LNDSCP 1

Arrived in an area marked for scenic vistas. Set-up tri-pod and camera to videograph the view. Read Clark's lecture on Symbolic Landscape which gave rise to thoughts on Petrarch, Duke of Berry and the Northern Renaissance.

The recorded Maine landscape that I am preoccupied with is not one of symbols. Less joyous, they read more objectively, hence the term recorded.

Felt the sun move across my back as I sat out here. Listened to people pass behind me, people and cars. Bugs, yes. Litter, yes.

One month in. Here's how the project is developing:

thesis- examine the impulse to record standing outside in Maine.

research material - texts on landscape, landscape painting, landscape photography, landscape videography

research method - create own record of standing outside in Maine while thinking reflexively.

bibliography - Clark, Kenneth. Landscape Painting. 1950.

I'm taking on Landscape. I've gotten a little farther then this in my own notes, but I wanted to let you know. I'm not really certain how it will all work itself out. I know its going to involve some art making, some art research, and some historiographing. With any luck it will be good and thoughtful, for whatever their worth as attributes.

The utopian vision...has its own facticity. It exists in the mind of the believer with such vividness and authority that it has the force of demonstrable fact. Ideals displaced to a future location can be their own proof. They are validated by the imagination, verified in the act of thinking. The act of thinking can be an act of faith. (McCracken 1988:107)

Imprecision and error in this creative process are not only possible but legion (McCracken 1988:78)

Now that I've entered at least the visual constructs of being retired - the distant urban homestead, the hound, the pipe and reclusive informational overload - I feel like I can start to talk about what happened. Not like it was bad. It was mediocre. It was intoxicating and at times made me feel real shitty. Seldom was it satisfying. Whatever it was called, it had to do with art and the way people interacted with it. It was scholarly and gossipy and gross. Simply, it was a scene, and not much of one speak of.

But I'm gonna try. I'm gonna spend some time going through the last few years. Its the last of the unpacking we have to do up here. Go through the art-shit. This could be called art shitstory then.

Sprinkle in some contemporary ramblings and you've got yourself something to read sometimes.

I'm over capturing this world, rendering it in a notebook or a album of some sort. Instead I am going to focus on observing it. I live in a place where urbanity and nature mingle, flirt with each other. Clouds hang low and grace small buildings with dew and shadows. Trees outnumber homes and bird vastly overpower the sounds we make. Its a place with vistas, not views. You can see a lot.

This place would be easily captured in beautiful art. Its striking coloration would look good painted with painstaking effort. It could be poetic, if I tried to find the right words. Even photography could be easy if I cared. But I don't want to see this place in that kind of way. I don't want to hunt for an image in a memory. I will focus on just looking for now.

A lot of what I do is compulsive and seemingly senseless, or rather nonsensical.

Below are a few handi-crafts made for makings sake and displayed to look like buildings.

Can't say much more about them.

Don't hate.

There will be a lot more

Z