn’t painting for an application or for anybody, since I didn’t have any kind of prospects lined up for showing, really just painting, in large part, for myself. Although I lived with two other people who were artists and I had a lot of artist friends -they saw what I was doing. It wasn’t like no one knows I paint. The experience was just about me and the painting. I can’t imagine how awful things would have been if I had gotten into grad school with that work I was making, initially, for grad school.

How old were you at that point?

In my twenties, twenty-three or so.

Jogger, Acrylic on Wood Panel, 32 in x 30 in, 2004

There was a lot of struggle when I was twenty three. Questions like, “what am I doing; what worth does it have, who am I in my work and how do I choose a direction?” Do you have a memory for what you worried about, artistically, back then?

All my friends who were making art there were painters, but they definitely were kind of conceptual. They had gone to Cooper or Pratt. I didn’t know anyone from the New York Studio School, which maybe would have been an easier fit. When I think too much about being intelligent or defending something I’ve done in a painting, I get suffocated. I mean it’s intellectual to some extent, but for me it’s about connecting to my experience and just connecting to my environment. Again, not that thought has no place in that, but it’s not the primary reason for making the painting to begin with or there is no end goal, proving some sort of point, necessarily, about painting. So knowing that about myself, but trying to be a “smart person” in my paintings -that was very stressful.

That time in your life, whatever you do, but certainly as artists, your mind is way more open to influence, even influences that don’t fit, and it pulls you into a kind a void. And if you’re lucky, or whatever, maybe luck has nothing to do with it, if you survive all that you get to come out on the other side, which I say is over 35, whatever, maybe over 40, I don’t know what age it is, it’s different for everybody, where who you are remains in tact, despite all that.

Yeah.

To me, that’s an arc of an art education. So what brought you to Chicago, SAIC?

I had been to Chicago as a kid and thought it was a pretty cool place. I had been told, when I was in undergrad, by one of my professors, Richard Cramer, who unfortunately has passed away of complications due to Covid-19, that Chicago would be a good place for me to check out; check out the Hairy Who. At that time I was making work that was a little more graphic, in terms of being kind of flat, and really composed, but it was also inspired to some extent by cartoons and comics. So I can see why he would say that now. At the time, I was just a kid, and I thought more about what was happening in New York as important versus what was happening in Chicago. So I just didn’t know much about Chicago.

Kurt Wirsum, Youdue, c. 1966

Even though the way I approach my paintings has changed, that current stayed intact. A lot of color, relatively stylized figures, but also not a presumptive attitude about art, which is what those folks [Hairy Who] were known for. They were smart; really intelligent people reacting to the high brow stuff in New York and on the West Coast.

So, the second time I applied for grad schools, I got an interview at SAIC. I went and got along with Dan Devening and Judith Geichman, the folks that interviewed me, and they were interested in where I was coming from.

I also applied to Yale and got an interview there too, but when I went it was like, “You don’t belong here, Joe.” When I was at the interview, they asked me who I was looking at and I mentioned Martin Kippenberger. Based on what I had to say about Kippenberger, which was mostly all formal, not conceptual at all, which is an enormous part of the approach, if not the entire thing, Kurt Kauper, who was one of the interviewers, said flat out, “I don’t think you understand Kippenberger.” It was pretty intense, he was right, but no one had ever been that blunt with me or it had been awhile. That was a pretty intense environment to be in anyway; I was interviewing at Yale and I was sweating bullets.

Yeah, it’s that kind of environment.

So when he said that, he was right. It made my stomach sink, and I also knew I wasn’t getting into Yale, but that made the interview at Chicago, which came after that, just feel more right, more natural. We got along. I was making these paintings on acrylic panels that I put together from wood at Home Depot -they were really poorly made. I wasn’t thinking about that conceptually, I was just making something to paint on. Dan said something about how the supports look like shit, and that’s got to be on purpose. It wasn’t on purpose, but I understood what he was saying.

So it just seemed like a good fit. Chicago, in a lot of ways, reminds me of Pittsburgh -a big, blue collar city. After getting to know Jim Nutt and Karl Wirsum, and other folks that work at the school, it seemed like the right attitude. They were serious, but not too serious, fun but not too much fun.

So, why did you move to Texas?

I was living in Chicago. I was teaching and working in a woodshop. Chicago was stressing me out. My parents had recently moved from Pittsburgh to El Paso, Texas, and then to Austin to be with my sister because of the grandkids. Work was drying up in Chicago and me wanting to be there was drying up. I initially wanted to move back to Pittsburgh, but part of that was to be closer to my family. Since they had all just moved to Texas I thought maybe I should consider moving to Texas. I found a job, there, teaching at the art institute. I have to admit I was definitely into the idea of moving to “the West.” Not the west coast, but the frontier west.

A romantic notion, maybe?

Yeah, for sure. Lot’s of people in Chicago were like, “If that’s the only reason you are going there, you shouldn’t go. Don’t move to Texas for that reason. ” But I did. So I moved there for a change. I liked that Austin was small, like Pittsburgh, but also that it seemed healthier than Pittsburgh -it is healthier than Pittsburgh. Coming from Pittsburgh, New York or Chicago, that seemed refreshing, although talk to anybody I knew down there and they’d say all I complained about was that it wasn’t old enough or decrepit enough [laughs].

So I started working from pictures that were of Pittsburgh or South Carolina, which reminded me a lot of the Pittsburgh area with the tangly growth.

Untitled, Acrylic on Wood Panel, 12 in x 12 in, 2011

When was this?

That was 2009 through 2014.

So you went somewhere new, but you were thinking about where you were from and you were looking for notes of that in things that were in Austin. You then made a decision to go back home to Pittsburgh. I read in an interview that it was a bit of a challenge for you to go back home, even though you had wanted to. I don’t think your work is nostalgic, but I think, to some degree, you have dealt with nostalgia.

Yeah, a lot.

Can you talk about nostalgia, going back home, the pain it involved, and how that manifested in your work?

Towards the end of grad school, I was feeling a strong desire to move back to Pennsylvania, to Pittsburgh; wasn’t able to, and I moved to Texas. I was looking at things that reminded me of the Pittsburgh area, to work from, and that were also related to family. So, when I worked on paintings from photos of South Carolina, those were all family vacations that were impactful on me, visually, and made its way into my art. I realized I missed family or that feeling of belonging that I feel here [Pittsburgh], because I grew up here and had a lot of experience with people who have lived their whole lives here.

My uncle passed away in 2012 and we came up here for that. That was obviously, emotionally, a very heavy time. He was my mom’s only sibling and she was pretty upset and I missed my uncle. We came up in June or July, a beautiful time to be up here, but also very emotionally intense. While I was up here I began taking some pictures of things that I’d like to paint when I got back to Texas. After I got back to Texas, the more I was making these paintings based on stuff from Pennsylvania, the more I thought, “Why don’t I move back to Pittsburgh -why am I doing this -it’s weird.” My parents moved back up about a year before I did, so there were all these things pointing me in the direction of going back which was something I wanted to do for at least a decade.

Big Mingo Gap, Oil on Canvas, 48 in x 56 in, 2013

When I got here [Pittsburgh], it was April or so. It was early spring, which here is dark, not warm, it’s wet, there’s barely any green although you know it’s on its way. That had a pretty profound effect on me emotionally, just like it did growing up. On top of the fact that I had suffered some losses; leaving people behind in Texas; not sure I was doing the right thing by moving [in] with my parents and not knowing what I was going to do. Found a job at a grocery store, no teaching had popped up, even though I made inquiries. I had to ask myself a lot of questions, had to change my perception of myself, I had to adapt.

What did that mean to you -to change your perception of yourself?

In Austin I thought of myself as an artist and a teacher that had come from Chicago. I was showing at a gallery in Chicago, regularly, every two years or so. My view of myself in Chicago was all art-based, painting-based. When I moved to Texas, that’s how I presented myself and that was the world I fit into. When I came up here [Pittsburgh] I just had a show and I had one more coming up, but beyond that, it was almost like a secret. I was working at Trader Joes and nobody here knew or cared about my experiences in Chicago or Texas. To some extent I had to be okay with painting or art-making as somewhat secondary to being a son. My mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer and I painted along with that. That put things into perspective quite a bit when there was the very real possibility of her death. I took myself out of a bubble; popped that bubble pretty hard.

But the thing is that once I got over that shock, it’s more in line with my nature, anyways, to exist in that middle ground. It was ultimately a good, but difficult, thing for me to have done. It was good because it helped me be a little bit more objective about home in a way that has improved my relationship with it, as well as changed the atmosphere of my work so that it might be less nostalgic. I’ve always, inadvertently, skirted nostalgia in my work, but now that I am here, I am painting what’s here. It feels like it is almost impossible for there to be nostalgia in my work, which is good because I was never comfortable with that.

I don’t think your work or landscape, itself, is a nostalgic enterprise, absolutely. It really depends on what you are going about.

Prior to that [the move home], I was being nostalgic. I was missing Pittsburgh or Bethel Park and seeking out things that reminded me of it.

Pink Motel, Oil and Acrylic on Wood Panel, 12 in x 12 in, 2010

In the online catalog for the 2012 exhibit “Tenses of Landscape,” which included some of the Austin work, you stated that “Reacting against... sameness has become essential to my work. I find the unique things (older buildings, trees, alleys/garbage) much more valuable than things that seem to be increasingly built to replace them.” You go on to say that these unique, old things remind you of painting.

So the question is what painting things is, or could be, in relation to your statement? The other thing I wondered, in the sense of reacting against the sameness of contemporary architecture, is whether you are reacting against a certain kind of art at that time. It’s kind of a tricky discourse because nobody wants to be reactionary, right? And yet, I know that people see [often incorrectly] that an artist making landscape is working against a contemporary art culture.

Can we have a dialogue about that -is there something to say about that?

Austin being a newer place, I was definitely talking about that sameness. I really didn’t like the architecture there. It was right for people who didn’t have a problem with putting this thing up or that thing up. It’s flat so there is no issue with expanding. Having been in older cities, prior to that, I saw Austin’s architecture as a visible byproduct of “new” culture, throwaway culture.

By looking at other things, I was definitely choosing those. By painting those things and putting them in shows in Chicago and Austin; I felt that by valuing them, by taking the time to paint them, I was giving people an alternative to what was happening.

Store II, Acrylic on Wood Panel, 24 in x 24 in, 2010

In general, I don’t know what’s going on [in contemporary art]. What I could say is, as you mentioned, I'm being pretty blunt about wanting the paintings to have an expressive quality. Maybe that is something that people don’t say even if it is something that they want; they don’t throw it out there.

I think at the time, because I saw myself as an artist-teacher, I was thinking more about reacting to, or having a dialogue with, contemporary art, but now I don’t see it the same way. Because my role has changed, which is good. It’s made my work better because it is more direct. I think less about how it is going to fit into what’s going on, as if I know what’s going on.

I think the idea of expressiveness is a challenge because the academic life, and to some degree the commercial life that may come after it, tries to work that out of us. There are a lot of artists that work from that place, but hesitate to talk about it because [talking about it] it has been trained out of them.

That was definitely part of my experience in grad school. I had a group of friends in school who were not so much making expressive paintings, but they believed in the act of painting. The thing that united all of us was the tradition of painting and trusting, even though it was hard, that something of relevance was going to come through because we’re making paintings now, in the world. Whereas other folks in the [grad] program, or the advisors, weren’t into expressiveness, in the literal way you think of it, like a Frank Auerbach painting, unless you had a conceptual reason for doing it.

Do you think that was a function of their disability to entertain what I think is conceptual...a way of thinking about what painting is or could be -that’s conceptual, right? How you conceive of painting and what it can do.

Sometimes I am not sure if expressiveness is the right word. I think of them as expressive paintings, but maybe more in terms of being emotive, having a mood, an atmosphere. There’s a certain amount of texture to them, not a lot of flat, plain painting. That kind of texture, or implied texture, is something I consistently like across the board, whether its music, actual landscape, or other people’s work. There’s the evidence of my hand, there, because I use my fingers to move things around. There are fingerprints, so they are literally hands-on.

I can’t help but to think of Frank Auerbach, or Kirchener, when I think of expressive. But who I really think of as an expressive painter, who has been a big influence on me, is Delacroix. Historically speaking, his work is not expressive -it’s Romantic. He’s bold, his stuff has a lot of color, his compositions are very active. It’s an experience to look at one of his paintings; you look all around, you get really close, you get really far. That’s the kind of quality that I like to have in my work. Formally speaking, you could call my paintings expressive; there’s a lot of movement in them that is generated by me making expressive marks to begin a painting and then building on them from there.

Eugene Delacroix, Horse Frightened by Lightening, Watercolor, 1824

Do you think it’s the sense of the natural world, the architecture, whatever it is, having a quality of languid animation -I say languid because your work isn’t wildly frantic. It’s sort of a dripping animation; even the inorganic feels organic.

Yeah, that’s how I see things when I look around. That’s what’s here. Even power-lines, hills, and houses -there’s a lot of, visually speaking, movement here. If I were living in Chicago, in Logan Square, I wouldn’t really get much -there would be a lot of horizontal and vertical. We get a lot of different visual stimulation here. On top of that, we have a lot of nature, pretty intense seasonal changes, all those things come together. Maybe expressive of emotion, or of feeling, maybe that is a better way to frame things when we are talking about painting because that [expressive] is such a loaded term. That’s why people don’t say, “I wanna make expressive paintings.” [Laughs] If somebody told me that, like one of my students, I’d be a little wary until I saw what they wanted to make and then that wariness might change.

Acanthus Island on the Mon, Oil on Linen, 11 in x 14 in, 2019

I find Symbolist impulses entwined with American Regionalism, Burchfield’s manic mysticism hybridizing with Redon’s macabre irrationalism in your work. There is also a current of later German Romanticism and, in some paintings, a compositional resemblance to deChirico’s Archaeologists. What do you think of these combinations I put together?

I think they’re good.

There was a specific image that you made and I thought, “why does this painting remind me of deChirico?” A lot of your paintings have an internal aspect; they mind the boundary of the canvas edge. “The Archaeologists,” he had a series of them, are like that, where they look like a still-life. Your painting is like that -it’s portraiture, it’s landscape, it’s still-life -all at the same time.

I had to look that picture up because I know deChirico, but I was always really turned off by Surrealism, although he is kind of a proto-surrealist. I am still wary of it, but I think there were some really good things that came out of it.


Giorgio deChirico, The Archaeologists, 1927

With “The Archaeologists,” once you brought that up, I instantly saw the subject matter and its relationship to the edges. I’ve become increasingly aware of the edge; how what I am making interacts with that. I’m looking at this one right here [on the studio wall], it definitely has that kind of still-life aspect where it looks as if it’s an object existing in a space. It’s a painting of a possum chewing on someone’s hand and arm. The possum and the arm have become like one thing. The exterior is just color.

The idea is that I don’t always want what I am making to look as if it’s a snapshot, or a window is a better way of putting it, out onto a larger reality. It’s like a way to make the experience of a physical thing rather than a picture of the environment in which you or I would feel a certain way. I’m taking that idea and trying to get at making a new thing out of those parts.

I think of them sculpturally, not all the paintings, but the ones you’re referring to. I look at it and think, “Why is there all this empty space?” To get the idea across of this thing being three dimensional, like an impossible still-life. Why not just try to make an impossible still-life? It would almost make more sense if they were sculptures.

Bingham's Vision, Oil on Panel, 24 in x 24 in, 2018

In your later, shall I say "bearded portraits,” I draw visual connections ranging from Ole Peter Hansen Balling's John Brown to Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son. What do you think about all that?

You’re not reaching too far with “Saturn Devouring his Son.” That’s definitely an image I saw when I was a teenager. When we see that painting, now, there’s an element of goofiness to it. But there’s also a blunt, downplayed, but in that way believable, violence to it with the mutilated corpse he’s holding. I’ve always been drawn to that kind of grizzliness.

That figure doesn’t look too threatening to me. If that figure wasn’t holding, and implied to be eating, another human being, I would certainly think it was strange, but wouldn’t be afraid of it. It reminds me of watching horror movies, when I was a kid, with my dad. You know this is fake, going into it, but there are gross things that happen. Like Dawn of the Dead, everything’s garish, the zombies are blue, the paint -there you go, the blood is bright red as paint. Yet there’s still a visceral, disgusting fear and terror to those things and I think that I saw that in that Goya painting. Then you can get into the irrational -that being something that just isn’t as aggressively off-putting as something that is bloody. He’s going for something like that. And the same for those paintings of witches, all that irrational belief in superstition or the occult. That has stuck with me for a time.

L: Ole P.H. Balling, John Brown (Detail), 1872 R: Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son, 1819-23

John Brown, he’s an interesting person. He’s a person, an era, I’ve been drawn to for awhile. There’s that connection to the hillbilly, you mentioned, just formally. Painting facial hair or hair that is unkempt is way more satisfying as a painter of primarily natural things than is someone who has a nice haircut and no facial hair whatsoever. I live pretty close to rural areas, here, and folks that remind me of... [laughs] the stereotype of the hillbilly, visually speaking. It's more that I see the bearded people as symbolically representative of my home and the land, here.

It is, technically, Appalachia.

Yeah. There’s a love-hate relationship with that. I have this critical remove from my education. I think, on the one hand, I like that, I need that -the everyday, which in this area, often kind of looks like that [my portraits]. I mean, I exaggerate it a bit, of course. But I also need that kind of criticality; one can be both.

Some Fair Spring Morn, Oil on Canvas, 24 in x 30 in, 2014

Is there a sense of self-portraiture in it?

Yeah, definitely. That’s part of the reason why I struggle with portraits. I don’t have a problem making myself look unusual or deformed or whatever in a painting. I can be pretty objective about it. I wouldn’t want to hurt someone’s feelings if they had an expectation of a portrait being painted of them.

Would someone ask you for a portrait? [laughs] Has that happened?

No, not really. I would like to do that and I’ve painted a few portraits of people, but it never feels good to do it. I never feel like I’m letting loose and doing what I want to do. Whenever someone who maybe hasn’t asked, but might want a portrait, that is what they want. They know they’re not going to get a photographic portrait of themselves.

Horse Hill Waugh, Oil on Canvas over Panel, 24 in x 24 in, 2016

From Thoreau to Ted Kaczynski, the retreat to nature has been a consistent counter-cultural impulse in the U.S. What do you think of the “lone man in the wilderness” concept? I’m not really catching much from you about the wilderness man; I’m not sure that that is relevant. Does this idea interest you?

It used to. I was very interested in mountain men for while. At the time, when I was getting into that stuff, I was swept away by the romance. I didn’t think at all about how it was connected to the destruction of the environment, expansion of corporations, all that stuff. I was just looking at what I saw was a harmonious balance between man and nature, but specifically for Americans. Now I think it is synonymous with the destruction of nature, consuming things, the displacement of peoples. But with mountain men, that happened here or there, folks were just heading out west to be alone and commune [with nature]. I realize now that my view of that was very romanticized, very inaccurate, and certainly something I wouldn’t want to put out in terms of an image of “better days.”

That’s not where you’re coming from.

No, but I was drawn to those things just [from] growing up here.

The influence of that mythology.

Yeah, for sure. There’s a connection to nature, there. I was influenced by those things, but now, when I tap into that, it has less to do with mountain men or the frontier. Those were a way for me to get back into this. All that stuff, like the film Jeremiah Johnson, the big resurgence of that stuff around the time of the bicentennial. I was born a few years later, but I grew up with people who were very influenced by that time period. There’s a lot of visual evidence of that here. By way of that stuff, I found my way back to images of home. I guess I had to go through it, conceptually.

Older Boggy Lite, Oil on Linen, 11 in x 14 in, 2019

I had the same impulse -I got to get across this country, I got to see it and participate in it. There’s some suspicion or skepticism about that and I think that’s reasonable. These ideas come full circle to the original displacement [of native peoples] and nation building, when I think about the people I associate with those [western mountain] places, now, which can be white supremacists on compounds, Ted Kacynski, Ruby Ridge -to me, that’s the mountain men now.

We just went up north for a couple of days and it was like Trump this, Trump that. Just sign after sign -big, hand-made signs saying “Love America, Vote for Trump.” This is really unfortunate because we’re in this beautiful environment. This is a place that you should expect more harmony. I’m sure there are pockets of that, but it seemed like the impression one would get from the folks living out in nature is that they are a bunch of angry conservatives. I know that’s not true, but it does seem like you have to contend with that now.

It’s complicated since we are all dealing with a set of stereotypes and mythologies. Our conception of nature is formed in cities where ideas are different and social or cultural norms are different. Out there, in the country, ideas they form about cities are just as wrong.

Horse Hill, We Hardly Knew Ye, Oil on Canvas, 16 in x 20 in, 2017

But it does play into the artwork, to some degree. I do not look at your work and think this is representative of that. It does seem a bit of a critique, the portraits. Maybe that’s putting it too academically.

I know what you mean.I think that is part of why I am drawn to them; it is because they do make me uncomfortable. They tap into different feelings than I usually tap into when I’m making my work, which are usually harmonious, good feelings. A lot of the portraits started out, honestly, to be critical of people here. People who are backwards. But I don’t think that it is fair or right to project that onto people. That’s why they are often filtered through self-portraits because, really, that’s what it is anyway.

You are a part of it, in maybe not an obvious way, but you are born of the same place.

I can love it, its backwardness, or I can be really irritated by it and think I should have stayed in Chicago where there is more of an arts culture.

By making it your image, you are implicating yourself in being the thing that you are criticizing.

Yeah, it’s good to hear that may come across. I’m still working on that with the portraits. Because the complexity needs to come across, not just be out-rightly critical.

Old Jonah, Oil on Canvas over Panel, 10 in x 12 in, 2015

What happens to your work after you finish it? Do you have an outlet for them?

Not currently. I was showing at Linda Warren Projects, in Chicago, but she closed her doors awhile ago. It’s the place that I consistently showed. I was lucky, right out of grad school, I got a show in her back room, the start-up place. That went well and she said “How would you like to have a show in the main gallery next year?”

Yeah, I would. [Laughs]

Yeah, exactly. Right out of school like that? There’s no way I’m gonna say no. That’s an interesting thing, too, because my experience was different than a lot of people. I started showing right out of grad school. I also had to work, I wasn’t selling and making all my ends meet, but I didn’t have to hoof it.

You weren’t applying to shows?

No, not really. Honestly, Instagram, visually at least, is my primary outlet just as far as getting things out there [now].

Do you sell work that way?

I’ve sold a few things, here and there, with it. If someone wants to buy something they are free to ask. I think my Instagram does say they’re for sale, but I don’t put a price on them. I don’t even wonder about it, unless somebody asks.

Linda had a sense of what she could get for something at her gallery. She had a clientele and had been in business for awhile. I was really lucky to connect with Linda because she is such a strong supporter of her artists. Without that person, without that guidance, I don’t know. Plus, that was in Chicago, this is Pittsburgh. I sold a painting to someone a couple of years ago, in Brooklyn, NY, and I’m sure they are used to seeing, if not paying, high prices. There’s so many different contexts that it’s hard to come up with one...it’s almost a case by case, I imagine.

Should a painting be the same price in Pittsburgh as it is in New York City? If you don’t have a facility in New York, say.

Why not? Assigning a monetary value is just that. I don’t believe that things that cost a lot are more worthwhile than things that don’t. In fact, I probably think the opposite. It’s a struggle because I kind of cut my teeth selling things through a gallery and I could get a couple thousand bucks for a painting.

Is that after her take?

Yeah, and that’s nice; I am not going to lie. But at the same time, maybe because of my upbringing, I don’t always attribute value to money. I think of it more as, if someone is interested in my work, if they’re getting something out of it, if it moves them, as corny as that sounds, that’s more important to me than making a buck off of it. Because I am fine, I am making money. I actually don’t think I would like to just make money through my paintings and just paint all the time, just be an artist all the time.

I sold a few paintings through Instagram; intentionally putting them up for sale and pricing them to help support BLM. I felt that was the best way to do it, because the money was going almost entirely to an organization that I think is doing good. The people that bought them wanted to support that organization and they wanted my work, so they were supporting me. It just felt great; it was a significant amount to give to an organization, wasn’t a loss on my part, and a person is getting a piece of mine. Why not let that be how I sell things? That’s possibly good enough.

Sherman Maggie's Dream of the Jays, Graphite on Paper, 22 in x 30 in, 2018

After moving back up here, I had to take a look at how I define myself. I feel more like myself, in terms of how I approach thoughts like that, than when I lived in Chicago. There’s a reality to being here that I didn’t have there. I don’t want to work at Trader Joes for the rest of my life, but there is something, I get a lot out of work that isn’t artwork. I need that to a certain extent.

When Justice Ginsburg died, her quotes started coming out and one of them was about how she needed to be a mother to create the the space for her law work. That one demanded the other and made the other one possible; it made the enjoyment of the other one possible.

Yeah, I think that’s true. On days off, I can’t wait to get in here and paint. I’ll paint sometimes after work. It definitely helps me appreciate it more that I don’t work as much in that field. When I teach, that’s the closest I get to feeling as if there is a seamless connection. I was teaching two nights a week at PCA, prior to the pandemic, so that has changed a little bit. I have been doing that less; just started doing that once a week, yesterday. That’s good enough for me, that little bit. I still get to share insight with people and get that genuine connection and help people at PCA. That’s enjoyable to me, as enjoyable as painting. For me I need to have both, not just one of those things.

What’s the future look like for you?

I have as show in Chicago in spring of 2022, at the Riverside Art Center. Judith Mullen reached out a few months ago to ask if I’d be interested in a show there. Otherwise I don’t really know, especially now with everything going on. I’m waiting to see how we’re going to move forward. So I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing.

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You can see more of Joe's work by visiting is website, josephaaronnoderer.com, and keep up to date by following him on Instagram @josephnoderer. This interview was originally published at Rosalux Gallery.

Invisibility of Mechanisms and the Half-Percent Revolution

2021-01-16T05:00:00.001-06:00

The events of January 6, at the U.S Capitol, point me back to the invisibility of mechanisms that play a role in popular superstition, conspiracy-thinking, and suspicion. That invisibility which manifests a sense of something much bigger, more diabolical, than its true extent, also provides the cover for power and influence of a small group of actors or a limited number of terrorizing acts, that can manipulate political outcomes against the greatest good. If perceived power is power, the magnification of the actions of a few by media outlets, including social media, and the obfuscations created by time, distance, mistrust, ignorance, and the representational vacuum created by globalized economics have come together to destabilize our system.

We have to ask who most benefits from this destabilization and follow that logic to its conclusions.

It is said that it takes anywhere from 3.5% to 25% of the population to flip majority rule to minority rule, to enact a social, cultural, or political revolution. I'm inclined to believe the smallest number of actual actors, along with a larger number of inactive support or disinterest, is all that is necessary. The majority may fear the changes afoot, or the actions they witness on TV, or even the ideas inherent to the changes, but most will sit in shock or horror, unsure of how to act without the strongest leadership to shape the majority's actions.

"IT can manipulate people with weaker wills, making them indifferent to the horrific events that unfold or serve as unknowing accomplices."

"I'm every nightmare you've ever had. I'm your worst dream come true. I'm everything you ever were afraid of."

Unlike the mythical spirits of ghost stories of the Continent, that rise up from the land to defend against transgressions born of arrogance and rationality, this American spirit rises up from its sewers to manipulate and encourage the arrogance of ignorance. American ghost stories are powered by our greatest crimes and recurrent ills.

When Absurdity Gives You A Squash, Make Cake

2020-12-08T05:00:00.004-06:00

The local Arboretum, where I manage photography education, employs a couple who've been growing an absurd variety of squash. In fall, it's quite a spectacular display. Some of these end up for sale and I happened to show up on two for one day, and that's how I ended up with two ridiculously giant "butternut" squash. I cooked one in the oven to eat as a side, but found it too fibrous and moist to enjoy the way we might delicata or acorn, or even ordinary-sized butternut squash. What to do?

Out of the oven, into the fridge until...

A cake was born. It had to be sugar-free, since that's the new way, here. Sweet is allowed, as long as it comes from fibrous sources like dates. If you google pumpkin bread, you'll get millions of hits. If you search for sugar-free pumpkin bread, you'll get a bunch of keto, vegan, gluten free, paleo wonk, but few, if any pages dedicated to the refined sugar-free. So, one must adapt, and adapt I did. Recipe follows:

Refined Sugar Free Squash Bread (Cake)

1 cup of unbleached flour, all-purpose works
3/4 cup whole wheat flour, all the healthier -right?
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp all-spice, what a catch all name
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg, ground of course
Zest of an orange, although, when in a pandemic, I pass up going to the grocery for one orange
1-1/4 to 1-3/4 cups (more moist, less moist) of pureed (or vigorously stirred), cooked squash
1/3 cup oil (or 1 stick of softened butter in my case)
2 eggs, preferably from your neighbor's chickens
1/2 tsp vanilla (glad to get that jug of it from Costco, pandemic baking and all)
2 cups whole, dried dates (thanks again Costco), one chopped and the other soaked in warm water and then pureed.
Chopped walnuts, as much as you like, or none if you wish
Sugar-free Lily chocolate chips if you're into that (chocolate is one place the alcohol sugars hold up well)

On To It

Preheat oven to 350 F

Butter up a loaf pan, average size, maybe 9x4x3 inches

Warm 1 cup of water in the microwave or stove-top and place 1 cup of dates into it to soften. Once softened, mix manually or with a machine to puree (doesn't need to be perfect). In a medium-large bowl, combine both flours, baking soda, baking powder, salt and spices. In another bowl, place the pureed dates, oil or butter, squash puree, and orange zest (if you went to the store to get one orange) and mix well. Add the two eggs to this mixture, then the vanilla and mix it up. Add this bowl to the flour bowl and now you're cooking.

Fold the ingredients together into a smooth consistency (well, as smooth as it can get, don't go crazy). At this time you can add the chopped dates, the nuts, and chips (if those are part of your diet), and fold it all together. Get that mixture into the buttered baking pan and it into the oven for, hard to say, 45-55 minutes. Check on it. Do the toothpick into the center test. When done, take it out and let cool for twenty minutes before turning it upside down for removal. Then enjoy. You can freeze it or refrigerate it, or eat it all in one sitting.

Post Script: For a guy who teaches photography, those images up there are real orange, absurdly orange, like the times.

The Politics of Superstition

2020-11-02T13:30:00.023-06:00

I know a thing or two about Donald Trump. I grew up with him.

We were both born in the same borough and more precisely, in the same hospital. Over the 24 years between our births, the populations served by that hospital had changed. For me, that change became part of my identity and for him, a repudiation that could only be salvaged by slapping his name on it.

Throughout my childhood, our local media afforded Trump attention that out-sized his accomplishment. In those rough years, the seventies into the Reagan eighties, the media wanted something or someone to look at that wasn't the blighted hangover of the previous decade. Instead, we were served Trump's self-manufactured over-confidence, a salesman, as the nation turned away from its problems to fix on the shiny object Reagan had promised, but would never deliver.

In this past, Trump's vainglory, gold-plated hucksterism and bald-faced opportunism was self-serving. Apart from the misguided attention provided by a talk TV media industry always in search of content, his effect on most of us, then, was negligible.

Yet, here we are, today, in a confused haze, a political fog of war. On the precipice of this election, whose over-stimulation of the senses is experienced by the political spectrum, I cannot escape my supposition that our political body has a tickle of calamity in its throat. A deep, possibly unconscious, metastasization of threat and decline that may have begun with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, or was it the election of 2000? Hard to say -it was all too easy to dismiss the subtle symptoms back then.

Social, cultural, or political conservatism has roots in the fear underpinning the premise of stability. If I were to discard Trump's means, leaving only ends, I would say this opportunist has successfully re-established the minority's conservative vision of defunded government (so-called tax cuts), reduced environmental regulation, religious fundamentalism, "law and order," racially-stratified liberty, extraordinary defense spending, and more. These ends are not new, but Trump's simple arithmetic of means and ends cannot possibly calculate all the potential consequences his means can bloom.

What began as a circus of comedic take-downs of various GOP suitors has become a theater of tragedy. What makes a tragedy is simple: it wasn't inevitable; it didn't have to be. Maybe the western wildfires are an apt metaphor. This tinderbox, full as it is with combustibles, shouldn't be governed by those apt to play with fire. Yet this president revels in flicking lit matches. His support is easily ingratiated; their laughter and applause entertain him; he becomes bored without it. His boredom excites his drive to upset those who've long had disdain for him. It is easy to get the political class yammering and even easier to attract the cameras. Trump thrives with this attention, more so than most when it's negative. Now, on the stage that political norms ushered him to, he uses it to destroy the vehicle on which he arrived. There may be no way back.

Is Trump irresponsible? His support doesn't think so, not as long as he is satisfying their belief systems. Yet, beliefs do little to solve the problems our nation or species have before us. Under threat of calamity and fear, beliefs have a history of promulgating persecution, mayhem, imprisonment and murder. First, identities are grouped into others, then they are targeted. The ravings of Q Anon have grouped Democrats, for instance, as pedophilic satan worshipers stealing children from pizza joints. The "China plague," it has been suggested, is a communist plot to destroy the United States with a manufactured virus. In China, conspiracies promoted on the web suggest Covid-19 is a U.S. plot to destroy China. Undoubtedly, we will see countless conspiracies around manipulation of our election, many not resolving for years -if ever.

Conspiracies are born out of a union of fear, ignorance, and an invisibility of mechanisms. Conspiracy-thinking is a form of political superstition -a mental salve and impetus for action. Can any good come from overwhelming ignorance (of which we are all capable), fear, or acting on that which is indemonstrable? We should all say not, were we to fully believe that we act from a place of unknowing.

Superstare [suˈper.starə], the Latin root of the word superstition, means 'to stand over,' sometimes implies 'to survive.' To stand over, of course, is to overcome, even to conquer. The Latin root indicates, to me, standing over reason, standing over what is knowable -the material earth, from which facts and reason can begin to be derived. Facts, reason, rational argument -these are underfoot, stood over, and overcome under the spell of superstition. This is the characterization I would apply to the base support of Donald Trump. Even if I were to stretch superstare to the meaning survive, it could be easily shaped to describe an identity politics of survival based in personal belief. This is the politics of superstition.

Where do we go from here? Some scholars believe the recurring European plagues of the 14th through 16th centuries led Western civilizations to the period known as the Enlightenment, from which many of our social and political ideals were founded. But, I understand if you think three centuries of change doesn't offer much hope today. If you have the time this winter, watch The Black Death: The World's Most Devastating Plague. And, if not so much for its contemporary analogue, the historical description of a small pox outbreak in Montreal, documented in Outbreak: Anatomy of a Plague, assures us that the psychological and political responses to wide spread infectious disease are entirely unchanged. See -order can be provided by knowledge.

As for Donald Trump and his rhetoric of disinformation, racial othering, blame, conspiracy, hubris and guile? I'd rather ignore him, because it deflates him, and consider this election, more than anything, a referendum on our nation's citizenry.

Vote, stay safe, reason, touch the earth.

Forced March

2020-10-24T05:00:00.001-05:00

The day was not ideal -but was it ever going to be? I mean, at least the wind was a breeze and the temperature above 30°. As far as I could tell it was the best day out of the following ten or the previous three. Sleet and graupel, thunder and lightning, snow, wind and temps dropping to ten degrees forced me to plant in the snow on a day more like March than October.

I tilled last Sunday before I knew for sure what was coming and that tilling modestly displaced the snow so that I could mostly make out my rows. The little hump in the top center is a few kale I left in place should things change and another few leaves can be eaten.

Despite the drought this year, several heads of garlic sized up well and even when they didn't, there were plenty of large cloves. Above, Porcelain variety named "Music," a well known large garlic. My other Porcelain is the strain known as "Armenian."

The real trouble was the snow drenched soil which, as the image of my wheel dib should tell, clung hardily to my gloves and glued the cloves large and small to it! The weight of the accumulating goo slowly pulled my glove away from my fingers, disabling dexterity and my attempts to push the glove back with the slick left handed glove were fruitless. The soil, wet and cold, clung to soaked gloves made for cold hands, but that was the worst of it. I completed the project in a scant three hours if I cut the clove popping done in the morning from the calculation.

I’ve reduced my garlic count this year to about 500 -my lowest count since my first year growing garlic. At the end of the day, the patch looked like I had a fight with a tub of Oreos cookies and cream, but was glad to be done and not out there today or any of the days to come.

I still have, ahem, a few projects sitting unfinished under snow. I'm holding out for a brief warm up that I tend to think will come whenever the temperature drops so incongruous with the season. So, some porch work this November, or if I am lucky, just before Halloween? Scary thought is how many things sit under the snow that were near completion or that I thought I could get to, but simply couldn't, by dint of weather and age.

Where Have I Been

2020-10-13T11:24:00.007-05:00

It's been awhile, and maybe it shouldn't have been. As you can see by the square-formatted images below, I have been spending too much time working for Instagram. Much more of my warm weather time is spent repairing our house in the woods (prior post). Yet much of that work should be ending soon as we approach freezing.

I took a break -really forced myself to cease working on siding and house painting to make a visit to our neighbors, adjacent to our woods, on the southern edge along the powerline. Luck has given us great neighbors, a couple -half from Minnesota and the other half from eastern Pennsylvania. Their property was formerly part of a farm, as was ours, but ours was the woodlot and the wetland waste where old car parts, appliances, and other mysteries were dumped (ravines were farmers' dumping grounds).

We grow what vegetables we can in one hundred and forty square feet of raised beds in the sunniest portion of our front yard. The remainder of what we grow, including my garlic, happens at the neighbors' garden patch.

You’ll see some of my native and non native plants growing in rows here (for sale next spring!) and hard to believe -my first successful carrot (just one -is that success?).

And the greenhouses -where I now have the pick of the last tomatoes which will be sauce as soon as I can get to it.

The balance created by visiting open space while spending much of my time within the woods is restorative. I grew up not far from the sea -I would go there whenever I needed that open space. The desert I lived in, now over twenty years ago, also provided it. Now, the neighbor’s cleared ten acres and garden patch does the same.

An Interview With Artist Jim Hittinger

2020-07-05T16:00:00.000-05:00

Rosalux artist Frank Meuschke talks with fellow Rosalux artist Jim Hittinger about studying art, working in Minneapolis, and takes a deep dive into his recent work.

You grew up in Michigan, was it suburban, city, or rural?

It was the suburbs of Detroit, not far from the city. Metro Detroit is massive, ridiculous sprawl. If you were to drive from downtown Minneapolis to the forest, if you drove that same distance in Detroit, it would still be six lane highways, strip mall hell for a while longer. So, yeah, I grew up in the Metro Detroit maze.

And that created who you are today?

(Laughs) I guess so, yeah.

Did you have a sense when you were younger that you wanted to study art?

I always wanted to be an artist. Honestly, earlier than I can remember, I was always drawing. It was always my thing when I was a little kid that I was good at drawing -that was my thing. You know some people’s parents are like “We’re not wasting money getting you an art degree!” But my parents were always like “Yeah, you should go to art school. You should be an artist.” So, yeah, I was always gonna do this.

That seems to me to be a less common story. Why do you think they were so supportive?

Yeah. Well my parents are academics. My dad is a philosophy professor and my mom has been an administrator at various schools and non-profits. So my parents are into the liberal arts I guess. They were always cool with it.

That’s great that you had that support.

My parents are interested in art. My family would go to museums; we’d go to the Detroit Institute of Arts and look at the collection on a Saturday.

Where did you go to undergraduate school?

Wayne State University. It’s a state school in inner city Detroit. It’s a bit like the U of M Twin Cities, where there’s a little nugget just inside the city that’s the campus -so that’s where I went to school.

Is it a school that is known for art study?

Yes, there is actually a really strong art program there. I don’t know that there was anyone who went there that is super famous, but Arthur Danto went to school there in, like, the late forties. The printmaking area had some of his old woodblocks and editioned some of them in my senior year.

I had no idea he was an artist.

He is better known for his theory and philosophy stuff, but he was also a printmaker.

It’s an intellectual pursuit, printmaking…

Yeah, I guess so. That’s why I don’t have the patience for it, not smart enough I guess. (Laughs)

I did not have the patience for it myself. Did you have to read his writings while you were a student?

No, honestly, I think I had to read his stuff more in grad school at the University of Minnesota than I did in undergrad.

Was there a particular professor that stood out for you as a resource or mentor?

Jim Nawara. His work was very different from mine. He makes very traditional, hyper-realistic landscape oil paintings. He paints meadows and streams, very traditional. I think that was great for me to have because even though I do not make paintings like that, I learned a lot about paint. He was obsessed with paint! He was the type of guy you would ask, “should I use this color or this color?” He’d then talk to you for like an hour about the differences between the pigments and oils used in this one versus that one. There were a lot of formal things that I just didn’t know about paint; which I know talking shop about painting bores the hell out of people who aren’t painters (laughs). So there is a lot about that that I learned from him that has been invaluable to me.

James Nawara, Blue Fence, oil on linen, 1999

It sounds like you were not going to resist going to college or say, “Screw this, I’m going to LA to be an artist.”

Well, the thought crossed my mind. I think I may have been more likely to do that if I didn’t have the support that I had. But you can go to college for art and I was like, okay, why not? I’ll have to take other classes, but I’ll get a cheap, shitty apartment in Detroit and go to art classes and hang out for four years. Sure, I entertained the idea of not doing that, but it wasn’t a hard decision. In school you get to learn your studio practice, you just kind of learn how it all works with some training wheels on. Going to exhibitions, talking to your professors about how you make money! Do you sell your work? Where do you show your work? Who do I have to talk with to show my work? It’s important to learn that stuff while you have this community safety net and I think that’s a really invaluable thing.

Did your teachers have an answer for you when you asked these kinds of questions, like, how do you make a living?

Yeah, I would talk to my professors a lot about that. And they were always encouraging me to try to show work outside of school. It’s like the best thing you can do to get the ball rolling is to show some work that’s not just the end of the year BFA exhibition. There are open calls at this gallery and this gallery, so I think that was a really helpful thing to learn. If I had decided when I was 18 to move to LA and figure that out for myself, I probably would have eventually figured it out, but I am glad I had that help to figure it out.

So you were actively showing while you were in undergraduate school?

Yeah. I think that was a benefit of being at a school that was in a city. Just being in a city that had a whole art community and art scene happening completely outside of school was really helpful.

So what brought you to Minneapolis?

Grad school.

How much time between undergrad and grad school was there?

I came right away. I wasn’t even expecting to get into grad school right away. I was looking for state schools that had teaching assistant opportunities, funding, but I wanted to be in a city. I didn’t want to be in some off the beaten path college town. There are some really good MFA programs you can go to, but you’re in kind of the…

Cornfields?

Yeah. Exactly. So the University of Minnesota checked all the boxes for me. So I applied and got in and came. That was in 2012. I finished in 2015 and I’m still here ‘cause I like it here.

Sounds like staying here was a pretty easy decision.

Yeah, I was planning on staying for at least a little bit. But I’ve been here long enough now that I feel at home here. Not necessarily certain that I will live here forever, but I like being here right now.

So the U has been a kind of anchor for you after graduation?

Yeah, a lot of my best friends in town I know are from there and are doing lots of different things. If you are just going to uproot and move somewhere, it’s definitely good to have a built-in community.

What was your biggest struggle as a painter? What do you worry about, artistically?

My painting sucking! (Laughs)

So you weren’t worrying that painting was dead or where will I go with painting?

I think that is always there. There’s always going to be people who think painting is for idiots who just want to make pictures.

But not painters. It’s hard to be a painter who thinks that.

Yeah, that would be interesting, actually, if you were. I never had much of a concern about that. There were enough other painters on the faculty and in the program that there was always a good conversation around painting and about what painting can be, where it can go, and what possibilities there are with it.

How broad is your definition of painting?

I don’t think I really even have one. It can be so many different things. If you are applying paint to a surface to make an image of a thing, you can separate these two things. Applying paint to a surface goes one way and making an image of a thing goes in the other direction. You could be working just with the idea of imagery, with making a representation; that doesn’t have to involve paint or traditional painting or drawing tools at all. There are also artists who are using painting materials to do something that doesn’t really look like painting at all. So I think there is a pretty wide and deep definition of painting now.

I imagine painting as being on of the broadest disciplines. For example, I like to think of photography as a kind of drawing. As a painter I sometimes made photographs as preparatory work, and I thought of that work as a kind of drawing. So now primarily working with photography, I see that as a kind of drawing too.

Yeah, I think more and more the idea of having a medium and sticking to it is not super important. Going back to art academia, there is an interest in blurring the lines between your study areas. I think this is a good thing, probably.

What brought you to Rosalux? You must’ve known about it while you were at the U.

I applied for the Open Door show in 2015 or 16 and had one or two paintings accepted to that. Maybe six months after that show there was an opening in the roster, and I got an email from, maybe it was Terry, saying this is what the gallery is and we are looking for a new member. It wasn’t an invitation to join, but it said I should think about applying for the open spot. So I did.

How’d that make you feel?

It was pretty cool, yeah.

I have a short list of exhibits that really impacted me as a young artist. Do you have any that had that effect on you?

There is one show, about ten years ago. I saw an exhibition of Vija Celmins work at the Menil Collection, in Houston. That’s one of the best things about my parents living in Houston now. Every time I am down there for Christmas or whatever, we go to the Menil Collection because it’s such a great museum. There was this huge show. It was called Television And Disaster. I bought the catalog for it, and I don’t usually do that, because who has the money for exhibition catalogs, but I had to get this one. It was great because I was already a fan of her work, pouring over images online and in books. It was great to get to see a lot of that work in person. She has done a lot of different types of work over decades, but it was specifically a lot of paintings of these hyper-realistic TV news stills…

Like a ship blowing up?

Yeah, yeah, a lot of stuff like that. She has this amazing way of painting those things where it isn’t just a painting of the event seen on the news. It really feels like a painting of the television screen of the event happening. She has this really fucking brilliant way of capturing that filtered experience with paint, which is something that I am really interested in doing. She has always been an important artist for me and I got to see a bunch of her most iconic work in one place and it was amazing.

Vija Celmins, Explosion at Sea, 1966, Oil on canvas

Celmins seems to exist on this plane of Agnes Martin. I have no idea what her life is like, but I imagine it as an ascetic kind of life. Maybe it has something to do with all that detailed rendering, the pencil work. It’s like, if Agnes Martin had watched TV all the time, you’d get Vija Celmins. (Laughs)

I always show my intro to drawing students some of Vija Celmins' drawings, some of those insane drawings she did of aerial water views. I tell them, "This is a pencil drawing by one of my favorite artists, just so you know here is a possibility for graphite drawings."

Does that blow them away?

Yeah, usually it’s “whoa!” It’s part of the first day lecture showing them a bunch of photo-realistic renderings in graphite; now here is a bunch of stuff that is not that, but are still very good drawings. It’s to show intro students that you do not have to be able to do a Vija Celmins water drawing to make a good pencil drawing. It’s a way to get over the fear of “does it look realistic?” I show Vija Celmins to say, “Here’s what you’re not likely to be able to do and that’s okay.” (Laughs)

Who’s work are you connecting with right now?

Aleksandra Waliszewska, a painter from Warsaw, Poland. Her work looks very different from my own and deals with different themes and ideas, but I think there is still a lot of overlap. I'm interested in how she presents these bizarre, fantastical images with a decidedly un-fantastical aesthetic. Her paintings show these surreal, nightmare scenarios, painted in this very matter-of-fact way in drab color schemes, mixing fantasy imagery with mundane scenes from contemporary life.

Aleksandra Waliszewska, Untitled, Gouache, 2012-2013

Did you have a moment that defined your point of view as an artist or has it been a steady evolution?

I don’t think that there is really a specific moment where that happened; I think it’s been a constantly evolving process, but I’ve had a lot of similar interests and aesthetic preferences for a long time. If I look at work that I made ten years ago, I’m like “what the hell? This looks so different and I would never make this now.” But work I am making now doesn't seem any different from the work I was making six months ago. There was never one moment where there was a hard left turn. Little, incremental things change.

So if you put that work that you made when you were 20 side by side with the work you are now making at 30, an observant person might recognize a connection or do you think not really?

Yeah, yeah. I think that there has been a kernel of what I am doing now in what I have been doing for a long time.

What would you say about your work is unique to you, what is the Jim Hittinger genius, and when did you become aware of it?

Well first of all, I definitely would NOT call myself a genius! (laughs) But probably when I was in grad school. That was a big part of what that experience was; having discussions with faculty and peers about those kinds of things and trying to unpack what it is that you are doing and why. How could you be doing this differently or more effectively? That was really helpful.

Did you have a moment of crisis?

I had some moments of trying to completely blow up what I was doing and try to do something completely different. Every time I would do that I would find myself, before I knew what was happening, making work that looked just like the stuff I was trying to get away from. Sometimes that was frustrating. But there is something there. There is some reason why I keep making this decision, this decision and this decision even if I try to completely stop and do something else. So, that was a good way to identify what those things were so that I could start thinking about why I make those decisions. What is the significance of these decisions, look at each decision independent of the others, and identify what is important and what is not.

When I look at your work, one thing that strikes me right away is your color choices. There isn’t a lot of color, but the color that there is, is very strong and you are fairly consistent with that across your work, at least over the last five years or so. Your color feels like it is loaded with something.

Search Party, Oil on Paper, 2015

Color is really important and that is a relatively new thing. The work before grad school and some during grad school had no color at all. I was making gray, brown, muddy, murky paintings. That’s not to say I wasn’t thinking about color. I was actively thinking about making different kinds of muddy, earth tones and grays, and how I could make different non-colors interact with each other in an interesting way.

The super bright colors, that was something I would never do in a painting that I thought I should try and see what happens. Maybe I should use some neon orange and see what happens. I started thinking about how those types of colors are usually reserved for a kind of code that everyone understands to mean caution or danger. These colors appear on traffic barrels, the lane is ending, the “X” they paint on diseased trees and it has to go, or construction safety vests. These super bright colors were perfect as a formal foil to the gray murkiness but also made sense conceptually.

It is a visual, formal thing but it is not extraneous because it speaks to the content of the work. If I do a series of paintings where this orange shows up in one image on a traffic cone and another image it's on a guy with a safety vest and then another image there is an inflatable pool that is the same color, then the inflatable pool becomes part of the code where there is something dangerous. Now this banal object, this dumb object, gets put in the same category as the “oh, shit, this is dangerous stuff.”

So these colors came out of a formal rut but there are a lot of colors out there and you chose very specific industrial colors that elicit an emotional reaction. Danger or warning aren’t emotions, but maybe these colors elevate the cortisol a little bit -there is a danger here.

The orange and the green, but particularly the orange, suggest the fluorescent crayons I had as a kid. I didn’t use these colors for most of the year, but in September and October I used them to make my Halloween pictures and this association is indelible.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

There are some Halloween characters in your paintings, but I don’t think your paintings are about Halloween. Would you talk about that?

Devil's Night, Oil on Canvas, 2015

One of the biggest things I am interested in exploring through my work is the idea of the uncanny, stand-ins, and substitutes for things. There are these symbolisms for grander ideas like mortality, spirituality and death. These huge ideas that people always grapple with get turned into a visual shorthand, in a similar way to how the colors mean “pay attention here, there is something dangerous here.” The way this holiday has evolved, Halloween and even Christmas, other rituals and festivals have these lofty ideas, but to symbolize the idea of the afterlife we are going to put some plastic ghost on our lawn. They become this fake, dumb plastic effigy to something that is actually an existential dread. Those colors tie into that, too, where anything that is that color isn’t real; this isn’t found in nature, it is something that is put here.

So the colors operate in a similar way, as a kind of stand-in. The orange is dumb, in the sense of not containing a lot of information and that, on the face of it, may conceal the extent of the danger. It says beware, but there is quite a lot of breadth between the sign and the actual danger. This makes me think about how painting itself operates in the same way, as a kind of stand-in where there is a lot of distance between the face of it and its impact.

In your painting Behind the House, 2019, a bright green, inflatable kiddie pool suggests to me the innocence of childhood. It’s as if the kiddie pool establishes the footing I need to view the work. There is an adult, face blackened, standing in the kiddie pool. Drooping shoulders present a kind of disappointment, as if the kiddie pool could have returned that adult to childhood innocence. Instead the water is black; its clarity appears sullied by the figure itself. Why did you title this work “Behind the House?”

Sure, the pool is a thing I’ve used a lot and also the white plastic lawn chairs. Because those are, and this is going to maybe answer the question you were asking about painting being that exact thing, those are things that are so recognizable if you grew up in the American Midwest. I use these dumb, mundane, objects like the pool, chairs, and chain-link fence as a comfortable, domestic thing so they can be like an inflatable Frankenstein. These can be painted in such a stupid way, but it will still be very clear what it is.

Detail, Parking Lot, Oil on Paper, 2015

The white plastic chair is a good example. Even if I do the crudest, laziest job of painting that shape, I think that it will still resonate for a lot of people -you know what those chairs feel like, you’ve stacked them before. So these become like a symbol of that domestic setting that you’ve experienced. That’s the purpose of all that stuff, to establish that you’ve seen this before; you’ve been here before. But now something is wrong back here and I juxtapose those types of things to show an underlying anxiety and dread that is going on even when we are in these comfortable surroundings.

As for the Behind the House title, I really like giving titles that are just “this is what it is;” not getting super poetic with titles. What is the difference between saying “In my backyard” and “Behind the house?” There is something upsetting about how cold and mechanical it is to say “behind the house” instead of “in the backyard.”

I read some poetry in that title. It isn’t in the specific words, but in the intent, so if I saw you on the street and you asked me, “Where’s the barbecue?” and I said, “It’s in the backyard,” that would be inviting. But when I say, “It’s behind the house,” there is a coldness to that; maybe its dangerous.

Yeah, this guy is going to kill me if I go back there.

What’s going on behind the house? It’s all those things that happen out of sight of the public. It’s all those aspects of living that you may want to hide. It operates maybe in the same way as a chain link fence. If I am going around a house, to the back, and there’s a chain link fence, there may as well be a barking German shepherd there too. Automatically I am on guard and maybe I shouldn’t go back there. The twist in the artwork is that I am imagining what may be happening behind the house when I read the title, what I cannot see, but you are showing us what’s back there.

Behind the House, Graphite and Gouache on Paper, 2019

Tell me about the blackened head and torso?

I’ve been doing this for a long time. The treatment of human figures is to make them anonymous. People say, “it’s ghostly," and that makes sense, but I bring this on myself because I use horror movie imagery. I never think of them as literal ghosts.

I don’t get that from them either.

I am paying attention to anatomy enough that we can empathize with the form that it takes, but making them hazy, fuzzy, and not totally distinct, especially compared to the other stuff in the paintings, is a way of denoting that this thing is alive and sentient whereas everything else in the painting is really flat, or painted as a pattern. I am finding ways to paint these familiar things in a way that isn’t what the thing looks like in real life, but as some sort of stupid symbol of it. Then, by painting the figure that way, without making it a super realistic rendering of a person, it becomes a different formal way to show that this is a different type of entity than all the other objects. Maybe I shouldn’t resent the "ghostly" thing.

Maybe it’s not so much a ghost, but more the spirit. The first thing that comes to mind when I see this figure is representations of the grim reaper. Not the scythe and all that, but it’s the black within the hood, it’s this void. That’s what we’re afraid of, that’s what the death represents -this void. You enter into it, but really it sucks you in. The blackened head and torso draws me in to some kind of internal space that I do not really want to find myself.

Your painting Procession, of 2017, I see as your most Celmins-like painting, now that I know the influence her work had on you. It has the sense of being seen on TV. In fact, when I imagine a funeral procession of vehicles, I picture the way it looks on TV. I know Kennedy’s procession was with horse and carriages, yet somehow I imagine this procession of black cars as seen on TV!

Maybe you’re thinking that because you are getting the funeral procession crossed with the memory of Kennedy being assassinated in a car procession seen on TV.

Probably. There couldn’t be anything more dry and dull to watch on TV than a funeral procession of cars. Yet, there it is in your painting and to me it has this sense of abstraction, of distance, as if it was on a TV screen. Am I reading that right?

I wasn’t actively thinking about that layer of it when I was making it, but it makes sense, I can see that. Also, since we were talking earlier about the huge influence that Vija Celmins had on me, I think there may just be a subconscious thing where the way I like to paint things is so rooted in being into Celmins that I would do something like that without even thinking about it.

So there is always this death, mortality, and morbid fascination but a hearse is such an easily identifiable thing that that is one of those things [like objects in my other paintings]. Two other cars are part of the procession. One is my car that I had at the time and my wife’s car. The other one is the hearse; it has this ornamental landau bar on the back. We know what that is. We know this is just a car and this is a car to carry dead people to a ceremony. And it has the little orange flags on it. You get the magnetic flags to stick on your car and it is that same orange color [as in my other paintings]. I’ve been looking at a lot of 19th century Russian realist painters making these super bleak paintings of Russian peasant life, like Vasily Perov. And there were a lot of funeral procession paintings. So I’ve been looking at all these paintings of Russian villagers doing funeral marches through tundra and I was like, I am going to do a 2017 version of this.

If it was only a hearse, I’m not sure I would have known what to make of that, so it needs the two “regular” cars. Feeling disconnected, maybe due to the sense of the TV screen, leads me to think about how I feel disconnected from my own death. This seems part and parcel to ideas you were talking about earlier about the color of warning, the orange. Feeling disconnected is part of being on this side of the symbolic. We are all living under the Covid-19 pandemic, more than 125,000 people are dead, yet still, those of us alive and well are somehow not affected by it and are disconnected from that possibility of death. So when I look at your painting I see death and yet somehow it’s not me.

Yeah.

And yet it is and still it isn’t. It’s haunting in that way.

Procession, Oil on Canvas, 2017

Yeah, that disconnect part of it was part of my motivation. There were all these opportunities in this image for formal experiments but then also being able to put the profound ceremonial thing and stick it in with some objects that are more comfortable and familiar. Like you said, if it was just the hearse, it would be a very different thing. It’s the hearse in relation to the other cars that was the thing; comparing a hearse with a 2010 Ford Escape was the thing I was interested in. The hearse might by like, oh that’s not me, that’s the disconnect, but the 2010 Ford Escape -that’s fuckin’ you dude!

In a sense, it’s that aspect [the Ford Escape] that makes it real, the particularity of the vehicle. Which is funny because I tell people cars are the hardest things to draw because we all know exactly what they look like.

They are hard to draw! If you are off a little bit, it’s fucked up!

You could draw a human body off and it would be fine, but when you get a car wrong, it’s way off. We know them so well they are like stand-ins for ourselves. It’s a way of putting yourself back into the painting.

In your painting, Burial At Sea, 2019, you have a lone figure attempting to push a beached whale back into the sea. There is something absurdist and surreal about it. Even if a lone person could push a whale into the sea, there is the sea pushing it back onto land -a terribly Sisyphean prospect. What had you thinking, from Minnesota, that you should make a painting of a dead whale on the shore?

Well, as we have been talking, it often comes back to thinking about mortality. I think it’s something that everybody is thinking about all of the time, but maybe don’t make artwork about it (laughs). I look at this painting and say, “what the hell?” This one is very different than other stuff that I’ve made. I guess that was the best way I could think of to use an image to talk about futility, to wrap your head around the idea. This thing is obviously dead and it’s also fucking enormous and not from your realm. Whales are scary, they are fucking huge, they live under water, and they are not part of our world. Just to see a whale on the land…

Fish out of water, man.

I know that these things exist, but it doesn’t belong here and I don’t know what the hell this thing is. The thing I wanted to get the most right in this painting, a key thing, is to have the illusion that the figure was pushing, and bracing itself on the land, and pushing as hard as it could.

Burial at Sea, Oil on Paper, 2019

For me, it’s like pushing away the idea of death. Maybe I can put it back where it belongs -the dark, incomprehensible depths of the sea. Having grown up near the ocean, I innately understand how the waves push everything right back; so you can try to push it out, but even if you could, there is something bigger than you pushing it back. So you have to confront this death, as big as a whale. It’s a really good painting as it really captures a lot of this idea, but with this sense of activity, of pushing it, of trying to push it away. You’re not trying to save the whale; you are trying to get rid of it.

I could run off with ideas about climate change because whales have become a symbol of ecological calamity, that is hard to ignore, but I don’t think that is what this painting is about. It’s about an awareness of our struggle with our own death and that this death is a lot bigger than us.

Yeah, you know it does read as something absurdist and surreal, but compared to every other painting I’ve made, this is the most realistic. Whales do wash up on the shore, this happens in the real world, but it is such an insane thing that seeing a painting of it is totally absurd, but it happens!

And when you see it, there is a sense of the world being out of order.

I find myself in a confrontation with the deep sense of my own aloneness in your work. Is that intentional?

Yes, the sense of loneliness and isolation is definitely intentional. I want the images to feel like they exist in a vacuum to a certain extent. They are representative of things from the "real" world, but I want them to feel sort of anonymous or like they are happening internally, like a memory of an event rather than the event itself captured in real time.

I like your new animations. Tthey are both humorous and sad, and contain many of the themes found in your paintings. Why animation? Tell us about your graphical choices -particularly the use of 8-bit graphics?

Animations are a way for me to incorporate an element of time and movement into the work. The time and movement is pretty minimal, but I think it makes a huge difference. If I do a painting of a plastic bag stuck in a tree versus an animation of it, where it is almost entirely static except for the bag getting blown by the wind very slightly, that opens a lot of possibilities for what the work can do.

The vintage video game style is for a few reasons - one being that I am by no means an expert in animation or digital drawing, and working with low-res, pixelated images makes things easier to animate. It's just a matter of moving a few pixels over between animation frames. I'm also an avid video game-player, and there are a few games that actually strongly influence my painting work, particularly open world fantasy role playing games. Animation is a way to for me to more directly interact with those influences.

Untitled, Digital Animation, 2019

The long-term plan is to actually make a video game, which I have started on! I've actually been working on it for a few years now, but it's slow going since I have no idea what I'm doing. The only "training" I have in this is looking up tutorials and reading Reddit threads about pixel art and game design. I do have a super crude version of it working, which is basically an overhead view of a neighborhood that looks like the settings from my paintings. It’s done in a Super Nintendo RPG style where you can control a little figure to walk around, but that's about it so far.

Jim Hittinger is an artist based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He works in several media including oil, gouache and watercolor painting, graphite and charcoal drawing, and digital animation. Duplicates, the uncanny, mortality, and unseen forces lurking just out of sight are recurring themes in his work.

Jim received his MFA from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2015. He’s a member of Rosalux Gallery, an artist collective in Minneapolis. You can learn more about Jim and his work at: https://www.jimhittinger.com

Frank Meuschke received his MFA from the New Mexico State University in 2000. He’s also a member of Rosalux Gallery. You can learn more about him and his work at www.frankmeuschke.com

How Do We Go From Here

2020-04-25T05:00:00.000-05:00

The plants know, nine times out of ten, the right time to leaf out. As warm as it is, as many days as it has been, those plants ill-equipped to fight off a hard freeze have survived by delayed emergence.

Many plants developed strategies for managing cold at emergence; the delicate appears tough. A dose of anthocyanin may (or may not) inhibit freezing water within young leaves of columbine.

Garlic mustard in the lowlands, where the soils are wet, show significant purple coloration where the mesic, upland colonies do not. Those in the lowlands are often frost heaved, repeatedly, as the late winter progresses to early spring. This is the best time to pull lowland garlic mustard as the frost heave aerates the underfoot, easily compressed wet soil.

There is no shortage of venturesome Old World garden plants. Besides England's Creeping Charlie, which appears to grow at length under the snow, there is Russia's loved Siberian Squill, above. Lamium maculatum is found in all corners of the world and our woods. Later in our season, the European Bellflower and Eurasian oxeye daisy. The problem isn't from whom or where these came, but how to manage what we must live with, now that it is here.

Iris reticulata, planted last November. Could these little beauties be just as versatile and productive as those already mentioned? Does the mature gardener ask why certain plants are necessary; do they seek out only those from a New World palette? How do convenience, apathy, desire, culture inform our choices? For each choice there are positive and negative consequences, understood and misunderstood. What strategy do we have for making good decisions among so many emotionally ambivalent and intellectually challenging choices?

We have choices, but can make only one decision. Who's in that four jet plane, traveling well above my head? Are there five people aboard, or three hundred? Do we need to fly, should we tour the world? Who are we if we stop? We won't stop.

The sun sets late now. It has been dry, very dry, with no appreciable rain in weeks. I notice the sunlight on an oak twig shaken free by windy days.

Plastic laid on the septic slope to solarize the weed field it has become.

I take a lap around the house, stopping to notice the lattice rehab I recently completed. Framed by the rose trellis, I do not see the house as much as I see all the projects I have done.

1. Railing rehab 2. Build new railing 3. Jack up porch to attach new posts to concrete piers 4. Rebuild lattice 5. Replace sheathing, reside and paint 6. Build new, but lower, deck 7. Replace rotten door sill and and rotten door 8. Solarize creeping charlie, regrade, and install sod 9. Move climbing roses out of shade 10. Remove hydrangeas from south side of house and replant as a hedge along the driveway 11. Frame raised beds with cedar boards and add chips 12. Remove and replace rotted deck boards.

The house lapped, I pause to look at the lattice rebuild in the back. The setting sun warms the old pink still present under the porch, setting off the grey we chose to replace it.

The Snows of April

2020-04-11T05:00:00.000-05:00

It is easy to be disappointed. Expectations are high. Training, preparedness, and experience is limited. As we shift from winter to virus, we work to overcome the virus of the mind; its total takeover of attentiveness to other elements of life.

What I can say about a global pandemic will take hardly a paragraph. We've fictionalized it again and again in movies and television. We practiced it via fantasy football-like parlor talk. We relearned its lessons in books and documentary. We eyeballed it from afar again and again. Still, people have died and will continue to lose life. Institutions will fail. We've maintained catharsis, not internalized preparedness.

I am not an optimist; not a ray of sunshine, but there is life beyond the virus. It is not the end of the world. For those of us lucky enough to escape the most extreme complications of infection, we must carry on those things that are worth carrying forward. We must internalize the opportunity we now have to connect with what we value.

_______________________________

After hacking our three year old pepper plant back to its thick, woody stem, it remained aphid-free for the month of March. With little to no leaves on all the peppers in the house, the aphids moved on to less desirable Lamiaceae -the basil and salvia.

When they can be found, emerging lady beetles are transferred to the aphid-covered plants. Water is sprinkled on the leaves for them to drink. At most I've had three lady beetles -all eventually feed on the aphids. After a couple of days eating, some have mated, but have yet to see any of their aphid-hungry young.

A curious event takes place on any infected plant that has maintained a lady beetle or two. The aphids scatter to the pot rim, and walk its circle, endlessly.

Despite the aphids, the freeze from being stuck out the window at 10°, the hard hack back to the woody stem, the pepper's hormones kicked in to regrow a healthy crown of new leaves. If occasional lady beetles emerge, are found and resettled, these pepper plants may just succeed on their path to another summer outdoors.

Ten Percent Rule*

2020-03-05T05:00:00.000-06:00

No matter how much insecticidal soap I sprayed, the aphids came back stronger than ever. Finally, so frustrated, I stuck the head of our giant three year old jalapeno out the window, shaking the plant vigorously to dislodge the aphids and shed the leaves on which they congregated. Although only outside for a minute, it was about 10° F, and not thirty minutes later, the remaining leaves had turned black -like frost-damaged basil. I was ready to toss the whole deal, but I hesitated. The following day, I pushed the head of the pepper out the window yet again and pruned the branches hard -all the way to the woody, tan stems.

This sweet pepper had been pruned hard in December, yet the aphids continue to show up. You can see their shed skins and the stunted condition of its remaining leaves.

About a week ago, the jalapeno's woody stems sprouted vigorously. I had hoped it would do so slowly -those new leaves such easy sucking and still three months before any pepper can be reliably placed outside.

This week, leaves twice as big but still tender, the aphids have returned. I put my ugly, fat thumb in the picture to show how tiny the aphids are. I rely on my camera and macro lens to spot new aphids since my eyes can no longer focus so closely.

Closeup of the three aphids.

It has been warmer than average recently. Although we are far from a Minnesota spring, which typically arrives in May, the warmth brings out a few Asian lady beetles that worked their way into the walls last October. Attracted to the light, they usually make their way to windows, and die. Outside, they wouldn't make it at all, given that nights drop to the single digits at times.

Aware that predation is the best way to control aphids outdoors and in greenhouses, I haven't been willing to release ladybugs in the house. So when the warmth brought this one to a window near the peppers, I coaxed it onto my hand and then the sweet pepper. The lady beetle is a reluctant helper, it seems to only want to hide, but the following day I didn't observe any aphids and the lady beetle was still on the pepper, alive.

*The 10% Rule is an ecosystem function where energy passed on from one trophic level (position of an organism in the food chain) to the next, only ten percent of the energy is available to the consumer. An example: the pepper plant passes on only ten percent of the energy to the aphid and the aphid only ten percent to the lady beetle who consumes it. To receive the full energy consumed by the aphid, the lady beetle needs to eat a lot of aphids -something for which gardeners should be thankful.

Ideal Cosmos

2020-01-19T13:00:00.000-06:00

At my latitude, nine rotations in mid December exclude daylight for fifteen hours and fourteen minutes. This slow motion reversal at the planetary elliptical vertex is experienced as stasis. Nine days of nearly equal day light. Then, day by day, our planet rushes toward another season at 67,000 miles per hour, delivers us a minute, then two, and finally three minutes additional daylight per rotation. This is time, flying.

That it is completely dark at seven thirty five in the morning, nearly 26,000 minutes after that reversal, is still surprising. The moon, approaching its 297° northwest by west horizon, nearly full, cast its reflected light through our window, waking me as would the morning sun, set to meet the horizon only fourteen minutes later.

The rising sun's countenance a dim facade.

Winter, with it's frozen palette,

pushes me to reconsider a lifelong disinterest in Florida.

All places can challenge our preconceptions.

Although Florida's humanity has created endless reaches of entertainment and consumerism, gated communities and social poverties, it is a place of subtle beauty, and warm, ever so warm. I've still not grown accustomed to winter travel, its luxury and privilege. Yet, it does aid the spirit and what does one have if one is low in spirit?

I've become taken with this greenhouse situated within Florida's Mead Botanical Garden. It's not my first greenhouse, and won't be my last.

At home we invite the aura of a Floridian winter when we bring outdoor plants indoors to overwinter. With them we bring various creatures, including this year's populations of aphids and fungus gnats.

In this choice we face the decision, should we be so thoughtful, of life or death for these insects. The suffering of plants, should they experience suffering at all, is weighted against the immediate squish or the slow, sudsy demise of soft-bodied beings. We recoil at the sticky residue and skins shed onto the windowsill, but not the lack of empathy for life. Expanded, these thoughts engage all the world, all the choices within our power to make.

Despite myself, I still moved to extinguish the aphids, to eliminate the gnats. A garden is celebrated, but a gardener kills. We do not move against the gardener, decry their deeds and demote their effort -apart from the more fashionable descriminations. We do not yet belong to an ideal cosmos, of which only mathematics and our imaginations approach.

Unbuttoned

2019-11-11T17:00:00.000-06:00

November 11 -a bright, sunny, and cold day. One month ago, on October 11, we had our first snowfall. Yesterday's snowfall ushered in the coldest air of the autumn. We bottom out tonight in the low single digits, but we are at 12° F this morning. There is a brisk wind, so we feel chillier than the temperature might indicate. On November 11, 1940, Minneapolis received 16 inches of snow in a surprise storm -forecasting wasn't as precise back then. In 2005, the temperature soared to 64° F on this day while 1986 had Minneapolis bottoming out at -1° F.

The many lakes of our area are open water -not yet a skin of ice on them, despite two weeks now of well-below freezing temperatures. The other day a man near Cambridge, Minnesota, not quite an hour north of downtown Minneapolis, thought it cold enough to try his feet on ice that had formed on Skogman Lake. Based on my observations, here, the ice couldn't have been more than an inch or so thick. If you've been to the lake in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, you'll notice the ice ladders stationed around it in winter. I recall watching a father and child shuffle out on the ice one day. Tragedy was averted thanks to someone more vocal than myself, whose hesitancy requires some introspection on some other day. Minnesota doesn't know what ice ladders are and I will never know confidence on ice.

As October rolls out into November, I need to have a flexibility never required by my ocean-tempered, Atlantic coast activity. We don't always have what we need, do we? Curiously, the post I just linked to, above, finished with this sentiment:

"I've grown accustomed to winter, finding solace in the recess of growth and decay. As much as I think of a new season's garden, of tomatoes and greens, peppers and garlic, it's always too much. I aim to accept what can be done and what can be done, well."

Now that winter has come to occupy an additional three months of the year, my experience of its slippery possession is that of prey who's frantic contortions allow a brief but futile escape from the quickening claws of no longer. A winter, fast, I accept like death, but with a consciousness of afterlife that offers a view to the world I no longer inhabit, a world perceivable through the bright scrim of slow-moving molecules.

Buttoned

Box store bulbs, fifty percent off, needed unfrozen earth to plant in. With this trouble, those bulbs should have been 75% off, no? Despite two weeks of frozen temperatures, I laid rumpled plastic, held down by bricks, over a patches of bare soil. When I planted on Saturday evening (yes, this dark at 5:00 pm), the soil was pliable under my coverings. Tulips and miniature iris -good luck!

Outdoor plants brought in for winter. Potted, pruned, and placed. Now, only fungus gnats, aphids, and watering to think about.

Unbuttoned

A hanging plant frozen in its basket

The vegetable beds, tangled, leafy, and snowed upon.

Remaining siding from this summer's window and siding replacement projects. I will do some of this indoors and wait for that forty degree day to come.

The rocks. In this location, under the replaced siding and adjacent to window wells, the builder had placed Hydrangea arborescens, you know -the spreading kind with giant flopping heads. Three Minnesota hardy azaleas were placed around the bay-type window to the left. Around the base of these, one and one-half inch St. Cloud granite (gray/pink/black coloration). In order to fix the siding and the kick-plate below it, the roots, the rocks, the clay, and eventually the plastic that laid deep beneath it all was removed. The hydrangea were removed a few years ago to make the driveway border.

Many rainy days embedded the granite rocks into the black clay earth. After grading the soil to a proper slope, replacing the edging, laying new barrier fabric and sheet plastic to shed water, the granite is only partially replaced. It is frozen to the soil, now, but it also requires pressure washing to remove the clay, which will not happen until spring.

Despite the snow and the freezing, I am still working on a few outdoor things, like gravel around the apron of the studio and cobble edging to contain it, possibly some tree felling, and rebuilding the lattice that sits beneath the front porch. Given the early depth of cold, twenty to thirty degrees below average, isn't it yet possible that we will see ten to twenty degrees above average?

At Home

2019-09-10T05:00:00.000-05:00

It was back in July when we spotted the first giant puffball of the season. This was early -too early to our senses. By August's middle the water table had been coming back up, not quite draining after a moderate rainfall. The temperatures had descended to the mid to high seventies and steadily declined into the mid to high sixties by the last week of August and first of September. The trees prepared themselves, the monarchs passed through, the squirrels returned to the lawn, and the rains fell. Our autumn is upon us, and has been since mid August. I have casually mentioned to some that the season had changed, before the Minnesota State Fair -typically a late summer festival. For my observation I received a squint and pursed lips, huh blended into hmm.

To perceive the early arrival of autumn is nothing special. To read the language of our environment and to understand its meaning, in the Western mind, is like understanding Latin. Most will see an archaic text, pass over it, and only occasionally fathoming the root of some current verbiage. Millions of years of evolving, hundreds of thousands of years within this epoch of variable, yet recognizable, climate and species and still we have lost the ability to be at home in the world. I write 'at home' to indicate that set of cues that are so familiar as to become understood inconspicuously.

Our trip to Yellowstone National Park, the primary stimulus for these thoughts, offered some very unfamiliar cues. If you haven't been, go. The park is massive, often taking several hours to get from one site to your lodging. There are bison, and more worrying -grizzly bears. You are walking on a volcano, something difficult to dislodge from your steaming, sulfur-scented consciousness.

__________________________

Every season I have five, ten, maybe twenty projects to accomplish during the warm season. I typically finish three, especially when the warm season lasts only three months. This year's major project was to complete the renovation of the front lawn-vegetable garden. Above, eggplants, peppers, and cucumbers.

The far left raised bed was refurbished as it had been made from scrap decking, then a new ten foot bed was built and installed, and the remaining two beds moved from last year's location. The framing and mulching was accomplished in early June and then I moved on to other projects.

After our return from Yellowstone I set about laying the sod. We chose sod to cover the area previously covered in black plastic laid to smother creeping charlie. Sod is outside of my experience, and I messed up. When laying sod it is best to have prepped the ground ahead of time, it's best to get it unrolled in a day or two. I had to stretch it over four days and nearly composted the sod on its pallet because I hadn't the time to prepare the soil, pull the volunteer tomatoes (what was I thinking?), or deal with the unknown habits of sedge that had grown where the beds had stood the year before.

It was only continual rain storms and the early autumn temperatures that spared me the near-total loss of live grass. I credit this for its return from tawny mush to lively green, albeit a few patches of dead remain. Although I've been spared the shame of spending a small fortune on sod and then killing it, the lack of soil preparation will undoubtedly reduce the benefits of sod over seed in the long run.

We've had a good year for brassica, getting two months of broccoli from under twelve square feet. BT worked well on the cabbage worms after I removed the floating cover fabric. I've also observed that deer do not seem to care for kale when there is so much else to eat in your garden.

My July planting of green beans were trimmed quite well by the four-legged pruning crew. But, they came back and I now have a steady supply to snack on in between mosquito raids. Unlike a national park (the "wilderness"), our place is home to us and many other creatures. Living with them feels much more natural than any wilderness experience I've had.

A new garden bed grows out an area of removed hydrangea. Scraps of plants, all flowering blue-purple, have been planted throughout the summer. In the background, the browning of a wet autumn.

Summer

2019-08-03T05:00:00.000-05:00

Minimally sprawling, open pollinated cucumbers named Little Leaf -from Fedco Seeds. Well, they sprawl less than the Burpee cukes that went in last year, but if it weren't for some clever trellising, the would certainly have sprawled into the paths. They are now supplying about ten cucumbers (picklers) a day. In front, peppers and eggplant; both late producers. Behind, trashy solutions.

The plastic is in place to take out the creeping charlie. It will be removed in late August (late August is so close!) to put down sod. Why sod? The mat keeps out the weeds and minimizes a return of charlie. Here, where the planters were last year, we've had many seedlings of last year's vegetables. Growing up in a cool, moist winter climate, I'd never seen tomatoes sprout from last year's fallen, but in Minnesota's freezer like conditions -the seeds don't rot. We've got several of these in the plastic zone and many more were planted out at the neighbor's farm (where I keep the garlic -which is nearly all harvested).

Adjacent to the tomato is a snapping turtle's nest of eggs to be hatched, we hope, sooner than later. Betsy wants to leave a patch of soil for the mother turtle to return to yearly -but I'd rather it not be in the middle of the grass I'm about to plant. I suspect she'll find the bare patch of soil if I leave it nearby. Funny thing is that I never see any turtles around our place -yet I know there is a giant snapper living out there, somewhere, and then two dozen or so babies head towards the wetlands in fall.

The hydrangea -floppy top. Heavy, as soon as the first real rain hits them, over they go. This year they have been eaten by the deer, pom poms and all. Sometimes they enter the vegetable garden for a second course, should they not get their fill on hydrangea. They've also eaten down the thorny, climbing rose on the trellis -leaving only a full top above their reach. They eat tomato vines, cucumber vines, even buckthorn this year. At my neighbor's garden, they've not only pruned my tomatoes to an even sixteen inches and peppers to eight, they've consumed his giant pumpkin plant -spines and all, a first. They haven't touch the dino kale, potatoes, and garlic.

In summer, gardens do their thing -as do we. This year it is a medley of siding, painting, customer projects, teaching, and exhibitions. I see the work to be done in the garden and it must wait. Seedlings in trays suffer my inattention -yet I keep my eye on these things just enough for them to tug at my desire to do more than is humanly possible.

The front garden is being encroached on by the woods, particularly younger maples that quickly shade out sun loving plants. Oaks and ironwoods do not do this. It's hard to take down living creatures, but the maples will likely meet the chainsaw come late autumn -after I pick up a new chainsaw. The old Stihl croaked last year as I cleared a fallen maple from a path.

Around that front garden is a retaining wall into which I have been ever so slowly moving large stones. The soil is miserable under road bed stuff from last year's gravel driveway rehab. I've got compost to add to the mix, over there, in the shade, now two years old, waiting for my attention and a shovel. Afterward, maybe in autumn, plants will be re-organized to deal with the expanded garden.

One of two woodland edge prairie-savanna hardly-gardens I planted after the studio was finished. These change every year. Without a supply of fresh black-eyed susan seed, it looks rather green. Prairie seed mixes can be rudbekia lush, but the plant tends to diminish once shaded out by perennial grasses and forbs. It's a biennial, so the third season the profusion is limited to small, fuzzy leaves -often at the edge of where they showed up en masse the year before. Each season different plants dominate -this year will no doubt be asters and goldenrod, to the point at which I will likely be thinning them out. Lavender-colored Monarda fistulosa in the background.

The second prairie-savanna garden has a dumpster in front of it, so no pictures of that this summer. The dumpster takes in insulation, wood, old rotting siding and a window or two. I've been replacing siding, piecemeal, every warm season as I convert the house from the pukey-pink paint you can see in the background, above, to the umber-magenta grey visible in the foreground. This garden, along a path from a back door to the studio, is hosta-heavy, magically invisible to the deer thus far.

The brilliant, but less prolific (in these drier conditions ) than I wish American Bellflower, Campanulastrum americanum, is blue-purple in the background. To the left, the very prolific Blue Lobelia, Lobelia siphilitica, about to bloom and a black-eyed susan that found a way to full form.

It May Be July

2019-07-13T19:04:00.003-05:00

Just finished putting together the new vegetable beds. Four raised beds, each about 12 inches tall. The herb bed was the first, back near the greenhouse. Then the two nearer, each already around for a couple of seasons, but moved yearly. After attempting to grow vegetables plunked in the middle of the lawn, I soon realized that it wasn’t going to work. We didn’t want to mow around sprawling vines and the shade allowed aggressive creeping charlie to truly creep.

I concocted this new scheme, very much wood chipped, framed by cedar ripped on the table saw and spiked with rebar to hold it in place. Once dreamed up, I set about building the final raised bed. The lawn will be rebuilt on three sides, plenty far from the beds.

Tomatoes are supported by two zinc-coated irrigation pipes plugged into 5/4 cedar deck boards also ripped on the table saw. String is attached to the leading vines and wound over the pipe. The tension created with this type of system keeps tomato vines from ever flopping over. I’ve never applied this system before, mostly due to laziness and lack of necessity. It’s neat -I like that, but it requires a willingness to reduce the number of tomato producing leaders. We won’t need so many as all our other tomato starts are planted in the neighbor’s garden, just downhill from the garlic.

This was the same, June 21, not much more than three weeks ago.

The Slough

2019-07-03T05:00:00.000-05:00

A busy life, the return of mosquitoes and then the ever more aggravating deer fly, have kept me from the woods -through which I must pass to get to the back slough. The slough, a small natural woodland basin bordered on its west by an old gravel pit, has become wetter over the last decade. Prior owners of the neighboring pit decided it would be more useful filled and so introduced a stream of trucks dumping their fill. We believe this raised the water table and is the reason our woodland vernal pond supporting silver maples and green ash has become a permanent swamp; one that has dried, only temporarily, a couple of years out of ten. The last of the trees within its bounds has died and the aggressively spreading, wet soil tolerant canary reed grass has taken hold in the newly sunny slough.

Yesterday morning a meso-scale storm passing just to our north provided a strong draft and mosquito-free window to pass through the woods. The last time I gazed upon this rapidly changing two acres it was a pond pushing beyond its bounds. Now, the lower water table of summer has changed it to a burgeoning meadow; the remains of duckweed sitting on a crust of drying muck.

Canary Reed Grass, Phalaris arundinacea

Although I seeded a portion of the slough in December with what is called a detention mix, I'm not surprised to see an abundance of human-bred, hybrid canary reed grass, Phalaris arundinacea.

It is a surprise to see the blue flag, Iris versicolor, I planted two years ago continuing to bulk up, maybe even thrive, despite the competition from so much mad dog skullcap, Scutellaria lateriflora.

This sedge, "weeded" out of a wetland edge of a nearby lakefront residence, has begun to transform the northwestern edge of the slough. I hope to see it "make a stand" against the encroachment of canary reed grass.

I purchased seeds of another grass, prairie cord grass, but have been hesitant to distribute the seeds. It is a native, warm season slough grass that I intended to use as a foil to the cool season canary reed grass. Like canary, it spreads by rhizomes and can be aggressive. Although it grows all over Minnesota, further reading led me to think that the six to eight foot grass may not be the right choice. I'd rather be out ten dollars in seed than dealing with another grass, not currently present, that then spreads too widely. My curiosity, however, gets the best of me -I have tray-seeded a few to see how they grow.

As more storms approached from the north, I pressed on toward the little wetland to see how it has changed since the high water of late spring. Water sheds from the surrounding moraine, draining through two gullies, then filters through two wetlands to pool at the bottleneck that leads to our driveway culvert. Earlier this spring I cleared the growing stand of buckthorn from the floodplain surrounding the bottleneck. Dying ash and falling box elder have opened the canopy here, letting in more sun.

In early June I made an attempt to slow the spread of canary reed grass weakened by five weeks of flood waters. Wearing knee high rubber boots, I cut any grass growing along the perimeter of the open water with a weed trimmer. Although it has come back now that the water has receded, it has done so less vigorously -a rather minor victory. If I want to maintain open water here, or better yet, introduce sedge and other wetland plants, I'll need to continue to fight back the canary reed grass which has a stranglehold on much of the small wetland.

Last Saturday I spent an hour at a nearby natural landscape contractor's end of season native plant sale. Most of my purchases (only $2.50 per plant!) were infill for my prairie plantings, but I did buy a couple of wetland plants. Above, ironweed, Vernonia fasciculata, has a wetland indicator status of facultative (FACW). This means it usually occurs in wetlands -66 to 99 percent of the time. This wetland status and my failure to grow it successfully in my dry Brooklyn garden led me to choose the flood plain as its new home.

My other purchase, broad-leaved arrowhead, Sagittaria latifolia, has a wetland status of obligate wetland (OBL) which means that it occurs in wetlands nearly 100 percent of the time. This plant prefers standing water and at least partial sun, so I placed in the pool that collects at the bottleneck, a stones throw from the ironweed.

We've been in a very wet period, receiving several inches of rain over the last two weeks. The tropical air and daily storms are expected to last through the week. Over the last 24 hours we've received over 3 inches of rain, and another three plus within the last ten days, bringing the water table back up to where it was in late May. This morning, braving the mosquitoes, I ventured to see the arrowhead I planted two days back -but it is missing, most likely it has tipped over into the muck under the rising water.

Intersection 53

2019-06-15T05:00:00.000-05:00

The last three weeks of May were owned by the selection of images from seventeen thousand, color correcting, titling, and finally writing statements for the exhibition of photographs made during my artist in residence experience at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve. Below is the catalog for the exhibit that is still on view at the Waseca Art Center until June 28th. Please note that the PDF viewer may not display properly, or at all, on mobile devices.

Many events, both life and landscape, have occurred since my last journal entry, when we were still snowbound in mid-April. But these will need to be drawn at a later date -maybe soon, possibly not. Summer is now upon us and it commands within me an unceasing freneticism as it does all warmth loving life.

Thank you for reading.

Sometimes it Snows in April

2019-04-12T05:00:00.000-05:00

Only once in my life had I seen an April snow. I was a child, there was thunder, and in a brief but hearty spurt of winter, giant flakes accelerated toward the ground. It wasn't magical, it was eerie.

Now, living in Minnesota, I can fully connect with the metaphor written into the Prince song I listened to as a teenager in New York. Here's why...

The arrival of the robins, first week of April.

Sunday, the southerly winds introduce warm air to cold ground; fog their conversation.

It was spring. The sap told it.

Fresh mushrooms and garlic mustard told it.

The chorus frogs playing their combs told it.

So pleasant it was, combative crows and hawks sat together in harmony.

But, then, it wasn't.

Day one filled out with about eight inches of heavy, wet, snow.

Day two, today, has been wind blown snow, ice pellets tink-tink-tinking the windows, and quickly arising thunderstorms. Not as much snow as last year's three day, April blizzard, but just as disappointing.

April, sometimes.

There was several minutes, at various points of the day, when the skies turned distinctly darker, distinctly yellow. This phenomenon, you may have seen it, can be seen when thunderstorms pass overhead, particularly in winter. So the color of the snow, in those moments, seemed a reflection of the sky, until I noticed the different coloration, blue-white, on the leeward side of snowy features -the steps, the roof fall...

The fire ring. Like a blurred image of a moon crater taken from an earth telescope, the snow took on the contours of the rocks beneath and then sculpted, softly, by wind and shaded in relief by red-beige particles blowing northward across the land. The color was everywhere, and the limits of my imagination concocted that it was created by wind-driven ice pellets scouring the trees. But I was skeptical, this felt familiar -that I had experienced this before -so I asked the Internet.

Brown is dust from Chihuahua Desert. Click for motion Gif

Consider that the uncovered soils of the Mexico, Texas and New Mexico -in this season, their windy season (I lived in the Chihuahua Desert for three years; experienced the wind and the grit in my teeth), can be drawn all the way up to Minnesota by a powerful low pressure. What happens down there, then, also happens up here -their soils are now our soils.

The Eastern Phoebe, an early spring arrival to our house and woods. We often have to chase its nest building off of doorways and gutters, and this year is no different. Our plan is to build a nesting site for this couple, but haven't quite gotten there yet. The blizzard has been a frustration for the bird, as much as us, as they mix a mud-like substance with twigs and dried grass to attach the nest to metal or wood, and these items are not available due to the new snow cover. Yet another way April can bring trouble to the arriving birds. The phoebes flew into our glass windows several times in the blizzard, looking confused, looking for a place out of the snow and wind.

Today, Friday, it continues to snow. I cannot clear the driveway as the gravel is soft from a complete defrosting, and the blower clogs immediately with the heavy, cement-like snow. I will move on to building raised beds for folks now that the wind has died down and I'm comfortable in the metal shed that sits beneath the soft-wooded, often hollow, basswood that rises 70 feet above it.

The Preservation of Metaphor

2019-04-06T05:00:00.000-05:00

"Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free... It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west."

-Thoreau, Walking

View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm — The Oxbow, Thomas Cole, 1836

Nearly a year ago, Holland Cotter wrote a piece in the New York Times regarding Thomas Cole's 1836 painting "View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm — The Oxbow." He re-imagined this 182 year-old work as a political gesture significant to our day while reiterating the psychological chasm between human activity and nature:

"The painting divides vertically into two atmospheric halves. To the left is a wild storm-soaked tangle of old trees and dense vegetation; to the right, far below, a flat terrain of treeless, square-cut fields running back to distant hills scarred by clear-cutting. The wilderness looks unkept and threatening, but seethes with life. The flat land, though cultivated and presumably fertile, feels as bare and bland as a tract-house town. And in the foreground of the picture is a tiny self-portrait of Cole at his easel. He turns away from his canvas and looks right at us, as if to say: Here are the alternatives; you choose."

Detail view— The Oxbow, Thomas Cole, 1836

At the heart of Cotter's take on Cole's cultivated fields "bland as tract housing" and a hillside "scarred by clear-cutting" is the rejection of the cultivated and settled. He suggests that Cole looks back toward "us," prodding with a stark choice; Cotter's tone implicating settlement as fundamentally immoral. Wedding wilderness to morality is not new in the American experience. It is a deeply ingrained component of our split psyche. Here, Cotter's rhetoric provokes the split, backing us once again into a corner, demanding that we choose one of our two selves: wild or cultivated, good or evil, sacred or profane.

As the words of Thoreau (top) suggest, this expression is entangled with our nation's creation myth. Annette Kolodny, in her book, "The Lay of The Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Letters," deepens our understanding of this psychic frustration and its self-destructive impulse. In her chapter Unearthing Herstory, she explains:

"Eden, Paradise, the Golden Age, and the idyllic garden, in short, all the backdrops for European literary pastoral, were subsumed in the image of an America promising material ease without labor or hardship..." and further "...when America finally produced a pastoral literature of its own, that literature hailed the essential femininity of the terrain in a way European pastoral never had, explored the historical consequences of its central metaphor in a way European pastoral had never dared, and, from the first, took its metaphors as literal truths." And lastly, "Other civilizations have undoubtedly gone through a similar history, but at a pace too slow or in a time too ancient to be remembered. Only in America has the entire process remained within historical memory, giving Americans the unique ability to see themselves as the wilful exploiters of the very land that had once promised an escape from such necessities."

The American wilderness had been described as welcoming and fruitful; it's feminized prospect captivated the territorial impulse, yet it could also be a terrifying, risk-laden experience of the unknown, physical hardship, illness and death. In 1846-47, just as Thoreau comfortably reveled in his nature experience of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts, Patrick Breen kept a diary of his experience as a member of the Donner-Reed Party trapped by the snow-covered Sierra Nevada. Stories of tragedy undoubtedly traveled east, but the symbolic impulse worked to suppress the terror and with it there was movement west, farther into the wilderness and then, by necessity of survival, there was deforestation, plowing, structures, and villages.

Erosion No. 2, Mother Earth Laid Bare, Alexandre Hogue, 1936

For Kolodny, the feminine image cast into metaphor and then into the lived experience of the American settler is not as much the problem as it is the key to understanding the predicament in which we find ourselves. In her chapter Making It With Paradise, she writes:

"We must begin by acknowledging that the image system of a feminine landscape was for a time both useful and societally adaptive; it brought successive generations of immigrants to strange shores and then propelled them across a vast uncharted terrain. For it is precisely those images through which we have experienced and made meaning out of the discrete data of our five senses (and our cerebral wanderings) that have allowed us to put our human stamp on a world of external phenomena and, thereby, survive in the first place in a strange and forbidding wilderness. And the fact that the symbolizations we chose have now resulted in a vocabulary of destructive aggression and in an active expression of frustration and anger should not make us assume that they may not yet again prove useful to us, or if not, that we have only to abandon them altogether to solve our ecological problems."

Ghosts of Lake Agassiz, Sophia Heymans, 2018

On a recent visit to a Minneapolis gallery, I looked over an exhibit of paintings by Brooklyn artist Sophia Heymans. I was intrigued by the Rhode Island School of Design-trained artist's landscape paintings that embraced a folk-arts styling. After spending some time with the work, I picked up the three paragraph artist narrative that described the work as "approaching painting landscape from a non-dominant perspective."

Clarifying the artist's intention, the statement goes on to say:

"American landscape painting, along with American history, has...ignored thousands of years of indigenous human history, acting as though this land was ours to tackle and overpower. Even when seemingly depicting the grandeur of the wilderness, as with the Hudson River School painters, the work still reeks of supremacy –peering ravenously down from a high rock at the wild young lands."

Then, as a counterpoint:

"Heymans flips the roles in her paintings, daydreaming of a time and place outside of human hegemony. In this post-human America, the plants and land forms are characters, able to express themselves after hundreds of years of White (European) dominance. Their movements are those of freedom and festivity. Trees high-five each other knowing they are finally liberated from human devastation. Smoke floats like reaching arms across borders that no longer exist. Rain clouds release drops into a lake, creating towering columns between heaven and earth. The paintings are from a bird’s-eye view, or the perspective of a cloud or spirit, hovering somewhere outside of human perception and dominion."

Twenty Seven Waterfalls, Sophia Heymans, 2017

In this imagined post-human world, anthropomorphous plant forms celebrate the continent's return to (non-indigenous?) prehuman days where they are finally free of subjugation by humankind. Although only an artistic phantasm, it's rhetoric is of the same bifurcation Europeans cast about these shores a few hundred years ago. To Holland Cotter's question, Heymans has made her choice, only taken to the extreme -humanity must exit to restore what was our dream of paradise.

"The pastoral impulse, neither terminated nor yet wholly repressed, the entire process -the dream and its betrayal, and the consequent guilt and anger -in short, the knowledge of what we have done to our continent, continues even in this century to eat at the American heart like acid," writes Kolodny.

In describing the work as seen from "the perspective of a cloud or spirit, hovering ...outside of human perception," Heymans attempts to extinguish the only humans left -the viewing audience. Art can focus our attention on it so thoroughly that we exit our bodies, if only briefly, but the audience is always integral to the art. We are each, individually, the figure of an apparently figure-less art. Heymans' art becomes my experience of celebratory nature, my experience of water flowing freely to nourish the land. It is not nature, so titled, Without Us, as much as it becomes nature without every one else. It is in this way that the work revisits the fantasy crafted by the early codifiers of the American pastoral -Hudson River School painters like Thomas Cole. Yet, to return to Cole's self portrait turned back to look at "us" in his painting The Oxbow, the painting is most compelling in its foregrounding of the audience -on the insistence that we be present.

"To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it."

-Thoreau, Walking

Twilight in the Wilderness, Frederick Church, 1860

Humanity in art, as represented by the figure, was minimized in 19th century landscape painting -the art often described as the inspiration for a national park system and even the environmental movements of the 20th century. The frontier dream, so effectively reiterated by Thoreau (in Walking) and so clearly demonstrated by Kolodny, had little room for civilization and no tolerance for the complicating narratives generated by throngs of settlers. Within the latter years of the century, the federal government began designating tracts of wilderness with national park status, effectively enshrining their identity within the ethos of the period. By the turn of the century, however, with little psychic or expansionist value after the close of the frontier, the unpopulated, monumental landscape painting of the 19th century had become all but forgotten. The wilderness dream that took its metaphors for truth would now be embodied in situ, in our national parks.

Left: Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite, Albert Bierstadt, 1873 Right: Fallen Bierstadt, Valerie Hegarty, 2007

Above, the most quoted visual pairing from one of the more interesting nature-themed exhibits to come together recently: Nature's Nation, organized by the Princeton Art Museum. That this polarized pairing is used to represent the complex exhibit isn't surprising given how easily digestible it is. It reflects a simple narrative deeply ingrained in our psyche -Nature, then, was wild and beautiful -today, it's ruined. That the burnt image of a Bierstadt painting is as much about the state of a nation as it is about nature, is likely to be secondary. To my mind it reads as an incomplete dismantling of the wilderness metaphor or, possibly, an image of what may become of it.

William Cronon has observed:

"The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism’s most important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time...appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are—or ought to be."

Visitors photographing deer accustomed to being photographed -Devil's Tower NM, Wyoming

When Cronon wrote those words for his essay, The Trouble with Wilderness, in the book "Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature,"he could hardly have imagined the combined effect of social media and mobile phones on the wilderness experience. While the increasing number of visitors to National Parks and Recreation Areas might suggest that more and more people are discovering their "truest selves" within the cathedrals of nature, the selfie and instant gratification of mobile social media have proven that wilderness allows us, as Cronon said, "to know ourselves as we really are" and, at times, not live up to who we "ought to be."

That mobile-phone wielding visitors do not show "appropriate" reverence in the presence of wilderness reveals, to some degree, current attitudes about wilderness. On the one hand, it shows the importance of social relations (an image of Yosemite garners many hearts) as a basis for the valuation of an experience of wilderness. On the other it reflects the alienation inherent to a largely urban culture that venerates wilderness in the absence of direct experience with it.

Neal Herbert, National Park Service

We admonish people to leave only footprints, take only memories (pictures). In doing so, we must acknowledge that restraining a natural enthusiasm for physical experience with material nature reinforces the abstract, the photographic, the landscape view over lived experience of the world. For the sake of preservation, this may be a necessity, yet one wonders why, year over year, more visitors make their way to the edges of wilderness, to shuffle along boardwalks and clogged arteries in pursuit of a photogenic destination. If these excursions are a reflexive reenactment of the American frontier mythology; that it is then thwarted by hoards of visitors, commerce, filled parking lots and campgrounds has had minimal effect.

Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, Thomas Gainsborough, 1750 -the most cited landscape in the Marxist critique.

W.J.T. Mitchell, in "Landscape and Power," chapter one, Imperial Landscape, conceptualizes landscape and its valuation this way:

"Landscape is a medium in the fullest sense of the word. It is a material "means" like language or paint, embedded in a tradition of cultural signification and communication, a body of symbolic forms capable of being invoked and reshaped to express meaning and values. As a medium for expressing value, it has a semiotic structure rather like that of money, functioning as a special sort of commodity that plays a unique symbolic role in the system of exchange-value... At the most basic, vulgar level, the value of landscape expresses itself in a specific price: the added cost of a beautiful view in real estate value; the price of a plane ticket to the Rockies... Landscape is a marketable commodity to be presented and re-presented...an object to be purchased, consumed, even brought home in the form of...postcards and photo albums. In its double role as commodity and potent cultural symbol, landscape is the object of fetishistic practices involving the limitless repetition of identical photographs..."

iPhone case with Gainsborough's painting printed on the back ($24.99)

The image of Gainsborough's Mr. and Mrs. Andrews may be commonly known among art students or students of the Marxist critique of images, but among customers for mobile phone cases, I imagine that the number of knowledgeable buyers is quite small. No matter, because the image exposes us to what it must at a glance. At face value it reflects back to friends or family a model image of humanity in nature at the moment the phone it enshrouds captures their image in nature. Subtly, it reinforces what landscape really is to us -a staged scene.

Mitchell goes on to say:

"As a fetishized commodity, landscape is what Marx called a "social hieroglyph," an emblem of the social relations in conceals. At the same time that it commands a specific price, landscape represents itself as "beyond price," a source of pure, inexhaustible spiritual value. "Landscape," says Ralph Waldo Emerson, "has no owner," and the pure viewing of landscape for itself is spoiled by economic considerations: "you cannot freely admire a noble landscape, if laborers are digging in the field hard by." Raymond Williams notes that "a working country is hardly ever a landscape." Further, "Landscape" must represent itself, then, as the antithesis of "land," as an "ideal estate" quite independent of "real estate," as a "poetic" property, in Emerson's phrase, rather than a material one."

Wedding photography of this sort is the contemporary, American application of the Gainsborough standard.

Wedding photography staged at the edges of wilderness has become common. In Mitchell's terms, it commands both the specific price of a photo shoot in a hard to reach location and the poetic property of the ideal estate. As these images suggest, the practice reflects an American ideation of nature and relation to it -grandeur, no vulgar indication of work or commerce (in sight), and a comfortable, elegant exhibit of mastery over wilderness. This wilderness, of course, is a stand-in for other material and personal hardships not so easily objectified that must be mastered nonetheless. The image of wilderness continues to hold value for there is no other readily understood, easily consumed, aesthetically appreciated backdrop for a life lived boldly.

If you detect a note of cynicism in the Marxist critique of landscape, you will not find any argument from me. Yet, I do think it offers important, if limited, insight into reasons why wilderness maintains its value in a mass culture that lives almost entirely within the bounds of civilization. It also illustrates how deeply abstract the conception of wilderness is among most Americans.

As this article has circled back to Holland Carter's false choice between wilderness or civilization and because I cannot fully come to terms with all there is to consider on the subject of the wilderness landscape ideal, I will end with the quotes below.

From William Cronon's The Trouble with Wilderness:

"The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living—urban folk for whom food comes from a supermarket or a restaurant instead of a field, and for whom the wooden houses in which they live and work apparently have no meaningful connection to the forests in which trees grow and die. Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living from the land."

Paul Shepherd, from his book Man in the Landscape:

"My point is that their [cities] origin is inextricably associated with a surplus agriculture, that cities tend to grow beyond what the local agriculture will support, and that there is an urban attitude toward nature which is insular, cultivated, ignorant, dilettante, and sophisticated. At the same time, by virtue of the very polarity in the landscape that cities create, they contain and educate and produce men who retreat to nature, who seek its solitude and solace, who study it scientifically, and who are sensitive to its beauty. The very idea of a sense of place is an abstraction, a sort of intellectual creation ...which is impossible except in a world of ideas whose survival depends on the city. "

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Osiris Rising

2019-03-19T05:00:00.000-05:00

Winter began at the end of January. The low temperature, early Wednesday morning, January 30, bottomed at -34℉ with a high temperture of -16℉. In February, temperatures did not get very much above 10℉, and were often below zero.

My wife described these low temperatures in this way -one feels surrounded. Imagine you stepped outside of your plane on a flight across country...

When it's minus thirty you can play around with making clouds with boiling water.

I retreated to Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve one last time to work on some writing. The moon rose, and later that night, the second of several significant snowfalls began.

The snow piles higher; sliding off roofs, snow blown, and accumulation.

The icicles grow longest on the upper floors -some over six feet long.

Ice dams form where house heat melts roof snow, where the weight of snow compresses it at the edges of a roof.

By February 20th we had the snowiest February on record -with still more snow to come. By the same date, however, one begins to think of what else may come -warmth! With it comes melting, wet snows, even rain. The weight on the roof is probably okay under the cold regime, but snow is like a sponge -lighter when dry and heavier when wet. Ordinarily welcome, the warmth could become a problem.

It is easy to imagine the return of glacial lake Agassiz, forming as rainfall accumulates between a snow pack of thirty inches, four foot snow mounds, and the frozen ground. I begin to clear areas previously left untouched -in front of the greenhouse, the sidewalk between the house and front yard and six feet beyond the walkway between the house and the backyard.

I even cleared a path to the compost pile -you can almost make it out on the far right, above. This was to keep us from trudging knee deep to dump the bucket, but also to give the melt water a place to travel down slope, away from the house.

Then it was time for the inevitable: clearing the roof. Wind helped keep some edges below sixteen inches, but other spots were above eighteen inches. This view is akin to a core sample -each storm depositing more snow, compressing under the weight of the next. The upper portion is the thickest and lightest, the bottom crispy and snow-cone like.

One of my better purchases: insulated rubber boots: good to -20℉.

When climbing out a window into a thirty inch snow drift, mind the space above your head. This icicle was disturbed by my head, broke, and dropped on my noggin -not a good way to start shoveling snow off of the roof.

On March 10 we woke up to another six or seven inches of snow. This time the temperature was in the mid to high twenties and the snow sticky: aka wet snow -a sign of things to come.

A six foot tall azalea has little positive things to say about six inches of wet snow. We have noticed that between -30℉ and 30℉, the azalea leaves change form. Warmer temperatures show leaves that are open wide and flat. At colder temperatures, the leaves are tightly rolled.

By Tuesday, March 12, the air was a warm and dewy 37℉. That's when the rain started to fall. By Wednesday, we had a morning fog with near white out conditions. It continued to rain through Thursday -leading to flood reports across several Midwestern States.

There is little moderation in the Midwestern climate -at times, we can span 70 degrees in a couple of days. On the coasts, even within a three week period, to experience below zero temperatures at the beginning and sixty degrees Fahrenheit at its end, is unheard of. With over thirty inches of snow on still frozen ground across the entire state, days of rain, and the increasing temperature to near 60℉ by Saturday, we will see large scale flooding.

Like Osiris rising from the dead, so too is spring. The geese were heard flying over just a few days ago. The birds, winter friendly, are spring noisy. The popping of basswood, Tilia americana, trunks were heard echoing among the woods on a sunny afternoon of twenty-five degrees -calling us out to tap sugar maples for sap.

From winter weather to spring in bird song.