"CORE"/ Ring Dance #2 was selected by the City of Olympia for its 2012 Percival Landing Sculpture display. It was on the plinth at the corner of State and Water streets. That’s the point where one-way State St. doglegs south to join Fourth Ave. Drivers traveling west on State were looking right at the sculpture, rising up behind the safety barricades that keep you from driving into Budd Inlet.
Following a year of public display on Percival Landing, the City purchased "CORE" for permanent installation just off Fourth Ave E, on Jefferson St. near Bar Francis coffee shop, and Old School Pizza. The previous summer, following a month-long popular vote by visitors to the park, the city purchased Dan Klennert’s “King Salmon,” and was moved to its permanent location at West Bay Park. You can see more of Dan’s work [by clicking here] or by driving out to his remarkable sculpture garden just west of Ashford on State Route 706, the road to Mt. Rainier National Park. Ring Dance #1/ INCEPTION was purchased by a collector in 2013 4/24/2012 What is a Poem? #1/ ReliquaryA poem is a strange creature in the modern world. Language, thought, and idea are now transmitted primarily through print, and are ingested in silence through the visual medium of reading. But long before written language was even imagined, poetic rhythms and cadences formed an essential means of carrying particular stories and thoughts across time and distance in a relatively stable form. A poem was an oral mnemonic device, an arrangement of sounds that the pattern-recognizing brain found pleasurable, relatively easy to recall, and repeat. Poetry developed as an oral container for stories and ideas.
Now that written language has been developed, and mechanical print has made the practice widespread, words and language can be locked in place in a form that is transmitted from mind to mind across time and distance. We read precisely what our progenitors wrote, the words in exactly the same order, even if the sounds are not in any particularly memorable arrangement. The starkly compelling visual component that language took on in writing and print steamrolls the more subtle dance of sound on which we once relied. A poem on the page is a script held in a reliquary—a container contained. When we encounter a poem on a printed page the tendency is to treat it as we would any other written character, and read it with our eyes and brain. Looking in through the glass of the secondary container, reading the silenced words, we may be imagining the sounds, to some extent, but we don’t experience the poem. Like so much in life, we imagine living instead of doing it. No wonder there is a tendency to feel like something is missing. I don’t mean to imply that there is anything wrong with the evolution of language into written form; it’s just what has happened. I’m interested in noting and exploring the effects and opportunities brought about by what has happened. The reliquary is right here in front of you. Caged in print under glass a world of wonder awaits the sacred technician who learns to unpin the old jeweled box, open the dry-hinged, squeaky lid, and speak the poem aloud a few times. Try a few variations of style, shout it, whisper it. Listen to how the poet pronounced the poem, if you can. Get out the dessicated relic and rehydrate it with your breath and energy. Let me warn you in advance, this practice will bring you quickly to another topic that needs to be explored: “how come I hate most of the poems I come across.” We’ll get to that. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, try reciting a few more poems until you find one that hits paydirt. It’s so worth it. 4/19/2012 Practice WaitsPoetry is a practice. We don't learn to make poems, we develop a practice that makes space in our lives for poetry. Poems are a visible result of that practice, but not the only result, and maybe not the best result. A strong practice once developed can weather slow periods, slumber through quiet times and spring to life when we need it. Like any other practice we may not know what it is for until we need it. Then suddenly the years and hours focused on the work give wings to our creativity and it all makes sense. Practice becomes us. SECOND NATURE from my second book "Natural History" speaks to the nature of practice: SECOND NATURE It takes a long time, years
of practice. Make the moves over and over—slowly at first then faster. Memorize patterns, train ear and hand, learn to play with sound and sense. Harvest silence from crowded corridors, rage from empty meadows. Drill cadences deep, carry them everywhere. Then, when you are threatened, when you have to move fast, your body will know what to do. Motions unfold like breath, well-worn pathways channel the moment into song, and—never doubt it-- making that one poem will save your life. -Don Freas 4/18/2012 FORM AND MOVEMENTI was awake at 1AM thinking about what moves me in sculpture. The current RING DANCE series holds me fascinated, and I was wondering what it is about that. The best answer I can come up with is “form and interplay of forms”, or “form and movement.”
When I equate interplay of forms with movement I realize I’m making a distinction that defines movement in a particularly subtle way—a way that excludes mechanical motion. Maybe I should come up with a new word, but I can’t think of one. So let’s talk about movement and experience—about perception. Have you been to a sculpture park that includes a piece or two that catches the wind to create motion, or is motorized to rotate, or operate—repeating some cycle of motion? We do notice it immediately. That’s because the brain is wired to notice and assess motion very quickly. It’s a survival instinct, at the deepest levels of perception. Something moving might be a rock aimed at my head; I need to know about that as soon as possible. Motion might also indicate running water, or a food source. As hunters living in the earth environment we have developed senses and sense reactions that assist in survival here. The tendency to quickly notice when a new motion comes into our field of view comes in handy crossing the street, and it’s very useful to advertisers. Ever wonder why those youths on the street corner are frantically waving signs for cheap mattress stores? Just as when there’s a TV on at the bar, or you are near the flickering flames of a fire—you can’t NOT notice it. Motion—particularly new motion—draws our attention. Intriguingly, the same hard-wired feature causes us to dismiss movement that repeats. Once it’s no longer novel the brain begins to rule it out, or see past it—so that we won’t miss the newer motion that could arrive at any second. This explains what happens with those enjoyable pinwheels and other whirly-gigs at the farmer’s market. Very attractive at first, so we buy them. But with familiarity we stop noticing. It’s a good trick, you might say a cheap trick. That kind of motion doesn’t interest me in sculpture. I’m looking for forms that move us in more resilient ways. The movement that I look for in sculpture is more closely related to the experience of walking through a landscape. The observer moves, and as the observer moves the perspective flows, lining up different features of the landscape in a constantly shifting dance of perceived relationships. In the forest, various trees line up then move apart; as the angles and curves play in the eye you experience a flow of perception. Same with walking through a redrock canyon, or in a cityscape of various building-forms, separated by streetscapes. It’s the perceptual movement that interests me, the observer’s interaction with form. So I look for elements or collections of elements that offer opportunities for interplay with the passing eye. Sometimes a perspective stops me cold, and I want to consider the pleasing arrangement that has come together—I might even come back again and again to watch it line up in just that way. Then I move a little, and another surprise coalesces, from a different perspective. That’s the movement I’m talking about. I’m not always sure what will make it happen, but I love it when I find that it has. 3/25/2012 RING DANCE #1"INCEPTION"/ Ring Dance #1 came back from the galvanizers this week. It still shouts a little loud with the fresh hot-dip zinc coating, but will quiet with exposure to sunshine and rain. I have been enjoying the sense of play and motion that the piece embodies.
I didn’t know in advance what the piece would look like. I made the rings, of various sizes, but then deliberately avoided any planning of how they would be arranged to form the final sculpture. I find that a piece like this has more life when I let it accrue on its own. I just started sticking the rings together, one by one. I think of this process as being divinitory. By that I mean I let the piece form itself, while I engage in a ritual sort of play with the elements involved. I apply a loose, fluid set of guidelines as to how I will proceed. The piece is thereby “played” into existence. I discover the final form of the piece by playing with the elements rather than by developing a set design and then forcing materials into the form of the preconceived vision. I wonder what will happen; then I find out. For guidelines, in this case, I paid attention to attaching each ring firmly to at least two others, considered how to make the piece fully three dimensional—with no front, side, or back—and tried to avoid placing any ring on the same plane with, or parallel to, any other. I didn’t even settle on what would be up or down until I came to the last few rings. The advantage of this open-ended play is that the resulting piece arrives from a place beyond my own imagination, from a crossroads of play and purpose, a mix of the limits of material and process, one decision dependent on the results of the last. I arrive in a new territory, not quite sure how I got there. Then I look around. RING DANCE #1 is available for purchase, and will be on display at Olympia’s spring Artswalk, April 27 and 28. I’ll be showing with the other “Fire Art” welders from South Puget Sound Community College. We will be on the southeast corner of Fourth and Washington, downtown Olympia. [Update: INCEPTION/ Ring Dance #1 was sold in 2013] 2/23/2012 Hazels to Hickory Nuts [Addendum, June 2015: The poems mentioned herein are no longer available on the website, but are in the collection, "Swallowing the World," new this month from Lost Arts Design.] I put seven new poems in the “Uncollected” section of the website today. A wide range, new and old.
CATKINS is the newest, celebrating the Hazelnut catkins. Hazels hold the ground north and south of the house. In January and February their soft subtle flowers are a welcome visual and textural delight when everything else seems scattered, chaotic, broken or skeletal. You’ll find two Northeast Florida poems, HOLY VISION and WINDFALL. I get down there a lot to see my father, who is in decline, but stable, and not in much pain. His body and mind just don’t work as well as they used to. So we all get down more often, to help him out. Dad lives in assisted living, but still has the house he and my mother lived in for the ten years or so before her death, in 2009. This house is sited on a beautiful curve of the intercoastal waterway on the landward side of Amelia Island, the northernmost barrier island on Florida’s Atlantic coast. The next island north is Cumberland Island, in Georgia. The back deck of the house practically overhangs a wide salt marsh, rife with birds, bordering the river, where great barges, layer-cake tug boats, and all manner of pleasure craft travel by day and night. Eagles, Osprey, Kingfisher, and all sorts of wading birds nest nearby. The place provides a remarkable and inspiring residence and retreat. HOLY VISION and WINDFALL were triggered by experiences in that rich, tropical landscape, where I always seem to be about to go, or just back from these days. The other four newly posted poems are AFTER DARK, CONFLUENCE, AT THE SCULPTURE PARK, and WEIGHTLESS. Let me know what you like, or what you would like to hear at the reading, March 21. 2/12/2012 New WebsiteWelcome to the new website. I'll be writing here about the practice of making things, and what lures me down these branching paths, from inspiration through outcome. I have some archived blogs from the old site that I'll re-post as they have relevance.
For now, enjoy the images—glimpses of decades of work and play. Thanks! 1/18/2012 In SnowBig snowfall during the night. Big for Puget Sound country. It's not light yet, but the blanket softens everything. I woke up thinking of Liam Rector's poem "In Snow", and David Broza's beautiful rendition [click here]. I found a performance clip—unfortunately not the whole song, but it gives a sweet taste. Ah Liam, we miss ye, lad.
1/3/2012 Renewing TimeI've been through this new year thing sixty times now, and never once have I felt the slightest shift or hitch in the smooth rollout—the countdown hits zero, the ball lands, the numbers flip—under the clever costume I am still you, here. Everything has changed; nothing has changed—the blessing and the curse of time in one steady swirl, ever balanced on a single point—poised, drawing this breath. Ahhhh.
12/31/2011 One Word Poem RevealedThe one word poem in my previous post was "YOU." Read the 12/30 posting for context. I suspect that in another context the one word poem would require a very large—perhaps infinite—title. That's the way of these things. |
Art and Practice
Don Freas is an artist, writer, and poet in Olympia, Washington. Categories |
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7/12/2012
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