Making Lace

It happens that I frequently write journal entries, but they usually say the same things, day in, day out, and year in, year out, with some things specific to the day, on occasion.  I weep in them and I laugh, because that's how my days go.  Sometimes I can’t say for sure if I’m happy or really down. 

I could throw my writing away, but a better idea is to combine the things I love – art, Yiddish, and writing, all together.   I write words, mostly in Yiddish, on top of the words I’ve just written.  You can’t read them, and I can’t either.  All of them are called “Making Lace”.  I’ve lost track of how many, so I assign them random numbers. I have several examples already in this blog, but here’s today’s.   Making Lace, 15

Returning

It's been a long long time.  I'm hoping to be back.

Making Lace, aquatint and etching, 8 page state book

By Invitation Only

By Invitation Only.  Please Knock Before Entering
Cardboard, polymer clay, wire, text.
9" x 10" x 3.5"

This is the sculpture that I showed in the group exhibition Meet My Uterus, at Ceres Gallery, New York City, January 8 through February 2, 2013.  The show, and my work, addressed the comments made by several men running for office in the fall of 2012 regarding rape and pregnancy, and the attempt in general by some legislators to eclipse women's control over our own bodies.


francineperlman.com

Wind

Sandy Day 1 Monday October 29 3 P.M.

From the Tree House Window

Threads of Shabos

A friend told me about a story she heard from a once-Orthodox man, that when he was a child, the end of shabos, Saturday, was determined not by a clock but by the moment when one could no longer distinguish a red thread from a green thread in the evening light.  Now I think he said “someone”, no doubt meaning the same someone every week, who went out from the synagogue every few minutes, and held up the threads in the waning light, and when he himself could no longer distinguish green from red, he went back inside and announced that shabos was over.   The beauty in this story belongs to this privileged man, because the perception of color is profoundly affected by one’s mood, by one’s emotions.  And I imagine that he didn’t need to go outside too many times, because at that moment in his devotion when the feeling came on him that shabos was drifting away, he went outside and could not tell the green from the red.

Green and red are complements on the color wheel, that is, they sit opposite each other.  Here’s the traditional color wheel  concept (in a very lovely rendition by Jill Morton) for pigments (though not for computer graphics):  the three primary colors, red, blue, and yellow, can’t be derived by mixing other colors, something like primary numbers, and theoretically you only need these three.  You make secondary colors, green, orange, and purple, by mixing the two primaries next to them, and with judicious mixing you can have all the colors you could ever want.

When two complements are side by side in an image, or in your dress, or in nature, they enhance each other.  They maximize the contrast.  So you put your tomatoes in a green box to make them look very red, and you hold up a red and a green thread in diminishing light to be absolutely certain that shabos has quietly slipped away for the week.

Two Ladders

Once again, out into the forest for maintaining our trail.  Two ladders:  one is a piece that I happily own, a ladder made by artist Judy Hoffman (not in the forest) from hand-made hand-dyed rolled paper, 12” high.  The other is a ladder made by a vine that sends its tendrils out and they wrap themselves opportunistically around whatever they come across, even a sibling twig, and they grow thick and build a solid wall.  Those walls, of course, we had to hack away to clear the path.  In the process, I saved this beautiful ladder, 18” high.   

Judy Hoffman's Ladder, with detail

 

Nature's Ladder, found complete in the forest, with detail

 

    Two Fine Ladders

Dance as sculpture

Watching dance, my attention moves from one part of the stage to another, so that I experience the intimacy and the beauty of particular movements.  But recently I had a glorious awakening.  At the Performance Festival of the American Dance Guild, being farther back in the audience than usual, my eyes suddenly took in the entire stage at once and I found myself watching a great sculpture where the parts moved instead of the viewer, and the dancers, coupling, grouping, separating, created continually changing forms in space.  All we had to do was to sit and be willing to receive.  I don’t know why I never saw it before.  All of my large constructions were created with many individual parts, lines of different weight and direction, with this very goal, that the viewers, moving around and thereby shifting their perspective, would continually see new objects forming in space. This is a gift too from park trees, those with twisting outstretched branches, if you keep your eyes fastened while you walk.  Walk backwards if you have to.

I won’t abandon the old way of looking, I simply know that an entire new dimension has been added to my experience of dance.

Here are two views of “Private Rooms”, 16’ x 12’ x 8’h:

Art in other places

If I keep my eyes tuned to the road, I’ll find it everywhere.  And so it was on the Jersey Turnpike, I think that’s where I was, in a bus to Lenox, Mass.    Very tall slender poles, a few stories high, guyed to the ground with red wires, three such objects in a row, symmetrical and perfect.  I didn’t know what they do, though I now think they are simple radio masts, which I’ve since learned can be quite complex and also camouflaged. They’re beautiful, to me at least.  Much of my work is about lines, and this road furniture was as inspiring and exciting as anything I see in museums and galleries. 

This photo, a set of radio masts in England which was the closest image I could find to “mine” in NJ, might cause you to scratch your head and ask What is she seeing.  The NJ masts are more slender, or so I recall from zipping by them in the bus.  Well, I can’t help anyone else with this, I only can say that when I saw them my attention was riveted, fleeting though the scene was.

Today I was waiting on the subway platform, #1, 125^th Street, which for me means leisurely pacing back and forth from one end of the platform to the other.  In the pleasant outdoors of this platform, a man sat on a bench with two or three rats draped around his shoulders, dyed in various colors.  I couldn’t tell if they were somehow bound to his shirt, as they seemed to be scrambling but not going anywhere.  I saw it and kept walking, as they were not so interesting actually, just dyed rats.  I only hope they are well cared for.  I tried to find a photo subsequently on the internet, but it seems that there’s a trend, and I couldn’t be sure I was getting the right rats, or the right person.