Jimbo Blachly
PLAIN AIR ABSTRACTIONSInwood, NYC, 1/17/22
While traveling in Maine and the Catskills during the summer and autumn of 2019 I had been struggling to find a framework or approach within which to record my experiences of moving through the landscape that would expand beyond the conventional notions of the depiction of a particular view or scene. I realized suddenly that I wasn’t making a painting OF the landscape but rather… I was making a work FOR the landscape. The slight shift in language allowed a new space for me to operate in, pathways have been opening up in my sense of collaborating with the environment.
THE HERMETIC PLAQUE
7/1/19
Current thinking on approach for Maine.
One or two days like a sesshin... structured time, activity, sitting, speed, medium...
Just drawing, maybe watercolor. Vague oil grounds...space/tone built up on wood slats. A bare wood in relation to actual ground… darks…A few nocturnes. Some text
Note accurately some color juxtapositions
7/28/19
Edgar M. Tennis Preserve, Maine
It occurred that today I was trying to make things that “fit in” the landscape ... an object that sits there, on a rock, against a pile, a tree... if only temporarily.
8/1/19
Inwood Oblique strategies after Eno/Peter Schmidt
Where is the weight
Picture/card/slat as prop as tool as experience
Observe boarders - build up or traverse.
Word as ground... clove, embowered etc.
Collapse distance; abruptly shift modes.
Atomize attention with space in between.
Be as detailed as possible trust that your current mood will direct.
Sonic components as organizing principle.
Observe kinetic aspects, don’t symbolize.
Reduce narrative. Don’t try to go somewhere else. No development. Observe.
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Speed...different rhythms or breath... seems like they are a living thing- expanding and contracting. The slow or quick abstract artifact that registers a particular place.
Talked to Howard Smith; he said paint like a blind person, seems you are groping.
We are the landscape
We are PART of the landscape not separate.
Remember Tuttle dream-tree vibrations, Kay Sage’s light, Small A. Martin wood pieces.
10/8/19
Slats/incidentals oblique plaques
Several fine bright stripes Mirror like...
To sit in landscape on rock, against a tree, log
Scattered on pine needles and rocks.
Hung on lines between trees.
Little briefly realized arrangements like Stone House poems...
Or that other Chinese poet who pulled random lines from his bag while he walked.
8/25/20
Palmer lecture by Malcolm Andrews
English pastoral comfort snug picturesque neat/utility, managed /productive. Idyll rustic fiction... rough break with the classical re romantic naturalism
Going-in-it-ness: seclusion, nooks, deeps, dells, hollows. Blake woodcuts for the Eclogues. Palmer caught between visionary and realism...
Mystic glimmer; he sought early morning, late twilight, full moon.
Compressed space intense scale shift (Cezanne like) simplified tree forms and colors intense range of mark making and pattern. Van Gogh, rhythm markings.
Space of an oak underground - Root space, density
Trunk- a tilted voice from the center’s pith declaring;
Branch’s aeration
Leaves inspiring aspiration
Space of the wind Unceasing winds
Space of paintings; campground picturesque. immediate environment, perhaps this is hermetic in its orientation, extreme locality, primarily closeups, how to undo a scene? Porous border of the hermetic. While maintaining a connection to specific observations of environment…time warps/space. Find an overlooked 5” dell
Perforate… aerate the pristine image.
9/18/20
Recollections from little pond
New bark abstraction, cloud and mud, tree mirror. Worked at night again, tree balanced. Good to place blanks off trail and around campsite. Failed to write initial impressions on panels or work over inked ones, which is front? Painted or title/poem side? Lytle said just pick one for this time.
Showing front,
showing back,
maple leaves fall.
-Ryokan
11/1/20
What could a hollow slat be?
A notebook and sheaf of card poems taken out, lying in the leaves in a hollow
Claim check in pocket for a hollow prelude/epitaph
Pause at damp stump
Wait on leaf drops
Hold a card in hand, in the hollow of a hand
Look overhead
Out Under It. Listen
Oh leaf- tapping knee, tapping leaf
Is this a hollow? “Russell Brook” flowing down yellow leaf carpeted gorge.
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How plain airs are related to the seaweed receipt
The token.
Flag to fold in the pocket ...Oldenburg
Souvenir, slat, broadside, card in hand, card to stand, wooden card, Plaque.
A floater
in a brook
under a hemlock narrowed sky
*Hemlock not oak, Salamander not newt… perhaps.