Beth Cavener-Stichner

I've been seeing pictures of her work all over the art building. I can say with no hesitation that no other visiting artist's work has struck me so suddenly and strongly; I cannot look at any of her pieces without feeling a reaction, visceral and gut-deep, pleasant or not.

I have always had an attraction to the idea of portraying a feeling or abstract concept through gesture or contortion of the body - ever since I can remember, those images that stretch or change the human body in bizarre and uncomfortable ways have affected me, deeply and immediately.

The extreme lifelikeness of the figures (I won't say reality, because the figures do not look like real hares or goats or wolves, but they do look like they're alive) both contrasts and compliments the sketchy style of her sculpting, leaving rough smears and handmarks in some places, and delicate details in others.

She seems to use prey animals almost exclusively (goats, hares, horses, deer, capybara) with only the occasional wolf and one possum. It seems to me that this could, purposely or not, reflect the extreme vulnerability of exposing your own fears, secrets, anguish, and joys.

This photo, in particular, made my heart jump and my stomach fall. Titled "Study for Self-Doubt," I could instantly sympathize with this creature who, despite its strong legs, is dangling from its own restriction.

I don't understand why art people are so down on representational art. I've yet to meet a non-representational piece that connected with me so potently.

I need to take some more figure drawing. My grasp of the musculoskeletal system is sadly lacking.

Between two spaces

In art, it is all about the negative space. What you don't do is nearly important, and one of the hardest things I've had to train my eye to do is to look at what isn't there instead of what is.

It's like this book I picked up once, a couple years ago. I don't remember what it was; my sister was reading it and I was bored so I picked it up. It was about a young woman searching to find herself, and through her travels she would meet men, gurus of a sort, that taught her about the things between. One was a drummer that taught her to hear the silence between the beats; another was a Middle Eastern calligrapher who taught her to read the spaces between words. I never finished the book before my sister wanted it back, and I've always wondered about the importance of the spaces between. What was the final importance of these things she learned?

Now For Something Completely Different

Cloud of pigeons!

Or, on the illusory nature of clouds:

WTF?

Clouds of Dust

I spent the weekend going mudbogging with my friends at the sand dunes in Moses Lake. There were plenty of beautiful clouds there...

most of the clouds I encountered there were the heavier, dirtier, grittier type.

If it wasn't clouds of flying, splatting mud, it was vast, choking clouds of dust that permeated the cabs of all the rigs, along with our hair and clothes. The clouds of gnats were everywhere in the mornings, and clouds of flies in the evenings.

The best clouds were the clouds of campfire smoke I can still smell in my coat.

Time Lapses and Tornados

If this doesn't convince you of the awesomeness and awefulness (and I mean in the old-fashioned senses with full emphasis on awe) of the heavens, I don't know what will.

How Now, Brown Cloud?

I saw these clouds today after class. They were striking in that they were unusually brown. This one reminded me of an invading spaceship - pick any spaceship movie you like - the way it was hanging over the horizon all huge and imposing with its brothers and sisters.

Bright and beautiful clouds with a dark underbelly - literally.

I asked the guy next to me at the crosswalk if it was just me or were those clouds reddish-brown?

He looked startled and said they were.

"Weird." I said.

The clouds I saw when I crossed the street and turned around were much more imposing, but they also reminded me of pouring cream into coffee and watching it sink to the bottom and billow up again.

poem

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazed---and gazed---but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils. -William Wordsworth

Texture

I was driving back to Pullman the other day when I took this out the car window. The texture is especially amazing - the odd feathery bit near the middle remind me of pheasant feathers or maybe scales.

Bo-bomb!

I was driving home to Seattle this weekend when I happened to espy this while refilling my gas in Othello.

Dangerous-looking cloud, eh? I wonder what would make it go all mushroom-shaped like that. Hmm...is that in the direction of Hanford?

On Clouds

I have been obsessed with them for some time now - my friends used to laugh at me for spending so much time staring up at the massive, weightless things. "Oh look, there's a good one!" I would say and they would barely glance at one that looked like every other cloud to them. To me, it always set my imagination on fire. I wished I could paint so I could represent the beauty of the things, or to write with the eloquence to describe it.

Now that I've learned to paint, and more or less to write, I find little greater joy than to make clouds. If I need to warm up, I make them; if I need to cool down I make more. My final project in 102 this past fall was this:

A self-portrait of me doing the thing I've done the most - cloudgazing.

It was almost life-size, and the various paintings have now dissipated, much like real clouds. One I gave to my sister. Another lives in my living room; another was painted over and reincarnated as something else.

The most beautiful thing about clouds is that things as big and glorious as ancient battleships, or cathedrals, or monuments, can change in an instant. They are not bound to anything - neither the rules of constancy nor to gravity. They are freedom.

Inception

K. The first thing to say is WOW. I get why people have been saying that Inception is this decade's The Matrix; not only because of the special effects, which are stunning, but because of the reality-questioning nature of it.

Reality is an uncanny thing. We live in it; we have no control over it; it is utterly intangible; the way we see it affects everything we do. Everyone is familiar with that moment of half-waking where we are caught between dream and waking, where we are no longer sure of what is real and what is only in our head; or that half-recalled memory that we may have simply dreamed.

Because of this, the totems used in Inception hold particular importance. They are meant to be a thing that is unique to the dreamer - that only the dreamer knows the true weight, proportions, and attributes of. They are a small piece of tangibility in the intangible, a thing that can be touched that represents reality, which can't. Isn't this part of the idea of sculpture? To render, in three dimensions, a thing that is abstract or unable to be seen in its entirety? Of course, it's not the only purpose of sculpture, but it is one that sets it apart from two-dimensional art forms.