by David Feingold and Michael Quaintance

“Flux” is the third in the collaboration series “Teeth is Tears,” created by artists David Feingold and Michael Quaintance. Michael writes poetry in response to David’s images. As Michael says in his bio, “Feingold’s images act as doorways, as pathways to those avenues of thought and feeling that have been sequestered in the corners of my efforts to belong and be seen… as.” Both artists’ works are informed by their lived experience of disability.

Flux

Flux
Nothing is initiated
No points of origin
That aren’t reflections
That aren’t responses
To
The need to please
That rests at the core of I in absentia.

Flux
The pieces move to satisfy
The assumption
The predisposition toward
Vacancy
And the relegation of person
To the ownership of the itinerant
To the ownership of the dispenser that determines design.

There is no
I—she—he
No
Me—my—or mine
Only quantity
And the relevancy of pieces
At the time that the puzzle
Is aligned to confirm the presumption and assumption.

There is no need to know
Nothing to know
It moves to confirm
To confine itself to the affirmation of confirmation
So that they
Are free
To rub the head of the dying and the dead
In celebration of their insight.

Flux
Faces within faces
Faces upon faces
Without the complexity of identity
Without the confusion of consciousness
Or the need to be conscious
That this might not be as simple as
As simple as its allowed—as it required to be.

The red is essential
Rhythmic surges
Pulsations promising continuity
Promising the continuance of continuity
Irrespective
Of the passage of time
And the gentrification
Of the periodically human landscape.

The neck is essential
The pedestal and the pivot
The pillar of vulnerability
Should the illusion need to be terminated
The foundation
On which replacements can be made If
Too much time is taken
And history takes purchase and infects the moment.

The mouth is vaginal
Receptacle and deliverance of
Utterances
Raped—ravaged and reviled
Should the “ists” fail to convulse
Rapt in the afterglow
Of their urgent need to impose their hungers
Into gaping mouths before they forget to remain silent.

Flux
Freedom through depression and repression
The careful calculation of denied
Yet essential balances
Abuse
Use
Allowance
The careful writing of the fading promises of truce.

Artist: David Feingold

David Feingold was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1951.  Feingold works in the medium of digital art.  Much of his art is used in conjunction with his anti-stigma awareness campaigns to the lay public as well as professionals and academicians.

Feingold has a varied education and professional background, which along with his personal experience with bipolar disorder, influence much of his art: Bachelors in Art Education; Masters in Visual Design; Masters in Social Work; and a Doctorate in Disability Studies.

His work has been represented both nationally and internationally in both brick and mortar and online galleries. His ultimate purpose in creating “bipolar art” is to present the inner struggles of those with psychiatric disorders and through understanding and acceptance, reduce the stigma and prejudice associated with all mental illness.

Feingold worked for 15 years as a visual designer and 15 years as a school social worker, when he had to take early retirement, due to advancing cognitive impairments stemming from a closed head injury from a hit-and-run accident in his teens. The closed head injury was the genesis of Feingold’s temporal lobe epilepsy and bipolar disorder. He resides in rural Michigan in a simple, one room dwelling, complete with a wood burning stove and a pond in the back yard. Feingold states that his home provides a perfect environment in which to produce his artwork as well as a harmonious balance and stability in light of the unpredictable challenges associated with his diagnoses of bipolar and seizure disorders.

This is Feingold’s second art collaboration. His first collaboration was with a musician/composer, whose music was informed by his own seizure activity as well as Feingold’s art imagery.

Website: www.feinart.me

Artist: Michael Quaintance

How long has “depression” been a central part of your life experience? Before answering, I need to respond to the assumptions and preconceptions that haven’t be voiced, but have proven to be inherent in this kind of question.   “Depression” (for me) is a region of sight and insight that exists outside of the constraints of belonging and the constructs of being used to set the terms and conditions of normalcy.  I also need to add that I use the term “depression” for the sake of convenience, so that you and I can begin our conversation from a shared point, even though our interpretations will differ at the outset.

So, what is depression… for you? Depression is not—depression does not—depression will not.  Is, does and will, belong to form, formality and functionality; the need to assert, discern and determine.  What you call depression, I call imposition and the limitation of the unique by mandates of compliance that have little to no tolerance for difference, or that which cannot/will not be defined.

My work, my writing is motivated by this unfinished—recently began—lifelong discussion. Feingold’s images act as doorways, as pathways to those avenues of thought and feeling that have been sequestered in the corners of my efforts to belong and be seen… as. The gift of isolation and aloneness over the past few years, has opened doorways and pathways that I’ve only begun to discover; and in word, design.

Ex-Dancer—Actor, Bachelors in Philosophy and Performing Arts, Masters in Education, presently completing a Doctorate in Disability Studies

Blog: hotsauceanddill.blogspot.com

by Christopher Hutchinson

http://www.teresaperez.com.br/blog/2016/02/26/art-basel-2016-maior-feira-de-arte-do-mundo/

Art Basel in America is a 4 days art fair that is being held from 01 December 2016, Thursday to 04 December 2016, Sunday. This art fair is being organized by M. C. H. Swiss Exhibition (Basel) Limited. The venue of this event is Miami Beach Convention Center (MBCC) which is situated in Miami Beach, Florida, United States of America. Art Basel in America 2016 will showcase a wide range of products and services related to art and collectibles sectors from the leading exhibitors, for example, premier paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, prints, photography, film, video, and digital art. Over 250 exhibitors are expected at this event to showcase their products and services. Over 70,000 visitors are expected at this art fair. Visitor profile of this event includes collectors, artists, dealers, curators, critics and art enthusiasts. The recurrence of Art Basel in America is annual. The first year of this art fair is 2002. https://tradeshowz.com/art-basel-miami-beach

Reaffirmation

http://www.modus-gallery.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/CONTEXT-logo-2016-dates-Miami.jpg

It’s always good to go to Art Basel Miami. The first time one goes as an artist one is simply overwhelmed with the quantity and quality of the works only experienced before in books. The first year your feet hurt from actually trying to see everything. You come in contact with real artworks that had a profound influence on you and are curious to see if they still have the same impact.

The art fan comes out and you are transported back to when you were purely in love with every aspect of being an artist. While you are having these spiritual encounters, thousands of people are mobbing through these spaces and they are just as zealous as you to reaffirm and acquire the impact of these art works. And while your favorite pieces are bringing back that nostalgia, two feet away is a gaudy monstrosity that has a completely jarring effect that breaks nostalgia–until two seconds later when you fall again for another piece.

Confirmation

http://www.modus-gallery.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/CONTEXT-logo-2016-dates-Miami.jpg

You could spend everyday for a week just at the main Art Basel convention center. But there is literally tons more art to see. At the satellite fairs like SCOPE, CONTEXT, ART MIAMI etc.

http://www.modus-gallery.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/CONTEXT-logo-2016-dates-Miami.jpg

These Satellite fairs are where you actually begin to see your and your peers’ work and in whose galleries. These fairs also include many of the same works at the main Basel but, for example, may contain the drawings and paintings of Richard Serra versus an actual full-scale sculpture. There is a sense of confirmation that you are on the right path. You also see the total and complete embrace of technology and art. There is a lot of 3d printed work, super-slick experimental materials, and florescent colors. This also confirms that you don’t need any of that either.

Wynwood Walls

http://www.themiamiartscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Wynwood-Walls-1.jpg

The Wynwood Walls was conceived by the renowned community revitalizor and placemaker Tony Goldman in 2009. He was looking for something big to transform the warehouse district of Wynwood, and he arrived at a simple idea: “Wynwood’s large stock of warehouse buildings, all with no windows, would be my giant canvases to bring to them the greatest street art ever seen in one place.” Starting with the 25th–26th Street complex of six separate buildings, his goal was to create a center where people could gravitate to and explore, and to develop the area’s pedestrian potential.

The Wynwood Walls became a major art statement with Tony’s commitment to graffiti and street art, a genre that he believes is under appreciated [sic] and not respected historically. He wanted to give the movement more attention and more respect: “By presenting it in a way that has not been done before, I was able to expose the public to something they had only seen peripherally.” Murals by renowned street artists have covered the walls of the Wynwood Walls complex since 2009, and to create more canvases and bring more artists to the project, Tony opened the Wynwood Doors in 2010 with 176 feet of roll-up storefront gates. The painted exteriors and interiors of the doors reveal a portrait gallery. Murals have also been commissioned for Outside the Walls through 2011, in key locations outside the park itself. http://wynwoodmiami.com/listing_details.php?id=82

The Wynwood Walls have changed in 2016. A couple years ago it was bouncing with grimy street/graffiti artists and the walls stayed open all night. This year there is evidence that commercialism has spread. The scene is much more conservative than years past. While you can still find graffiti artists still there doing work, it was more curated, as opposed to other years.

The Wynwood basel is on the other side, across the water from South beach. There is a definite push going all the way to little Haiti, Miami.

Prizm Art Fair

WESLEY CLARK
My Big Black America
84” x 144” x 14”
salvaged and stained wood
2011
http://www.prizmartfair.com/prizm-program

Curated by Mikhaile Solomon

 Prizm Art Fair presents the work of international emerging artists with a select focus on solo presentations by artists from the Global African Diaspora. The theme for the fourth edition will explore the global impact of Africa’s cultural DNA.

Alexandra Smith, Alexis Peskine, Allison Janae Hamilton, Alonzo Davis, Amber Robles-Gordon, Ariston Jacks, Asser Saint Val, Cleveland Dean, Cosmo Whyte, Deborah Jack, Duhirwe, Ezra Wube, Felandus Thames, Francks Deceus, Ify Chiejina, Jamal Ince, James A Rush, Jayson Keeling, LaToya Hobbs, MahlOt Sansosa, Morel Doucet, Marvin Toure, Maya Amina, Musa Hixson,  Nadia Huggins, Nyugen Smith, Olalekan Jeyifous, Sharon Norwood, Shaunte Gates, Shawn Theodore, Sheena Rose, T. Eliott Mansa, Terry Boddie, Vickie Pierre, Wesley Clark, Wole Lagunju http://www.prizmartfair.com/2016-schedule-of-events

Little Haiti is where you find the Prizm Art Fair 2016. Prizm is where you have to go to see your global African and African-American contemporaries in the same space. This means one has to travel from South Beach across the water to Wynwood and a few miles more. This still illustrates the gap between the Global African diaspora and the Western art canon. African art is still in the basement of many museums. This fact is a sobering reminder.

It was worth traveling across the water, through Wynwood, and a few miles more to see a common visual aesthetic shared by many African diaspora countries working in the same vein. The work could have been presented better but was worth it. The William Cordova curated space was especially interesting.

The most worthwhile were the panel discussions that got a little rowdy with opposing views on the actual state of the black arts movement, and a generational gap or lack there of, in that movement.

Rubell Family Collection

Solange Pessoa https://rfc.museum/ha-solange-pessoa

High Anxiety: New Acquisitions
November 30, 2016 — August 25, 2017

High Anxiety: New Acquisitions presents selections of artworks from 32 artists acquired since 2014, many of whom explore polarizing social and political concerns through a broad spectrum of contemporary artistic practices. In gauging the output and energies of these artists we find creative currents that speak to our shared state of uncertainty, nervousness and pessimism. “Artists help us comprehend and grapple with the critical issues in our lives,” says Mera Rubell. https://rfc.museum/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/high-anxiety

The Rubell Family Collection consistently provides a challenging and pointed view every year. It’s a great space to cleanse the palette and reset after seeing so much art at Basel. The space and lighting are ideal to view the work. And the mob isn’t quite as pushy. Of all the artworks you remember in a year at Basel, the ones from RFC will be amongst them.

Basel is great to recharge your theory and practice. You get a chance to engage with your art inspirations as well as recognize what the current trends are. It’s a gathering of thousands of art minds. At Basel, art dialogue and methodology is the majority. Art lectures and talks are filled with genuine interest and responses. It is the equivalent of attending 50 museums and 20 artist talks in four days. You are able see trends from Denmark to Canada. That can be overwhelming so you learn to pace yourself the next year. Making the Basel pilgrimage is a mandatory.

Christopher Hutchinson is an accomplished Jamaican conceptual artist, professor and contributor to the art community as a writer, critic and founder of the nonprofit Smoke School of Art. He is a Professor of Art at Atlanta Metropolitan State College and has been featured as a lecturer including prestigious engagements at University of Alabama and the Auburn Avenue Research Library. For two decades, Chris has been a practicing artist. His works have been exhibited in internationally recognized institutions including City College New York (CUNY) and featured at the world’s leading international galleries such as Art Basel Miami. He has always had an innate passion for creating spaces where Africans and people of African descent contribute to an inclusive contemporary dialogue—ever evolving, not reflexive but pioneering. This requires challenging the rubric of the canon of art history, a systemic space of exclusion for the Other: women and non-Whites, and where necessary he rewrites it. He received his Master of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from Savannah College of Art & Design, Atlanta and his Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Alabama.

by David Feingold and Michael Quaintance

“Bruise” is the second in the collaboration series “Teeth is Tears,” created by artists David Feingold and Michael Quaintance. Michael writes poetry in response to David’s images. As Michael says in his bio, “Feingold’s images act as doorways, as pathways to those avenues of thought and feeling that have been sequestered in the corners of my efforts to belong and be seen… as.” Both artists’ works are informed by their lived experience of disability.

Bruise

I blend
Not because I fit
But because I’ve learned to hide
Effectively
Allowing only select orifices to seep and bleed
Select thoughts to register
On a face well hidden
Beneath a face well-rehearsed.

Versed in verse
It’s all a matter of cadence not content
How rather than what
When rather than why,
Maintained for audience
My absence of authenticity
Goes unnoticed
And I am given name, place and a seat
At the table of bones.

I have loved
An agent provoking myself
Waiting for the moment when the mask will slip
And the effluvia of my other self seeps out
Onto her—never our sheets,
While the stench of my incarceration
Softly enters her pores
suffocating, debilitating all of the dreams shared
when my role was believed and played
So effectively.

That time is gone
So many twists
So many turns
Breaking bones, stretching muscles beyond points
Of endurance,
It’s only the bleeding that oils the engine of my continuance
It’s only the bleeding that softens the impact of each step
Taken
In an effort to belong.

The question I ask myself is why
Do I
After all these years
Bother,
Knowing that I seep when I sleep
That my voice is vacant
That the blindness of my left eye will one day
Be overtaken by the insight of my right,
Why do I
Play in a field of children afraid of monsters
When I am and have always been
The monster they and I were taught to fear?

Comfortable in dark rooms
Caressed by the arms and eyes of shadow
I am
Despite the absence of a name
Someone,
Distressed and bruised
A decayed semblance of the first step taken
I am story and truth
Memory
Without the need
Beyond the mandate
To lie to myself for the sake of everyone
Anyone
Else.

Home
I have no need for lock or key
As no one wants
To come here
My laughter—my tears
A commentary that no one wants to hear.

So why then do I bother
To be, simply not to be
To be seen, knowing that I am never seen
To exit
When I know that every entrance returns me
Here?

Artist: David Feingold

David Feingold was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1951.  Feingold works in the medium of digital art.  Much of his art is used in conjunction with his anti-stigma awareness campaigns to the lay public as well as professionals and academicians.

Feingold has a varied education and professional background, which along with his personal experience with bipolar disorder, influence much of his art: Bachelors in Art Education; Masters in Visual Design; Masters in Social Work; and a Doctorate in Disability Studies.

His work has been represented both nationally and internationally in both brick and mortar and online galleries. His ultimate purpose in creating “bipolar art” is to present the inner struggles of those with psychiatric disorders and through understanding and acceptance, reduce the stigma and prejudice associated with all mental illness.

Feingold worked for 15 years as a visual designer and 15 years as a school social worker, when he had to take early retirement, due to advancing cognitive impairments stemming from a closed head injury from a hit-and-run accident in his teens. The closed head injury was the genesis of Feingold’s temporal lobe epilepsy and bipolar disorder. He resides in rural Michigan in a simple, one room dwelling, complete with a wood burning stove and a pond in the back yard. Feingold states that his home provides a perfect environment in which to produce his artwork as well as a harmonious balance and stability in light of the unpredictable challenges associated with his diagnoses of bipolar and seizure disorders.

This is Feingold’s second art collaboration. His first collaboration was with a musician/composer, whose music was informed by his own seizure activity as well as Feingold’s art imagery.

Website: www.feinart.me

Artist: Michael Quaintance

How long has “depression” been a central part of your life experience? Before answering, I need to respond to the assumptions and preconceptions that haven’t be voiced, but have proven to be inherent in this kind of question.   “Depression” (for me) is a region of sight and insight that exists outside of the constraints of belonging and the constructs of being used to set the terms and conditions of normalcy.  I also need to add that I use the term “depression” for the sake of convenience, so that you and I can begin our conversation from a shared point, even though our interpretations will differ at the outset.

So, what is depression… for you? Depression is not—depression does not—depression will not.  Is, does and will, belong to form, formality and functionality; the need to assert, discern and determine.  What you call depression, I call imposition and the limitation of the unique by mandates of compliance that have little to no tolerance for difference, or that which cannot/will not be defined.

My work, my writing is motivated by this unfinished—recently began—lifelong discussion. Feingold’s images act as doorways, as pathways to those avenues of thought and feeling that have been sequestered in the corners of my efforts to belong and be seen… as. The gift of isolation and aloneness over the past few years, has opened doorways and pathways that I’ve only begun to discover; and in word, design.

Ex-Dancer—Actor, Bachelors in Philosophy and Performing Arts, Masters in Education, presently completing a Doctorate in Disability Studies

Blog: hotsauceanddill.blogspot.com

by David Feingold and Michael Quaintance

“Teeth is Tears” is a collaboration series between artists David Feingold and Michael Quaintance. Michael writes poetry in response to David’s images. As Michael says in his bio, “Feingold’s images act as doorways, as pathways to those avenues of thought and feeling that have been sequestered in the corners of my efforts to belong and be seen… as.” Both artists’ works are informed by their lived experience of disability. This is the first in a series of their collaborations to appear on Creative Thresholds.

David Feingold, Seeing the Light

Teeth is Tears

The first thing you learns
Before the silence and the shame
Is the high cost of suffering and the impudence of pain
That god’s gone a-callin’
and the devil’s home to stay
That the hurt gon’ hurt forever
But you bes’ laugh hard today.

The second thing you learns
Is you a ditch for irrigation
A furrow in the fields
So all the blood run fresh and free,
Wait, with yo’ legs spread
For the plow to split you open
Pray the Lord gon keep his promise
That you be free, one day, to flee.

My daddy was a teeth man
My granddaddy too
They smiled for Mr. Charlie’s
Number one and number two,
They tilted they heads backward
While they smiled and smiled and smiled
So they tears fell back behind they thoughts
And their rage got washed to ground.

My daddy was a teeth man
My mamma cried in pain
She told him it was sorrow
But he knew that it was shame,
That everythang he loved he’d lose
Get stripped and passed away
If they saw the fire in his eyes
If the laughter turned to rage.

My daddy died a toothless man
My granddaddy did too
He never brushed the stains away
Kept proof of their abuse,
He ate the rot
Day after day, felt the grit rough on his tongue
He kept his breath rank and stale
So they breathed in what they’d done.

The first thing you learn
Before the silence and the shame
Is the high cost of suffering and the impudence of pain,
So, our niggers, keep on smiling
Niggers new and niggers old
All our bent and limp and cracked and gimped
Made to stand out in the cold.

The second thing you learn
Is those yellowed teeth, are tears
Lines of carefully coded history
Passed down through generations
And ignored
year after year.

Artist: David Feingold

David Feingold was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1951.  Feingold works in the medium of digital art.  Much of his art is used in conjunction with his anti-stigma awareness campaigns to the lay public as well as professionals and academicians.

Feingold has a varied education and professional background, which along with his personal experience with bipolar disorder, influence much of his art: Bachelors in Art Education; Masters in Visual Design; Masters in Social Work; and a Doctorate in Disability Studies.

His work has been represented both nationally and internationally in both brick and mortar and online galleries. His ultimate purpose in creating “bipolar art” is to present the inner struggles of those with psychiatric disorders and through understanding and acceptance, reduce the stigma and prejudice associated with all mental illness.

Feingold worked for 15 years as a visual designer and 15 years as a school social worker, when he had to take early retirement, due to advancing cognitive impairments stemming from a closed head injury from a hit-and-run accident in his teens. The closed head injury was the genesis of Feingold’s temporal lobe epilepsy and bipolar disorder. He resides in rural Michigan in a simple, one room dwelling, complete with a wood burning stove and a pond in the back yard. Feingold states that his home provides a perfect environment in which to produce his artwork as well as a harmonious balance and stability in light of the unpredictable challenges associated with his diagnoses of bipolar and seizure disorders.

This is Feingold’s second art collaboration. His first collaboration was with a musician/composer, whose music was informed by his own seizure activity as well as Feingold’s art imagery.

Website: www.feinart.me

Artist: Michael Quaintance

How long has “depression” been a central part of your life experience? Before answering, I need to respond to the assumptions and preconceptions that haven’t be voiced, but have proven to be inherent in this kind of question.   “Depression” (for me) is a region of sight and insight that exists outside of the constraints of belonging and the constructs of being used to set the terms and conditions of normalcy.  I also need to add that I use the term “depression” for the sake of convenience, so that you and I can begin our conversation from a shared point, even though our interpretations will differ at the outset.

So, what is depression… for you? Depression is not—depression does not—depression will not.  Is, does and will, belong to form, formality and functionality; the need to assert, discern and determine.  What you call depression, I call imposition and the limitation of the unique by mandates of compliance that have little to no tolerance for difference, or that which cannot/will not be defined.

My work, my writing is motivated by this unfinished—recently began—lifelong discussion. Feingold’s images act as doorways, as pathways to those avenues of thought and feeling that have been sequestered in the corners of my efforts to belong and be seen… as. The gift of isolation and aloneness over the past few years, has opened doorways and pathways that I’ve only begun to discover; and in word, design.

Ex-Dancer—Actor, Bachelors in Philosophy and Performing Arts, Masters in Education, presently completing a Doctorate in Disability Studies

Blog: hotsauceanddill.blogspot.com

by Christopher Hutchinson

Note 8- the foundations are the foundations

http://drawpj.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/unit-2-icon-400-v2.jpg

Many students start off with a foundation course with the wrong intentions, perfection being one of them. This idea of being a perfectionist actually slows the learning process and sometimes renders that foundation course useless. The “perfectionist” student is having a philosophical debate about something that actually has linear steps to grow in art pedagogy. The steps of the foundation course cannot be skipped without proper understanding of the previous lesson.

The foundations are repetitive exercises to build the individual artist’s tool bag. Questioning these foundation steps confuses the “perfectionist” student, not the professor. The professor already knows how to accomplish these steps. The foundations are the foundations. These courses are arranged to crescendo based on the previous lessons learned. Foundation courses work much like learning your addition and subtraction math facts. Imagine trying to learn addition and they constantly challenge the previous fact learned. That is the difficulty with challenging the foundation classes, especially when there are so many facts to be learned before a true challenge to the art-making practice can be articulated. In the foundation courses you get the tips and tricks to make the steps easier and gain actual repeatable knowledge that becomes second nature.

http://boymamateachermama.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/boy-mama-teacher-mama-addition-facts2.png

Many of these “perfectionist” students may grasp one lesson and then have a hard time getting the next lesson. The classes crescendo. The stopping and starting, coming late, setup time, and flow of the class have a lot to do with grasping all the facts necessary to move on effectively. These students complete the course and move on to another art class only to run into the same “art facts” skipped in the previous course. These students are choosing to accept only the lessons they feel suit them. This then breeds an incomplete artist with limited experience and low-confidence to attempt things they feel to be too difficult. This person ends up not challenging anything, becomes super sensitive during critique, and ends up quitting or changing majors. Confidence begins with knowing as many foundation art facts as possible. Develop the patience and drive to achieve and exceed every lesson—that is the “perfectionist” that is a joy to teach.

Note 9-The Apprentice

apprentice

[uh–pren-tis]

noun

1.a person who works for another in order to learn a trade: an apprentice to a plumber.
2.History/Historical. a person legally bound through indenture to amaster craftsman in order to learn a trade.
3.a learner; novice; tyro.
4.U.S. Navy. an enlisted person receiving specialized training.
5.a jockey with less than one year’s experience who has won fewer than40 races.verb (used with object), apprenticed, apprenticing.
6.to bind to or place with an employer, master craftsman, or the like, forinstruction in a trade.verb (used without object), apprenticed, apprenticing.
7.to serve as an apprentice: He apprenticed for 14 years under a master silversmith.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/apprentice

Today’s lack of work ethic, required of an apprentice, may derive from the success of postmodern ideals. Ideals that advocate the erasure of craft and praise celebrity rather than grueling art practice. This generation of students wants to completely skip the foundation process and go directly to postmodern conceptual practice.  A real artist would enjoy every bit of every mundane exercise presented in foundation courses.  Only in going through and mastering those exercises will the artist begin to develop a vocabulary that could articulate a postmodern discussion. Postmodernism and conceptual art are only two movements in the history of art already dated.

Once again one may want to have a discussion on postmodernism and conceptual practice but run into the same issues that were not mastered in their foundation.  If students do not achieve smooth transitions in their compositions of still lifes, their postmodern and conceptual ideas will certainly be rough as well.  An artist has to have had exhausted the foundations to begin their art theory practice.  One has to learn multiplication and division before being ready to solve for x or do calculus.  One has to practice communicating successfully before achieving the subtlety of irony.

Christopher Hutchinson is an accomplished Jamaican conceptual artist, professor and contributor to the art community as a writer, critic and founder of the nonprofit Smoke School of Art. He is a Professor of Art at Atlanta Metropolitan State College and has been featured as a lecturer including prestigious engagements at University of Alabama and the Auburn Avenue Research Library. For two decades, Chris has been a practicing artist. His works have been exhibited in internationally recognized institutions including City College New York (CUNY) and featured at the world’s leading international galleries such as Art Basel Miami. He has always had an innate passion for creating spaces where Africans and people of African descent contribute to an inclusive contemporary dialogue—ever evolving, not reflexive but pioneering. This requires challenging the rubric of the canon of art history, a systemic space of exclusion for the Other: women and non-Whites, and where necessary he rewrites it. He received his Master of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from Savannah College of Art & Design, Atlanta and his Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Alabama.

by K.D. Rose

K.D. would like to thank the incredible artist George RedHawk (DarkAngel0ne on social media) for permission to combine her words with his art.

What Belongs to You

Ethereal

Rides in the car
loosening in the still light,
running like a deer through God’s house.
Skywalker.
Mindbender.
A leap into the glimmering.
Traveler.
One with something like air and water but neither.
Feels like music.

Futures

He stands in the doorway
ecstatic in the book of the sun,
thinks he bought me,
so I offer him fare trade−
the luxury of commerce
on a wet night of uncertain weather.
We unbutton the horizon.

The Tall in the Small

You will never be a stone in the sky.

With both hands dancing,
you will nurse wild forests,
seek matter uneven,
holy antennas reaching,
footlights for the blind,
living candlelit lives
while ghosts rail with bad advice.

You are the naked light.

K. D. Rose is a poet and author who has books published in multiple genres. Her newest release is The Brevity of Twit. K. D.’s poetry has been published in Candlelit Journal, the Voices Project, and showcased in the Tophat Raven Art and Literary Magazine. Her poetry has also been accepted for publication in The Stray Branch Fall/Winter 2016 issue. K. D.’s book, Inside Sorrow, won the Readers Favorite 2013 International Silver Medal for Poetry.

by William Michaelian

Am I truly limited by my senses, or are they, too, imagined? Can I prove my own existence? Is such proof desirable, or even necessary? What of my childhood, and everything else I am in the habit of believing I remember? Is memory a thing of the present? Is it a story told, and then countless times retold, changing and continuing of its own volition and accord? Drawing and writing; waking and dreaming; fiction and reality; life and death — I simply feel no need to know where, or if, one ends and the other begins. Does that make me strange? And yet what is strangeness, but the very delight of a beautiful, unaccountable world, ever the more vivid once we have learned to let it go?

Going Home

By firmly gripping a pencil in grade school and beyond, I developed a callous on the middle finger of my right hand. It’s still there, to the left and just below the nail, despite the fact that I’ve been typing almost exclusively for decades.

When I was small, my father found a clump of white asparagus growing in the vineyard. He dug it out and planted it by our house well. It fed us faithfully each spring.

I remember my father
walking on the hard dirt avenue
at the end of the vineyard
rows behind our
house,

the cuffs turned up
on his jeans, the dust and sticks
and weeds, his impatient
stride, having to run
to stay beside
him

that hot July when I was four
and he was thirty-seven,

but I don’t recall our destination,
or what he did when we
arrived, what I said,

or his reply.

Once, on a hot summer evening, I aimed a BB gun at our old wooden basketball goal and fired. The shot bounced back and hit me in the forehead. I fished it out of the dust and put it in my pocket. I don’t remember what I did after that.

When I was about ten, I took nine snails from the irrigation ditch that ran alongside the east end of our farm and put them in the aquarium on top of my chest of drawers. A few weeks later, the aquarium was teeming with snails.

My first car was a bicycle. My first bicycle was a scooter. My first scooter was a tricycle. My first bus ride was in a dusty red wagon.

One night, my mother’s Aunt Mildred took out her teeth and showed them to me.

In the kitchen during a family get-together, with my mother looking on, I ate a piece of uncooked marinated lamb intended for shish kebab. It tasted good and I didn’t feel ill at all, but I never did it again.

We grew all of our tomatoes back then, and bought all of our onions and parsley.

Same as now, there were stars in those days that had no need of names.

If I were a lizard on a woodpile, I would still be able to write, but I would do it differently.

If I were a pumpkin on a vine, I would want to face east so I could watch the sun rise.

If I were a faithful old hound, my name would be Bill.

Late one night, driving home with some friends from the mountains, I pulled off the road, stopped the car, and told everyone to get out and look at the stars. They did, in amazed silence. I wonder if they remember that now.

I still feel thrilled when I find a marble.

Back in his heyday, Willie Mays lived near my cousin’s house in San Francisco. We rang his doorbell. No one answered.

My father used to chase them when he was a kid, but I myself have never seen a roadrunner.

The first thing I smoked was a nickel cigar.

To this day, I feel funny referring to myself as a man. A man was always someone older, someone responsible. My father and grandfather were men. I am still a boy.

I cannot blow my nose using my right hand. It has to be the left.

I always tie my left shoe first.

I kick with my left foot.

The first poem I remember reading is “O Captain! My Captain!”

When I first started piano lessons, I used to sing with every note. The teacher told my mother I had perfect pitch.

There are some things I will never write about. That, too, is how you will know me.

William Michaelian is an American writer, artist, and poet. His most recent book is the Tenth Anniversary Authorized Print Edition of his first novel, A Listening Thing. He lives in Salem, Oregon.

Website: http://www.william-michaelian.com

On December 21, 2015–Winter Solstice, the day with the longest night of the year–a dear friend and an extraordinary human being said goodbye to life on earth. His name is Walt Pascoe and many of you know of his very human, honest, luminescent, and soaring artwork–artwork that matches his spirit completely. Many of you also knew the man himself–and, if so, feel the loss keenly.

Walt wrote an essay, accompanied by artwork, for Creative Thresholds three years ago–it ran December 21, 2012 (this is uncanny, perhaps fitting)–about his struggle with colon cancer. A searing, poignant, and brutally honest account of his experience. I’m choosing to run it again in honor of this amazing human being and friend.

We miss you, Walt.

Melissa
Curator/editor

Savage Uncertainties On The Road Home

by Walt Pascoe

And but so yeah.

Having recovered nicely from the insult of surgery to resect 10 inches of my large intestine, I was more or less happily bobbing back up to the surface of my murky little emotional pond. It had been disappointing to learn that cancer cells were already frolicking around my lymph system like unruly children, and that the tender wisdom of western medical modalities dictated a course of prophylactic chemo. But after a brief time for contemplation and acceptance I’d come to terms with “stage 3” and prepared myself accordingly. There was the relatively minor surgery to insert a semi-permanent, sub-cutaneous port in my chest for easy access to a major artery, and the inevitable institutional waltz w/ the doctors office and insurance company to pre-approve this gold-plated poisoning. And finally a couple more visits to the various scan-masters for more complete head to thigh reconnoitering of my tender corpus, in order to be doubly sure there were no other cancerous redoubts hidden under a rock somewhere. All this transpired in a relatively compressed time-frame, the doctors and staff proceeding w/ an admirable, if not entirely reassuring, sense of professional urgency. And so it came to pass that my oncologist only received the latest reports the night before I showed up to begin chemo infusions.

The six-month course of chemo for my particular cancer goes by the vaguely militaristic sounding acronym FOLFOX. Essentially it involves kicking back in the coolest recliner you’ve ever seen while various anti-nausea meds and the main chemical arsenal are deployed sequentially for a few hours. (What is it with all the battle metaphors?) One of the meds is more effective if administered in small bursts over 46 hours, so before you’re allowed to leave a pump is hooked up to your port and you wear this home. Its a robust little programmable squirt machine that looks more or less like the FedEx guys’ scanner, and you get to wear it on a belt around your waist or over your shoulder. So much for any shred of sartorial hipness I might have been clinging to in the waning years of middle age semi-decrepitude. On the bright side, the pump makes a rhythmic clicking sound which, while lying on the bed next to me at night, is not without a certain comforting intimacy…

“Incantations on the Road Home” 48”x64” Graphite on gessoed panel

Wait… what?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Turns out there was in fact a further metastasis. Stage 4. Another decent sized tumor wrapped around a bronchial tube near the entry point into my left lung, snuggly nestled next to my heart; a weirdly poetic location given the stressful mid-life transitions I’d been enduring of late, but one that rendered it inoperable. So a second biotherapy (a monoclonal antibody called Avastin) was added to the FOLFOX chemo regimen, all to be administered over a 6 month period…

“Raven Gets In” 48”x60” Oil on canvas

“I always put lime on the people I kill. Wait… are you calling 911?” ~ Drunk guy in a Mexican restaurant, as related by my friend Melissa Johnston.

And so it seems that cancer has created the mother of all liminal spaces in my life. And it is from this strangely pregnant territory that I peer out into the… I want to say abyss… but like so many words now it seems inadequate, overused, and worked to within an inch of its word-ly life by the incessant hype culture hum we wallow in. The title of some crappy movie, complete with cross-licensed plastic action figures free w/ your next Happy Meal. And seriously, how many of us ever reach beyond the tremulous shadow of the concept and endeavors to actually process this deep down inside our whirring, buzzing lizard-brains? It crouches at the center of your chest like a cold rock, pulling you down through the turbid water more effectively than the finest cement shoes. Who the heck would want to go there voluntarily? Who…

“Fatal Shore” 48”x64” Acrylic on canvas

Blaise Pascal wrote in “Pensées,” “We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.”

It’s amazing how emotions flow just like weather.

I can go along doing what I think of as “well”: feeling optimistic, comfortable being alone, celebrating the liminal, accepting the transitory nature of things, handling the chemo, sensing health and wholeness on a walk in Whites Woods, meditating, reading, feeling a measured enthusiasm for the future w/o treating the present like just something to be got through, the master of silver linings, counting my blessings, deeply grateful for the love and support of my friends and family, acquaintances at the Post Office saying “hey, you look great”, relieved by the fact that I haven’t yet assumed the grayish-blue pallor of the wasting.

And then there will be this slow creeping intimation of unease, like a little darkening on the horizon. Just a few clouds on an otherwise sunny day…

Stillness and solitude in White’s Woods, Litchfield

Willem DeKooning referred to himself as a “slipping glimpser”.

As the storm gathers and starts to darken my interior landscape I can feel the slipping; the accumulation of tension in my heart and body. Fear, longing, and worry… a somatic ache that fluidly transmutes into a profound and painful spiritual dread if not checked quickly by some distraction. This is where it gets tricky being alone. It is so much easier to distract yourself from it when you are with other people. Just ignore and bury it in the cosmopolitan joy of human culture and friendship. Or loose yourself engineering a life.

“[…] almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of ‘psst’ that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer. ”
~ David Foster Wallace in “Infinite Jest”.

I guess this terror has always been present, and is for every human being. We do with it what we will. Tune it out. Turn it into art or literature. Transmogrify the brutal fact of our inevitable decay into infinite varieties of work and the illusion of progress. Am I thinking too much?! This is not always true. There are times when laughter and joy come in solitude and I can revel in it. But the laughter is hardened and forced when you are filled w/ grief at the prospect of loosing all you love… threatened in such an immediate, tangible way… I’m attached to my attachments! A lousy Buddhist if ever there was one! It’s amazing how I can go along feeling buoyant about the possibility of remission… and oh the delirious possibility of “durable remission”, held out there like the most seductive of outcomes. And then just tank for awhile… fall into the dark… gazing up into a night sky perversely ornamented with PET scan constellations of cancerous cells awash in radioactively tagged glucose, collaged all over my chest and neck, blinking out an inscrutable code… exhausted from the grasping after some more universal, ever-present , capital “L” Love. God. Some hopeful bulwark against the immensity of the void surrounding my fearful and trembling self. A glimpse perhaps…

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

~ Wendell Berry ~

(Collected Poems)

And so it goes. Alone with the Alone. It is a choice. A pseudo-monastic exile, punctuated by genuinely caring and helpful visits from my loved ones and the logistics of the chemo rhythm. Simone Weil said “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”…

“Exile Study No.4 ~ Perdita” ink and graphite on paper, 22″x 30″

And what exactly is it that I am attending to now?

Seeking Now through mindful solitude. That word, though: seeking! Seeking itself one of the most seductive of attachments. After the briefest foray into the silence, I flee back into the endless loop of intellectual and aesthetic dialogue w/ the dead. With those I’ve chosen to valorize as artistic mentors for 30 years: David Smith and Charles Olson. And into the radiating web of endlessly fascinating threads that fan out from their volcanic productions. Back into yet another painting or drawing, searching searching searching, always searching… wading through a rich but terrifying uncertainty…

“The Secret Life of Wind” 48”x64” graphite on gessoed panel

“Sometimes when I start a sculpture, I begin with only a realized part, the rest is travel to be unfolded much in the order of a dream. The conflict for realization is what makes art not its certainty, nor its technique or material.”
–David Smith

In Alex Stein and Yahia Lababidi’s wonderful conversation, “The Artist as Mystic”, Yahia quotes Heidegger: “Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.” This resonates now. Not just a little! The words vibrate in my chest as if I were standing alongside a huge, beautifully wrought bell being rung. Small pieces of the rock crouching there begin to fall…

“The Chain of Memory is Resurrection I” 30”x40” graphite and acrylic on bristol board

Writer and artist: Walt Pascoe

Please check out more of Walt’s art at http://www.waltpascoe.com/.

by Carla Aaron-Lopez

Carla writes about the experience of being an emerging artist. Her previous posts are: Notes from kingCARLA, Notes from kingCARLA 2, Notes from kingCARLA 3.

Kevin Bongang, Mural in Edgewood neighborhood, Atlanta

“Kevin just snapped,” said Corey. And he did.

One year, his drawings looked a certain way and the next year they were on another level. They took on their own whimsical nature unlike the controlled squiggles that Kevin was known for drawing. His color palette no longer looked like someone studying color but of a man that had created his own world and the colors informed the mood of the characters that inhabited this make-believe space. I was blown away by someone that I felt had potential but wasn’t sure where he was going with all that. Half of the time I don’t even know where I’m going.

I had this conversation about Kevin with Corey, an artist friend of mine, a few years ago before I left Atlanta. Corey is another person that also snapped when it came to his art. It is his series of female portraits that are just striking. At the time, I didn’t really understand the ramifications of Corey’s statement about Kevin or what it meant to truly snap artistically. Years later on a spontaneous trip back to Atlanta, I saw one of Kevin’s newest public art murals and began to understand the power of snapping as an artist.

Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon.jpg

As much as I’ve studied art, there is a legit moment when the artist snaps. The work changes and evolves to an actual visual statement versus a singular creative object. Hobbyists make creative objects. Artists make visual statements that force viewers to think and see the world differently . As cliched as it is to use Picasso as an example, he snapped the day he walked into a museum, saw some African masks and changed the direction of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. That same painting changed the entire direction and nature of modern art in the late 20th century. Picasso makes art history and we all know the rest of the story from there.

What went through his head the moment he saw those masks? We can speculate but we weren’t there nor can we go back in time to have a Being John Malkovich moment and crawl into his mind to see what he really thought.

We just know that it was at that moment, he snapped.

Honestly, I’m waiting for my moment to snap. I’m in awe and envy of my friends that have had their moment. I want to evolve but I have let fear get in the way. Fear of not making something mind-numbingly great. Fear of not hitting the black intellectual nail on the head. Fear of getting fired for making super controversial feminist (yes, I’ve finally admitted that I am a feminist) work because I’m a middle school art teacher and the list goes on. It’s these types of fears that keep me from progressing the way I would like to as an artist and I don’t know when or how I’m going to get rid of them. I’m on the side of my proverbial mountaintop but scared to continue.

Eventually, I’m going to snap too. Or just be stuck in waiting until I quit making art.

I look up to many artists that have all had that moment somewhere in their career. Sadly, majority of them are men due to the art world’s lack of compassion for all women artists. Even more sadly is that if those same women artists have never had children and it wasn’t because of a biological reason (see Frida Kahlo), I lack total respect for them. My life doesn’t align with theirs. They will never understand the beauty and harsh reality of motherhood. They will never understand the intense paranoia of doing something that could possibly take food off your table and clothes off your child’s back. Face the facts, I live in the South and Southerners don’t do controversy very well. That’s a reality for me while others can get away with it. I stand in the wings of life’s grand stage secretly applauding their controversial actions.

I’ve lacked in producing any work this past year because I’ve finally achieved the goal of getting my career as an educator and financial life together. Not only have I been concerned with making my art but seriously, how was I going to pay for this? How were supplies going to get into my home? These priorities force me to think and see art differently. Encounter new ways of executing old ideas. Boldly steal concepts from my favorite artists and force them into my fold. I figured out a long time ago that if I wanted to make the bold, controversial art, I needed for it to be large, attention-getting and everything that I feel I cannot be in public.

I want the work to be disgusting and unladylike. I want to do it under a pen name of a white man and totally fuck with the perception of gender and power because why not? White men rule the art world. I want the work to have everything that you hate in it. Pictures of outer space and shit. Big, fat ass strippers because why not? Throw in little nods to slavery and the black experience here and there because black and white people love that shit.

Maybe I have snapped and I don’t know it yet.

Maybe I’m fantasizing again.

Or maybe I’m bored and unchallenged because I am a middle school art teacher who spends nothing but time sharpening my foundational sword.

There’s only so much I can do right now in this moment.

–    Ms. Lopez

Artist: Carla Aaron-Lopez

Instagram: @iamkingcarla

Twitter: @teachkingcarla

by Meredith Blankinship

Spokane & Friends

From the exercise bike on the 2^nd story
of the glass-walled gym I watch the action
at the Kum & Go across the street
I read nutritional information for
a Burger King fish fillet I chew
mindfully in the turnpike truck stop
just outside of Pittsburgh

Slomming the page with bursts
of terror, epileptic Xmas tree
gums my sleep. Don’t worry baby
visiting Spokane tonight
just saving for necessity

This is me before and after 10 cups
hung alone in the swing of middle
ground squinting into the sun. My limits
worse over time. Secrete and slip and when
I breathe in it is kerosene. After
I clawed my skin off they said
keep digging until you hit bone
Now I piss away the light

A woman is like two miniature collies
out for a walk, an inoffensive place where
anyone may lay down. Maybe some of us
don’t have to do horrible things
in order to be better people but I did
and that’s the best I’ve got

Grim Girls

Begin with the scribbled-out
Begin with a fever
Somebody’s dad touching you behind
the concession stand
and you

Say bad of ghosts
that don’t know your names
Walking down to the river, at the river
you never want to go back
Tie a shoelace
a bit of calico a plastic bag
to a branch close to the water
to trail the surface of the water

And then you go back
but this time pearl-handled funnel
above is ready
to clip what’s happening to you
The impulse hammering

where grim girls hold
their severed tongues
Magpies pick politely
at traffic’s orange, they know
the difference between
each kind of apologia

You proceed down the hole too small
for your cabbage-leafed hands
Your weeping pink eyes
sopping disease, inclination
to disintegrate into the floor, pool
you’ve ground yourself into

Tell the truth
Barricade the door
No face beyond the hair threshed
No room now for niceties:
nightgown, doily, bloodied linen
In a voice that laughs
at everything you
get more under-
belly than you’d think

Dawn at the First Disruption of Base Camp

The cat’s mournful yawp
at my hush-the-brain
at my restless liver
the hole in the ocean you find
when you break the knife
from handle, become once-human,
half-cocked

when the leaves fall off
the trees
and onto snowy ground
you see the branches filled
with crows

the monster’s legs
tattooed astride her pubis
then life got boring
the ice repose
of a vine-covered day

the timbre of a way
to remember
that each picture is another
thing I’ll never see

like what’s swimming
in the lake
in the abandoned mall
in Bangkok

DeadDead

because the dead
corrupt the living
answer without names
each sun

unbearable vertiginous neck
tendons clamping into
finely scraped hollows

tooth sharps, lick clean
the stethoscope that is
hungry, as all creeping
things hunger and grin

with or without naming names
the dead contaminate
your face miming
in the voice of your loved
ones from very far away

who may speak to the dead?
whose living days
reek with interference
calling back what belongs in
cedars in the bulge
of blackberry root
palpate what is left behind
for containment
the blue tarp flapping
in the yard

you say you
do not know me but I
am here for good

Precautionary Measures

Morning grins in the face
of the drunk dude who tries to break
the shatterproof glass of the front
door with his sternum. We are
what’s on the internet on repeat
when spellcheck is off. Let the engine
accept its ramifications. Let light
decide to do its thing or not.
This new kind of house has pleasant
stink only slightly putrid so look
close for secret spores.
Hello July, today I will listen
to all ten common sounds that cause
deafness on repeat and I will fucking
love it. What are you going to
do, July? I love you, skinning paper
with a bookmark, lines
thinning out into the distance,
into time we haven’t ruined yet.

Photo by Lisa Wells

Meredith Blankinship is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from H_NGM_N, SKYDEER HELPKING, Imperial Matters, Heavy Feather Review, Similar:Peaks::, GlitterMob, Sink Review, and Finery,among others. She is a recent transplant to Atlanta, GA.