Woodland Pattern Book Center

I am teaching a workshop at Woodland Pattern this Thursday. Here is the title and the description:

Text/Image/Memory
It is easy to write about the 'loss of one's childhood' or the 'loss of a parent.' We have heard these phrases often enough to think we know what they mean. But I suspect that the reality of our life experiences is far more complicated than we often care to reflect on. Those realities include joy and pain, wonder and confusion. Often we struggle for words that will do justice to these feelings. In this workshop we will examine strategies for re-visioning experiences that have been formative in ways (both positive and negative) that we struggle to understand. We will look at the work of others as a starting point for visualizing how we see the world. The process of making, a mystery in itself, often gives us the gift of memory with new understanding.

It has been a pleasure to prepare for - and it is a pleasure to return again to Woodland Pattern - a place that I have so much affection for - and has been so meaningful in my own development as an artist while I have been in Milwaukee.

They have a wonderful archive of people who have read their work and exhibited in the gallery that is really worth checking out. One of the pieces that is a favorite of mine is the following by my friend Mark Anderson. It is from MANUAL.

You start small and expand as much as you desire, in the course of your life, but language is something that is often taken for granted, and over time, expediency will replace curiosity, and of the thousands of words available to learn and use, you'll probably settle on a small handful that serves your needs.

At some point, perhaps, you will travel to a foreign country and if you are a standard American with nothing like a second language you will be reminded of that early stage in your life when the range of your vocabulary was really really narrow. It's probably something you won't think about too often, but in the beginning, you had one word—[gurgle, sounding like hi, why and I]. Then you split that into two, then a third came along, then more and so on, but eventually you may forget what it was like to have only as many words as you had teeth.

Eating is something that gets underway at the beginning, and it grows and changes as you do, into more advanced and particular behaviors which eventually relate to your response to hunger more as a metaphor than prime manifestation.

From the initial urge to suck—a desire that never really leaves you—the things you will do to appease your appetite as you step beyond the world of the crib multiply in manifold forms, dodging and weaving around your ability to control and understand them.

Confusion ensues when hunger leaves the realm of the stomach, and mashed peaches gives way to cigarettes, coffee, bigger toys, new clothes, ,more this, better that; better job, bigger hat; greater power, wealth, knowledge; more money, more time; more me.