Reading Responses

READING RESPONSE #1- Lauren's Submission 

"A Modest Proposal"

The reading of Johnathan Swifts “A Modest Proposal” has always been a difficult one to swallow, considering. . . Considering the way Swift felt a need to use children as his metaphor to lure the people of his time to examine their priorities. It’s powerful, yet disturbing. But, “A Modest Proposal” is also quite a clever satirical essay, to say the least. It manages to hold a compassionate angle, yet, is diabolically ruthless. The tone, Swift engaged in almost forces his readers to think that he’s downright cold and heartless to humanity. We think he’s serious one minute, while questioning his authenticity the next. With a pertinent choice of words, Swift's essay produced an impact on our moral light of Divine beliefs, and the ability to draw from the human capacity to love. . .
British rule during Swifts’ time was forcing most of the Catholics into a pitiless squalor. Mothers were typically seen panhandling for food and clothing for their starving, naked children. Swift used his abilities to write in such a way, so he could open the eyes of their oppressors. He wanted them to fathom these present economic issues, and feel the pain of its people. Shockingly, he wrote out, in calculated cold-blooded tactics, how people could benefit their economic issues and turn the problems around, turn them into gratifying assets and solutions for all those involved. He was mocking them. Swift would come across, as if he, himself, were some kind of heartless animal too. An animal, in a tone that possessed no heart or any respect for human life. Again, he is taking on their roles. He calculates his 'Modest Proposal" down to a sick mathematical science for profit, while also saying, “Fathers will treat their wives with more respect.” Meaning, pregnancy can eventually produce an income, therefore, they should protect the asset. In a year and nine months their investment will pay off significantly more. The children would be sold off as mere "table snacks". Morsels of infantile meat for the elite.
Swift also had intentions to point out the “Pretender’s”. The ones in rule, pretending to care for their citizens and illustrate to them how ludicrous their callous minds were. Wives, and/or mothers, were treated like mere cattle? Their only worth would be to produce lean “meat” for the higher classes.
Swifts poetic pretenses in this essay stopped his world,  to ponder over the real sicknesses that were surrounding.

“…just dropped from its dam…and a new thought was born."

As I was reading about the conditions of the Irish people, during this time of British rule, it brought back memories about my life in Allentown, Pa. after the war in Vietnam. It didn't affect me, personally, but the city itself was going downhill. Factories were closing and many people were out of work. I was living in Allentown when Billy Joel released the song "Allentown".

https://youtu.be/N4qzwmeXNQA

Another inspiration came from an oil painting I did for my professor in Painting I. The Still Life displays were disturbing to me, in that, they displayed baby doll body parts coming out of skeleton mouths and assorted colored vases. I had to turn my canvas to its side to paint the foot. So, at first glance the viewer wouldn't see that it was a baby's leg. That picture is too morbid for my liking.





After the reading, I put a Baby Jesus figurine onto a paper plate. I placed a clear plastic fork and knife, overlapping, into the shape of a Cross. I started thinking about how this story is not that far off from what was done to our Lord. When I looked deeper into the shadow of the Baby Jesus the photograph created, seeing it as, a witnessing... Jesus still sits atop of the shadow. God always protects the babies. Whether right here, or sitting at His right hand, we are never deserted.

And this sick thought came to be afterwards...

"Choicer Cuts"-Paper collage

We're so human. LOL!

READING RESPONSE # 2- Olivia's Submission
"Farewell to Shadowlands" Ch 16. 
from "The Last Battle" by C.S. Lewis

As much as I like imagery, and this reading is chock-full of it, fantasy doesn't excite me in a story. It's too fake for me, yet, I love the abstract. Who can figure?
 This excerpt of "The Last Battle" had too, too many characters to follow. No sooner I was trying to picture, Eustace, someone named, Farsight, comes into the picture. Then Jewel, then, Puzzle, Edmund, Tirian, and a Unicorn. That's when I lost all desire to read on. But, its required, so I shall...
I liked the imagery in this story moreso than the story being told. Certain lines spoke to me, like. . . "delicious foamy coolness", and,

"She saw something white moving steadily up the face of the Waterfall.

"The white thing was the Unicorn...."

"The point of his horn divided the water just above his head, and it cascaded out into two rainbow-colored streams all around his shoulders"

The "unclimbable cliffs", and  "...every time they barked their mouths and noses filled with water". I loved the imagery of, "White, up the face of the waterfall", and,  "climbing up light, itself..."
I can remember as a child, wishing there was a world where fear didn't exist, and everyone was happy, where,  no one ever fell, or became sick. A place where no one died. I suppose this story, in all its glorious scenes does help us think back to when we were invincible, or. . .   so we thought.
 I could take lines from this story and create me very own story. "Further up and further in", the Unicorn roared, and no one held back. I like that line in how it speaks to me. The further up I go, and the further in I get, sometimes, I too want to hold back. I'll ask myself,  "What am I getting myself into?" and, "Where might life lead me from here?" I suppose the gist of this fantasy story isn't so bad after all. "The very smell of the bread-and-milk he used to have for supper came back to him..." That line made me want to smell my mothers cooking again. I loved when she would pull a leg of lamb out of the oven and the aroma of it all, made you wish it was time to eat right then and there. The mint jelly was a must to dip it in too. . .Yum!
"The inside was larger than the outside" With that line, my insides wanted to dig in to that memorable lamb...

One day, I hope there is a place where I can go and see my mom again, and have her pull a leg of lamb out of the oven, and we'd sip on a cup of Lipton tea together, and play catch up. Without her there is always a "Shadowland" about. . . .:(


Manipulated Photograph-"Sweater and Clay"

"Do Not Be Afraid"

I found the door to heaven

But I didn't have to die

Like the iris in our eyes

It reacted to dark and light
But the opposite!

In the dark, it seemed constricted

In the light, it opened wide

With my eyes I peeked into heaven,

Where everything seemed right...

There was no pain; no suffering,

There were no tears, but smiles. . .

I saw my mom with my sisters

And all those I missed in file.
But, why?

One by one they approached me,

Saying, "What are you doing here?"

I felt a little rejected,

Until I realized it was fear.

"Do not be afraid...",
I heard a voice sing loud

"Death has no sentence here,

Unless darkness writes you out..."

Digital Photograph

"Daydreams and Silos"

I often dream while wide awake
Never in my sleep

If I do, those usually come true
I gather it's much better this way...

Today I dreamt I was atop a silo
Out in the dim of dusk

Peering down, I saw seven and a half             billion sounds
Souls, feeding my speak to a hush

Some sang of happy

Some cried of sad

Others screamed mad as hell!

Some seemed content
     Some swelled in hunger
Many, felled whimpered and bent

     Millions were just born

Many, sadly, were dying
A few bared enormous strength!

Others knew their place
From, the mouth of, with grace
Together, sung out what they faced

Then the world in the silo embraced. .

Reading Response # 3 -Kobe's 

Reading-"An Experiment With Time"
Ch II.

Kobe's submission discusses the ability to see color, specifically, the color red, and the science behind "seeing". 
To try and make someone understand what it means to be "seeing" is to write poetry...

"I Hear in Color"

I hear in color

For what its worth, of falling leaves
Voiced, immodest Earth. . .
I pick up redden,
Chaste chthonian sounds, blue;
Greens, blend . . . Adust hues!
Sung shades, timbre woods;
Nuance wraiths, undertones rued. . .
Fall, fells, inundates,
Soul's bound, stipulate;
I hear in color. Limen sound; 
Rainbows leave, wan down. . .
Fall, orange, felled, rust,
Yellow crimsons, dust to dust.
Suffusion graces . . .
Purple pine traces . . .
Eyes belying, what ears announced.
Emblazoned, measured;
I hear in color
Redounding what death pronounced
I hear in color . . .
Leaf by leaf, toned deaf.
Heather days of languish waste,
Fall sings colors' death
Winter soon songs of,
A cadenced, colorless breath. . . .
I hear in Color . . .

Photography

Colorful Sounds from Black and White Keys

READING RESPONSE #4 -Christian Ard's Part 1 "Beyond Good & Evil"

So my thoughts are, if you’re transparent then you are truthful. 

Photography

Oil painting

TRUTH is TRANSPARENT

Photography (Optimized)

TRUTH is LIGHT

Photography (Optimized)

TRUTH is SPOKEN

Photography

FROM A FROG'S PERSPECTIVE

Photography

"Who's FRANK?"

Frank, open your heart! 

Reflect over your watered self and look beneath the surface of 

Another’s side . . . 

For instance. . . across the lake . . . Do you see the forest there, hanging upside down? 

And here, drifting on my surface, the debris of falling's found?

Told you I could float! 

I’m approaching my autumn soon

What’s dead will forever be swept away.

But, His water . . . My stream. . . will be carrying little itty-bitty pieces of me, first down

Then up, toward the mouth of His sea

There, under graying skies, musing on my side of the lake, will be the gather of my face of what’s to come.

Had He turned me upright from the start, I would have never understood how difficult it always is to look at myself ...

And swim without Floaties!

Frank, but I do give a damn! 

God, I love Him! 

 READING RESPONSE #5-CASSIE's Reading

Cassie's reading stirred my memory of the stones that make up Stonehenge. The Sarsen and Blue stones. 

Sarsen and Blue

        Through the sunny spokes, out from under the lintels, dark,
        
I slaked them, them, and there, Beaker Folk. 
(In the light, no one knew of the Druid).
In this chron unknown, 
somehow I could see them all rolling stones;
Heeling my way down an Avenue.
They placed their rocks 
measured precisely put
,
      Eight feet in the ground, viewing twenty-two foot.
What was it of Merlin they wrote?
Over the sea a wizard flew these rooks?


     Well, it was a long-haired Gryphon who locked earth’s door-bolt;

     Many dug their barrows; no cures to quote.
 

For years in address, until the altar stained red,
She laid in sacrifice on the Cosheston Bed,
And split all their artifacts! 


     Who knew of this Archer who slept 
with his flints and child?

     His key is on file! 

Soon, he, nor Earth, will no longer rest quiet.
 
The Trees will speak of you, 
And, of the Sarsen and Blue,


     And me! 
And we will all see how her song will lift stone, 

With the matter from the midden before every soul is lost.

Then the planet opened up. . . .

READING RESPONSE- #6

Kimmy's Reading-... from the book, "Survival of the Beautiful" by David Rothenberg. 
This book introduced me to Ernst Haeekel, "a descendent of the great Teutonic Romantic scientists, such as Goethe..." (pg.40). His sense of science was a spiritual quest, on a mission to find the meaning and form of the Divine world around us. Haeekel drew and painted hundreds of pages of beautiful illustrations of these tiny sea organisms. Their symmetry mesmerized him, as they do me.
Symmetry is a natural occurrence, due to the magnetism of our earth. 

"Giver, Earth"

16"X 20"

Pen & Ink

READING RESPONSE #7-
Noah's "Avant-Garde and Kitsch"

I believe disparity is a part of the natural order of things, and to be original in our specific relationships between aesthetic experiences and the social and historical contexts of our cultures is important. We need to be aware of the world we live in, and understand how far we’ve come. We need to be daring. When creating art, we are recording where that experience happened, and what happened, to us. And, in order to really understand what lies at the heart of every society, is to understand its historical effects, and how it affected us, first-hand. As an artist, I find that to be probably the most important reason why I create art.

What happens when change must occur in any society? When something isn’t working in society, and, a certain someone comes along and tries to fix it, there’s always going to be others out there giving them a hard time. Change within every culture is a gradual process. ‘Out with the old, and in with the new'. 

 I consider myself an avant-garde poet, and artist. I incorporate God in most everything. I cherish what I value, especially the value of aesthetics, and what happens while I’m alive here on Earth. Everything we do has a purpose to us. It has every reason to be documented in some way for future reference. From this reading, I created exact replicas of my hands, but they also represent God’s hands. God gave me two hands to create anything I want, and for me, whatever it is I create, I do it spiritually, through Him, and with fervor for mankind, for a reason. 

Two hands are better than one. :)

     








PEA- GREEN BOAT- Clay Gravy Boat. 
This also was made in response to Noah's reading. The reading made me think of the poem, "The Owl and the Pussycat", "...[who] went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat." Mine is a gravy boat, because the gravy of the Avante-Garde is to be original. In Edward Lear's nonsense poem, he used the phrase "runcible spoon". It was a word invented just for that poem. I've read that there was much more than nonsense behind Lear's work, and that there is an underlying reason why they felt the need to escape to the land 'where the Bong-tree grows', to buy their rings to be married. Society allows homosexual marriages in our culture today. Lear was a homosexual, but during his time, nobody dared expose such issues. He found a way.

READING RESPONSE #8- Jessie's reading-

Cosmic dust is a part of everyone of us. While our bodies are in a constant state of decay and regeneration.

"WE ARE STARDUST"

https://youtu.be/3aOGnVKWbwc

We are impermanent. Never static.

READING RESPONSE #9-Annie's reading-

From smiling clowns with bald heads, wearing rubber wigs painted white, and tasteless fate, interior junk, and a total eclipse...Annies reading was full of amazing imagery and thought provoking moments. My daughter flew out to a farm in Oregon to see the total eclipse, and when the skies went dark, the crickets came out to sing. "It was an eerie feeling", she said. 
Annies reading mentions the 'alpenglow', that red light of sunset, and platinum grasses...I love it!

                                                                                                                                         h 

 READING RESPONSE #10-Emily's

"A secret pulsed code from some alien star . . . "
Ever since my own encounter with possible alien life, when I saw this 'ship' show up in the sky over Elkton, Florida, I have felt the 'secret pulse'. I don't think the whole universe was created just for us, for man on Earth, and us alone. This amazing experience has lead me to several other alien phenomenon. I believe that within every man's search for anything, just being awake to all possibilities, while searching, we find.

PHOTOGRAPHY

PHOTOGRAPHY

 Mixed Media

READING RESPONSE # 11-Christian O.- Chapter 6, "...of Mice and Men"

I enjoyed reading this story, in part, and I am intrigued with the writer. I never read it before. I've heard people talk about the story, I've just never had the opportunity. It's a sad story, and it made me think of our society, and how we treat inflictions of the mind, by incarcerating men and women who suffer from mental disabilities, instead of trying to give them a better life. 87% of those on death row are in line to be executed for their crimes, suffer from some diagnosed mental disability. We are a sick society. If a child has a disability, we are more efficient, yet, still lacking. With older people, once they surpass adolescence, our society, ignores their needs, and eventually some of them get locked up and put to death. 

"Vase of Vacuity" was created in response to Christian O's reading. I named it as such, because I have no answers to hold, as to why we slack at taking care of the mentally ill.

READING RESPONSE #12- Art with Fear

“The point is that you learn how to make your work by making your work, and a great many of the pieces you make along the way will never stand out as finished art.” Pg.6

“You make good work by (among other things) making lots of work that isn’t very good, and gradually weeding out the parts that aren’t good, the parts that aren’t yours.”  p. 26

1.     What work have you made that seems most yours? Why?

All of my art seems most mine, because all of it is mine! Once I finish a work of art, 'it is-what it is', for me, for that moment in time that it took to create it. 

The shaping of an experience or a thought comes to light, in some form or another, in living color, or black and white.

Whether I was pleased or not with the outcome, it was always all me for that moment, and I will look back on it and remember what it was that emerged and why.

“Chances are that whatever theme and technique attract you, someone has already experimented in the same direction. This is unavoidable: making any art piece inevitably engages the larger themes and basic techniques that artists have used for centuries. Finding your own work is a process of distilling from each those traces that ring true to your own spirit.”  p. 103

2.     Who are artists that are making work that relates to you?  Are there other influences? How are these other influences connected to your work?

  Alison Saar "...explores themes of motherhood, the role of women, the intensity of their hearts, and their embodiment as nature. Saar uses nature as metaphor in imagined intersections with the female body and frequently creates assemblages that transform found objects."

Louise Bourgeois: She relived the birth experience in her art time and again—her own birth and that of her children—never more so than in the last decade of her life. Among her representations is a mother with an umbilical cord that remains attached to a baby.

Nancy Mintz: explores the precarious nature of motherhood. Using themes of an egg, a house, a ladder and the moon, Mintz, the mother of two school-age children, explores all the anxieties that come with having children. How does one protect a new life? How does one care and sustain others? What is the line between maternal protection/overprotection? What is a good parent? What hopes and dreams do we have for our children?

By combining fragile and durable materials, Mintz comments on the solid bonds that bind a mother and child and the vulnerability of those bonds.

Nature also influences me, especially trees.

3. “And while a hundred civilizations have prospered (sometimes for centuries) without computers or windmills or even the wheel, none have survived even a few generations without art.”  p. 104

             Discuss, in your own words, why you think this is so.
              I think its because human beings have an internal desire to leave their mark, as to how their time here on earth was understood. People make art, to be 'dyadic', meaning to 'instruct'. An artist, no matter what form his or her art takes, is an 'instruct' in some form or another. We are here to instruct the next generation. To show them what we have learned, or noticed. 

4. “Art is something you do out in the world, or something you do about the world, or even something you do for the world. The need to make art may not stem solely from the need to express who you are, but from a need to complete a relationship with something outside of yourself.”  p. 108

            Which of these ideas resonates most with you? Why? If they all resonate, how do they differ?

   The idea of 'something you do for the world' resonates the most with me. I want to make this world a better place, before I leave it. I create art that sends messages, that I feel I need to be expressed, to better life here on earth as a whole. I don't look at cultures, or symbols, or societies, differently, they all have a purpose, every last one of them. The world as a whole, the universal meanings of our existence, play a big part in my thoughts and ideas, and the need to seek out the answers to the problems I foresee happening if we continue on the path we are on.

5. “Making art depends upon noticing things-things about yourself, your methods, your subject matter.”  p. 109

        What do you notice about yourself? What are your methods?  Subject matter?  The answers do not have to be limited to art related topics.

            What I notice about myself is I am quite naive. I trust people, and although it has backfired on me, many times,  I still give people the benefit of the doubt. I've been sheltered from society, in that, I dance to my own drummer. I don't watch television, or read the news, if I can help it. I am never swayed. I am who I am. I look at the past to understand the future, I look to science to understand my art, and art to understand the science of existence, and I love everyone, even my enemies.  My methods for making art, whether it be a sculpture, or a painting, or a poem, is to sit quiet among the trees that surround me, or the music I am listening to. This allows my inner senses to communicate with the external me to manufacture the messages I receive. My subject matter can vary but I seem magnetized to Nature the most. 

6.“The only work really worth doing- the only work you can do convincingly- is the work that focuses on the things you care about.”  p. 116

“All this suggests a useful working approach to making art: notice the objects you notice.” Pg.101

    
          What do you care about? The answers do not have to be limited to art related topics.
           I care about mankind. I want everyone to just stop all the fighting, and killing, and bickering, and help me find a way to love everyone. My parents taught me how to love, unconditionally. With five adopted sisters, of different nationalities, and exchange students from all over the world, who spent at least a year at a time with us, and sponsoring families from other countries to start a better life in America, it all had its impact on who I am. My parents fostered over 35 babies too,  and I was the one child, out of their sixteen children, who showed the most interest. So, mom allowed me to be their godmother. I have 35 people out there that I am a godmother to. Everyday I wonder if I will ever meet them again. I know no prejudice. I don't understand it. I want this for the world.