The Written Word

July 5 - October 20, 2023

Artists share fleeting moments from the subconscious to the conscious, on route to self-realization. Informing aspects of their creative process

STEVIE KINCHELOE

Afternoon. Los Angeles.

Another heat wave searing the city. The fan from the AC unit swallows up all of the sound in the world with a roar, one can hear little else. In a way, its affect creates a curtain of privacy around my little desk that’s tucked into the corner of the living room.

My partner breaches the illusion for a moment, offering tea.

— No, thank you.

A pillar in my creative life, my unusually small secretaire (which is referred to as ‘Virginia’— of course a nod to Woolfe), is a muse, a portal, and has become something of a revolving self-portrait. Each shelf piled with beloved books— those that I keep closest, hoping to absorb something beyond their words, perhaps their essence: Smith, Plath, Spitz, Oliver, Rilke and others— a prayer candle, a small marble vase, the faces of heroes— two prints, one of which, through a happy accident came out looking like a cyanotype— the feather of a raven, the feather of a Yellow-Headed Amazon Parrot, a collection of antique portraits and architectural postcards found at a Parisian print-shop, small stones holding in place a pile of hand-scribbled notes, a gifted heart-shaped brooch with a blue stone at its center, a framed painting of my own, words torn from two bags of tea— the first, “Be fearless, knowing that all will be provided at the right time,” and the second, “Gratitude leads to love,” neither is cited with a source— a small notebook, and two curling petals dried into a deep rusted-orange.

Climbing beyond my desk onto the wall, torn sections of rice paper are sporadically held in place with masking tape, notes and reminders of each of my current projects. Below, two black and white images, scanned prints, are taped to the wall— the first of a dried rosebud and two feathers, the second, of a large hunk of quartz I dug up from my parents’ land in Colorado.

I turn to look outside the window, the air is still and Los Angeles bakes. The AC hypnotically drones on. I briefly close my eyes.

There is nothing I must reach for.

There is no question I must ask.

There is no clock.

There is no metronome.

There is only breath.

There is only listening with the inner ear.

There is becoming nothing more than a thought.

There is only now and now and now

and I want to give myself fully to it.

Stevie Kincheloe

Los Angeles 2023

STEVEN DAYVID MCKELLAR

I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of being able travel and see a lot new places and actually BE in lots of places for long periods of time. In places with different foods, different smells, different languages, world views and so on. 

And it’s been said many times before, but there’s nothing that expands the mind and opens the heart like physically traveling into newness. It gets me closer to understanding the broadness of our humanness on earth. And it doesn’t require flying on a plane or booking some expensive vacation. It could be as simple as going to an unexplored part of your town and sitting on the street corner for an hour and just observing. 

Every time I do, I cleanse myself of the illusion that there is an unchanging structure for me to fit into somewhere in this world, that I have only to find and then I can really thrive. Or even worse, to stay in one place over fear of shattering that false reality. Cause through dwelling in newness I’ve realized that there is no escape from one’s self, and that there is no man-made government or cultural structure or external way of being that I can fit into that resonates with all the ever-evolving complexities and powers of my existence. 

‘We are the world’ yes that is true. And too heartbreaking to really swallow. Too much to grasp. To carry it and live in the fact that we are all connected, would shatter our realities too much. So, we stay in one place. Mentally and physically. 

Don’t be fooled, ignorance and denial is a world-wide epidemic. 

But there is a cure. :)

Steven Dayvid McKellar

Los Angeles, August 24, 2023

ANNABELLA PRITCHARD

My photography practice was a helpful way to explore ideas and dreams and stories that I couldn't express with words. Years later, I realized it was also a creative approach to process grief and anger. But these days, I am more exhausted than ever, and it takes too much time to create the elaborate environments I need for my visual storytelling. So now I just write about the dead. Which oddly enough feels more invigorating and cathartic than I would have expected.

Annabella Pritchard

August 21, 2023

ALICE SHEPPARD FIDLER

I yearn for the cool, dank, green of the lake.

I need to be out of my head, out of thinking and reacting, and into my body.

 It’s been an intensive day facilitating a workshop, one of several I am hosting this summer on the theme of identity. The young adults I support are mostly neuro divergent and find traditional education systems too taxing for their sensitive natures. I am always amazed how brave these young people are, to come along in the first place when they are often hindered by anxiety or fear. I imagine my young self among them in a time and place where diversity is recognised.

I ask the students to lie down on large bits of paper and draw round each other’s outer edge. They rise to the challenge of this intimate process and adapt quickly to working at scale.

I’m interested in what being human means in 21st century. What we need to survive and what traces we leave behind through our interventions with the world.

 Throughout the pandemic my work developed into a project called Touching Space, Placing Touch. I took up residence in different public places with props devised to question people’s relationship to space. My research was informed by visitors who came to see what I was doing. One woman grew confident and shared her story of how she hadn’t been touched for four months with the first contact on her skin being when she went swimming in the lake.

I had never thought of water having this ability to touch, how when it touches you, it touches everywhere.  

I anticipate the water enveloping me, my limbs moving automatically as I swim out stroking through the cold. The dense odour and colour taking me swiftly to a state of relaxation. I feel as if I’m retracting and expanding simultaneously, an implosion to something cellular while remaining completely present and whole. This is what I am after. Without these moments of intense being I don’t feel complete. Swimming, especially outdoors, keeps me present and alert. A switch off and a switch on. It is a visceral experience crucial to my practice. 

Alice Sheppard Fidler

Cotswolds, August 2023

AMBER MAIDA

The fibers of our being, woven & stretched like the fascia sweater of our vessel expanding & contracting with each breath, in all directions and pulls.  The spirit-strings that swarm within and extend farther than we can travel in this lifetime, reaching things not often understood but strung & knotted just the same.  Resonance/humming from a source that feels deeply bound rippling out, turning our dreams from the inside out ever dare to let the invisible take light like a distilled alchemic mirroring… no time, no day, no night, just the in-between of things where self knowledge and wisdom grow from the macro/micro experiences… such as the moon’s tidal orchestra conducts the expanse and contraction over the shore, leaving gifts in the divots- worlds within worlds.  Reaching as it goes until time to pull the blanket of waves back.  An ending to a comforting, loving, bittersweet, and always memorable embrace that takes some of what was in the tide pool tiny worlds back into the vast seas. Memories encapsulated from these times, objects hold the cherished stories of whom they’ve touched, encrusting their energetically electrified surface, placed and rearranged on the sacred alter of our soul-full selves.

Amber Maida

 8/16/23 Connecticut, photo by EMS

RICHARD SPEER

My first passion as a creative person was music, in particular classical piano, symphony, and opera.  Visual arts came later.  Probably as a consequence, I look at writing from the perspective of language as music—language as it sprang from the oral tradition.  People’s speaking voices have pitches, timbres, and volumes, just as singers and musical instruments do.  We speak in rhythms and tempos that can be lyrical, staccato, accelerando, marcato; we can make a dramatic pause like a fermata and deploy glissando, tremolo, and other effects for emphasis.  Recited poetry, with its bardic and rhetorical traditions, is where language began and where it remains most visceral.  Poetry is the intersection of music and language.  It sings.  Writing can sing, too.  I try to write for the mind’s ear.  My personal aesthetic mission is to write sentences that sound good if you read them aloud.  I don’t really care what I’m writing about as long as the words have flow and euphony.  I happen to be an art critic, but if I were a film critic, novelist, travel writer, or playwright, I would still have the same modus operandi.  I’d like to think I could have a great time writing the minutes of a city-council meeting or the instruction manual for a John Deere tractor.  Because my first professional training was in journalism, not art history, I come at criticism with a commitment to clarity, concision, and accuracy.  When it comes to the value judgments inherent in critique, I’ve always been someone with strong opinions and a deeply inquisitive, sometimes even interrogative, nature, so I don’t have a problem forming and expressing an editorial viewpoint.  As time has gone on, I’ve tried to temper knee-jerk reactions and judgmental tendencies with a respect for patience, nuance, and, I hope, compassion.  But the deep-down truth is, I’d sacrifice all that for beautiful sounds:  bei sogni, lingua come musica.  That’s my confession and credo.

Richard Speer

Portrait of Richard Speer, Yamashiro, Los Angeles, 2023, by Diana Milia

ANASTASIA KIRAGES

I’m sitting in my AirBnb in Milan, eating a yogurt that I picked up at an Esselunga the evening before. The noise of the fan is whirring softly above me. It’s odd because where I’ve been staying, Mosso Santa Maria, the air in my room is still. When I arrived the week of July 10th, I thought the silence was deafening. Since then, I’ve gotten used to it a bit.  

I have been in Milan since late Wednesday evening. I welcome the noise of a bigger city, but the pace of Mosso has taught me to appreciate the unhurried, intentional life of the countryside. My day to day in Houston is go go go. Living in Mosso and having a studio at Casa Regis forces me to stop and reflect. For one, there is no water at Casa Regis, so we literally must stop what we are doing and take time to go get water if we need it.  

This isn’t my first time being in Italy actually. I was here back in 2008, studying abroad in the Tuscany region through a program at UT. A classmate of mine on the trip, Samantha, took a photo of me on some steps during lunch one time. In the photo I’m staring off at who knows what. I think about that younger me now, a 20-year-old Stacy. I probably didn’t think I would be back in Europe, making art again, in a different context. Sometimes life is pretty wild though. 

I had my first kiss during that summer of 2008. I’d been a mostly reserved person up until then, focusing on my schoolwork and whatnot. But there was something about summer in Italy, man. I dated that person for a little bit afterward, but it didn’t work out. Va bene, I hope he’s doing well.

What do we take with us and what do we leave behind when traveling to new places? It can be so many different things. Some fleeting, some not. I think about this as I peruse the wares at an open-air market or an antique store, looking for materials to collage with. I’m drawn to stained, crumbling books that look like they will disintegrate in your hands if you pick them up, the older the better. Photographs, found notes, postcards, and perfectly preserved maps in a vellum sleeve. These items once had a purpose, and to give them a different one by using them in my art, in turn creates purpose in my own life.

Anastasia Kirages

Friday, August 4, 2023, at 8:55 am

SUVI HÄNNINEN

Memory of absentminded touch that gently sweeps over my neck to remove a hair run loose from my collapsing bun traverses all over my body. What was in that touch? I remember a pink ribbon, that has become loose from my hair as a teenager, and I am flooded by memories of yearning, reaching out towards the world to experience something, anything. The echo of the touch starts to mount in my body becoming this longing that seems to have no end. I am breathed-in to a sensation of something that has laid dormant in me for long time. One gesture awakens me to new realizations of my own skin. I am inspired and in-spired: as if strong waves are passing through me in billows…

The sensation folds itself in multitude pleats of vibrations that move in me. I am swallowed in it yet swallowing it in me. No clear images, they are shifts like shadows on the wall. This something reveals and conceals at the same time, just like a fold in a fabric leaves one side open for looking and one closed, hidden. As my own identity is fluid in constant formation, giving something to perceive and leaving parts hidden. I am in-between things: there is pulling towards the execution of an idea and the pure sensation of it. I surrender to it; not knowing and knowing at the same time.

Suvi Hänninen

Northern Italy, July 2023

IPSHITA MAITRA

The ephemeral reinforces itself time and again. It calls loudly to be noticed, shattering perception, breaking down patterns, displacing identity; 

Often I have been confronted with moments of déjà vu, open portals, stumbled into energy vortexes…

Such experiences have dotted my whole life, and while dismissed or negated earlier, the last decade has been about growing into an acceptance/ an understanding of this ‘force’ (I have no other way to describe it) 

I lucidly traverse between the two realms, being here stuck in a physical dimensionality, a weight of sorts… 

And being totally still, thoughtless, open, connected where suddenly the quantum begins to reveal itself 

Operating in symbols, synchronicity, codes, multiplicity - the natural alchemy of elements and material, particle and matter becomes apparent, some times even obvious. 

It is in this lucid state I begin to create, begin to work. Though it’s a state of mind, for me it is also a place. 

A place of flow, a place of being, a place to access the universe and allow it to manifest, through me. 

I wait till the ‘me’ the ‘I’ almost disappears, where thought no more interferes with the gesture, where the body becomes just an extension of this transcendent phenomena that is trying to manifest it’s own nature.

This is also how I view all great works, as a revelation, of the great collective unconscious, each revelation/ work - a facet of its duality, it’s plurality, it’s equal balance of light and shadow and within it all its state of total void: space : dissolution 

Ipshita Maitra

Goa, India

MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG

I realize I’ve been going back and forward in time, but it is memory I’m dealing with, and that’s the way it works, as when looking in the dictionary, one word will lead to another, by proximity or by reference: oligarch, oleaginous, unctuous.

  And sometimes the memory will be there in clear focus, 

sometimes not.

Imagine your’e a dog and your owner throws a stick for you to catch. If you’re alert and quick enough, you’ll grab it on the fly;

if not, and it’s gone beyond you and is lost in the grass, you look, sniff, turn in confused circles till you find it and bring the stick back to your owner with your indented teeth marks on it and your own fresh glistening saliva.

Michael Lindsay-Hogg

"Luck and Circumstance" page 49

Photo credit: Lisa Ticknor

LISA TOMCZESZYN

Alchemic meditation 

Creating stillness in the modern world takes practice.  It can require years of practice to create space outside of the noise of human interactions - space outside of judgements and expectations. It is within the quietude that the voice of the universe is audible.  Watercolor painting captures these fleeting echoes of beauty, riding the twofold relationship of receiving and giving, balancing the physical alchemy of merging ground pigment into the woodfibers of paper floating in a medium of water, within a physical dichotomy of fury and restraint.

Lisa Tomczeszyn

Los Angeles, 7 29 2023

SHANE GUFFOGG

When it was finished, I varnished it to have the appearance of an old masters painting. But there was something else happening with it, which was there was virtually no trace of the painterly brush stroke and the painting of the ribbon floating in space functioned like an image on a page of a glossy magazine. The image was contained within the varnish and the pictorial space. I began thinking that the “space” was the unconsciousness and the floating ribbon was the subconscious, perhaps the beginning of a letter or word.  That idea broke open a floodgate as I then started to wonder what ideas look like before language is attached? That spark of a nano-second before the brain constructs and transforms the thought into a visual symbol that is recognized in the form of language.

My mother is someone who rarely throws anything out, including ribbons for gift wrapping. She had a box of them and I took them to my studio and began pulling them out, tossing them in the air and with sumi ink on news print paper, did quick ink sketches of how they landed, then pinning them to my wall. I did this for a few days until I had all the walls covered with these calligraphic renderings of what I hoped were images of my subconscious. I stared at these ink drawings, trying to make sense of them but also allowing them to seep in, without having to understand them. It was a fine line I was trying to walk. Then a thought hit me. It was late at night, and I grabbed a piece of charcoal and scribbled it down on some paper.

Memory is the discourse between the mental (mind) and the physical (body). Painting is the mental act of my physicality and the physical act of my memory.

It was an ah-hah moment and I felt like yelling Bingo. It was a moment of justified and intellectually quantified freedom. The ribbons were the figurative realism I was so reluctant to leave behind, but the void of which they were painted in was abstract. The re-contextualizing of these ribbons allowed the images to float, not only within the picture plane, but between what we know and what we think we know. A sliver of a moment that suddenly appears like an apparition that just as quickly vanishes, leaving us with only a faded mental blue print of something we will never construct. It was my key to the door I knew I needed to walk through.

Shane Guffogg

Los Angeles, 2008

Memoirs Book 1

RICHARD PASKE

Cacophonies of Waves crashing with Thunder as Trumpets and Tubas blare give way to delicate traces of melody, falling step-by-step down the scale under my fingers, not linear but almost so. These moments, this composite, this Alchemy of Sound thru compressions and rarefactions of air pressure...This is my Music.

And then... Finger flesh pulls metallic strings wound tight, pulsing deep with my compadre on drums building a House of Sound roofed by soaring electric guitar screaming across the Sky in a brilliant Wingless Transportation. Touch.

Chords of rainbow frequencies from deep down lowest to cumulus height make Harmonies not foreign to Pythagoras and his Spheres, nor to Sapiens of all Ages. ElectricLiquidLoveSound gushes from Ear to Toe, touched by these Vibrations, some eternal/some not. This too...is my Music.

Sound, Touch, Feeling...

Richard Paske
Los Angeles, 2023

SUSANNA SCHULTEN

Painting is for me a refuge.

It nurtures my soul.

I will always have to paint like other people drink water and eat.

I do try to reflect in my paintings what happens around the world, hoping to move the audience intellectually, emotionally and sensually.

Emotions are universal.

My humanistic philosophy is grounded in sharing contemporary stories and fables which is then reflected in my art.

Susanna Schulten

Berlin, August 15, 2023

JULIO PANISELLO-HUQUET

My painting practice is madly bound to language. It unfolds like this: I meet swirling clouds of dust in my mind, embodying ideas, choices, and uncertainties. They gaze through me when I try to meet their eyes. Yet, as I back away and allow these pendulous particles space to breathe, they precipitate into words.

I string those words in my head into prayer beads, calls for painting action, and then run down to grab my brush with my vacant hand. I pause to catch my breath and regain composure, stare at the fissures on my painting surface, blanketed with fern-like swirls and stone-breaking scratches, and begin to paint, poised.

I paint to commune with what once was, a rhythmic recitation of those strung words resonating within me, my brush waltzing across to what looks like harlequin tiles now, and the small voice of my younger self wakes me again gently with a low, sweet tune.

And then, I do it again.

Julio Panisello-Huguet

July 13, 2023
West Hollywood

SAUN SANTIPREECHA

Existence is movement, movement is time, which cycles and winds its way through us connecting our memories, our myths, our experiences which we weave into narratives, ever writing, ever re-writing. But with that inherent movement we must also steer—or attempt to steer, a perpetual dance between innate rhythm and our will to new ones—can we create such new rhythms that last? Or are we so sunken into grooves it is practically impossible? Concrete as a material for me explores this movement and the transformative nature of materials and ideas. It embodies the malleability of ideas and thoughts which, through time, if not questioned—and even in spite of it—hardens into ideology, into concretized myth. I also work in similar ways with other materials, exploring the existence of dualities within each. Rope, something to bind and connect but also destructive and deadly. Gold, a symbol of wealth and power but also the allure of it. These tensions form a kind of web, as are the various threads of my inquiries that inform each work.

For me, the art object, whether it be visual or aural, is a trace of these inquiries and the process of questioning. As such the object is never ‘finished’, as inquiries are never concluded, only temporarily abandoned and picked up again, perhaps with fresher eyes and ears, in another attempt at asking and comprehending. The object exists too as a conduit for the triangulation between concept, object and spectator—or to coin Claire Bishop’s term, spect-actor. And so for me, the inquiries, the research, reading, watching, discussing, is half the process, the other half being the physical and intuitive explorations with the materials. Both feed into each other in an inseparable loop of existence–ouroboros.

Saun Santipreecha, July 12, 2023

Los Angeles, California

VICTORIA CHAPMAN

Things appeared golden and bloody at the same time. The knowledge and understanding of love, desire and passion were in the air as well the transition of death. Again the feeling entered taking me all at once. An abundance of light reached my face, glistening my eyes radiating my chestnut hair. I became an essence of life just as the portraits on the wall. I began to feel emotion from a different time.

I was composed of pure life, I had a will to survive. Just as these pieces in the room. I felt a retainment that would keep me living beyond death. All the essence and purity displayed and all the meaning at once. Something altered my vision and heart. I felt real in a surreal world whose boundaries lay in the existence of this room

Thoughts while working as a security guard inside the Titian Room at the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum Boston, MA

Victoria Chapman 1990

FRANCESCA VIRGINIA COPPOLA

What is left of reality if we remove all the layers and superstructures that we have built around our perception? To me, nature is a skeleton of what remains, and that is why in my art I focus on this primal level of existence. Natural elements function as archetypes; signs and symbols that speak directly to the our “soul” or to primary parts of ourselves, on an unconscious level.

Francesca Virginia Coppola, July 9, 2023

Rome, Italy

SAM FRANCIS (1923-1994)

I look carefully at all the objects and books. There some small statues in ivory, a reclining woman. I study it. There are some small paintings on glass the light shines through –

2.10.1975

Walking down a long stair and incline to the depths of the earth with great dancing devil who leads and follows as I lead and follow. He is a dangerous fellow and I must relate to him at all times or he could carve me up.

A light.

Sam Francis from Cobalt Blue

Writings from the papers of Sam Francis, page 101

About Sam and his aphorisms. I have been working on a research project regarding Sam and his art. This has taken me to interview Nancy Mozur, studio curator, and George Page, his master printmaker. I learned Sam wrote daily, which was just as important to him as his paintings. “Did one come before the other?” I asked. No was always the answer. They happened at the same time. 

“Sam’s poetry and prose were often scribbled in diaries, on napkins, postcards, and letters to friends as well as scraps hidden within books. Pieces of paper found homes floating on the floor or stuffed inside the coat pockets. Journals were of the moment, left incomplete only to be started again in a new surrounding, a new country.”

– Nancy Mozur (Introduction Cobalt Blue, Writings from the papers of Sam Francis)

Artwork © Sam Francis Foundation, California/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York