DC deserves personhood status.

Detail, Yoko Ono's "Wish Tree for Washington DC" at the Hirshorm Museum and Sculpture Garden. Definitely feeling some love on this trip....

I just got back from a Fourth-of-July getaway weekend to Washington, DC—the place where I grew up and came of age. Meredith and I lived there during an unforgettable period—Marion Barry’s bitch-set-me-up heyday—and a pivotal time in our own small lives. Our first independent households, careers born, graduate school, married and identity frameworks forged. It will always be a special place and I love going back there but I was especially jazzed to notice something profound on this past trip: a new maturity, though I cannot say whose.

The DMV has arrived as a major metropolis, in ways that go beyond its enormous size. The Metro is still pretty clean but now it has buskers, rats, people selling crap—and a feeling of shared endeavor. There’s a lot going on around town, quite different from the easily exhausted scene in the eighties and nineties. It’s grown nicely and added many cool things—like the terrific Capital Bike Share, on which New York’s CitiBike is modeled. The infrastructure has improved and it’s even more pleasant to walk, run and ride about then it was before.

Even though much has been added through in-fill (enterprises ranging from garden shops to a baseball team), many of the institutions from back in the day are still there as well: stores, restaurants, bars, secret gardens, shortcuts through the woods, places to hear a guy play sax by the river.

By contrast, nearly all of my friends have moved on, which surprisingly does not bother me—it’s just the flow of life. It’s almost the opposite of New York where most people are still there, clinging to whatever branch or root they can find, while the landscape around them is blasted away by a flood of real estate money.

Meantime, DC has continued to grow and flourish, playing with new ideas and points of view. Being back this time felt like visiting a friend that has retained its main personality traits and is still very familiar and welcoming but has developed in the meantime, with new thoughts to share. The city had acquired personhood—or maybe I just noticed it.

I grew up a huge devotee of Italo Calvino, Armistead Maupin, Lawrence Durrell and writers who talk about cities as living, organic entities. But that didn’t really feel the case for my hometown. It was as if the abundant green space dispersed the energy too much for it to coalesce and ignite fusion, making it a pleasant place but not a real city.

The spark is definitely there now, but if Calvino taught me anything it’s the impossibility of knowing whether it’s the place that has changed or if the maturation I’ve noticed is my own.

Postscript:

I ran the concept by my friend long-time James, traveler, poet/philosopher Lawrence Durrell character. He just recently gave up his DC address but was back in town to work the Folklife Festival and couch surfing--much as I do for the Marathon. We watched the fireworks together on a rooftop with a partially obscured view, then went back to his friend's apartment and drank Virginia viognie and talked about the world. A typical evening. Anyway, when I texted my thesis to him, he responded:

I think DC is stuck in an adolescent purgatory and will never attain personhood. This is because it is a 4-year town. If we move the capital to St Louis,  DC will become Fred Sanford.

Well then.

Asher Durand: Tree Portraitist

Image: Asher Durand, Nature Study: Rocks and Trees
in the Catskills (NY Historical Society)
Ironically enough, I couldn't catch the Asher Durand show at the Brooklyn Museum because I was in the Catskills at the time studying the very trees and waterfalls the 19th Century master so lovingly painted.

So it was with great relief that I managed to slip into the Smithsonian Museum of American Art to see the show in Washington, the day before it closed.

In some circles today, Durand is better known for his associations than for his work (witness the fact that the exhibition is organized around his portrait of the more-revered Thomas Cole). In his day however, he was a chef d'ecole, a motivating force for landscape painting and one of the best-known artists of his generation.

It's true that Durand had first-rate chops as a portraitist, apparently painting a dozen presidential portraits. What excites me, though, is that he brings a portraitist's incisive gaze into the landscape, treating plant life and the earth itself as specifically as he can. Though Romantic in temperament, there are none of the generalizations and aesthetic ellipses one usually sees in American Rontanticism. His paintings are not about God or Manifest Destiny, but about the land and trees themselves--and the artist who painted them.

The work lets us each determine its meaning on our own and does not editorialize beyond making evident the artist's love for his subject matter. And yet these are not nature studies either--they're full of emotional weight because they cause the viewer to reflect back inward and our own baggage comes tumbling out.

Durand's spiritual reflections on Nature opened the door for people like me, who use imagery from the natural world to reflect on the Human Condition without resorting to baroque moralizing. Nature is not some agent of God bent on wrecking us, nor is it some unattainable Acadia. It's right there in front of us; it's us.


Love Knot. Charcoal on paper 28 x 40 2007. [more]
I had not seen the above painting prior to visiting Platte Clove,
but my debt to Asher Durand is obvious.

The Commonplace Made Strange:Edward Hopper at the National Gallery

The Nighthawks contains everything you need to know about Edward Hopper and this very comprehensive exhibition is the only Hopper show you'll need to see.
(Image: Art Institute of Chicago)

Edward Hopper was a reluctant icon, retiring, etc. Don’t mistake his shyness for lack of ambition. He had one eye turned toward posterity at all times, but he was modest and hard-working, an artist who regular Americans could relate to. He was a consummate artists’ painter: "I can’t think of any artist who doesn’t like his work," comments Eric Fischl in the excellent documentary that accompanies this triumphant—but never triumphalist—exhibition. His work was rigorously composed, his colors painstaking developed through complimentary layering and juxtaposition, very sound from a technical perspective.

His work speaks of the unspoken, the unmentioned awkward silences that sometimes between descend between people. No one is looking at each other and their silences are as deep as the waters off the Maine coast. His couples are are always in distress and I wonder about his marriage. Isolation, alienation, estrangement are Great Themes of the 20th Century and he really nailed them. I will observe, however, that when you spend time with the work, it becomes apparent that much of the work is about solitude, as opposed to alienation. And in an urban setting, solitude is desirable.

Speaking of urbanism, he was a great champion of the urban landscape. No one could paint a brick wall like Hopper. In fact, his brick walls had more dynamism and depth than his skies or ocean deeps. He was uninterested in the natural world to the point of total dismissal. Those fact that was particularly striking after having just seen the Turner retrospective next door. He was all about light on walls, marquees, translucent window treatments, and—especially the windows themselves, often darkened, like the scary hollow eyes of so many of the people who dwell in his world.

Show Info

Reviews:

NY Times

The New Yorker

Washington Post

Washington City Paper

Confronting the Sublime: J. M. Turner at the National Gallery

"He did great work in the trees! [..and the skies!]"
-heard in the exhibit hall.
Image: J.M. Turner, "The Junction of the Thames and the Medway", 1807, National Gallery of Art)

"Contemplation of an infinite and powerful nature was thought to be not only exhilarating but also enlightening—leading to thoughts of transcendence and man’s insignificance in the face of the vast universe." –Wall text

Well, that’s part of what I’m after, but I don’t think Man is insignificant—would that he were! I think all beings are very much a part of the grandiosity that surrounds us all. Still, I love that reverence and his pictorial ideas are very relevant to my own work—especially those relating to vegetation and treatment of the sky. This is a major retrospective and I’m glad I saw it—especially as prologue to the Hudson River show tomorrow. Here are a few impressions:

• His skies are some of the most turbulent and dynamic in all of painting.
• His sky theatrics are motivated by the horrible haze and pollution of 19th C. London.
• His skies divide into three types: wrath-of-God turbulence; smog; untroubled blues of purer and more primitive places, including Italy; and serene yellows of late life.
• He REALLY could not draw the figure. Whey the British so revere such a pathetic draftsman is beyond me.
• He executed small sketches on site, then rushed to the studio and did quick watercolors from memory. Then he did more refined watercolors that he used as models for much larger oils.

Exhibit Info
Reviews:
Washington Post
DCist

American Traditions

So psyched to be back in DC... People are politically aware,

the place is so spacious and clean... and I'm a step faster

than everyone else... (-citymouse)

I’m writing this on a New Century "Dragon" bus to DC. I’m going there for a few meetings, to see a few friends, and to see some shows. I want to see the Hopper show (one of my earliest faves) at the National Gallery and the Hudson River School at the newly-renovated National Museum of American Art. My work is a direct descendant from the American Romantics who sought the face of God in Nature. John describes my naturalism as "mediated," which is spot-on and very much in the same spirit as Durand and company. I’ll stop at the Corcoran to see the Ansel Adams show (for reasons which should now be obvious) and for the ultimate purpose of my trip, to see Jeremy Blake’s retrospective. This will be a sort of pilgrimage and a chance to pay my last respects.

So this trip is about more than seeing art. It’s about clearing my head and Art’s healing powers. Big respect to Meredith for her understanding and allowing me a few days away for this restorative. Big thanks to Evelyn for letting me crash in her posh hotel room.

---

Today is the 3rd of January, and the Iowa caucus is the opening shot of what looks to be the most lively election season in recent memory. The stakes are huge: America stands at a potential turning point...or we could let the moment slip away into hopelessness, depending on whether we are guided by our aspirations or our fears.

---

A side note while we’re on the subject of popular democracy. I’m sitting in the back of the bus because I was late and that’s all that was left. It kind of sucks (no light and right next to the bathroom) but it’s not the end of the world. What I find very striking is that I’m the only white person in the back third of the bus. Everyone else is black. The front two-thirds are mostly Chinese, with some white people mixed in.

Now maybe the Chinese are familiar enough with the bus to know that they should arrive early (as I clearly did not). It’s crowded up there and maybe the Chinese are used to having billions of people around. Most folks back here are stretched out snoozing (though it’s not yet 8:00). Maybe blacks (and artists) just want more space or are more used to bathroom smells.

But I do find it interesting—from a purely observational perspective—that the bus-riding patterns are so similar to what they were in Rosa Parks’ day. Now people may have options that they did not have before, but does everyone actually live better than they did back then? Certainly, in many ways. But in many ways, I think not.

---

Postscript: When the bus stopped in Washington, all the sleepy black people stayed onboard, continuing on to Richmond. That explains why they were in the back... easier to get some shut-eye on a long trip. Or perhaps not...

One more thing, not unrelated to race. It's immediately clear: DC is Barack country. The metro was alive with chatter about his strong victory in Iowa. 49 more states to go!

The Ramble's Still Wild!

Sebastian made a pilgrimage to introduce his dino toys to their much larger relatives.

Sebastian and I were taking a break from the Natural History Museum and he was playing idyllically by the edge of the Lake in Central Park when I looked down and saw a condom wrapper. Instead of the usual mixture of delight and revulsion I feel when I find them at the playgound (which is often) I felt unmitigated of elation. It was a sort of validation that New York is not dead yet. People are still turning tricks in the Ramble, and doing it safely to boot! What could be better?

Nearby, I also had confirmation that New Yorkers are still rude, which was less encouraging. This woman was seated in a rock, deep in thought. Who knows what she was pondering but it seemed pretty heavy so Sebastian and I gave her some space. Soon, and inexplicably, another woman marched up and sprawled herself on a rock directly in front of the woman (who was having her moment). I guess in retrospect, it might have been a gesture of some kind and it's possible that neither woman was a New Yorker. Either way, it's wack.

---

*When I find a condom wrapper on the playground (or its less savory cousin the Dirty Johnnie) I have very mixed feelings. On the one hand there's nuisance and potentially gross cleanup. On the other, one must appreciate the nearly undeniable evidence that someone just got lucky. The Dali Lama says that we should celebrate our neighbor's good fortune.