Convergence

Mostly these missives are about connections, stories that demonstrate how the universe and us two-legged animals are bound together in a waltz of light and thought and biology. The last one a month ago drew parallels between big-brained mammals, us included, that aren't so apparent and yet are foundational to the strengths of generational knowledge. Shared memories... story telling... generational bonds...

I'm kind of a jam band guy. I was listening to the Allman Brothers on my Dad's stereo. First album I ever bought was Yes "Fragile." (I know, prog rock teen). Second was "Woodstock." I knew I liked musicians who were masters of their tools. My father worked the concert doors at the University with his pals from the English department for fun, so my brothers and I saw The Who on their Tommy tour, ELP, Clapton, Sly and the Family Stone, Ike and Tina Turner, Marshall Tucker, The Doobie Brothers, Rod Stewart, Peter Frampton... I saw my first Grateful Dead show with 150,000 people at Englishtown raceway in NJ in '77 with my brother Andrew. I took Andrew with me to see Yes play in Charleston, WV; and when I recently looked up the date of that show, I discovered that somehow my Mom had let me take the VW Bug three hours over the mountains when I was fifteen with a learner's permit with Andrew to see laser beams and Roger Dean's art house stage set-up with Rick Wakeman and Chris Squire blazing away at maximum everything. It was epic. Andrew was 14. 

In Philly, in college, I saw the Dead, Zappa, Return to Forever, The Boss, Santana, and Bob Marley from the second row. I've seen shows in New Orleans, Red Rocks, Nassau Coliseum, racetracks, fairgrounds, MSG, Saratoga Springs, The Warfield, The Fox, Roach's, Memorial Auditorium, Providence, San Jose and the Sphere...  The Red Hot Chili Peppers wearing socks. Lenny Kravitz with no shirt and skin tight leather pants, Talking Heads, Violent Femmes, Zappa playing "Whipping Post" in Montreal, Phish... 

And I have the stories to go with them: Lost ticket stub so I had to jump down from a ten foot wall to rejoin my peeps; Jorma coming on stage six and a half hours late, playing at 11 on his amp while scooping some white powdery stuff off his Mesa Boogie between songs and drinking out of a vodka bottle (My ears rang for two days; sometimes they still ring); Buddy Guy retelling the same tale between songs; George Clinton in full seventeen piece fury stomping the cosmic funk; Jerry blowing the audience into shreds of ecstasy; Pat Metheny playing religion -- the good kind. This could go on ... Rickie Lee, English Beat, Miles Davis from the second row, Jazz Fest and "Blue Sky" and an ice cold beer saving my soul...

But why now? Convergence. Two nights ago on the waterfront with a flawless sunset to our backs, we stood in the mayhem of rapt and shaking humans while the band Goose pumped their brand of airborne electricity into our ears. They are the newest in the realm of collective improvisation -- excellent musicians making it up on the fly with the drummer sprinting, keyboard chords held to the floor, bass man playing the rhythms of sub-Saharan early man while the guitarist solos in piercingly, perfect synchronicity. Elevate. Then, elevate, then...  I was there with my brother who telepathically communicates, especially around music, and his son, and my son. Two generations standing together -- young men in their mid twenties and us grey hair teenagers. Genetics as close as they get. Communication. Communion. In concert. 

This is what ART is about. My dad took my brothers and me to Stonehenge, to the Louvre, and to see Count Basie. We listened to Handel and Dave Brubeck and Brahms and Segovia on his turntable playing through colossal speakers he brought back from England. And there I was with my son and Kev and his son on the waterfront in the sonic tsunami, loving life. 

Following up the last missive I shared, whales sing to their children and grandchildren. Elephants speak in subsonic frequencies of how the planet works and where the water is, leading the younger generations. I tell stories and my boys roll their eyes, but I will repeat them. The significance has to do with their rehearsal. Value endures in the utterance. Killer music has to be shared repeatedly. The virtuosos in the world deserve our attention and attendance. Our humanity balances on this focus of expression and continuation. As I said before, go see live music outside. AND take your kids.

In the art realm, I am starting a series based on concerts. Stay tuned. 

And

Stay tuned. 
Love and hugs,

Get outside in these shortening days.

The light is still strong. B mac

P.S. Did anyone notice the word above with nine letters and one vowel? 

P.P.S. "Tell us a little bit, but not too much." Feel free to send me lyrics that resonate through your lives. I quote the Dead's Robert Hunter lyrics constantly and occasionally get a raised eyebrow. Last Saturday I was on the lake at sunset, paddling on my SUP. "Estimated Prophet" was cranking away on my ear buds. The sun shot through a hole in the clouds to illuminate a pool of lava over by the western shore. I turned to paddle directly thataway. The sun lowered and blazed across the surface exactly when the lyric sang, "like an angel, standing in a shaft of light." True story. Convergence.

The Largest Brains, the Lowest Notes

Ask any kid about the largest animal and they will likely blurt "Elephant.” If a bit older, they could suggest that the dinosaurs are the largest creatures ever. Being grownups, mostly, we know that the blue whale (Balaenoptera Musculus) is the correct answer. Its tongue weighs as much as an elephant. At 100 feet long and up to 400,000 pounds, it is the largest creature in all of our planet's history. We could swim through its veins. They eat a quarter million calories in a single bite.  Where do they live? Everywhere. In summers they feed near the poles and then winter and breed in the tropics. One of my brothers tells the tale of paddle boarding off Monterey and having a pod surface to swim alongside, blowing hot, snotty, fish-stinky plumes. He tells of a sense of safety and security with these massive mammals along on the trip, removing his paranoia about great white sharks in the area. As paragons of life on earth, whales rule. They sing to each other over hundreds of miles using frequencies that travel in salt water up to 10,000 miles. Their society is matriarchal. Read the scripts from divers and researchers and they all resonate with profundity, age, intelligence. Whales also experience menopause. 

So do elephants. And humans. And great apes. What is that about? Human females biologically live longer than males. What is the evolutionary advantage of that? Elephants live in large family groups generally led by the oldest female. They age out of reproductive capability, but continue as the most experienced members of their tribe. They lead. Queen Elizabeth II ruled for nearly 70 years. The average lifespan of a blue whale is 95 years. My Aunt Dee is 100 years old and sharp as the proverbial tack. 

Somehow the wisdom of the natural world decided that the hazard of death in childbirth was too great a loss to the communal intelligence. Menopause is the solution. Let's keep these grandmothers and great grandmothers around as long as possible and, forgive me if I'm overstepping, but it might be wiser for some of the current crew of older males to be demoted to the JV squad bench. Just observing the natural order of things, my friends. I'm far from an expert on pretty much anything.

Right? What do I know? Seems to me that some of the older males of our species should be paying a little more attention to the older moms. Might be a little less bombing and a little more day-care funding. Maybe AI will be able to sort out whale language and our global intelligence will expand. Research in this field is ongoing by impressively dedicated scientists dropping buoys with microphones into whale pods as fast as they can. Let's raise a toast to the humans working to understand the complexities, the languages and interdependencies in our biome. John Muir said, " When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." 

What does this have to do with art? Art fixes in one place some sort of a thing, whether it's colored goo on canvas, a group of sounds you love to sing with, an object out on the lawn that says "YO, pay attention!" Can't say it any simpler. My art is begging the viewer to recognize the insane capacity of us to perceive and comprehend electromagnetic frequencies in the human visual field, roughly 380 to 740 nanometers or, said another way, 405 trillion Hertz to 790 trillion Hz. 

Blue whales can hear 7 Hz sound waves up to 220,000 Hz. Elephants don't have the benefits of water to carry sound but they can hear 14 Hz to 12,000 Hz up to six miles away. The lowest frequencies they can detect through their feet and trunk with enough precision to triangulate the direction of the sound miles away. I have shared repeatedly the specifics of our superpower of vision.

Art is a sustained chord. It is a monument. It is a distillation of information. It is what long term memory does. It captures information and holds it. It can be wisdom frozen to refer to again and again. What our grandmothers know and their parsing of the value of the information is the essence. Art is the fossil remains of data. Wisdom is functional art. 

Biggest. Oldest. Fastest.     Data.

Art is the storytelling behind the facts. Listen to the elders, especially the grandmothers. They know meaning more than facts. Old wive's tales are the basis of humanity's collective consciousness. Humans write, record. Elephants ponder and follow the wisest. Whales compose, rehearse and share. 

So repeat your best stories until they become community understanding. Paint. Write. Sing. Call your mom. Thank your Nanna. And get outside and goof around in another amazing summer. 
Go see live music outdoors right now. 

Ciao,

B mac 

Slinks

Titans are titanic, giants, all-powerful, a family of gods from Greek mythology. Titan is also the name given to Saturn's largest moon, and the rockets used by NASA from 1959 to 2005. This is the metal on planet Earth with the most appropriate name. Titanium has the superpower of having the highest strength-to-weight ratio of all metals. The SR-71 Blackbird is a US military plane with an airframe and skin of this metal that flew at a sustained altitude of 85,069 feet and at speeds over 2,100 mph. At three times the speed of sound, the heat generated caused the plane to expand in length ten inches, and this is from a material prized for its thermal stability and rigidity. I strongly recommend visiting the ones on display. They are the epitome of a sculptural machine -- sleek, black darts whose only onboard weapon was thrust. They could outrun missiles. All modern military planes are pointy, with shapes that scream fast and lethal; but the Blackbird is easily the loveliest of line, more graceful than brutal, more science fiction than engineering fact, more Pininfarina, built more like a diving falcon than a gun in the sky.

Titanium is a greyish, very light, corrosion resistant, transition metal, discovered in Great Britain in 1791. These attributes combined with its thermal properties are ideal for military and aerospace applications requiring super strength and minimal weight. It is also a perfect material for making prosthetic implants and screws to hold bones in place, making hypoallergenic jewelry or eyeglass frames or bicycles or even horseshoes. (We eat .8 milligrams a day in our food, but because it's inert, it passes right through).  I often wear these bracelets through the scanners at the airport. There is plenty of side-eye from the security involved, but this metal is not magnetic. 

In 1997, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened. It is sheathed in 42,875 panels of Titanium, each panel roughly 2' by 3' and .151 inches thick. The iconoclastic and visionary Frank Gehry, a titan of architecture, was studying potential sheathing materials in the parking lot of his Los Angeles offices. Stainless steel -- heavy, too reflective, and too gray, particularly on the rainy days common in Bilbao. Lead, toxic. Copper, too thermally unstable, heavy, reactive, structurally weak. One afternoon the test panel of Ti shone golden in the afternoon sun and the light tipped the scale. The Ti sheathing could be half the weight of stainless, but was still going to require 60 tons of a very expensive metal. Mined on every continent and ninth most abundant metal in the earth's crust, it's pricey because refining it is complicated, requiring multiple processes and artificial atmospheres to change it from mineral to metal. When construction bidding went out, Russia had just dumped stockpiles on the global market, sinking the price to a sweet spot. Material was sent to Pittsburgh in the U.S. for the technical metal fabrication of sheathing and hardware and back to the site where mountain climbers on ropes were employed to fasten the panels onto the compound curves of a climax of 20th Century design. The Guggenheim Bilbao is a 258,000 square foot sculpture of Deconstructivist architecture, a monumental art object of exquisitely curvaceous space, inside and out, AND an art museum, filled with treasure.

Fifteen years ago, I wanted to make portable sculpture, toys that could be reconfigured on a tabletop, little towers, rumpled piles, a circular fortification. Bracelets seemed like the answer. The first batch were stainless steel, brass and bronze. They sold well. We ran out. At the time I was playing with anodizing titanium, making 24" diameter bowls in pink and purple and gold and blue and green that were featured in a show at the Dartmouth museum. Titanium beckoned as a material guaranteed not to turn your arm black and be lighter AND would have all these colors available. The links are machined with a hyper precise CNC process and cut with an industrial water jet. Super tech and digital, but I have the cutter run fast causing texture and a little feathering on the surfaces. We called them Slinks. Five years ago we did a second batch and my son Schuyler, a mechanical engineer, introduced myriad finishes to the process. 

And here we are. Generation 3 Slinks. We are working on some standard finishes to make them available through Etsy, but this missive is an invitation to get them in the experimental finishes stage. These are the initial batch. Pick one out. $350 each. Two for $600. Three for $900. Shipping is on us. Be sure to zoom on the photos to see the subtle differences in the finish work. Shoot us an email with your pick and we will do the rest. 

Happy high summer! 

The lake!! The lightning! The hot long evenings...

Peace my friends,

B Mac 

P.S. I would like to cast backward five millennia. We were all members of tribes, families, clans. I like to think of these bracelets as signifiers of our lost brotherhood and sisterhood. Seeing someone wearing a Slink makes me smile every time. These are personal, finished by yours truly, your humble wizard. No two are ever identical. Hand finished things aren't. The colors on the metal are not patinas. They are caused by wavelength interference by light reflecting off a clear oxide layer and light reflecting off the surface of the metal itself. The nanoscale thickness of the oxide layer determines the color. It will not wear off; titanium oxide is one of the hardest things known. So join. These are tech and these are primitive. They will be around for thousands of years, maybe tens of thousands. Join the band. Share with only the cool humans. Wear a bit of the Blackbird.

O

"Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as riding in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane," wrote Annie Dillard in 1982 after seeing an eclipse from a mountainside in California. Last April, we lucky souls here in Vermont experienced a total solar eclipse. Now I have never fallen out of an airplane, but she is right. Standing on the lakeshore with a group of friends, we anxiously watched the sun being slowly obscured by the moon on a sunny afternoon. At first it was exciting and then seemed to be taking longer than it should. Nerves. As the moon's shadow expanded, the visual gave way to the physical. Our warm afternoon was getting kind of chilly. As the sunlight waned, colors became less vibrant, vital. A red shirt looked like dried blood. The green of the trees became sepia toned at an increasing rate and the sense of something impending grew. This is all cool and stuff but... Birds that were merrily singing on a spring day suddenly stopped in the same way that you don't notice the neighbor's lawnmower until he stops mowing. Colors drained more. The light was platinum instead of gold. Twilight at 3 in the afternoon. The sun was nearly gone. Only a sliver remained and you could stare right at it. I felt strangely afraid. Colder. Prickly.  Looking west across the lake a wall of darkness was rushing toward us at 1500 miles an hour...

In Norse mythology, Fenrir, the monstrous wolf, pursued the sun and during an eclipse, devoured the sun. That's how this felt. Devouring. The world could end and it will feel just like this. The gods are angry and it is   all   over    right    now. The word "eclipse" comes from the Greek verb, "to abandon, to darken, to cease to exist." 

Some of us were struck silent. Darkness fell, empty and private. Stars appeared. Tears on faces replaced the chatter. The black hole in the sky was ringed in white with two small red flares. Across a couple lawns, a small group on the beach cheered, for a moment. My consciousness left this century and abandoned what I know of science and retreated back five millennia to a shepherd  in a landscape experiencing this impossibility. My lizard brain kicked in full force. This is the end. Staring directly at what can never be looked upon, time seemed to stop. Night. Stars. The white ring. The red flare. The silence of the world. We. Are. Lost. 

There is a stone in Ireland that researchers claim holds a record of an eclipse on November 30th, 3340 BC, and a Syrian clay tablet records, accurately, an eclipse on March 5th, 1223 BC. Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher, came up with a surprisingly scientific explanation of the arrangement of celestial bodies around 500 BC. We have the word "syzygy" to define this alignment. (Any other words have three y's and six letters? There is a piece for sale on my website with this name, btw.) But, back to the lizard brain part. The entire experience was shattering. My verbal fumbling about that afternoon is the falling out of the airplane. If you haven't seen a TOTAL ECLIPSE, you won't understand. Metaphor helps. Therefore...

This artwork, "Totality" and its siblings, "Corona" and "Nosara" are the first round pieces I have made in 25 years of making these light sculptures that rule my time on the planet. Up to now, squares and rectangles were the whole program. I like this format and their immediate reference to what Shakespeare observed, "the eyes are the windows to the soul." The black hole of an eclipse, the dark star, the pupil center and the iris surrounding are begging for more focus in the future. I'm all in even though these discs and their round frames are a pain in the butt to make. The looking out at the miracles of reality are perfectly matched with the looking in to the "windows" William celebrates. "Wide-eyed" could hardly be more apt. 

Please share these missives and my art with anyone who needs a little light in their day. We are soon to release a compilation of these blog things that I have been scribbling for 15 years. Who wants one? Volume One is called "The Iridescent Veldt". In the meantime, buy art. You know you need it. 

Happy summer y'all. Get outside and play till it hurts. 

B Mac And Sarah the Fifth

P.S. And once my lizard brain lets go and I return to my constant fascination, a reminder: The surface of the sun is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That corona, that white ring that we can only witness first-hand during an eclipse, is one to two million degrees a thousand miles above the sun's surface.  Can't make this stuff up.

P.P.S. And for those of you that read all these. Moon, sun, what's next? How about the 15 quadrillion spiders on our planet. Yes? No? 

P.P.S.S. And lastly, November 30th is my birthday AND Sarah's too. Hmmm...

The Deluge

Hi Friends,

So there we were three hours from Bozeman in the Badlands on a blazing hot Sunday afternoon and a hose split under the hood and started spitting coolant all over the engine...

There I was in the middle of a 16 mile paddle on my board. My pals are ahead out of sight. Wind is shifting hard to the west so straight abeam. Can't stand up anymore. Rain is starting to pelt and lightning hits the water right over there....

Ernest Shackleton's ship, the Endurance, was trapped in sea ice, crushed, and sank in 9,000 feet of water in 1915 around 7,000 miles from where his voyage began. His entire crew of 28 men were left stranded on the ice.

The dark side of the moon is not real. It's not a thing. All sides of the moon get the same amount of sunlight. What is real is the "back" side of the moon. Our moon is gravitationally locked to the Earth. Being 81 times more massive than our closest dance partner means that round rock is going nowhere but around us. However, the moon makes the Earth wobble. The Earth spins around its axis, as you know, day/night la la la, but that axis is also rotating in a conical path doing what is called "axial precession." Picture the path of a gyroscope as it's slowing down. We take around 26,000 years to complete the circle and this explains why today's North Star will not be the same for your great great great great great great grandkids. But while doing this there is another circular squiggle in the path of the axis called "nutation." This word is from the Latin for swaying or nodding and defines another wobble of the planet that makes a complete cycle in about eighteen and a half years. And finally, there is the Chandler Wobble. Yet another small wobble exists, first identified by Seth Carlo Chandler in 1891, caused by changes in the Earth's mantle and core and atmospheric and oceanic angular momentum and melting ice sheets and tectonic subsiding. Its effects occur over a fourteen month period. 

What we experience as normal -- dawn, daytime, nightfall -- is the same. Lurking in the simple rotation of our home is the bizarre and the extraordinary; and this is where all stories start. It's the wobble. Everything was fine and dandy until... You see, normal is not normal. Even the mundane of day and night is full of twirling anomalies. There is no true path. The stories that define our lives are the wiggly bits, and chaos is EVERYWHERE. Cycling, circling. We cling to routines as comfort amidst the havoc. Even the simplest rhythms can break into exhilaration or injury or a chance meeting that changes EVERYTHING. Since one can't see the future, consider that today may be a day you will never forget. Today is a wobble. Who knew? 

Schuyler and I fixed the split hose by talking to folks in a grocery store who sent us down the street to meet a chap with a garage and a big heart. It changed the timing of our little tragic moment such that we made Bozeman just as the sun was dropping behind the Crazy Mountains. Montana sunsets, yes sir!

I sprint paddled to the shore, crouched, and got drenched in the cold deluge while the squall howled over and off. Got back out on the lake and paddled home where my concerned pals cheered that I wasn't dead yet. 

Shackleton? Well, just read the book "Endurance". It's a spell disguised as a book that will alter your life. You can touch his lifeboat in the basement of the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan right next to Anighito, a massive meteorite. Go ahead and  touch a 34 ton rock from space that just dropped from the sky one day. 

So be good. Be kind. People are dealing with wobbles. Remind yourself that forecasters are guessers, that what is going to happen is a total mystery. A pandemic, Pink Floyd, Fukushima, the discovery of free energy, a cure, Mt St. Helens, a working tokamak, hurricanes, rocks from the sky, meeting the love of your life, writing a song that eventually everyone sings, someone standing on the moon... Ridiculous, right? Nothing is more ridiculous than I am made of stardust and typing.  Nothing.

It's all light my friends. Keep in mind the above when you look at the moon tonight. Hovering, calm, reflecting...And keep all this in mind when you read the newspaper. Get a puppy. Go for a hike. Call your mom. Buy some art. Find the comfort in the chaos. The wobbles will continue. 

AND the first one to respond to this missive will get a third off of price on anything in the website. Don't hesitate. The second to respond gets a quarter off. 

Spring!

B Mac 

P.S. This may sound silly, but please read these blog thingys out loud. They have rhythm and pop and intentional stumblings that require breathing and enunciation. Ciao.

How Hot is That Flame

As someone who cooks, the transition from a gas stove to an induction cooktop is challenging. 

A couple of weeks ago Amanda Petrusich wrote an article for the New Yorker about the band Phish. It's a poetic and comprehensive flyover about the audience, the bandmates, their history as Vermont locals who tour the globe serially selling out huge venues. It's almost a structure, the colossus of sound, belief, and affection that brings together a wildly diverse community. At the heart of her prose is the axis around which the circus spins -- The Portal -- a slice of space/time in which transcendence occurs. (And just by the by, I sold a 4' x 8' piece of my art named "The Portal" in December to a client who has it in a nice collection in Dallas). Amanda's metaphor of a doorway, a crossing of a threshold to another plane, references back to "The Doors of Perception", a book by Aldous Huxley published in 1954 discussing his experiences with mescaline. The phrase is lifted from a poem by William Blake written in 1793 -- "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite". These notions can be readily discounted by the portion of the population who have never been to a Phish show. Cosmic woo woo, smoked brains, too many shrooooms... step-children of the Grateful Dead... But if you have been to Madison Square Garden or the Sphere when the Portal opens, (and I have), there is an event, a moment that could be thirty seconds or twenty minutes in which the people around my seat levitate. They grin and dance. The music soars. They leave behind their jobs, their car that has started making a strange noise, their annoying boss, an under-performing portfolio or its non-existence, the frantic media of impending doom and they join the BAND. They visibly become a unity, a collective of brothers and sisters bound in the moment. They belong. Together. Right here. Right now. We ARE, with the explicit/implicit notion of "We."

In 1444, Thomas à Kempis, wrote the phrase "sic transit Gloria Mundi" which translates "thus passes the glory of the world." I came across the phrase somewhere years ago and wrote it in Sharpie on one of my work tables. It stared back at me for years. I made a triptych last year, three panels with the names "Time", "Space", and "Everything Else", and titled the whole shebang "Gloria Mundi". I wanted to focus on the "glory of the world" aspect and leave out the "thus passes" part. I sold it to a client who was finishing up a guest house project. I got to enjoy these panels on the walls of the gallery until last week when I installed them in their new home. Though sad to see them depart, I am thrilled with their presentation as I got to build a lighting system to optimize the artwork night and day. The phrase "sic transit Gloria Mundi" has been used for the last 600 years in the coronation of every pope. 

The heart of this is the collective -- people want to belong. Humans need tribes. And they need to step outside, to give over to the team, to let go. They want a sense of release and we want to do it together. We want to be in groups. Scrolling Instagram or Facebook is really only fun when you share the fun stuff. Social media is alone time, until you share. I live in Red Sox nation, a collective with history and glory and miracles and songs and icons and holy ground.  Warriors, Cavaliers, football or football, rugby, cricket or the church of MOMA, Monet, Richard Serra, James Turrell, Mecca, Paris... Choose. 

Induction stoves make less indoor pollution but I have friends who recently built homes and were each insistent on their choices. One, a life-long chef and foodie, went with gas. The other, a devout environmentalist and foodie, went electric. Choose your group. A billion plus Catholics are a global mass of humanity bound by their beliefs. Every day I am mesmerized by the way light moves, the fierce orange-yellow from the glass furnaces next door to my studio, the slow liquid reflections on the windless lake, the iridescence of refraction on my artwork, the sky of a Vermont spring behind those blossoming cherries on Home Avenue. 

I sold a big piece of art to one of the dudes who are Phish. It's what one is confronted with walking into his recording studio on the lakeshore. I can only hope they and their crew can find a moment of levitation in what I do. Wavelengths are my notes too. Near-death experiences are always recounted as approaching the light. Might as well approach it today too. Glory of the World, yes please...

Berkelium Bk #97

Day by day different

boxes of discrete realities

trade position with shadows

and sunlight followed with

dreams and then lunch. 

February March April May

frozen then free then

inside and outside and

move up the column

and down the row

every atom ascending to 

stability where time slows,

while electrons whirl merrily

without need of anything

to the end of

time and beyond where

what we know ends 

and what we don't

flits above and out

just other and next

away from incomprehensible shapes  

one after the other

whose meaning, like these

lines, bunched and arrayed, 

only nudge and mumble

codes and geometric glintings, 

without pine needles or

wavelets, the dog on

the sand dancing about.

Oh yes, I spoke

of the pure to

no one in particular

while the moon, always

still, yet scribbling light

on the surface blown

wiggly with night's breath

meaningful and ignored or

arbitrarily understood in stages,

while the canon sounds

and the shimmering won't

hold still one bit.

That swarm, just there,

gleaming on the water

we notice and love

and lose and leave.

Rains begin in California

and then warm returns

before the sun goes down. 

Hi friends,

I wrote the lines above three years ago for my Elements book. 

The blog piece that I wrote to send out today made me feel wiggly -- the lines on the page needed tuning; they felt overly complicated, lacking a center, maybe burdened with outside concerns...

I am heading to California very soon and the above poem swam up out of my mind. In reading the above lines, the words made me feel comfortable. We will be doing the San Francisco Fine Art Fair at the Fort Mason Center on April 17-20th. The title is an Element on the Periodic Chart, and I will be visiting family in Berkeley. Please read the above out loud. Take your time. Hope to see you folks on the travels I make with my art. 

Peace and love,

We are all together.

Bruce 

The Last Word

Marcel Duchamp famously stated "The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word."

You folks who read these missives will recognize the through line that I express non-stop. Perceiving my work, looking at that image above, is a mere shadow of the art itself. To understand, to see, to feel the work is to stand in front of it, to move gently from one foot to the other, to wander slowly back and forth. Every subtle shift of your eyes changes what you see. What you see is not what I see, even as I stand beside you. My work "requires" participation of the sort Duchamp suggests in even a more literal sense. Have a look at the attached video links to get a sledgehammer concept of what I am saying. They will show you the shifting of light, color, refracted spectra; but looking at even a hi-res video on a little computer or phone screen will not let you "feel" the piece. These days I am loving working on large format pieces -- "Lotus" is 8' by 8'; "Suspension" is 4' by 8'; "Open Air" is 3' x 5'. The notion is immersion, room to swim around, visually and mentally, your brain processing the experience of dimension where there is no dimension.

 
In junior high, my dad, an English professor, talked with me about "suspension of disbelief" in god-knows-what context. What a weird phrase. I later ran into it in actual context when studying the British Romantics. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in 1817 "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, (which) constitutes poetic faith." The idea that watching a play, a movie, is not actual life but a narrative of possibility that has value. This IS art.  We get that our hero just had a car wreck and, though bleeding from his ears, is now riding a motorcycle on the roof of a market in Istanbul chasing the villian who has a robotic eye and stolen nuclear codes. Suspension of disbelief is required or this is no fun at all. If you have ever enjoyed a story involving time travel, then you are on the team. AND the antecedent of this choo choo of thought goes all the way back to Ancient Greek theatre. 

When I started working on "Suspension" I was thinking its title would be "Three Body Solution". I was addressing the physical calculus of the famous three body problem by representing celestial objects exerting their gravity on each other and the viewer. The infinite possibilities of influence... The three forces... And then I realized that the three bodies of the problem are the viewer, the artwork and the artist. And back around to Duchamp we go. He wrote, "The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."

During the photo shoot of these images in front of you, I was saying to Sarah, the mastermind behind the lens, that the center of this piece feels suspended from above. She asked the name of the piece. I said, "Dunno yet. What do you think?" She said "Suspension". And my brain clicked -- "suspension of disbelief." Boom. I make. We look. Name appears from the third person. Tripartite creation. Third body solution indeed. 

The push and pull and off-speed swirl of the creative process is a mystery of conception, application, perseverance, and luck. Not all pieces are as strong. Not every panel vibrates. This one does and pivots nicely as an axis of the whole whirl itself. My artwork requires you and your scrutiny, my diligence, and the self-organizing nature of the universe to spin. 

Send me a note now and then so I know you are paying attention. It's optional but rewarding. "Organized perception is what art is all about," said Roy Lichtenstein.  That organization is you and me and the thing on the wall. 

Thanks for noticing.

Please visit us and "Suspension" at the LA Art Show, February 19th through the 23rd. Part of the proceeds from our sales will be donated to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank and 211LA

Hugs, 

B Mac 

Add Lightness

As a little boy, I had Matchbox cars. Being a little boy in England, I had a Lotus AND a BRM -- British Racing Motors. Having a toy, a race car, with my initials on the bottom was the coolest. As the years went by and my brain and horizons grew, my body didn't so much. I wrestled in tenth grade in the 105 pound class. Small, powerful things were my avatars. Freddy Patek. Cheetahs. Wizards. The British racing company founded by Colin Chapman -- Lotus Motorcars -- stood car design on its head, working out of old stables behind a railway hotel just north of London. As Ferrari and Mercedes were busy making ever more powerful track machines, Lotus made ultra-light cars. Chapman said, " Adding power makes cars faster on the straights, subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere." That was my kind of philosophy. Innes Ireland, who was a driver for Lotus claimed, "It should win the race and, as it crossed the finish line, it should collapse in a heap of bits". Efficiency at its purest. The revolutionary Lotus 49 was less than eight feet long, weighed 1,100 pounds, made 400 horsepower and dominated racing for years. Light and fast, Lotus won 79 Grand Prix races. 

On Christmas Eve, just a few days ago, the Parker Solar Probe made its closest approach to our local star, completing a mission that was launched in 2018. The craft is moving 430,000 miles an hour (120 miles a second) and traveling three times faster than the previous fastest object made on earth. It's small, about seven feet by ten feet by three feet and weighs only 1,200 pounds. A hexagonal solar shield hides all the instrumentation from the searing 2,500 Fahrenheit heat and the radiation that is 475 times more fierce than a satellite orbiting the earth experiences. Some instruments are peeking out from behind the shield and collecting data about the sun's magnetic field and plasma bursts and the inner heliosphere. They are operating at nearly 3000 degrees as they were engineered.  At the conclusion of the mission in around four months, the craft will rotate and incinerate all the instrumentation on board. The slab of carbon foam and foil reflector will continue orbiting the sun for millions of years.

The lotus is an aquatic plant, a water lily. In Sanskrit it is known as Padma or Kamala. Growing in flood plains or slow moving water, it is a perennial with seeds that can become dormant and survive extreme and prolonged drought. Researchers have sprouted seeds that are 1,500 years old, which explains why in Chinese culture, the lotus is a symbol for longevity. The edible seeds have been cultivated for over 3000 years, and they can be dried and used as prayer beads. The roots can be fried or pickled or made into tea or eaten as a potato-like vegetable; the stems appear in salads, curries and soups. All parts of the plant are used in folk medicines. The lotus flower is the national flower of Vietnam and India. 

Nearly two billion people worldwide view the lotus as a sacred symbol of heaven. In Hinduism and Buddhism the flower signifies the path to spiritual awakening -- the rising above the decay and darkness beneath the surface of the water to blossom in the purity of the light above. The Sanskrit word "moksha" refers to freedom from ignorance and the development of a state of self-knowledge and enlightenment. This, in Hindu traditions, is the aim of human life. It is a state of perfection, symbolized by delicate white blossoms emerging from the mud. "No mud, no lotus" is a phrase at the heart of a book by Thich Nhat Hahn examining the human condition from the perspective that suffering is an essential aspect of the human experience. Mud is required. Darkness is half the day. You want to orbit the sun, spend six years getting up to speed. You want to build a race car, start in a stable. When I flew back from England at six years old, I left my cars in a little bag under the seat in the airplane. I was crushed.

Tadao Ando is an architect I have followed for decades. Six months ago I got to walk around an opus work of his, the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, completed in 2002. His mediums are concrete and light, essentially sculpted planes of grey stone and sunlight often incorporating water in his designs for reflection and glimmer. He joins this missive because of his Water Temple built in 1991 on the Japanese Island of Awaji. I remember when this opened. Most dramatic buildings require ascending steps to a lofty construction, (cathedral, capitol, domes, soaring arches, sky scraping monoliths). This space, the Hompuki Temple, is entered by descending a narrow, concrete staircase into a large, oval pond of lotus blossoms. The path to enlightenment can require descending too. 

When your mission is done, all the speedy stuff of life, you will cross a finish line and collapse in a heap of parts. Or pivot and incinerate in the sun's blast. Or descend the stairs into the flowers. In the meantime, accept the mud. Get new toys. Survive the drought. Move your body. Add lightness. 

The lotus blooms pristine and perfect from the muck. 

And of course, buy art. It helps with focus to have a reminder in the house that light and brilliance are right HERE. Personally, I'll skip the lotus root tea. I like lattes with my enlightenment. Maybe I'll title the next piece "Caffeine". 

Peace out, 

b mac 

P.S. I am fully aware that this is a speed dial into an immersive topic, cold plunge followed by lava bath. Racecars, flowers, spacecraft and, by the by, spiritual enlightenment... We will expand on this. In the meantime, the days are getting longer and the sunlight strengthens. Slingshot the sun. Pick up the tempo.