dandyland muse

Images from The Firebird ~

2011-12-23T12:13:00.002-05:00

The Ogre's Orchard ~

The Firebird ~

These not-quite-finished paintings are part of a set of 12 images from Russian Fairytales.

Firebird Frame ~

2011-11-13T16:12:00.002-05:00

The frame is a collaboration with woodworker Jake Shackleford. This is the first layer of color - (Venetian red) - to be followed by ivory black and gold leaf. The Firebird painting has some layers of color to go too.

Zack Conklin's video ~

2011-10-24T22:34:00.002-04:00

Photojournalist Zack Conklin spent 3 days with me last week, making this video. It was strange having a camera clicking every 15 seconds while I painted! You can see it here:

http://stories.mountainworkshops.org/workshop/2011/video/69/zach-conkle-timeless-art/

The Ogre's Orchard ~

2011-10-21T15:20:00.003-04:00

The Ogre's Orchard is one of the images in The Firebird, part of the series of paintings of Russian fairytales that I'm working on now. There's a lot of work left to be done on this one - I've just started applying the color glazes.

Bronze Tarpin ~

2011-10-19T20:08:00.000-04:00

Keep the Wild Honeysuckle ~

2011-10-14T13:11:00.002-04:00

"Keep the wild honeysuckle" was the cryptic advice given to me by my grandmother in a dream. I never met her, but knew her, from stories and the quilts, drawings & rugs that she designed, as an artist and a sensitive soul.

Anna's Doll

2011-10-14T13:04:00.003-04:00

Anna would have been my father's eldest sister, but she died in the early 1900s, at age 6, of scarlet fever. When we looked in the upstairs of the Old House, I found two of her china dolls. My eldest sister has them now. Thoughts about the love that children have for their dolls, and that parents have for their children came together when a friend miscarried and asked me to make a little coffin - "a little wooden boat." It was one of the most difficult objects to make that I've ever attempted, not so much in its construction, which needed to be simple (tho without nails, it seemed to me) - but in its concept. Anna's Doll is part of that.

Cocoon Song ~

2011-10-13T11:12:00.002-04:00

Cocoon Song ~ Baoku Moses, Dan Dutton, Brent Olds, Shane Gilmore & Susan Alcorn - Oct. 7th at the Singletary Center for the Arts, University of Kentucky.

Songs & Dreams; Oct. 7th concert at the University of Kentucky

2011-10-10T09:48:00.003-04:00

Joining me for the concert were Baoku Moses, Shane Gilmore, Brent Olds, Susan Alcorn, George Wakim, Jack Walker, Ken Leslie, and Stan Nelson.

Prince Ivan & the Firebird's Feather ~

2011-09-22T18:55:00.002-04:00

(For some reason this painting is hard to photograph - it's not this pale...)

This is the 2nd painting in a set of images from Russian fairytales. I'm using the so-called Venetian glazing technique for these paintings - first the image is painted using burnt umber and white, then the colors are applied over the underpainting in transparent layers. I still have a lot of glazing yet to do on Prince Ivan & the Firebird's Feather. Of all the paintings I've ever worked on, this one has required the greatest number of colors - 21 and counting. I usually work with 6 or fewer.

Here's what I used: Burnt Umber, Zinc White, Burnt Sienna, Transparent Brown, Italian Earth, Green Earth, Yellow Ochre, Brown Ochre, Venetian Red, Alizarin Crimson, Rose Madder, Cadmium Yellow Light, Aureolin, Viridian, Veronese Green, Hooker's Green, Ultramarine Blue, Cobalt Blue, Stil de Grain Vert, Ivory Black, and Mars Violet.

Here's my palette - (a piece of discarded foamcore.)

The Firebird ~

2011-09-18T22:56:00.001-04:00

Here's how the firebird looks with a few more layers of color. There's still quite a bit of work to do!

Study for The Firebird ~

2011-08-14T22:35:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I began a new series of of images evoked by Russian fairytales. I decided to start with "The Firebird" - because of the life-changing impact on my work of both Stravinsky's music, and the Ballet Russe.

I was in the 8th grade of my school when an English teacher played The Firebird for a writing assignment. I remember that what I wrote, while listening to the music (that was the assignment) - was maudlin, and false as well, but it made me aware of the power of music to tell a story, and with that realization I was determined to become a composer. I asked my parents for an instrument to compose on, and incredibly, my father went with me to a music store and bought an organ for me, my choice - because it was the only keyboard that they had. The only Stravinsky that I could find was the piano-four-hand arrangement of The Rite of Spring, in the Fantasia music book, so that's what I began with.

I'm pretty sure that I read The Firebird, as a fairytale, at some point when I was a child. I read a lot of fairytales, especially if they told of far-away places like Russia.

In time I would discover other resonances of the firebird image through study of Gaston Bachelard's unfinished final work on the poetics of the Phoenix.

What surprises me, just as it did during work on the ballad paintings, is how determined the image of the firebird is for me. I've painted a number of phoenix since first hearing The Firebird, but this one has a certain nature that I want to - should I say capture? ~ very precisely.

Picking Blackberries ~

2011-07-19T15:18:00.004-04:00

Living in the country ~

2011-07-14T08:39:00.004-04:00

This summer has a certain mellowness about it that reminds me of days long ago here on the farm when there were more domestic animals, versus the wild varmints present now. Contemplating those images of the past, and how the activities of contented farm creatures create a certain atmosphere, I'm trying my hand at painting what I remember.

Living in the country is the constant thread in my work. The hill is a lovely place, exciting in its constant changes, comforting in its reoccurring seasons - I'm a bit of a fish in its water, unaware at times of how pervasively the environment pervades my thought and work. I realized the other day, with a bit of surprise, that this country-mousedom is probably the main difference between my art and most. And as Aesop's ancient fable makes clear, the city and rural life have distinct boundaries, and opposing fields of prejudice - each idealizing and denigrating the other.

These thoughts lead me to wonder at the assumption, fairly common amongst city folk, that their country counterparts have debased or non-existant conceptions of art, countered by the opinion of many country folk that though that may be true, such things are not really important in the bigger scheme of things. But in fact, both country and city folk alike adore their relative kitsch, as much or more, economically speaking, as anything else they put in their homes and public spaces.

Then there's the counter-current, in which city dwellers dream of bucolic sunny healthy happy farms with slow food and real dreams, much better for the planet than the traffic they're stuck in, and the flashing glittering towers of affluence, ease and grandeur that come, naturally, along with wealth, are located, of course, not in a backwater, but in a country-dreamed city.

Like Joni I've looked at clouds from both sides - and settled in where I've always been.

Stills from You'll Always Come Back ~ The Ancestress

2011-07-11T19:56:00.005-04:00

Containers: At the edge of what can be known - the shelter - the prison - the haunted house - my room - body - word - photo - sound.

Pixilated.

Dots...

"Earth - Illness and Suffering - The Permeable Nature of Things - Secrecy and Revelation - Wickedness and Righteousness - Exile and Movement - Death and Resurrection"

The Past, contained in Memory - The Present, contained in Time - The Future, contained in Dreams

The Salamander ~ (stills from You'll Always Come Back)

2011-06-28T21:54:00.004-04:00

Maybe all abandoned houses are haunted. I made a joke that we were going to work in a haunted house to the YACB performers when the first batch of us went in. Then it turned out to be true - each performer, in one way or another, had some sort of unsettling experience in the house. Isaac and I, perhaps, were troubled the least - or took the strangeness for granted in a way that allows you to experience more of it. I think he and I live that way.

These are images shot on the staircase, with a gun we found in the house. Shane had the camera, I did the makeup and direction. We started in the cellar and worked our way upward, but the staircase is as far as we got.

Then Jordan was in the house and took some pics with his phone, and the orbs showed up.

Rabbit in Bronze ~

2011-06-27T09:19:00.002-04:00

11" x 15" ~ One of two cast by Bright Foundry, in Louisville. It was a wonderful surprise to find that each part of the sculpture rings with a different tone - you can play a tune on this rabbit!

Poster design for Black Stravinsky ~

2011-06-11T18:07:00.002-04:00

graphite & colored pencil on paper ~

Rabbit ~

2011-05-25T08:54:00.003-04:00

This started out as a welded steel skeleton for a clay model to cast in bronze. But once Jesse had welded the skeleton, I noticed that some of the old pitchforks in the dandyland ogun piles had the right lines for the ears, and then it became a scavenger hunt for the rest of the parts. Most of the pieces are from old farm tools and machinery.

Dance Bench for YACB ~

2011-05-17T23:13:00.002-04:00

Plan for a bench ~ black granite, black walnut, steel pipe and wagon rims.

The Moss Garden ~

2011-05-10T21:49:00.002-04:00

The moss garden that we made last year for Richard is doing great. The moss and ferns like it, and so does he - so we're expanding it a bit. Sat. morning we moved this 5000 lb stone into place. A little spring will emerge from the V shape.

The Cedar Horse ~

2011-05-06T21:52:00.004-04:00

Shane & I, with help from Jake & Richard, installed the Cedar Horse. I was very happy that the horse proved strong enough to be transported laying on its side. This is an image contemplated for many years, so I'm especially grateful to see it realized in a 3 dimensional form. The mane and tail were the last pieces to be added - we went on a hunt for them in the cedar grove.

The Horse ~

2011-05-05T21:45:00.003-04:00

This cedar & fencewire horse is for my neighbor. There's still a lot of work to do, but I couldn't resist a ride.

Triptych for Love & Time ~ (1999)

2011-05-03T10:47:00.004-04:00

These are terrible photos of the collage Triptych for Love & Time - today is overcast and the glossy paper glares with added light. It's a riff on Bosch's triptych. The little people are the dancers, photographed by William Cox, performing Love & Time, printed in various color combinations to fit the three panels. The rest of the images were cut from a large stack of magazines.

Plan for a bamboo ring ~

2011-05-02T17:30:00.001-04:00

Iris ~

2011-05-02T17:19:00.002-04:00

Moon & Stars ~

2011-05-02T09:29:00.001-04:00

Rabbit Tobacco ~

2011-04-29T19:20:00.002-04:00

Two studies for "Rabbit Recreations" ~

2011-04-18T22:08:00.004-04:00

Spectators ~ sepia ink on paper

"Keep Your Eye On The Ball" ~ oil on canvas

Study for The Archer ~

2011-04-09T08:35:00.010-04:00

steel, plaster, marble, graphite ~ 48" tall

Some dreams form gradually, over a long period of time, without the slightest awareness of the thing being formed, or even that the formation of the objects worked on will turn out to be steps to a destination. Archery was a dream of my childhood, one among many. I made bows and arrows - the materials to make them were at hand - trees, sinew, flint, feathers - not so much out of a need, or desire, to hunt, or even to have an accurate aim. Perhaps it was about flight.

When I began making sculpture for my neighbor, the first piece seemed like the simplest solution to a request - "Can you make something using these big rocks?" One was flat, hence a dolmen, and hence oriented (by some belief) to the earth and sky, emergence and descent, sun, moon, stars. One was long, fish-like, by a pond, and the simple thing was to stand it up, becoming another sort of sign of passage - inevitably phallic, with a carved on spiral that turned out to be a recording of a love letter, if one only had a needle to set in the groove.

The next piece came from a request for a stone egg. Then 3 cubes of sandstone, scribed with curls and diagonals - the flowing vortex of wind, water, and flames, lines straightened by the will to signify precision. Then came the rabbits.

My neighbor happened to see a painting of rabbits that appealed to him, and showed me an image of it. I raised a number of orphaned wild rabbits in my zoo-keeping youth, and absorbed my mother's stories of the trickster rabbit, so I had my own images to draw from. I did, and they fit, leading to a series of rabbit sculptures, drawings and paintings.

Anyone who loves Japanese and Chinese painting, as I do, knows that the natural companion of rabbits is the Moon. One doesn't even have to know the Chinese myth of Houli the Archer, or the Greek Artemis, to guess that the missing piece in the collection is an Archer.

Tomb -Womb - Phallus - Egg - Rabbits- Moon - Archer ~ Happy Spring!

Primary Vanity ~

2011-04-08T19:44:00.003-04:00

In earlier posts I mentioned that my first memory, of the primary colors, began a series of primary paintings and art of all sorts. They happen sporadically. Earlier this year long time friends commissioned me to make a new version of one of those - Primary Cat Attack. Soon after completing it, the Primary Vanity popped into my head, helped along by the thought that my collaborating woodworker, Jake Shackleford, would be able to make a sublime cabinet for the paintings.

The paintings are a combination of sepia ink, watercolor and oil paints, cut through to show the mirrors behind them. Each time that I approach the primary paintings the 3 colors take on different personalities. This time yellow seems wholesome; red fantastical; blue - mysterious and serene. I was almost finished with the red drawing when the outline of a Goatweed butterfly took shape merged with the face. That's a whole nother story.

Daffodils ~

2011-03-10T15:51:00.003-05:00

Oil on linen, 30" x 24" ~

I picked these King Alfred daffodils thinking they'd be bitten by a frost. Like the first ikebana, they were thrust, albeit not by a samurai, casually in a vase of violet glass. Not as much wabi as a water bucket on a battlefield, but good enough to make me think of painting it.

The design in the background is a 5 yard piece of indigo batik, by my friend Oyeniyi Obanji, a Yoruba artist and Sango dancer living in Osogbo, Nigeria. I added the silk to bring some more violet in.

Over the years I've painted and drawn daffodils a number of times. It's a way to celebrate Spring.

Lemons ~

2011-03-06T20:30:00.004-05:00

I'm sure that I must've painted lemons at some time when I was a kid. I did paint still-lifes, and some of them were surely stereo typical bowls of fruit - (is this one stereo-typical?) - but then maybe I wouldn't have considered lemons to be IN a fruit bowl when I was a kid. It would have been banana, grapes, orange, apple, in that order, in a wooden bowl. I knew what I liked.

I liked lemons, in desserts, and even the way my mom liked them, with salt. Cebah put salt on all kinds of things. She also made superlative lemon merengue pies, lemon bars, lemon pudding, lemonade, you name it. She liked granata, of course, when she tasted it. I introduced that one as an adult.

I think the first lemons were painted, on cardboard, in my teens, along with bread and a bottle of wine. I am a romantic. Then they were there because where I cook I like them to be, and because they were yellow. I think my nephew has this painting - it survived. So did the romantic.

The first time the lemons co-starred was in a mid-80s still-life, "Larks and Lemons." My dad brought me two dead field larks that he found in a snow drift. He knew that I liked to paint birds. The brilliant yellow breasts of the larks were slashed with a jet black V. On a sky blue cloth they were perfect with the lemons, like their Spring song, always a little dampness in the fields when you hear it - a penetrating thing, a single high falling note, like a very hopeful sigh. They are called "star-(bird)" by the Cherokee, because of the star-point pattern their tail feathers make as they fly. It all goes together.

The night before last they arrived in the dream, painted, along with the yellow cloud of daffodils and enough romanticism to pierce the mist of Spring birth-pang chill, and awaken, astounded at life's beauty, the lemons heaped in a stone bowl, glowing mysteriously tart in the middle of everything.

Leaping Rabbit ~

2011-03-05T17:36:00.002-05:00

A clay model for a bronze ~ 9" x 15"

On My Table ~ ink, brush, paper ~

2011-03-04T20:40:00.002-05:00

Last night I dreamed about drawing the lemons on my table. It wasn't this drawing, but it did involve ink. It also involved the red clay from here on the hill, used as a pigment. And it was just the lemons.

But when I got out the paper to draw, all the other things on the table were interesting too, so I did everything, and omitted the red clay. Tomorrow, if all goes as planned, I'll try the lemons again. I could paint all the time just now.

Ring Around The Moon ~

2011-02-23T01:02:00.003-05:00

...rain will come soon. That was the old saying.

There was a fabulous ring around the moon this past full one. Jason, Shane & I went out into the field to look at it and it was truly amazing. This painting, oil on linen, 42" x 40" ~ is much about how I feel at present - very happy!

Phoenix ~

2011-01-12T08:42:00.003-05:00

Oil on linen, 24" x 30"

Winter sunsets are the most spectacular here in dandyland, though they are colder to watch. Silhouettes of trees present technical problems - one of the pleasures of seeing them is the intricate lacework of their uncountable (and unpaintable) twigs and branches. Reduction is a slippery slope. Is a daub that suggests the color and effect of a million twigs really the best solution?
I wonder.

Back in the 80s there was a charming older couple who collected my work living in Cincinnati. Their collection, gracing an Italian Modernist house in the posh hills above the city, was impressive - Jasper Johns, Barnett Newman, (less to me - David Hockney) - some of the more restrained examples of abstract expressionism and minimalist painting of the late 60s/early 70s. I did feel a rush from seeing my work hung on the walls with that of "famous artists" whose work and lives I had studied in books.

Once when we were talking about painting, Mr. ___ asked me a question which has tumbled in my head ever since - "Why do you not use subtle colors?" I think he meant the relatively unmixed, "unbroken" hues and primary colors that I was, and continue to be, fond of, but I was stumped to understand what he meant by subtle in my own terms. I took it as a backburner challenge - a question to explore. l've been exploring it ever since.

In another sense, landscapes that look like paintings, "contemporary" paintings that look like landscapes, are marked as naive by many art viewers. Paintings are expected to come loaded with all sorts of info besides a view, a simulated view at that. And what is more postcardish than a view of a sunset? Surely only second rate photographers are enticed into enthusiasm over something so un-subtle as the ephemera of weather, sunlight and land. "Paintings are about the materials they are made of - canvas and paint." - so a very dull curator pontificated to me once. What he really wanted to say, but lacked the nerve, was "I don't like you."

Perhaps this is all related, in our culture, to the reason that black and white (+gray, brown, and navy) make serious, important, reasonable clothing for dignified people & occasions, while scarlet, spring green, lemon yellow, iridescent blue, etc, etc, are for primitives, lower classes, and children - silly people.

What I do know is that sunsets and sunrises, as subjects for paintings, are a bit harder to sell than landscapes without the brilliant colors. If you want to sell it, and you have to do something involving the color effects of the sun on the horizon, choose a moment before or after the most colorful one.

All this is very much besides the point of a painting, something which flares into existence as unexpectedly as a phoenix.

A still from the You'll Always Come Back video ~

2011-01-08T08:49:00.003-05:00

Yesterday Shane shot the first performance footage of Kim for the You'll Always Come Back video. It was eerie and thrilling to see the super slow motion movement of the Hag in the snow.

On the Brick Pile ~

2011-01-06T11:04:00.002-05:00

Shane ~ New Year's Eve 2010 ~

2010-12-31T10:07:00.003-05:00

Shane ~ oil on linen ~ 12" x 12"

This is half-done - at this point it is almost monochromatic, using mainly burnt umber and flake white, with a little cerulean and venetian red. After this layer dries, I'll apply the finishing colors in transparent glazes. Hopefully the final result will have some of the glow of its inspiration.

The Homestead ~

2010-12-30T11:30:00.003-05:00

oil on linen, 24" x 32"

This view looks from Cedar Creek Vineyard to an old farm, owned by a friend. I've wanted to paint the three pine trees since I first saw them, years ago, but that didn't happen until Shane took a nice photo of them for me. Painting an old cabin nestled into the hills could be a cliche of Kentucky, but I enjoyed painting it and I like how it looks. The cabin trumped the pines in a way - I thought of calling it "The Haunted Farm," because it reminded me of a haunted cabin that a friend of my sister took me to see when I was a child.

A walk on Christmas morning ~

2010-12-27T19:20:00.003-05:00

Christmas Day, 2010 ~

2010-12-25T19:24:00.005-05:00

Ink on paper, 24" x 32"

Shane & I spent the day inside yesterday, eating treats and watching anime, enjoying each others company. With the dark came the rare snow, soft and lovely, on Christmas Eve. This morning I got up early and walked all the way to Pitman Creek with Alf, looking for images to paint. Everything looked so beautiful that it was hard to choose what, in particular. I settled on yet another view down the creek, and decided that the tricky medium of Japanese ink was best suited for it.

This evening I actually snuggled up in a chair beside the logs crackling in the fireplace, read some Gertrude Stein and gazed at the Christmas tree, counting my blessings.

I've enjoyed this Christmas the best of any since I was a child.

Storyboarding ~

2010-12-16T09:58:00.004-05:00

After days, (and especially) nights, of storyboarding clippets of You'll Always Come Back in my head, this morning I started the thumbnailing of it. With the images summarized on paper, I can begin to see how the first 2 or 3 minutes of the video will work, and that's a key to how the whole thing is constructed. Whew! I wondered if insanity would beat expression in this case. The work ahead seems daunting. Although I've worked with moving images - dance, film (super 8 in my teens), and video continuously through the years, the efforts have always been short (less than 10 minutes) and understood as steps toward developing a technique. This will be the first effort at a long form with a determined purpose - a video opera. I have the tools to begin, we'll see if the will is there, and the luck. It's exciting ... and a bit terrifying.

Primary Cat Attack II ~

2010-12-03T14:25:00.003-05:00

Oil ~ 32" x 24" ~ The colors in this pic are not quite accurate! (overcast day) This is the second version of this image, painted for dear friends. The first one is here: http://www.dandutton.com/image_6.html

Pix from the Gothgiving ~

2010-11-27T21:44:00.002-05:00

The Creek in November ~

2010-11-21T10:34:00.003-05:00

This is oil on linen, 36" x 42" ~ about half finished. (lots of twigs and ripples left to work on!) I've painted this one section of Pitman Creek, near my house, many times now. I never tire of the views there. Painting this made me think of my longtime friend Doug, who owns several of the paintings of the creek, and my Mom, who loved the grays and browns of November.

Knobs with Clouds ~

2010-11-16T21:39:00.002-05:00

Looking East from Dandyland ~

Carving in progress ~ Reynardine ~

2010-11-16T20:53:00.003-05:00

Shane & I are working on this sandstone carving of Reynardine.

The Crowman ~

2010-11-14T20:59:00.003-05:00

A walk to Pitman Creek ~

2010-11-14T13:58:00.006-05:00

Beechlight ~

2010-11-14T10:47:00.005-05:00

Collection of Lori Cunnigan Prather ~

I go back and forth between loving willows and beechtrees. It depends on where I am. Here on the hill, the beeches have it. They are such beautiful trees. Sometimes at sunset the smooth silver-gray bark is illuminated with a glowing copper light that matches the color of the winter leaves. Yes, winter leaves ~ some beeches hold onto their leaves through the season. Gradually the autumn copper fades to a ghostly pale gold, almost white. It's wonderful to hear their fluttering hiss in blowing snow.

This is oil on linen canvas, 36" x 42."

Pine Blanket Chest with Raincrows and Honeysuckle ~

2010-11-12T22:47:00.004-05:00

Jake Shackleford made this pine blanket chest & I painted the raincrows and honeysuckle on it. It's a container linking the content of two songs - "Raincrows" from The Faun, and "Keep the Wild Honeysuckle" from You'll Always Come Back.

Jake adapted his pattern from Pennsylvania-Dutch blanket chests made in the mid-1800s. The raincrows converge Pennsylvania-Dutch "fraktur" designs with a bit of Audubonesque bird-torquing. I couldn't help singing a song I learned from Jean Ritchie while I was painting:

"The cuckoo, she's a pretty bird -
she sings as she flies.
She brings us glad tidings,
and she tells us no lies.
She sucks all pretty flowers
to make her voice clear
and she never sings cuckoo
till the spring of the year."

The pigments are all made of clays and minerals - green earth, naples yellow, yellow ochre, ivory black, zinc white, and a tiny bit of cobalt, in honor of the Kobold, spirit of the mines.

You can listen to "Raincrows" here: http://www.deathslabrecords.com/www.deathslabrecords.com/The_Faun.html

Raincrow is the dandyland name for the bird more commonly known as the yellow-billed cuckoo. Their croaking calls presage summer showers.

Limestone Lantern Yokai ~

2010-11-12T19:36:00.003-05:00

Here's the Limestone Lantern that Shane & I have been carving. It's a commission, destined for a moss garden. The base has already been installed at the site. Once I get the cap to fit correctly, we'll take it to the moss garden and cut a slot in the base to hold the lantern in place. Maybe it's because the stack is so odd and slanty, but this lantern seems to have a personality. In Japan there are all sorts of monstery things that haunt particular sites, from ghosts to creatures to animate musical instruments to hybrid who-knows-whats, called Yokai. I can't wait to see if the candle inside it makes the eye project a raybeam!

The Cedars ~

2010-10-26T21:40:00.004-04:00

I keep circling round a project of painting cedars, remembering a single (I thought successful) ink drawing of them, done back in the 80s, and thinking surely I can do something with them again. The shapes and colors of cedars are unique - nothing else has the texture, or that multi-shade of green that seems to have maroon hidden inside it. Or blood. Which fits with the Cherokee legend that the powerful red fragrance of the cedar heartwood is a stain that dripped, long ago, from the decapitated head of an overly dangerous ancient sorcerer. Today was blustery and the cedars were even better in cloud darkened motion. Maybe I can settle on something in these images to paint!

Spiral Drawing ~

2010-10-24T15:10:00.003-04:00

Spiral Drawing ~

Ping ping, the chisel hits
the stone, ringing something like
a flavor in my thought,
of the hickory flames, and the deep blue sky,
a sentinel crow
croaking to itself,
sun and shadow on my skin.

The rock chips fly, white dust
falls on the ground. I'm following
the round of a spiral's curve,
cutting down
through substance older
than my kind,
well past the middle point in time.

Death, and birth, and all extremes
are distant, like a bell -
clangorous when close, melodic at a mile.
Beyond all hope now I am loved
as much as I desire, have glimpsed complete
the beauties of my dream,
and even touched them with my hand.

Art is called to show
all things; to turn a stone into a phonograph,
as though it mattered
deeply, in ten thousand years,
that at the instant of the strike
I loved you more than all my words describe.
There is no reason otherwise.

Autumn ~

2010-10-21T18:19:00.008-04:00

At Dry Branch ~ Kim as The Ancestress ~ pix by DD & Shane

The Little Knob Creature ~

2010-10-16T15:42:00.003-04:00

Shane calls this creature "The Shrine Guardian." When I first started carving it, the three knobs on its head made me think of The Knobs, as the hills in this part of Kentucky are properly called, and how my dad knew all of their names.

We made this for a commissioned moss garden we're working on. It will stand beside a Japanese Temple-style stone lantern. It's carved from sandstone.

The Metamorphosis of the Crowman ~

2010-10-01T23:24:00.002-04:00

I'm planning to paint. This ink sketch is as close as I've gotten so far to the images I'm seeing in my mind.

Shaving ~

2010-09-15T09:49:00.004-04:00

One sequence in the 12 hr performance that I was able to take some pics of (because I wasn't performing in it!) was "The Shaving of Shane." Burley and Kim, aka The Hexenmeister and The Ancestress, did the deed, accompanied by the gorgeous ragas of Alok Narayana and Gregory Acker, on tablas and flute.

You'll Always Come Back in Louisville, Sept. 11th, 2010

2010-09-14T19:09:00.002-04:00

The performance of You'll Always Come Back in Louisville last Saturday was such a wonderful and mind-boggling experience (I think a 12 hr performance SHOULD be mind-boggling...) that it will take some time for me to assimilate and write about it. You can see some of William Cox's fantastic photographs of the performance here:

http://design219.jalbum.net/You%20Always%20Come%20Back/index.html

Although it is impossible for me to pick out one thing about the event that I liked best, I do know that one of my foremost hopes for the work was accomplished, and that was to reunite with the descendants of Pete Dutton. What an incredible surprise it was when a group of people entered the performance site wearing "Dutton Family Reunion" t-shirts - all relatives of Pete! Nothing could have made me happier!

Elena's images of the performers in You'll Always Come Back

2010-08-31T05:09:00.006-04:00

Elena Dorfman's images of the You'll Always Come Back performers, captured in the Spalding mansion

The Spirit of the Spring ~ Shane Gilmore

The Panther in the Chapel ~ Idrissa Ekundayo

The Spirit of the Spring ~ Shane Gilmore

The Hexenmeister ~ Burley Thomas

The Ancestress ~ Kim Perkins

The Panther on the stairs ~ Idrissa Ekundayo

Return of the Krampus ~

2010-08-28T07:44:00.003-04:00

While I'm posting blurry images, this one has been in my mind of late ~ ( a pic of the pic will have to do ~ it's from a new historical survey of Early American Photography ). It is a documentary photo, of a past event re-staged as a performance - yes, RE-staged. The event was the kidnapping of a North Carolina Republican, back in the days when the Republicans were against slavery, by the Klu Klux Klan. Before his whipping could take place, he was rescued by a marshall who happened to be a former Klansman himself. The marshall was a shrewd self-promoter, or a theater director as they're sometimes called. He re-staged the event, using the outfits of the arrested Klan members. An added strangeness is that if you look closely at the hands in the photo, you notice that the Klan actors in this tableau are black, whether friends or hires is not known.

What surprised me is the costumes. These early Klan outfits have horns and beards ~ they look like the Krampus. Are the KKK direct descendants of the Krampus, Woden/St. Nick's "Black Peter," bringing switches, coal, and a beating to children, such as black men and abolitionists, who haven't behaved? Is this a photo of the Germanic Mannerbund? Or does the boogie man always have horns and a beard?

The cone-shaped headpieces have ancient European precursors as well, as I discovered in the ballad research on The Wife of Usher's Well. Some examples of the old shamanic head-cones, representing, so it is thought, empowering light rays, from the sun, or perhaps the otherworld anti-sun, have been found in ancient burials, made of hammered gold. In The Wife of Usher's Well, the hats worn by the returned dead sons are made of bark, possibly birch, one of the rune trees.

The Scout in the Dining Room ~

2010-08-28T07:39:00.002-04:00

Idrissa in the dining room, awaiting his shoot with Elena ~ from Kim's iphone.

Overwhelmed ~

2010-08-27T08:26:00.004-04:00

Yesterday was quite a day. I was up before daylight and headed for Louisville for a YACB photo shoot in the strange art deco mansion at Spalding, just across the street from the ballroom, our soon-to-be performance site. Once there the convergence began, first with Kasey, (my piscean twin ~ we were born on the same day) administrative director of the Kentucky School of Art, our presenters, then a barrage of phone and text messages as the others arrived. Next was Shane, early (! yah!) with his 100 watt smile. Then Evan, the ferryman, rolled in with the fabulous Little Feather (Elena) and Idrissa, the rock. They were followed by Kim and Burley, Elizabeth (the new arts reporter for the Courier, whom I now count as a friend), my wondrous sister, Sarah, with our dear friend Robert in tow, and soon after Wu and her lovely daughter. Wow!

The occasion was for Elena to make some photographs of the YACB dancers in full garb. You'll see the images soon. From what I saw on Elena's laptop, prepare to be amazed. She is simply one of the best photographers, and I think the site and subjects were so in her zone. Like every artist who is really really good, Elena has a busy schedule. She made the trip to Louisville and worked hard all day to capture the magic out of sheer love and mutual admiration. As did everyone - well, it's true that Elizabeth was on the job for the paper, but I think she was having a good time too! Add to this, not present, but behind the scenes, William and Kirby, who loaned the lights for the shoot and helped make it possible, and then, Steve and Laura Lee, whose belief in my work brought it all together. Wow. And there are more ~ all the performers, all the supporters, all the friends and family who have helped enrich, guide and shape the process.

What overwhelms me is the belief in the work that I do. It is everything to me, and sacrificing time and energy for it is my life and my joy, so I'm always glad to be working on "the project." That people whom I love and admire are willing to sacrifice their time and energy is humbling. I don't know any way to express my gratitude and love except to make the best art that I can.

My love and thanks to everyone in the YACB complex! (

The pic shows Elena and Evan getting ready to snap Idrissa on the stairs ~ I really think that when an amateur photographer like myself takes a photo of a great photographer like Elena, it's better if it's blurry and badly lit.)

What Seems Impossible May Not Be ~

2010-08-25T15:44:00.007-04:00

(I've been so busy with work on You'll Always Come Back that I've neglected to blog for some time. I'll return soon with more about the work, but for now, consider this:)

Geraldine Dutton Ledford & myself

The workshop performance of You'll Always Come Back, here in my hometown last Saturday, went wonderfully well - much better than I expected. After the performance several people in the audience approached me with interesting stories evoked by the songs, images and dance. One of those turned out to be a cousin I had never met. He was interested in family history and we spent a few moments talking about the show. A few days later his wife got in touch with me and told me that her husband had told his mother, age 93, about the show, and incredibly she remembered Pete Dutton. (!)

The reason she remembered him vividly is that he had scared her. Her family had lived near Dutton Hill, but at the time she was a girl they had moved into town. She would have been about 11 at the time of this memory. She told me that she had a pony and was riding it back out toward Dutton Hill when she met Pete walking toward town. She said that it scared her so bad that she turned the poor pony round, whipped it as hard as she could, and flew back toward home. The reason embarrassed her now, she had been told that any black man would rape her. The irony of this was that Pete was headed to her parents home to visit them.

It boggled my mind to think that anyone living had seen Pete alive. And this was only because Pete lived into his late 90s, and she appears on the way to that feat as well.

Just before I left to visit with her and record what she could remember about Pete, I happened to remember the Elmer Foote collection of magic lantern slides in the University of Kentucky Library archives. Elmer Foote was a photographer who made a number of photographs of african-americans living in our county early in the 1900s, along with scenic views. These photos were printed on glass and hand-colored for viewing with a device called a magic lantern. I knew that he had been at least close to the Dutton farm, because Dutton Hill appears in one of the images. Amongst the magic lantern slides is this one, of an elderly black man walking on a road. I decided to take a print of the image with me in hopes that we could use it as a comparison and conversation starter, so that I could say "Did Pete look anything like this?" expecting her to say "No, he was taller, shorter, wider, thinner, etc etc. and that possibly the image would spur her memories in general.

Imagine my shock when she said, "Oh he was more bent over than that when I saw him, but yes, I remember he had that beard, and walked with a cane." (!)

I still find it hard to believe that I may have found an image of Pete, and I realize that it may not be him, but I'm thrilled and haunted to know that what seems impossible may not be.

Body Theater ~

2010-08-06T15:14:00.003-04:00

The other day I ran into an article on the work of a German theater director, Rene' Pollesch, that reminded me of what we're trying to do with You'll Always Come Back, situate the bodies of the performers exactly in the present, in a way that accentuates consciousness without masking response, while, at the same time, maintaining ties to the forces of history and nature that shape narrative. Here's an excerpt:

(Pollesch's work)..."developed under the influence of Happenings, performance art, and institutional critique, this model privileges the actor's singular bodily presence as opposed to the reproducible role, thereby emphasizing the autographic as opposed to the allographic components of performance. Analogously, theater's live element is foregrounded, while competing media such as film and television are marginalized.

Works in this vein advance a critique of alienation, one that seeks to invert the function of the theater with regard to compensatory tranquilization; since we have to play roles in our everyday, capitalist lives and not allowed to be ourselves, then in the theater we must work experimentally with that which is forbidden to us - namely corporeality, extreme fantasies, the act of breaking boundaries of role through a character thought of as endless, unitary.

Pollesch is reacting to our contemporary moment in which performances of body and self are precisely what the social norm requires from its subjects, and in which people would prefer alienation to forced authenticity."

Diedrich Diederichsen on Rene' Pollesch

Scenes from the July Dandyland Workshop for YACB:

2010-07-26T22:31:00.006-04:00

These photos were made by Evan Hildebrandt. What a wonderful group of performers! The wknd was amazing & we learned a lot. With a little luck, we'll have You'll Always Come Back performance ready by our next workshop, on August 21st, a fund-raising benefit for our local community arts center. The crew are: Shane Gilmore, Bob Douglas, Joee Conroy, Brent Olds, Kim Perkins, Jesse Rivera, Lauren Argo, Idrissa Ekundayo, Jackie Royce, Leah Fowler & yours truly!

Testlabor ~

2010-07-10T07:53:00.001-04:00

Testlabor ~ DancePerformance, Sculpture, Music Project staged in Germany ~ Yoshioka Yumiko is the choreographer.

Lucky in Love ~

2010-07-07T17:41:00.004-04:00

I've been working on this painting forever, or nearly. I know that it started back in the 80s. At first it was a black canvas with cobalt thumb prints. It even had a title; "Sylvannia" ~ both a joke on the TV brand blue screen with pixels, and in a deeper sense of the woods at night - one of the primal fears of humanity, so I've read, but I love the woods at night. I thought of doing a similar painting, a collection of hundreds of 4 leaf clovers sealed into the paint layers. That one was going to be called "Life of Idleness" ~ but I never did it.

I've always thought of myself as the luckiest man alive. But like Pan I figured the downside was a lack of luck in love.

In the 90s, at Robb's urging, I painted the figure of a crouching blue man on the field of thumb dots. This was partly to make up for the temporary loss of an earlier painting - "Rain in the Cornfield" that I loved. The being in that one was modeled on the body of my lover at the time.

Several years ago I started embedding objects in the paint layers - a sea shell, a piece of sequined cloth, a random shape of plywood left over from something I'd cut out - then a heart shape. I almost titled it Venus' Bed, but at the time, it seemed like something I didn't know that much about.

A few nights ago I dreamt that the movie producers I was working with offered me some books needed for my research, if I could climb through the challenges to get them. It was almost like that Japanese tv show contest of physical skills - Ninja Mountain. There were four books, but in my glance I could only get the gist of what two of them were ~ one was my completed collected works (The Ominichronic! Huge.) ~ but that would be posthumous, right? - and cheating. I was tempted. The other was nearly as large, titled simply "Cobalt." I didn't make it through the gauntlet to snag them, (the dream changed...) but the two wondrous books that got away inspired me regardless.

I'm calling this one "Lucky in Love."

From the Symbolist Manifesto ~

2010-07-02T09:00:00.007-04:00

This morning, all sunny and shifting light cool in dandyland, I've been thinking about the Symbolist poets and wondering exactly how their work connects with You'll Always Come Back. Like all breaks, epistemological and otherwise, the past couple of weeks, spent doing things not directly related to YACB, has refreshed, but left me with the tricky job of picking up the thread(s) and rejoining the severed spine. Maybe this quote, written by Jean Moreas in the Symbolist Manifesto, is something I can be for or against, to start with...

"Ainsi, dans cet art, les tableaux de la nature, les actions des humains, tous les phénomènes concrets ne sauraient se manifester eux-mêmes ; ce sont là des apparences sensibles destinées à représenter leurs affinités ésotériques avec des Idées primordiales."

(In this art, scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena will not be described for their own sake; here, they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideals.)

"The physical universe, then, is a kind of language that invites a privileged spectator to decipher it, although this does not yield a single message so much as a superior network of associations." ~ Marshall Olds.

And this verse, by Paul Verlaine ~

Je suis l'Empire à la fin de la Décadence,
Qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs
En composant des acrostiches indolents
D'un style d'or où la langueur du soleil danse.

("I am the Empire at the end of the decadence, who watches the large, white barbarians passing, while composing lazy acrostic poems in a gilded style in which the languor of the sun dances.")

The Death of the Grave Digger ~ Carlos Schwabe

The Eagle Kind ~

2010-06-26T08:48:00.001-04:00

Back in the late 70s I used to get up early on Sunday morning (quite a devotion for a teenager) so that I could watch The Reverend R. A. West broadcasting live from Varney, West Virginia. Reverend R. A. sang his own songs, and healed you by having you place your hand on his, via the T.V. screen, and that was plainly magic, scam, or both. The show only presented the Reverend as a talking head, and R. A.'s head was quite engaging. He looked to me, with his brillcreamed slicked-back black hair, like a very unholy cross between Elvis and Bela Lugosi in "Dracula," only not really that good.

Still, he had a flashing full-tooth smile that out creeped Lugosi, and showed a kind of brash confidence in what he was doing that the introverted Elvis never had. I studied every detail of his program.

Then, lo and behold, I discovered that the Reverand R. A. West was coming to my hometown, to stage a revival in the National Guard Armory, an ancient gym where, in high school, I avoided playing basketball in "P. E." (Physical Education - Ha! - as mandatory games were called in those days. I wasn't going there.) I overdressed for the occasion and found a seat in the front middle, next to a young woman with a long gingham skirt and a very large bun on her head.

The Reverand R. A. and his band appeared and began to play, his paraplegic son Jay on the drums, at a startling volume. I had just seen the Rolling Stones at Rupp Arena, and R. A.'s band struck considerably louder. My stomach was throbbing in time to his signature song "He was more than a man." In no time the woman next to me began to nod back and forth and speak in tongues.
The tongues had a lot of "sh" and "sl" sounds. I knew that I could mimic it fairly easily. The nodding grew more violent until two of the goon-looking helpers who were passing garbage cans (in leu of collection plates) got ahold of the woman and moved her into the aisle, where she could flip, like a worm having convulsions, held for her own safety (and to secure her modesty by holding her dress down) until she had exhausted all her energy. The rest of the crowd followed suite, as though the gym were a big popcorn popper full of religious kernals. I began to wonder if I would be found out as an anthropologist, and wondered, also, what the consequences of acting might be in these sort of circumstances. I knew everything I needed to know to perform my own kernal pop, but it seemed dangerous.

The revival went on forever. At a certain point, R. A. gave a long talk about how the lord wanted him to have the yellow shoes he was wearing, and how, for that reason, the expense (presumably extracted from the garbage cans, now on their 7th passing) was not only justified, but a direct expression of the lord's will, punctuated by a series of his cheshire grins.

Then the lord began to speak directly (according to R. A.) to certain 7 members of the audience, compelling them to give $1,000 each. This was repeated several times. Then we went down the scale - 10 were told to give $500 each (I couldn't help, blasphemously, to think that all these were plants in what appeared to be a very very poor audience.) - then 20 to give $100, and so on. By the time they got down to having a 100 give $20 I was ready to join in just to get it over with.

Then R. A. called for anyone who wanted to be healed to come to the front. A line formed of everyone in the audience except me. Two of R. A.'s assistants would hold onto the healie, while R. A. asked them a series of questions concerning what they believed about the power of the lord. These questions had "I believe" as the only possible answer. To answer in the negative, under the circumstances, wasn't possible - everyone there, well almost everyone, certainly believed. Once the questions had worked up to "do you believe the lord is going to heal you right now?" - R. A. would bop them on the forehead with his hand. Immediately the bopped would collapse into convulsions, speaking in tongues as fast as they could go. When they could stand again, they were led to the side and a new healie would step up to the plate. I was torn. Part of me wanted to anthropologize every detail, but part of me wondered if he had a cattle prod-like electrical device secreted in his sleeve. It looked like a jolt. That's how naive I was in those days.

I learned some valuable things about theater that day, and I've never put it to better use than in You'll Always Come Back.

The Knockout ~

2010-06-12T20:52:00.003-04:00

Isaac (my young student, age 9) did this version of George Bellow's Ashcan School masterpiece "The Knockout," part of a series of boxing paintings he's been working on.

From a German Circus ~

2010-06-05T10:59:00.002-04:00

My friend Larry just sent this haunting photo to me, from a German circus. After I return from the West, I'll have more to post.

Mimesis and Movement ~

2010-06-02T15:13:00.004-04:00

After some thought about certain comments on the movement of bodies in YACB, it occurred to me how universal the assumption of mimesis is, and how hard it will be to alter. Every witness of the performance who has commented on it so far assumed that the movers represented characters in a narrative history. Part of this assumption was aided by titles given to the costumes and visual art, but I think it would have happened anyway.

In actuality, The Movers are intermediaries, or grounds of attention, between the audience (an incorrect term, but I'll take that up later.)- and the fusion of visual and sonic arts. The Movers are "just people" who move in response to the environment and the changes that take place in it. I've given them some tasks, but none of the tasks have more than a symbolic correspondence to the multiple and fragmented layers of the lyrics. From my point of view, the most interesting aspect of this type of kaleidoscopic consciousness is that it shatters narrative and history into fragments, so that the layers of their construction, and the forces at work on them, can be clearly observed. The problem with this is that what is observed can be construed as error or confusion, since this type of work doesn't favor virtuosity. In fact, all forms of virtuosity obscure it. So the problem, if it is a problem, is that the audience are watching but not seeing. They are looking for something that is not there, and ignoring what is, in hopes, perhaps, of the opiate of illustrated fantasy.

It would be better if everyone entered the space and encountered the work directly, with their own bodies, but that's a bit much to expect, considering the extreme inhibition of our society.

It might help to put quotation marks around storytelling too ~ since narrative exists in this work only to call attention to the conventional nature of its form. Rather than functioning like the text of "Jack and Jill," it's a bit more as if a certain edition of Jack and Jill was run over by a lawnmower, the pieces picked up and assembled into a collage - a collage that is as much about the texture of a children's book run over by a lawnmower as it is about fetching a pail of water.

This sort of approach would not be surprising to most viewers of contemporary visual, or even musical art, but our culture is so woefully lacking in sophistication concerning dance or the expressive capabilities of the body that mimesis or athletic display are the default modes of perception for most people who witness it. I'm not sure what to do about this, yet.

After the first performance ~

2010-05-31T15:02:00.004-04:00

It's a little soon for me to comment on the first performance of You'll Always Come Back, but I wanted to post a little something. The event, our first convergence as a company, was amazing. Just being in the wonderful building that contains Bromwell's Gallery, Evan & Alison's studio space, and Jeff & Tracey's lovely apartment, with 30 some of the most creative people I know was enough to blow anyone's mind. We learned a lot, and we found out what we need to know to go forward with YACB.

This amazing photo of Idrissa and The Lathe of Heaven will have to do for now. After I rest up and assimilate, I'll be back!

The Hand That Paints The Sky ~

2010-05-26T00:42:00.001-04:00

~ IS Blue.

The Horse ~

2010-05-23T18:05:00.004-04:00

Still of Barron as the young Ancestress, from a video for You'll Always Come Back.

The Primary Colors ~

2010-05-23T10:47:00.002-04:00

Primary Colors ~ this is an old painting of mine, from back in the 80s, but the subject, the 3 primary colors personified, has come back in You'll Always Come Back (of course!) courtesy of the owner, Charlie Carr

Cobaltamania ~

2010-05-18T22:08:00.002-04:00

Thanks to the generosity of Meg & John, we have yet another way to coat things with cobalt. Today Shane finally got to use the spray painter, on the portal, & the owl woman mannequin for the Dressrack Assemblage.

Wrap for The Ancestress ~

2010-05-17T09:30:00.004-04:00

So much is going on here in dandyland that it is hard to keep up with it all! This past week the fabulous fashion designer Rebekah Trigg and cellist Vaughn were here. Rebekah and I worked on a wrap for The Ancestress, long bands of stretch fabric with embedded oak splint spines. I got two blisters making the spines, trying to keep up with Rebekah's flying sewing machine! Two of these pix show Kim trying out the dress; the dark psychedelic one is of Rebekah trying it out, after we finished at 3 am.

The Ancestress ~

2010-05-12T15:11:00.003-04:00

Oil on canvas ~ 2010

About You'll Always Come Back ~ history and cosmology

2010-05-11T18:05:00.002-04:00

According to our family stories, my Great Grandmother, Lucy Jane Browning, and Great Grandfather, Daniel Dutton, met at the Kentucky State Fair, and married in 1844. Lucy’s family left Kentucky after her mother died in the cholera epidemic, settling in Sweet Springs Missouri. The household, before her marriage, consisted of Lucy, her mother’s mother, her widowed father, and a female slave.

After their marriage, Lucy and Daniel visited Dutton Hill, as the homestead came to be known. His parents, David and Mary, were German speaking farmers who came from a Pennsylvania German community in Wythe County Virginia. They started buying land in 1810, and built a cabin in a little hollow beside one of the branches feeding into Pitman Creek. David and Mary Dutting (as the name was spelled on the first deed), brought with them not only farm tools and household goods – they also brought a belief, part of what is called “Hexen” in their Germanic culture, that the seventh son of the seventh son inherits power; power, at the very least, to heal humans and animals. Anyone who has studied magic knows that the inverse power is also implied. My Great Grandfather Daniel was just such a son, and his parents turned over ownership of the farm to him. He and Lucy built a house beside a giant white oak tree, hundreds of years old.

Lucy remained on the farm for the rest of her life. Daniel (the first) rode a horse back to Sweet Springs and returned with two slaves, Charles and Pete, ages 6 and 8.

Pete Dutton set his (probably bare) foot on Dutton Hill in 1845 and remained there all but the last few years of his life. He built a small cabin just above a spring - Pete’s Spring, as it is still called, eventually married Jennie, and raised ten children. Pete’s Spring has a legend attached; if you take a drink there, you will always come back for another.

In 1863, when Pete was 26 and still a single man, Southern soldiers came into Kentucky to raid cattle and provisions. They made their way as far North as the Kentucky River before the Northern forces countered their advance. They turned back, driving some hundreds of cattle and horses before them, down Crab Orchard Road (now known as Hwy 39), a route that would bring them directly to Dutton Hill.

Our stories tell that Pete took the horses and mules and hid them in a cave on Pitman Creek. Before he left, Granny Dutton, (Lucy Jane) told him “Pete, if they ask you for those horses, you give them to them.” Pete replied, “They’ll get them horses when Pete’s dead.” After hiding the animals, Pete came back to the house to get something to eat. While there, he and Lucy (Daniel was away, selling timber in Cincinnati.) looked out the window and saw “a soldier for every blade of grass in the yard.” He went to the door and the soldiers demanded provisions – “Nigger, we want corn for a hundred horses.” “We haven’t got that much” Pete replied. “We’ll take what you’ve got then” Was the response, and the soldiers began tearing up the house and barn to see what could be taken.

At this point, gunshots were heard on the Northern side of the hill, and the rebel forces left off looting and raced to the top of the hill to barricade for “The Battle of Dutton Hill.” My Grandfather, Daniel II, also the seventh son, was two years old then. Pete carried him, and Granny led the other children to David and Mary’s cabin, more concealed and further from the battlefield. They hunkered down there for the duration. But Pete made his way back up to the hilltop and concealed himself up in a cedar tree where he could watch the battle unfold. He told this story, which matches the military account precisely, to my Dad, Joseph Dutton, the seventh son of Daniel II, and he passed the story on to me.

The Shakers at Pleasant Hill noted that there was a killing frost on the date of the battle, and that their peach trees, in full bloom, lost their crop. The morning after the battle was April Fool’s day. Eighteen of the dead Southern soldiers were gathered, most likely by Pete, and buried at the top of Dutton Hill, head to head, in a mass grave. After the war, the father of one of the young men killed there came up from Alabama and had a limestone obelisk erected on hill, with this inscription;

“Here off duty till the last reveile lie the Southern soldiers, in numbers who were slain in this county during the war of secession. They fell among strangers, unknown, unfriended. Yet not unhonored. For strangers hands have gathered their ashes here, and placed this shaft above them, that constancy, valor, sacrifice of self, though displayed in a fruitless enterprise, may not be unremembered.”

As the seventh son, and barely sixteen, Daniel II was emancipated by his father so that he would inherit the land, along with the Hexen power. There is a story that neighbors brought their horses to him to be healed, a procedure that involved pouring spring water over the afflicted animal.

Daniel II’s first wife, Nannie, would die as a result of the birth of a son. The second wife, my Grandmother Sarah Belle, was an accountant, a schoolteacher, an herbalist, and an artist. Like his forebears, Daniel II was both a farmer and a woodworker. He set his sights on becoming a finish carpenter and learned to operate a lathe. He was a handsome man, and something of a mystery. Of him I have heard that “He drank.” “He was a ladies man,” “He was a perfectionist,” the hexen story, that he almost lost the farm through debt, and little more, besides the fact that he was committed, as a lunatic, to the Old Kentucky State Mental Hospital. Exactly why, beyond the generic term - “nervous breakdown,” I have yet to discover. He recovered, or was changed enough to be released and return to the hill for the remainder of his days.

In the last few years of his life, Pete lived with his daughter in Danville. My father was sixteen in 1931, when, as he told it, an old colored man who looked like he was ready for the grave himself came to the Old House and said that they had brought Pete’s body back to bury. My Grandfather sent my dad to dig the grave in our family cemetery. It was August, and the red clay dirt on the hill was baked hard. Pete’s family stood around the grave, waiting and watching while my dad dug the grave.

The headstone reads “Pete Dutton and wife Jennie ~ born in slavery, died free.”

As a work of art, You’ll Always Come Back, attempts to keep simultaneous anchors in three kinds of time; the artifacts of history I’ve outlined here, including the orally transmitted stories; the experiences and responses of the performers, including myself, who present the work; and the two cosmologies, one Germanic and one African, that meet on Dutton Hill and converge in the lives of my ancestors, and hence, in my own.

The particular African cosmology in this case is Yoruban, a culture centered in Ile Ife, an ancient town in Nigeria. It is here that Oludumare, the owner of the universe, sent down the orisa, personified forces of nature, an act that would establish human culture on earth. One of these orisa is Orunmila, who instituted a system of knowledge concerning the relationship of categories that is known as the oracle of Ifa. A considerable portion of slaves in the diaspora were Yoruba, due in part to their expertise in working with indigo, but the power of Ifa that came with them exceeded their numbers in potency, and grew wherever it traveled. Today, with an estimated adherence of over 5 million people, Ifa and the Yoruba cosmology, known by various names in the countries of the Western Hemisphere, constitute one of the fastest growing belief systems on the planet. Not the least reason for this being that the binary based code of categories in Ifa happens to work very well with computer-based technologies of communication like the internet.

Germanic myth looms large in any survey of art history, in part because of the perversion of the ancient sun-symbol, now known as the swastika, by failed artist cum fascist dictator - Adolf Hitler, and the terrible crimes he committed. The Nazi party cloaked itself in occult symbolism, appropriating images and legends from Germanic myths. It was this diabolical usage of deep-rooted culture, and the concept of “blood” as the ultimate group signifier, that helped the Nazi party rise to power, just as it had provided the rationale for slavery in the United States.

The time line of You’ll Always Come Back is centered in Pete Dutton’s life on the hill, 1845 to 1931, before the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and the war that ensued, and before another phenomena which would have a great impact on our family and the land. This was the rise of what has been called agri-business, replacing the small farmer with the factory farm, a planned and systematic destruction of a holistic and sustainable approach to food production, to be replaced with methods that inflict unimaginable cruelties on chickens, cattle, and swine. The German immigrant farmers in the US were far ahead of their time in the wise use of sustainable farming methods, such as the collection and use of manure as fertilizer, and this is shown clearly by their relative prosperity, as well as in the design of their barns and farms. My father considered factory farming to be morally wrong, and ultimately, impractical, and I’ve seen the wisdom of that assessment.

Considered together, there are a lot of categories to keep track of in You’ll Always Come Back. One friend suggested that this performance is like the creek that borders Dutton Hill; you can dip your boat into at any point, know something of its nature, walk away from and return to it, always aware that it is both constant and ever-changing, flowing through and enlivening the past, the present, and the future. The performers – musicians, artists, makers and thinkers who have contributed to the realization of this work are my family, just as surely as any genetic relative could be. We are united by our shared imagination, and love, both powers greater than race and mortality.

2nd Head, in Headcase (unfinished)

2010-05-10T20:59:00.003-04:00

Just 14 more to go!

(The heads are of clay from the hill, formed around sedgegrass cores. I still have to do the faux woodgrain.)

Today I had help. Jake, Josh, Shane & I cut out some wide shingles. Jake & Josh made oak splints for The Ancestress' spine-wrap, Shane gathered sedgegrass and pugged clay. It was a lot of fun, and I'm feeling a little better about how much is done at this point.

Headcase - (heads sold separately)~

2010-05-09T20:23:00.003-04:00

Today I made the first of the 16 heads. The clay from here on the hill is plastic, but relatively soft. It's difficult to make large objects quickly with it. So I decided to speed things up by making a core of sedgegrass. And I decided that it would help me learn about Ifa to think about each of the first 16 odu (paths) of the Ifa oracle while I made the 16 heads. The first odu is Ejiogbe. the father of the rest. It represents light, and the right path ~ "The hands belong to the body. The feet belong to the body." These first 16 of the 256 odus are twins, because the 8 marks that present the oracle are paired, like matched butterfly wings. In a binary code there are 16 possible pairs of 4, and 240 other combinations.

Ifa reminds me of the I Ching - but the I Ching uses 3s rather than 4s. The first hexagramgram of the I Ching is "Ch'ien" "The Creative." "These unbroken lines stand for the primal power, which is light-giving, active, strong and of the spirit. This hexagram is consistently strong in power. Its image is Heaven."

The Headcase isn't finished. I still have to put the darker blue bogus woodgrain lines on it. Tomorrow I'll start on the next head, Oyekumeji, which is, predictably, "Darkness."

The woodwork on the case is by Jake Shackleford.

The Ancestress & Summer Girl~

2010-05-06T16:40:00.005-04:00

Back in the 80s I did a painting that I titled "Summer Girl." It developed in a series of drawings of stylized male and female faces, influenced by some of the early 20th century Navajo painters. The colors were close in chroma and muted, almost pastel - the forms were flat. William has the painting - maybe he'll share a photo of it. Summer Girl's body had a design, as though she were wearing body paint, of undulating lines that curved around the jaw in a certain way, and up each side of the torso. When it came time to paint Kim for the role of the Ancestress in YACB, it seemed natural to use the stylized makeup from Summer Girl - the idea of that was simply to signal "I am female." Another link was the butterflies. Summer Girl was standing in a field of stylized flowers and surrounded by butterflies - The flowers were Ruella, a summer wildflower here on the hill with an odd link to art - for some strange reason they were the subject of one of Andy Warhol's early silk screens. He probably just happened to see a photo of them and copied it. I think that was the only time Andy did flowers. Ruella opens for a single day.

The butterflies were Pipevine Swallowtails, a large, nearly black swallowtail with iridescent green or blue back wings. There used to be alot of them around here, sadly now they are rarely seen. I've seen one in the past five years.

In my vision of The Ancestress painting, the butterflies are the yellow ones, the color favored by the orisa Osun, and those would be Tiger Swallowtails, Cloudless Sulphers, Dog-faced Sulphers, Alfalfa Butterflies...

I made this photograph of Kim, with The Ancestress body paint, out in the hay field, as a step toward the painting.

Noh when least expected ~

2010-05-05T07:59:00.004-04:00

Yesterday Shane worked on the two pieces in YACB that speak directly about Pete Dutton's story. In every case in YACB, a work intended to make the process of imagining the past more articulate, the challenge is to find real and powerful connections between the artifacts, the characters and events in the story, and lived experiences. The goal is to expand the lived experience of time by a seamless, dreamed fusion with the time of legends, connecting the moment of performance with the ever expanding world of "once upon a time."

As I tried to help him find that entrance into the dance - perhaps "a legendary state of being" would describe it - I found myself remembering the time that I spent with my Noh teacher, Oe Nobuyuki, a master of that ancient form of Japanese performance.
Specifically I recall his firm insistence that the patterns in the dance of the Shark God that he was teaching me had nothing to do with representations, or mimicry, of the movements of actual sharks. In my interpretation of sensai Nobuyuki-san's instruction, the formula for the connection went more like this: dancer's body conforms to enactment of formal pattern; formal pattern conforms to the quality of "kami" - the animating force of the universe, which can "descend" from the otherworld to imbue images, forms and movements with transformative power - in a manner correspondent to the same descent of that power into the shark. The connection is formal, via an intermediary dynamic. It isn't RE-presentation, it is a presentation, in pattern, of the original force that animates a pair of images in two worlds; the artificial world of the fairytale and the referential world of nature it describes.

Shane's connection has been an identification with Pete. As we shared and invented the projected character of Pete, based on the handful of artifacts (stories mainly) associated with him, Pete began to represent the being that Shane wanted to become, a catalyst for self-transformation. In a way it is only by imagining an OTHER being that we can begin to shake off the fetters of habitual patterns and replace them with a new, and hopefully, more vital state of being. The prefix "trans" comes into play in language about this process - transformation, transferral, transcendent - linked by the act of boundary crossing.

Most Noh plays are ghost stories, and YACB conforms to that pattern. In the classic Noh tale, some being, a ghost typically, is stuck in a repeating pattern (the haunting) - until an act by a witness (a wandering monk, usually) liberates the ghost and releases the tension, a lack of harmony, and replaces it with an enlightened state - the truth becomes known and someone is set free. This seems especially potent in the story of a former slave.

In "Dubliners" James Joyce has a story titled "Clay" in which a parlor game of touching substances becomes a form of divination. The main character, a young woman, touches clay, and in the valorized state of game-play, the clay becomes an omen of death, the corpse and the grave. Clay is such an evocative substance - the it-could-become-anything substance of pre-being, post-being, and thereby the substance of otherness. That's why an unformed lump of laterite (native clay) can be the substance site of Esu, the orisa of the crossroads, the intersection of worlds, and the process of transformation.

Shane says he likes being painted with clay, and it seems to fit his young, relatively unformed state of being. In this case, rather than being a sign (redundant) of death, clay, streaked on the body by fingertips, signifies the possibility of transformation and growth.

The question becomes whether a witness (the audience) will recognize it ~ will the formal qualities that we are articulating present the essentially unsee-able reality that animates both the legend and the performer? Time will tell.

Work in progress ~ Idrissa

2010-05-01T16:21:00.003-04:00

Here's the whole painting of Idrissa - still in progress. It's a difficult painting to photograph, made even trickier by a dark overcast day. When it's completed I'll post a clearer image.

Idrissa ~

2010-04-30T15:58:00.003-04:00

I started work on a painting of Idrissa today. I've been thinking about this one ever since he was here in dandyland. I haven't applied oil paint this thickly since my teens!

Yellow Ladyslipper ~

2010-04-29T10:34:00.007-04:00

Kim has been collecting images of yellowness, as part of the work on her role as The Ancestress in "You'll Always Come Back." I was looking at her series on facebook, talking to Jason on the phone about a light design in blue lightbulbs of a black sun, just having chatted with Burley about his crimson gender change tonight, amongst other things, (the butoh dancers in YACB are also the primary colors) when my own lightbulb went off and I remembered the yellow ladyslipper. It's perfect for The Ancestress.

Many years ago the herbalist father of a friend, a very reclusive and, according to my friend, not especially friendly to other people sort of man, whose herbal knowledge came from his Amer-Indian roots, took me out into the woods to a remote hillside where many of these yellow ladyslippers were growing.

On the way, he pointed out certain plants to me, and asked me what their names were. I knew the so-called "common names" of all of them, and the "latin names" of most, & being eager to show off my (ridiculously slight, as it was) knowledge, I named them one after another, just like Adam. I assumed he didn't know, though there was something funny about the way he asked the question, so I was a little on guard. Of one particular plant he asked "Do you know its name?" So I gave the common name I usually used. Then he came back with "But it has another name - do you know it?" I gave another common name. He looked at me in a penetrating way & said, "It has another name - do you know it?" So I figured I'd be definitive, (and a show off) & gave him the Latin name. Sure enough, he looked even more piercingly at me and said, "It has another name. Do you know that one." I confessed I didn't. He didn't offer what that name might be - I assumed (again) that it was the one the plant answered to, and I started paying closer attention.

Anyway, when we arrived at the hillside, deep in the woods, he told me to dig one of the ladyslippers up and take it, giving me very detailed instructions as to the sort of place to replant it - a South-East facing slope, the amount of shade, what kind of earth - I knew of no such place on our farm. And silently, I was distressed at the idea - yellow ladyslippers are rare, and it is illegal to dig them up. I knew, vaguely, that the roots were used in Arabic herbal medicine, and called "jalap," but I didn't know the Indian usage. I didn't have a spot that fit his description, and all conservationist-y I felt it was a crime to dig one of these beautiful flowers up, but I did as I was told, certain that the ladyslipper I dug up was doomed.

I planted it in the backyard. It wasn't really a slope (tho on a hill) and the soil wasn't the deep loam, and the shade not quite like the place he had taken me, plus it was too dry. That was back in the 80s. It was years before it bloomed again, after being moved. Occasionally I would add some mulch around it to help moderate the dryness, but really I left it to its fate, which I assumed, again, was a malingering decline to extinction. After maybe ten years, it apparently sent out a rhizome a foot away and another stem emerged. Eventually they both bloomed. Then visiting children picked the blooms, and a botanist friend who saw it informed me that if the flower was ever picked it would never bloom again.

For a very long time, years, neither stem bloomed. But this year one came back. It's odd not telling my mom to come & see it, but it makes me hopeful too. So much has happened.

The Beech ~

2010-04-25T22:32:00.002-04:00

A study for the ceiling of the installation of You'll Always Come Back.

Temporary Platform ~ A Map for Idrissa

2010-04-21T22:19:00.003-04:00

10' x 16' ~ work in progress. This is the first time I've done an improvisational painting. I couldn't get up high enough to take a pic of the entire canvas - these are bits and pieces.

The Horse ~

2010-04-17T12:55:00.008-04:00

("The Horse" text is by my grandmother, Sarah Belle Dutton, a little essay written when she was a schoolgirl. Maybe it's just me, but when I read it, I felt like she was writing about herself as much as about horses. I set the text into the form of a prose poem. The horse is a reoccurring motif in You'll Always Come Back - much to my surprise. I didn't realize it until all the source texts were assembled and all the songs were composed. If this text had one meaning to a woman in the 19th century, it has another, related but different meaning, to a slave.)

The Horse:

The horse is a fine animal
about five feet high and of various colors
He is a proud-looking creature,
when he gets loose from his keepers
he prances up and down as if stepping on air.

The horse is not only the most noble of brutes
he is also one of the most useful
He carries people on his back, draws a heavy load,
a plow, or a carriage.
He thus lends to man his great speed and his
powerful strength.

He can swim as well as most other animals
although he is not very fond of water.

In South America and some other countries
there are troops of wild horses, which grow up in the forests
When wild they are very quick-witted
in everything necessary to their support and safety;
but when these creatures are rendered tame
and live under the protection of man,
they seem to lose their faculties for want of
exercise and become stupid.

They are not called upon to use their wits
and by disuse almost lose them;
but it is this change in their natures
that renders them useful and manageable
If they retained their fierceness and cunning
that belongs to them when wild,
they would not patiently submit to be the helpers of man.

Adire Eleko

2010-04-16T10:06:00.003-04:00

It took some doing to get it here, but on Tuesday this beautiful piece of cloth arrived from Nigeria. My friend Oyeniyi made this piece of Adire Eleko, traditional Yoruba indigo dyed batik, that I'm planning to use in You'll Always Come Back. Most people are aware of the connection between cotton and slavery in the Southern US., but not so many are aware of the important role that indigo played in the slave trade. Slaves were brought from Yorubaland especially because of their expertise in growing and processing indigo. One result of that infamous history appears in many a wardrobe ~ blue jeans.

Idrissa in dandyland ~

2010-04-15T10:28:00.004-04:00

So much has happened in the last few days! My new friend and collaborator, Butoh dancer Idrissa Ekundayo, came to dandyland so that we could begin work together on You'll Always Come Back. We talked about the piece, about our lives and work, and about the image of the crossroads being that we hope to evoke. These photos are are first work together, and so exciting (to me!) as indicators of what we will accomplish in the performance. The convergence of our thoughts and time to work together connected with the arrival of a beautiful piece of cloth, a traditional Yoruba batik made with indigo dye, created in Osogbo, Nigeria, by my artist friend Oyeniyi. I'll post more about that soon, but for now, here's Idrissa (and Kim).

Petals ~

2010-04-05T22:51:00.002-04:00

Petals:

April Fool’s, but really
There is a corpse in the fencerow,
Where he crawled, one would imagine,
To escape the battlefield.

Angled under the tangled
Thicket of honeysuckle and briars,
Eyes glaucous, wide open, empty, staring
At the blank, overcast sky.

Frost bit the hillside hard
And hit the newly-opened peach buds
Such a gnash they loosed at dawn and fell, pink, slowly -
Darker mirrored in the dead man’s eye.

The proud will not endure -
they’re like dream on a spring night.
The mighty fall -
Like petals on frost.

Cobalt in Cincinnati ~

2010-04-04T17:48:00.005-04:00

I spent a good part of today tying knots in baling twine. The net I'm making is the super-structure for a tree-like shape that will be part of the You'll Always Come Back installation at Bromwell's Gallery, opening May 29th. I was planning just to perform the music, a few extracts from the dance, some video projection, and mainly have the show be the watercolor paintings of YACB images. But that all changed when Brent pointed out the very problematic acoustics of the room. The choice was simple - the music required that the room be altered, and that means a complete installed environment. The solution came from the body of Idrissa, a butoh-trained dancer who has agreed to work on YACB ~ once I met him, and saw his body language, I realized that the space which surrounds him is a fantastical hybrid world, part outdoor, part indoor; part dream, part substance. The substance is blue, meaning in this case, indigo for cloth (Africa) and cobalt for other objects (Germany). The term cobalt is derived from the German "Kobold" - a supernatural being that indwells in a particular space, like a mine. Miners in the old days heard them knocking, deep under the earth, and the dermatitis caused by contact with cobalt ore was only one of the dangers such creatures could cause. Cobalt was declared a basic element (weight 27) in the 1700s ~ it is toxic, but also, in the form of B 12, essential for mammalian life. It may be essential to life itself, as algae and fungus both require it. And it can be blue ~ an opaque blue with a greenish to purplish bronze haze on the surface, as though the light reflected from its surface is broken into a lustrous intensity, like the sky, only deeper. I thought it would be nice to see a lot of it, so I'm planning to paint every surface with a nice thick coat of cobalt and see what happens. It will be a deal darker, more monochromatic, and more intense, than this sketch can show.

A new suit ~

2010-04-02T11:13:00.002-04:00

A couple of months ago I ran into my old friend Jo at the library & told her that I was working on a new piece that involved Yoruba mythology (we have a common interest in myths). The other day when I went by the library to pick up an interlibrary loan book I'd ordered on that very subject, the librarian said "Someone left a package here for you." In the package were 3 books on African art, and this suit, which I think is Nigerian. I love it. My friends are the best.

The Egg is almost finished...

2010-03-25T11:14:00.001-04:00

Apple Tree Shadow ~

2010-03-19T12:17:00.003-04:00

Gregory was here in dandyland for almost a week, working on a shadow puppet play with a school in Corbin. There were a lot of puppets to make, so I helped out. I did a herd of animals, and then an apple tree. The apple tree puppet serves two purposes; the school play needed one, and I needed a design for Eva, in the 4th quarter of You'll Always Come Back. I'd thought of doing Eva's scene as "Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden" ~ 1800s style, and for that I'd need an apple tree. This is a shadow image of a piece of cut paper with LED lights.