Psychic Propulsion

Chris Ashley’s December calendar of html drawings, now showing (and growing) at the online Marjorie Wood Gallery reminds me of the post-modern advent that my stepfather did when my brother & I were kids, buying us little presents, blank journals and wind-up frogs, each package with its own “open on” date.

Chris’s mastery of optic effects with light and dark shades and contrasting colors often make his “drawings” feel like sculpture, with the appearance not just of depth but of curving surfaces, and even, to my eye, movement. As I mentioned at the time to Chris, many of his early html works made me imagine that I heard music, and now, as I flip through the first week’s images in a pop-up browser and they seem like one being changing its forms, the synesthetic effect is back. I’m hearing low, simple tones, like striking a large copper pipe with a rubber mallet.

In an essay that accompanies the exhibit, George Lawson writes, “Ashley’s HTML images are to canvases as emails are to handwritten letters, ephemeral but profoundly convenient. What digital correspondence lacks as perfumed, autograph, keepsake, it makes up for in its immediacy, and the same holds true for Ashley’s art.”

A couple of sketches from an evening at the Barnes & Noble cafe, two people engaged, respectively, in academic and social intensity

The artist and blogger Shan Bryan-Hanson is doing a series of meditations on objects that inspire her.

Money Plant by Shan Bryan-Hanson

She writes, “I’ve always been a person who really looks at things, which sometimes finds me meandering off on side trails (wasting time, some might say), however, this summer life got very busy and I didn’t spend much time looking.

Even though I completed a lot of tasks…I felt I missed out on something. Hence, the contemplative painting project.”

Both the writing and the paintings, especially those of maple seeds, thistles, milkweed, and dandelion, remind me of the wanderings of my childhood, hours I spent “reading” the outdoors, collecting buckeyes and smelling the green insides of their shells. I experienced the elements of nature as living creatures, poison berries glaring red out of sheer force of will, the floating seeds longing to be caught and wished upon, trusting me to release them back into the air. How clever of the winter ice to mold itself over the ivy leaves! How obliging of the hedge leaves, green cottony swatches in springtime, to harden in autumn into wedges that snapped satisfyingly between the fingers.

The helicoptering of seedpods seemed to me like a coded message. And I remember wondering how to find the money that the money plant offered, or whether its translucent disks might be negotiable as currency.

And perhaps, just a tad bit, slightly, absent minded.

Last week I misplaced a banana I had brought for lunch, and after several days of snatching at fruit flies, I found it….smashed between two books. Fortunately, there were papers on either side, so the books were unharmed.