More on Goldsworthy

[vaneramos]

How did I miss discovering sooner this artist Andy Goldsworthy? His work has been on my mind ever since I found the website yesterday. At The Bookshelf I found several of his books, all out of my price range but I intend to go back and browse through them. Meanwhile here are more websites:

• What is art? What is an artist?


• Snowballs in summer


• Andy Goldsworth: the beauty of creation

While downtown I noticed people:

• a familiar lunatic with a tangled beard carrying an empty Alexander Keith's can upsidedown, who wandered into The Bookshelf ahead of me but, finding the bar door locked, came out again.


• a curly-haired cub with beard and long eyelashes, walking hand-in-hand with a young woman across the street; he had the same quality of beauty as Elizabeth Taylor.


• a couple with long, brightly-dyed hair, black coats, multiple piercings and dark sunglasses emerging from the shop that sells crystals, bringing with them a characteristic waft of incense and aromatic oils.


• a petite middle-aged woman sitting in the coffee shop, black blouse barely containing her pale bosoms, grey eyes peering into a mirror as she smiled distantly with ruby lips and carefully patted her immaculate, chestnut-brown coif; then she took out a magnifying glass and used it to read a book.


• a slender, young Asian woman, not pretty but striking for her type, who sat down across from me in the coffee shop with one of the Harry Potter books—the green cover—and opened it to the first page, started reading, then took a break to sip hot chocolate from a white saucer mug as wide as her cheekbones.

I want to notice and do things more. Back home I walked to the park and found the fragrance of wild phlox filling the woods.

Inspired by Goldsworthy, I intended to create something. I had brought a few tools: trowel, brush, spray bottle and pruning shears. I gathered some purple phlox, but discarded them in favour of etiolated willow leaves fallen on the path. Starting to work in the mud, I discovered how painstaking it is to create the simplest sculpture using natural materials. Leaves don't cooperate as clay does. Mud is dirty; it sticks to fingers and leaves. I managed to create and photograph this crude disc.




Willow leaves on bicycle trail


It will get run over. That's why I made it there. Everything is temporary: a falling leaf, one's life, the Earth, the sun.

This is for trapezebear. Happy birthday, Pete, with lots of hugs.

Comments

[art-thirst.livejournal.com]

What is art? What is an artist? <=this site is pretty good for answering those two questions.

Goldsworthy's work while very interesting for what the materials are, often leaves me with a feeling of overmanipulation. That may be because there is no formal or specific spiritual underpinnings to his work. It is really quite difficult to work in nature and not have the medium of photography interrupt how we view it, even if it happens in an unconscious way. We don't see these as photographs, we see them as 3-dimensional works using natural materials. Because, as photographs, they are staged that become an important part of the viewing and intrepreting process.

I really like your circular piece. That little shadow on the upper edge really gives it depth and color in a way that made me look twice to see what was going on. I looked at the images BEFORE I read your words. :-)

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

The introduction to that sight was quite informative and your remarks are interesting and instructive.

Creating the disc was a spiritual experience for me in accepting that it would be temporary. In fact I had to move away to rinse my brush in the river at one point and a cyclist nearly ran over the disc, which put me through a moment of letting go.

I'm aware that the photograph presents the disc the way I want people to see it, rather than how it is (in fact I'm dissatisfied with the fact that I had to manipulate the image somewhat to clean it up). It brings to mind a sculpture garden here in Guelph, where one can wander around and view the creation from all angles. I would like to present this ephemeral sculpture that way, but that's impossible. There's a strange blur between the work with natural materials, the photograph as a record of it, and the photograph as art. I'm not sure whether these impressions strike at the point you intended to make or not.

The work intrigued me and I want to do more like this. I had a feeling of moving toward an expression that is highly personal for me.

I was excited about the sunlight, too. The whole time I worked on the disc, it lay in deep shade, but by the time I completed it the sun had sunk lower and started breaking under the nearby trees. It kept moving over and around the surface of the disc. I knew I wanted to capture its radiance on the willow leaves in a meaningful way. That proved a challenge, with the motion of wind in the trees and the digital camera's delay.

I had only about an hour to execute this project. I tend to get impatient creating visual pieces, so creating something more complicated will be another spiritual experience.

I'm also excited about inviting my daughters to work with me on this sort of thing during the summer.