The Home Stretch

Before the work, the wonder...

Autumn has arrived. On Sunday night (Oct. 13, the October full moon, the "hunter's moon,"  rose high over the river. It was a sight to behold. Small wonder that our ancestors worshiped her, and that the Woman Clothed in the Sun in the Book of Revelations—we call her Guadalupe in this hemisphere—stood between her horns, crowned with twelve stars. Ancient hymns describe Mary as "pulchra ut luna," pretty as the moon. 

I missed last month's full moon entirely: clouded over every night. This month, hints and guesses, and dazzling little revelations between the trees. Patches of moonlight on the fields driving back from masses in Leavenworth on Saturday night. In the middle of the night, I awoke and the world outside my window, and the river, was pure silver.

But silver isn't the only color in this season. The world is turning into gold in daylight. Last wednesday I woke early, and it was cold, really cold. The temperature had dropped to 25 degrees or so during the night. 

There is a large, elegant tree next to the Centrum, the main building of the Guild, which houses the main living room and refectory/kitchen. The building used to be a Grange Hall. Anyway, the tree has been teasing us for the last few weeks. 

 

Here it is on October 2, a week ago. 

On Wednesday morning, I went over for coffee on the way to the studio. Overnight, the tree had been gilded by the frost, and it was raining, no, snowing golden leaves. This little video doesn't fully capture the insistence of their falling, or the soft whispering sound of the leaves dancing off each other, but you get the idea. Hard to think of many things more lovely to stand in. Once, years ago in 1994, I stood under cherry trees shedding their blossoms in the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks in DC with my friend and brother John Ciani, not too long before he died.  It reminded me of that day, and also of Gerard Manley Hopkins elegaic poem "Spring and Fall: to a young child"

 

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

 

 Well, yes, but we must find the gold where we can. or make it, as the alchemists tried to do, out of the base materials ready to hand.

 

 

 

 

Anyway, beautiful days. 

So to the work. It is almost complete. I am both relieved and a little sad. It's been five intense, focused weeks, mostly silent time. A kind of retreat, I suppose.  

The most trying pieces, of course, I saved for last. The rich drapery of the Quester's robe, his face and hands, the little Pantheon I decided to insert in place of a medieval tower, are in the kiln now. Probably not for the last time. 

First traced, and cooled, and then highlighted with a matte paint, rather like doing washes in watercolor, or fine cross hatching in drawing. That takes a variety of tools: a badger-hair brush that blends the matte, and then I use sticks, dental picks, a feather, cocktail skewers and my carefully dried fingertips to remove some of the paint and leave in what remains shadows, dimension, light and shadows. A clean up of the edges with the diamond blade bandsaw. And another firing. 

Getting the face ready for second matte painting and firing. A new template cut and glued onto the glass:

 Then cut on the band saw, with finger guards on my digits. (BTW, with all the glass cutting and nicks, my fingerprints no longer unlock my iPhone.)

 Then, a little manicure on the grinder:

 

And back into the kiln: 

 

The Pantheon is a reverse painting: the whole of the glass was covered with matte, and then delicately removed to reveal the building peeking through. The scale is so small and the paint is so tricky that removing it gives me more control than actually painting it onto a blank glass surface. It's almost like making a sculpture: revealing the image hidden in the medium, rather than applying it. 

 

This coming weekend, back to Seattle for a province meeting, a sit down with the provincial about the future, and my friend Viet Tran's final vows at our annual regional jubilee celebration. Then back here for a week and a half or so, to finish some smaller projects, and pack up this project, carefully, to get the pieces back to Seattle where I'll mount it with bright white mortar on a sturdy backer. Then later my colleague Michael Schultheis will begin his painted work on the cosmos that the Quester is peeking out into. The work will be installed in early summer, 2021, once the Center for Science and Innovation is complete.

The week after, my last full week here before returning briefly to Seattle, I'm doing a series of talks up here to a group of artists during Grunewald's Sacred Arts Week. I'm basing them on the visual reflections on the movements of the Spiritual Exercises I did for the annual Jesuit province retreat last August. I learned a long time ago that the best work one can do is work that can be repurposed, recycled. I'm using both traditional and contemporary, non-religious images to suggest the themes for contemplation and reflection: what some people call "visio divina" rather than the more traditional "lectio divina" where we sit with the text. Sitting with images, I've found, often opens up doors that might otherwise remain closed.  

I'll send along a few more posts in this blog: how the final piece looks, how I'm going to get in in 125 pieces to Seattle, and then how the mounting goes. My work will be complete before Thanksgiving, and then the mosaic will rest quietly in storage until the install in early summer, 2021, once the Seattle U. Center for Science and Innovation is complete. 

 Thanks again for your patience and interest.