Art/Culture – Susan Tyler Jenkins

Deep Dive

December 3, 2015

Since last writing I’ve been on a deep dive into studying art-making, studying myself as a student again, and studying myself in NYC again…

Intense, wearying, joyful, painful, sad, insightful, fattening, irritating, depleting financially, and overall very worthwhile.

I found a living situation that is at once incredibly fortuitous and awkward, and have had plenty of opportunities to watch my irritation and resistance get triggered by someone else’s irritation and resistance. It’s returned me to bodhicitta practice, which is the only way I feel able to short-circuit the churning mind that is reacting to situations instead of letting them go.

I also did further training as a dharma teacher (also helpful in the live situations), so I might be able to support the community of meditation practitioners wherever I land next year.

December 3: "Safe" Collage (In Progress) — December 3: “Safe” Collage (In Progress)

As far as the art-making goes…I love my mixed-media class, where I work on my own projects. Started slow, and have been working at a fury pace the last week or so to finish one large piece, and a few smaller ones. Meanwhile, I studied drawing full-time in October and part-time in November, which revealed a lot of limitations and pedagogical frustration. Perhaps after 3 years of drawing classes I might be producing things freshly, and as enjoyably as when I am making assemblages, painting, writing or singing, but it’s not feeling any more natural than before I came…in fact, less.

My first instructor had me focus on how I use line to describe the figure…so I gradually developed a bunch of beautifully-outlined figures, but no volumes, expressions, environments, etc. Then I switched to part-time and that instructor disdained the outline altogether in favor of structure, vectors, responding to the movement of the pose, including the background of the studio and how one uses the page. All useful things to think about, but now I had to completely rewire myself and produce very unsatisfying results, instead of building on what I’d spent a month developing. Like learning to play music, or speak a foreign language, the process of becoming masterful at drawing is mystifying.

What I confirmed through this process is I am interested in drawing as a way to capture human expression, the face, the experience of lives intersecting with the world at a given moment, and the qualities that make a beautiful drawing in general, whether realism or abstract. I made some advances in exploring these aspects of drawing, but realized finally that I have to do more work on the street without the formality of instruction shadowing me.

You can see some of the other drawings I liked in my sketchbook.

Week 1, pre-instruction: 20 minute drawing.

shelter/media (working title) – Winter 2015 (work in progress)

April 22, 2015

Armor - helmet. Papier Mache sculpture modeled on 16thC English royal parade armor. Decoupage pattern cutout from NY Times photographs of various homes

It began before I ever knew I would move to New York. It was a strange necessity, the unsettled disease. Except there was never any cure it seemed. Or more to the point, the cure was depicted, weekly, monthly, illustrated, described in detail, but obtaining this cure seemed elusive.

The story of ‘home’ has been weaving through consciousness my whole life – never any more intensely than the 20 years I lived in New York City, always finding a gap between the life I imagined and the life I experienced. In NYC especially, the story of this gap, fiercely felt by so many, finds itself told in the pages of the New York Times Home & Garden and Real Estate sections. Which recently were merged. Home is no longer it’s own story, but has been subsumed into Real Estate.

Examining my experience of ‘home’ as I’ve traveled nomadically the last two years I’ve felt that sense that it’s very hard to imagine the home without the environment – i.e., the home within one’s own basic being. Realized individuals in the different spiritual traditions have a strong ability to be at home anywhere, but speaking for myself, environment – home, town, community, earth – are entwined deeply with my sense of well-being. I’ve begun to parse some of the feelings of what the obsession with the material trappings of home both celebrates and obscures about living on this earth, at this moment – and have moved into mixed-media explorations to further this inquiry. Below are some images of work I began making during a winter 2015 retreat in Margaree Harbour – a small village in Cape Breton Nova Scotia.

In the many ways we think about “home”, I realized a strong yet subtle aspect is protection, armor. We armor ourselves through creating a home environment that protects us from the world. Or we armor ourselves through creating a home that supports our engagement with the world. So often the impulse (for me anyway) is to augment and tinker with the physical environment of home – to be in the ideal apartment, ideal neighborhood, with the objects that most reflect back to me some sense of accomplishment, or wisdom, or brilliance. It becomes a materialistic pursuit very quickly. Hence the easy, troubling alliance with shelter media – images of some ideal just out of reach, yet seemingly accessible, ‘if only’.

In making armor I’m exploring what it means to create a shield between myself and the world through a form that can display these images of desired “ideals”. I’m also interested in resurrecting the connections with the history of this armor and seeing what if any parallels there are between its function in Renaissance society and how I’m appropriating it now.

Armor – helmet, side view. Papier Mache sculpture modeled on 16thC English royal parade armor. Decoupage pattern cutout from NY Times photographs of various homes.

source material – 16thC English armor, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

“Mining for the elusive”, Larch wood kindling block, NY Times photo printed on Epson photo paper, colored pencil, charcoal, glue stick

“Dream Lightbox” maquette. Cardboard, masking tape, plastic packaging window, NY Times photo printed on white copy paper.

Boerum Hill Apt Light <3<3 – wire mesh, kitchen string, NY times photographs printed on white copy paper.

Open Studio – space 4, photographs from “pictures from home” series and new “bird feeder” film

Open Studio – space 6, photographs from “pictures from home” series

Open Studio – space 7, photographs from “pictures from home” series

Found dog wood sculpture, “thinking and non-thinking” calligraphy, sketch of Margaree Harbour.

Open Studio Visitors April 17 2015 Margaree Harbour NS

Cape Breton Snow/Sky

April 8, 2015

April, 2015

Since working with Joel Meyerowitz, I’ve been mesmerized by the horizon. His classic “Bay/Sky” images inspired my photography both in the Hudson Palisades series and here in Cape Breton. I hadn’t intended to focus on photography during my time here, but as I looked through my casual daily shots, I realized there was something happening.

Winter on the west coast of Cape Breton is subtle in its beauty but sharp in its elemental push. There are hundreds here in the glory of summertime who vacate in September, leaving behind a few hardy souls. Winds whip through the highlands or off the Gulf of St Lawrence approaching hurricane speeds and drive continuously changing weather throughout the day. One day, the temperature swung 40 degrees (farenheit) in less than an hour. Once the sea ice fills the Gulf, however, the winds tame, the sun is out more, and there’s quiet pierced only occasionally by the caw of crows, the whine of weekend snowmobiles or the periodic scrape of the snowplow on the Cabot Trail. More images at www.susantylerjenkins.com in Other Work.

March 6, top of the Shore road in Margaree Harbour.

Winter retreat project 1 – holz hausen

January 24, 2015 Comments: 1

I arrive in Margaree Harbour at a cottage with sweeping views of the Margaree river delta and Cape Breton Highlands. The arrangements were made in the fall so my firewood order (about 2 face cords) is “green” – meaning it’s not cured/dried for a year yet, and will not burn well. I begin to think about how to relate with this wood pile and come across the holz hausen, a European wood-piling technique. It creates beautiful conical or beehive masses. Some argue it dries wood faster. I decide immediately it will make a relationship with the land I am visiting for the next four months and embark on building one.

One of the downsides of “sweeping views” is there is little protection from the wind, which is extraordinary here. Many days have steady winds with gusts of 40-50mph from the west, and at least one day a week the winds are gusting 70-100mph from the southeast. They call this wind “Les Suetes”, which evolved from the Acadian French for “the southeasts”.

The holz hausen works best at drying if placed with maximum exposure to wind and sun. I find the place where my driveway forks into the field. There is a natural bend that embraces the side of the cottage that receives Les Suetes, and is also exposed to sun throughout the day. Because the wind can feel like an aggressive force when it shakes the house, this location feels like a guardian spot.

The dimensions for my holz hausen are to be 7ft diameter by 7ft high. This is described in the research I find as being approximately 2 cords of splits. I think initially that I have 3 cords to work with, but later realize that I actually only have 2 cords of wood to stack, and am burning about 12 sticks a day as I go as well, to keep the house warm.

Center pole and cross-braces in. — Center pole and cross-braces

I have no wheelbarrow; I carry the logs by hand, 3-4 at a time. The time I have to work on this is also limited as I spend my first 10 days in the cottage in a solitary meditation retreat. Also, the elements are wearying. As I carry the logs, local crows and a squirrel observe my progress. I feel also that the valley is watching this gesture take shape.

My body becomes achy and I am tired each morning. I also notice my strength increasing. I buy a maul (a kind of axe with a sledgehammer thickness) and enjoy swinging the flat head into the sides of splits frozen hard in the ground. The feeling of creating something physical outside, placing each log carefully, feels purposeful and satisfying.

After I have been working for almost two weeks, and also burning my wood for heat, I realize I won’t have nearly enough pieces to rise to 7 feet. Since I have already placed the center pole, I feel a pang of disappointment as I know this will now be sticking up instead of hidden within, making the sculpture look like a caramel-dipped apple. I had been thinking “minaret.”

The wood supply ran out quickly. This morning (January 24) I took the maul and a crowbar and whacked out the last 20 pieces from the frozen ground and finished the roof. I added some of the old wood rounds on the property to close the hole at the top.

L1050706 — Finished, January 24th. Les Suetes clouds forming.

Tonight, the completion date, we are expecting 170km/h gusts (100mph), the heaviest since I’ve been here, as a big storm is carried in by Les Suetes across the Bay of Fundy. My friends who used to live in this cottage tell me to make sure to push all the glassware back on the open shelves, since they can vibrate off and break during these winds. Will the structure’s dome shape receive these winds easily? I sleep restlessly as they begin to pound the house around midnight, rising at 2am and again at 6 to check the stove. When light arrives around 7:30, I look outside. We’ve had inches of rain that washed away all the snow and filled the furrows with water. The air is damp and warm – almost 50 degrees! The holz hausen stands intact, undisturbed.

I have about 4 day’s worth of wood set aside to heat with, then I will begin to dismantle and burn the logs in the holz hausen. It will be gone by March.