Field Notes No. 002 // Soft Bodies

No. 002

FIELDNOTES

soft bodies july 2014

FIELDNOTES art through collection

Issue No. 2 soft bodies Field Notes exists to document the expressions and art that collect over the course of our experiences.

This issue serves to rethink the way in which we perceive (and often tend to hide) our tenderness, our malleability, our vulnerability and our own softness.

Rather than elements of weakness, these things allow us to open ourselves up to investing in others, to being helpfully corrected in our sometimes hurtful behaviors and to nurturing our own fragility.

Softness never negates strength.

-Alexa Masi editor-in-chief

contents nicole dyer monoprints

pp 3-4

thomas brown for my fans

pp 5-6

tiffany horan art brut sad puppy mum paper cranes motif

pp 7-9 p. 7 p. 9 p. 10

michael lipsey featured artwork bianca zabala pressing engagements seattle

p. 12 p. 13

peter giunta your city from the shore

p. 14

p. 11

nick hasko eclipse felix treadwell head untitled

p. 15 p. 16

alexa masi my love is a swamp making connections eyes cast no shadows

p. 17 p. 18 p. 22

jamie harrison illustrations

pp 19-21

james palko billy collins

p. 23

cover by felix treadwell

p. 15

“i’ll be ok�

nicole nicole dyer dyer dyer nicole nicole dyernicole nicole dyer dyer nicole dyer

monoprints

i n k d r aw i n g s e r i e s

Art Brut

Art ArtBrut Brut Art ArtBrut Brut on artists and non-artists Art ArtBrut Brut thoughts

by Tiffany Horan

Non-artists, may, under certain circumstances be able to produce the sublime better than the artists themselves. A number of artists embrace a naïve, childlike style even though they are technically capable of producing more traditional or photorealistic works. Working in an uninhibited, frenzied or freeing manner tends to allow the artist to create reminiscences of past conviviality, moments that existed in all of us as children.

Reverting back to a time before responsibility, where the colour of the sky was unimportant because the sky could be any colour you wanted. French artist Jean Dubuffet invented the term ‘raw art’ or ‘art brut’ which basically described art that had been created outside of traditional art or art dominated by academic training.

“sad puppy”

‘Art Brut included graffiti, the work of patients in psychiatric hospitals, prisoners, children, and naive or primitive artists. What Dubuffet valued in this material was the raw expression of a vision or emotions, untrammelled by convention. These qualities he attempted to incorporate into his own art, to which the term Art Brut is also sometimes applied. Dubuffet made a large collection of Art Brut.’1 Art Brut didn’t really reach Britain until in 1972 when an art critic named Roger Cardinal created a new term for it. He called it ‘outsider art’; his version of this raw art was to be applied on a much broader scale than Dubuffet’s Art Brut. It is similar to what Dubuffet called ‘Neuve Invention’, where the artist has some interaction or connection to mainstream culture. ‘Marginal art’ and ‘Art singulier’ are essentially the same things, where the artist is on the margins of the art world. Usually, the work of outsider artists is discovered after their deaths. It often illustrates extreme mental states, incredibly controversial themes, unconventional ideas, or imaginary worlds. These artists tend to have no contact any art institutions or the art world in general. In Britain, there is a magazine called ‘Raw Vision’. ‘It defines outsider art as “creative expression that exist outside accepted cultural norms, or the realm of ‘fine art’”, and says that its “creators would not consider themselves artists, nor would they even feel that they were producing art at all.”

Yet, these individuals are able to work in a way we (perhaps educated artists) are not really, truly able to. They remain uninfluenced by the modern world, by what was and what is, they create the way a child would, a form of communication before language, they create art in its purest form. It seems a more sublime, a much more real form of art, produced using parts of the brain we’ve suffocated with knowledge, the sky is blue and therefore it must be blue unless I choose to paint it red. They might not notice the colour of the sky only that it is to be painted with anything, as long as it is painted, as long as it exists, what does the colour, or shape matter? This calls into question the definition of art. If these individuals do not consider themselves to be artists and the work they’re creating is not art, then who are they and what is it? Are they simply creating because they enjoy it, a way to pass the time? The non-artist seems to be under the illusion that the artist’s sight and ability to judge art is greater than that of their own. ‘For while the sight of a man who is interested in art, whether deeply or slightly, is often conditioned by this interest, that of the man uninterested in art is conditioned by what he does or wants to do.’2

“mum”

How can we as an educated art public decide it is art and these individuals are in fact artists if the work was never intentionally created to be viewed as art and is it relevant to the sublimity of the work? The non-artist would not set out to create a sublime work of art. The artist might. It is the unavoidable hope of an artist to evoke. Usually works that have been made to intentionally illustrate the sublime, particularly the sublime within nature, are unsuccessful.

They are too concerned with a conscious effort to affect when the sense of sublime seems to come from a complete disregard of such conscious decisions.

The non-artist accesses this ability in a different way to the artist; the artist must allow themselves to get into the correct state of mind, a state free from the pressures of consciousness.

This isn’t to say that artists are ingenuously going out of their way to disconnect from the world around them by disturbing their natural state of mind through faux, chemically enhanced scenarios or situations. We as human beings are continuously connected to our influences, we cannot escape what exists through living, our experiences, captured by our senses, consciously and subconsciously exist whether or not we chose to express them in a way considered to be creative by a viewer. This inability to escape our own experiences is what seems to enable sublime encounters with works of art. Art is not sublime. The sublime is sublime; it exists within art regardless of an artist or non-artist’s intentions towards the work and regardless of the viewer.

1. Wilson, Simon and Lack, Jessica, The Tate Guide To Modern Art Terms (London: Tate, 2008) 2. Malraux, André, The Voices of Silence (United States of America: Princeton University Press, 1978) 275.

“paper cranes motif”

michael lipsey michael michael lipsey lipsey

Pressing Engagements

bianca zabala

I can’t remember the last time I put my fingers to my pulse and told my body it was okay it still needed to figure out how to breathe, but wondering if the curve of your mouth will ever learn the shape of my name again is muscle memory.

When monarch butterflies begin to fly towards warmer weather, something in their wings comes to life and makes sure they land on the same trees that housed their mothers. It is, perhaps, the strangest and best case of finding the truth about yourself, but I do not know if I will ever grow wings to take me that far.

Some butterflies come back on the day I untangle myself from a roaring springtime loneliness and rest themselves on my head, the only fitting crown for Persephone emerging from the dark.

A voice in my head stills my hand, says don’t wave them away no matter how much they remind you of the night you drank too much and offered your hair to any boy who would pull.

The discovery is this: that we have, us humans, more reasons to remind ourselves to hold each other’s hand. I remember, better than ever, the way you pressed your forehead against the statue in the park to prove to yourself that you were there.

I am building in my living room a monument to the realisation that you can unlearn even the worst of your ugly habits.

bianca zabala

Seattle

Do you remember what the sunset looked like when I may have said I loved you but sure as hell should have said I needed to figure myself out?

Close your eyes and remember it all for me, the quiet thrum of the engine of your father’s car and how forgetting to ask his permission for it was your way of insisting that he start trusting you.

Your mother’s smile encouraged the idea that some god upstairs was watching and knew a thing about stringing together perfection. That summer, you learned how to fix the air-conditioning while I stayed sprawled on your bed, wearing your clothes and cradling a dog-eared copy of your brother’s favourite book. We forgot your mother’s habit of afternoon gardening so often, she stopped cooing at us and started ignoring every time we kept the windows open as we kissed against the wall, all molasses-slow and pomegranate-sweet.

I kept staying for dinner and your sister kept smiling knowingly at us.You moved against me like you were running your fingers through honey on a simmering July evening.Your father will always remind me of weekends on the coast, and your mother will always know I loved you like you were the only thing keeping the sun burning.

Forgetting is the sweetest way of holding on.

Your City

from the

Shore peter giunta

You are Skipping a rock on hard concrete Watch the asphalt ripple beneath Ripping through sleek cities turning Roads to sand and buildings to beach

You let your feet sink Into the seaweed of the subway counting The commuting minnows and the jellyfish Turnstyles, you turn to see Stylized street signs melt into shorelines As the stone skips behind Today the urchins ride for free Through the ribbon reefs to sit at their tables And do nothing at all

To us it’s ridiculous But it’s as if you were born for this As if you have always been speaking through polyps You see through unblinking eyes A beautiful damselfish Wish you could tell if it was A girl or guise As you sink beneath the tide The stone skips above your head And turns the coral back to lead Until the city and sky scrape each other once more You stand in your street clothes and admire

Eclipse

nick hasko

Merry go round: Blood, pink, moon-tattooed forest of sterling seven lakes Silver Kerouac tuxedo Mars in retrograde drops in phase: rain.

The train cars’ rhythm you played in G or A mine (quarry) where we shared minds (quarry) Climb to the summit, look around; the ground seldom trodden trees ripe soldered season eyes are earthen beauty hushed our fog-kissed lips in a dream we shared.

Bear (distance) Mountain road slowed to whisper sweet-nothings to (my) deer (it’s on the tip of your tongue) steer this path a sycamore draws awe from the sun we didn’t notice in mist, but it’s/they’re their Mars in retrograde -stage presence (be here now) -friends in age -cage-trends of the general public is anywhere but here now

“untitled”

felix felixtreadwell treadwell felix felixtreadwell treadwell felix felixtreadwell treadwell

“head” - facing page

my love is a swamp

alexa masi

tell me it’s best to have an endgame in mind. tell me that whatever i’m holding out for has better be worth the wait. tell me it’s enough to just leave the porchlight on -- “go to sleep, take care of yourself first”. all of the advice i’ve been given is stuffed inside rainsoaked tennis balls drying out on the crayon colored court. it’s carried on a dozen lightening bugs, it’s their orange oil stain glow spreading across the twilight. it’s soaking in green tea bath water. it’s all comforting to keep. i held a frog in my hand on a sunday afternoon. i turned him over and saw the filmy skin stretched over his stomach, only just protecting whatever he’s got inside. but if you run your thumb across it, gosh, the little thing starts to fall right asleep. i was comforted when they told me to stay measuredly detached because inaction is so easy. i could choose to simply wonder how many fist fights you wanted to get into when you were fourteen instead of sitting here with my thumb on your knuckle, even when it starts to split open and show me all of your bitter januaries and all of your steam. i could simply wonder. i could have my hard thoughts. and my hard arms. and my empty arms. but with that, my affections would fester inside of me and turn to bile. i would rather throw them into the swamp and onto the stomaches of frogs than nowhere at all. so yes, i’m keeping the porchlight on and i’m also keeping my windows open. i’m hanging my arm over my bedside so that you’ll be able to find my hand when you come upstairs and lay on my floor. you’ll think that you’re taking something from me but i’ve been offering it to you all along.

“vixen”

jamie harrison

“the lady”

“scarecrow bot”

eyes cast no shadows in my last moment wearing a sundress, gravel was dragging underneath my shoes and I was scraping at something until my mother told me to calm down, calm down before somebody catches me filthy and sweating out all of my sunday morning breakfast.

alexa masi

a soft looking lady tells me that all creatures are being watched. soft looking ladies speak to me and I watch their lips because I am still trying to memorize the lord’s prayer and that is what it sounds like they are saying. I am watching their lips and they tell me I am being watched, too. in my last moment wearing my seatbelt in a car that will wreck itself against the interstate’s burnished bones—and that spot is being watched, too—my mother tells me that I’ve got a dozen roads open but how many will prove to be true is up to me, and then the road drives metal into my forehead. a soft looking lady comes to my window and tells me in a voice plain like public access television, “nothing” when I ask about the worst that’s gonna happen to me, and I move my mouth the same way I remember hers when I’m sweating out a fifteen year old’s love, when I’m lonely for her god and my mother and lonely for that one road only. my eyes are kept open because no one keeps a better watch than I can, and any charge held against me I already wrote down on wide-ruled loose leaf. I kept my stray dog love and my sunday school shame tied up with fawn rope so when they come to catch me, they can get it around me quick. and so I’ll tell them to let me be in the air for a little while, I’m sure I’ll get settled if they give me that moment, but please be quick because my feet are burnin’, they are burnin’ so bad.

james palko

billy collins

Laying in bed in the dark I silently address the birds of Connecticut Northeastern wings, acknowledge the initiation tap, rapping, tiny knuckles on glass pane. Who takes? if not one glance at mornings’ fine, welcoming ushers So proud, they are with their plumage crests heaving their one duty of the day complete arising the weary slumberers, O ghastly crew Us, the kings of midnight’s final bell tolls.

FIELDNOTES art through collection

additional artist information nicole dyer

nicoledyerart.com

thomas brown tiffany horan michael lipsey felix treadwell jamie harrison

brownmegacorporation.tumblr.com tiffanyhoran.com stoicmike.tumblr.com felixtreadwell.com jamieharrisonillustration.com

Nicole Dyer was born in Ithaca, New York, and raised in Lakeland, Florida. She received her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland and currently lives and works there.

Nicole Dyer can be contacted by email at ndyer@mica.edu

Jamie Harrison is a junior Illustration major at The University of the Arts. She currently lives in Philadelphia, right next door to the town where she grew up. She is inspired by stories told through literature, film, video games and, of course, illustration.

She likes to combine decorative elements in her work to help convey a narrative and enjoys creating dreamlike worlds.

inquiries // submissions fieldnotesmag@gmail.com