THE CONCEPT OF NONESS
Photo by Tim Girvin I was listening to someone, telling me "no." I watched, as they held their finger up, wagging it -- like a little, defining ruler, ready to smack me on the head. And I realized that the first inclination, in considering that word, was -- "what?" Why would that be "no?" Better still, and faster -- it's less about the no-ness -- the declaration -- and more about the idea of bridling against the concept of restriction. What I realized is that when someone tells me no, the...
THE HEART OF BULLETS
Photo by Tim Girvin WALKING THE DESERT I came to a place of bullets, by the thousands -- some, to casings -- others, to spent bullet shells of the brass made. These lie in the sun like golden teeth -- knocked out, scumbled in the sand, fragmented and dusted with other litter -- charcoal, gun-powdered dust, the black of fused nitro, scented with metallic tinges -- a tongue of burned remarks. All in all, the masculine ground of things spent -- mostly, to my take, wastefully. Where, the bullseye?...
THE CRANK OF WATER
Photo by Tim Girvin Being out on the opening plain, in the bold light(en)ing of the sun cast, black earthen shadows -- the desert, the wind rips across the line, tumbleweeds roar across the dustscape. And I find this windmill, that's taking me back to the same old place, back in the beginning -- back to Flagler, Colorado, and my grandfather's farm. There, the windmill turns and clanks and cranks -- and the water keeps coming. Right now, as the wind turns the aeromotor, there's a long clanking...
THE MAP OF MIND
Photo by Tim Girvin I was studying the different scratching on the surface of a wall -- in a room that was covered with the graffito -- Latin for "little scratching" -- of hundreds of people. Except that they didn't only write on the wall, but incise their ideas deep into the plaster. That tradition, in a funky way, permeates the walls of A couple of thousand years back, Herculaneum (and Pompeii) and other Roman cities, the graffiti was found in two ways: for one, scratched and incised in the...
THE CONCEPT OF THE (W)HOLE
Being at the DIA | Beacon, NY, up the Hudson, there are a series of installations by some of the greatest artists on the planet -- classical emplacements involving the highest theories of each, a kind of portfolio of perfected legends. Those that are still working. Those that have passed along. But one of them, Michael Heizer, is an especial theorist, artist, designer -- still working, expanding on his dreams -- has a kind of symbolic place in my heart of exploring. There's more to be...
THE LUXURY OF LIGHT
Photo by Tim Girvin After the long running, days on daze of grim light, the proverbial oyster shell coloration of the Pacific Northwest wintering, low rolling clouds, the Sun merely a fuzzy luminescence. Today, for a moment, a turning to spring, sprung -- that first evidence came to light -- a bursting, bright and swaying in the breeze. Sun coming. I took a minute, just staring into that light, Sun brilliance, feeling that on my face, eyelids and eyes -- and watching the bobbing movement of...
KEEP SMILING
Rummaging for a hat, the other day, I found an old baseball cap that I'd given my daughter. She never liked it, though I thought she'd like the pug-like expression of the front panel. But didn't. I think it might've been the coloration, which was sort of a muddied yellow device along with a yellow and black detail for the bill and back clasp. I got into dyeing a sequence of articles, all black. There were some things that were already black, and I was trying to make them more blackened; and...
STORMWANDERER
Photo by Tim Girvin THE CIRCLED WIND I went out in the early dark this morning, in the storm. Wind, rain, cold whipped round -- circling. And I stood in the center of the storm. I dreamed of that, the wind, the circling. And I could taste the wet, the salt of the sea That turned in the sky and swung back round, the circle -- a sphere of energy, that wrings wound and wind. It's been going for days. The birds are reeling in the storm, wheeling and running the sky like the brushstrokes that come...
THE WHORLWIND
Photo by Tim Girvin SPINNING MIND AND IMAGINATION STORM I spilled the ink on the surface of the glass, milky underlayment and light flowing from beneath. There was light, showing through from the shadows, the street bound -- lights, emerging. That floated the ink, so it whirled on the glass, and I spun the movements with my fingertips. And as I spun the circles, spinning and whirring the lines of the ink, my fingers and fingernails, blackening the fingerprints -- these prints become other...
THE GIVING PLANT
(a hallway meandering found, a personal photograph of a detail of Cappy Thompson's glasswork, Swedish Hospital) MY FATHER AND MOTHER HAVE INSTILLED A LOVE OF PLANTING IN OUR FAMILY. The planting inheritance, a flourishing of the verdurous instinct... But it's more to the relishing of seeing things grow. And sharing in that growth. My father comes from a planting background, as a farmer. Early on, our family bought a farm, some several miles from our house in Spokane -- mostly hay, back in the...