FAMILY HISTORY...

I have been working on a project for quite a few years, which is to clarify, codify and give homage to many small bits of paper (including photographs and letters) which bear witness to the lives of various members of my family, stretching back in time.

 To start with, I'll illustrate this process with two photos of boxes assembled to do this organizing:

The painting over the plastic boxes in this picture is one I had done years ago in Nantucket. It's fitting that it's there because it represents my other enjoyable preoccupations: drawing in ink, painting with watercolors and chalk, and taking photos. The doing of this blog is very much in accord with these: an attempt to get closer to nature and its mysteries, including those of human nature.

Here is another photo of the boxes, which also include cardboard file boxes...I will add some photos of them too, not as decorative as these plastic boxes with their neat labels, but labeled they are with various couples' names and eras.

Since writing this above, I am very sorry to say that my cousin, Nick Roach, has passed away. It was Nick and another cousin, Jim Keegan, who initiated me into this wonderful process of stepping back, bit by bit, into the past to revisit and connect with each our branches of the family. They had begun the process by both researching things on Ancestry.com and then I was fortunate enough to be included in this backing and forthing of found photos and letters which we each had discovered and then shared...

So more, then, about Nick and Jim in the next post...

William Wegman

I just reread a wonderful article found in my favorite publication in the world: The New York Times. Written by Roberta Smith, it appeared on Friday, August 17, 2012 in the New York edition of the Times, and was about artist William Wegman. Titled: "Postcards in an Artist's Journey", it was a review of his show, "William Wegman: Hello Nature" at Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine. I so wish I had seen the show...

First I have to confess to having an extraordinary lot of clippings saved over time for which am always trying to establish some filing system that will let me find a particular thing again. And this particular one (see photo below, page C25):

is missing its first page (probably C1) but nonetheless holds the genes of what so interested me. It was buried amongst a whole bunch of intriguing things, and always when I pick one up from the pile, I have the vain hope of possibly throwing something away, and then find that rather than heading for demise in the wastebasket, the item in hand instead expands and fills the exact same vessel of time and attention as the original moment of first contact...the special rapport I feel with many of these clippings reminds me of shells picked up on the water's edge, where their nature, their geometry, perfect or jagged, modest or spectacular, bespeaks of larger matters (like fractals, for example.)

The "Postcards" article was enhanced by the kind of videos which often accompany New York Times articles online. One particular one that seems the absolute essence of what it is to be an artist: click on the photo of the sleeping dog, "William Wegman's Wilderness". I love it so much and love everything about this article. Am liking William Wegman very much, so very enjoyable to watch him opening windows in his Maine cabin, and starting to work on a picture.

Here's the link to the article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/17/arts/design/william-wegman-hello-nature-at-bowdoin-college-museum.html?pagewanted=all

And more about fractals in a future post...