Trance Farm
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Inspired by writings on the devil, themes in cultural artforms, and social taboos “Holy Fuck” depicts a scene on the edge of civilization: a witch’s Sabbat. Women gather behind a farm in a woodlot on the edge of a forest where trees are harvested. When trees are cut down, weeds grow to quickly fill in the opened space, taking advantage of the sunlight. These weeds are often filled with chemicals that are variously medicinal, poisonous, or hallucinogenic. Borage, chickweed, English daisy, burdock, datura, henbane, hellebore, mandrake, and deadly nightshade can all be found in the grayscale flora. The fragmented text that sits behind the women reads: Where Every Heresy Sprouts & Is Green. It is a reference to these types of weeds as well as the waste spaces that, being neglected for a time, provide a place for experimental, antisocial, or fringe behavior. It is also a religious proclamation against the unregulated explorations of those who slip outside of the controls and conventions of culture.
I go where weeds take me. Weeds as “hexing herbs” not only conjures up witchcraft and the witch trials but also to the professionalization of medicine: replacing midwives with doctors. Both of these historical turns away from something called a “witch” rejected the cultural context that might embrace direct access to either shamanic realms of the mind or health and healing. This negation broke tradition and shattered a socially-maintained database: the knowledge of the use of herbs for healing and ceremony. Looking back, trying to reconstruct the recipes and context is to become embroiled in nostalgia, polemics, coded language, ethnographies, cultural comparisons, and wishful thinking. A critique on any of these or other problems with ‘looking back’ might be an end in itself but not for me. I embrace the nostalgia and wishful thinking and everything in between! I move ahead filled with contradiction, misinformation, and magic!
The symbolism of “Holy Fuck” pulls from shadow puppet diagrams, Universal Indian Sign Language, medieval depictions of the mouth of hell, and the clichés of witchcraft imagery. The scene depicts an ambiguous sexuality: part erotic orgy, part rape/sacrifice. The transformation theme common in most shamanic art is shown here in the skinless faces that lack identity, the crouching woman becoming the bear head she is wearing, and the skull-headed man caught in a smoky vortex. 12 disembodied eyes float above the man and the scene is surrounded by 12 floating, black-glowing trees. Six flames ignite from the base of the foreground woodpile. Six sets of shadow puppet hands between the witches. Six witches conduct the ceremony. The backwards title text obscures the curse.
Jesus in a deep alcoholic, meditative bliss. Drunk on wine. A visionary calendar emerges showing the various events throughout the year on the vineyard and in the winery: the wine-maker’s calendar. The phases of the moon surround the calendar, from new moon to the full moon behind J’s head. The moons are also grayscale “eyes” of concentric rings that have the same four-step grayscale as the rainbows that emerge from the black sun in the center of the calendar and diamond pattern border. This, to me, is an attempt to show the power of the grayscale, my devotion to it as an artist, and that it is an important part to understanding my work. The crosses throughout the image are raptor perches used by growers to attract predatory birds who kill the small creatures like gophers and other rodents that threaten the growing vines and ripening fruit – the bird on the upper left cross is a kestrel. The starling on the post with the barbed-wire is a sign that the fruit is ripe – because they show up when the fruit is sweet. The text emanating from J’s heart gives a name to those stages of grape-growing and wine-making (Prune, Plough, Protect, Ripen, Harvest, Crush, Ferment, Punch, Barrel, Taste, Bottle, Rest). They are listed in sequential, cyclical order as they occur around the year. “Rest” is pointing up at J’s head because he is resting. The text behind J is from Meister Eckhart (13th century German mystic) and reads, "There is something that enlivens us when joined with our body” but is here meant to refer to wine as the “spirit” that which enlivens us instead of the holy spirit.
As with all of my drawings, I am interested in the origin of symbols, myths, beliefs, etc.,. The effects of alcohol (in this case, psychedelics in others) combined within a belief system that uses altered states of consciousness can confirm those beliefs: Drink this and you will feel the spirit possess you. This is the awakening and the beginning of the transformation of the mundane world into the sacred. A raptor perch becomes a holy cross. The sheep used to mow the grass between vines become personifications of a deity. The hope that fruit is born from labor becomes submerged in gospel.
This drawing came about through a variety of accidental encounters. The ‘robe’ Jesus is wearing was a gift, a blanket that a former student’s mother made and that he gave to me. The cross perches I saw at a vineyard in Ballard and who make wine called La Croce. Some of the elements in the background and the calendar vignettes are from photographs I took while traveling and visiting vineyards and wineries, others are from books on wine. The datura in the lower left corner appears in many of my drawing and is a reminder of the native psychoactive weeds and it’s importance to me.
How To Identify Flowering Plant Families, 2010
The composition is based on Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man”.
Text running down the central axis of the drawing is from the Chandogya Upanisad and reads: The essence of plants is a person”. This is a twist on the humanist concept of Man as The Measure. The letters of the words are grouped into seven groups to obfuscate the straight-forward reading of the sentence and create a secret language that has to be “sounded out” to be understood.
This is also a play on its title which suggests an academic way to engage nature. This figure, however, is choosing a direct, experiential path.
The star text at the bottom is descriptive jargon pulled from botany texts either describing flower parts or flower orientation.
The setting has been stitched together from several reference photos taken in the Santa Ynez valley.
The plants all come from illustration in the book from which this drawing takes its title.
With “Noah’s Sailboat”, I am returning to themes related to my first series of graphite drawings Noah’s Woodlot.
In 2005 Santa Barbara experienced flooding from heavy, persistent rains. There was a mud slide in a tiny coastal town nestled between steep cliffs and the ocean known as La Conchita that buried a family in their home. A friend who lived in Ventura was commuting on the 101 north the morning of the slide. As she approached this stretch of freeway, traffic stopped. There was a rushing sound and a slurry of mud swamped the road. She was pulled from her car as it was swept off the freeway careening into a ditch. A bus traveling south took stranded commuters back to Ventura but was cut off by an overflowing river surging over the freeway into the Pacific. On a smaller scale but closer to home, my street was flooded by an overflowing creek clogged from years of plant growth. Water gushed over the nearby intersection which was also a bridge over Mission Creek. After this week of rains, we were cut off from the south. Workers reached Santa Barbara by boat or the long drive around the Los Padres National Forest to enter from the north.
The areas throughout Santa Barbara, Goleta, and Isla Vista where I had been drawing plants (freeway shoulders, drainage ditches, alleys, parking lots and other waste spaces) after the storms had few plants remaining. These spaces were scarred, scattered with debris, and filled with logs left by CalTrans after breaking down uprooted trees. This, along with the social chaos created by the natural disaster, inspired the meditative Noah’s Woodlot series. Uprooted trees and sawn logs became poetic leftovers of one man’s efforts to rescue the animal kingdom from the wrath of God. These were simple, exploratory drawings but I had always intended to return to them.
In the years since the La Conchita slide, I have worked on several other series. In this same time, however, the foothills and mountains surrounding Santa Barbara have burned. Several fires scorched the landscape from Goleta (The Good Land) to Montecito and over the hills into the Santa Ynez Valley. Most of these fires came from human acts (mower sparks, arson, and the embers from an illegal campfire that were reignited by sun-downer winds). Hundreds of homes were destroyed and two people were burned severely having to jump through flames to get to their car. A large, seemingly immobile mushroom cloud loomed over the ridge behind the city as the valley burned. The city was blanketed with white ash for months and as the winds came and went, the ash remaining in the hills was carried back to the city. But at the end of this cycle of fire, the rains returned and I returned to Noah.
“Noah’s Sailboat” is a first-step towards a large-scale ark drawing. I also thought the idea of a sailboat was a funny scale-down of the expected ark. The composition is a reference to a type of drawing that a child might have made of a boat with a triangle sail, wave lines, and a radiant sun. I also wanted the drawing to be of a static object that had the visual feeling of movement. I like to play with the ways in which action is re-presented as static image which is part of the reason why most figures in my drawings are shown frozen as if in trance. The undulating, snowy hills are to give the feeling of rising and falling water, the branches mimic wind and splashing water, and the vultures are to be seen as if trailing behind a sailing boat.
This drawing also figures Noah to be a lunatic who hears the voice of God, “Behold the end of all flesh has come for the earth is filled with violence and I will destroy them” (edited version of Genesis 6:13) but in acting upon this it turns out that he has misunderstood the message. He mistakes the voice in his head for his own voice and becomes mad with delusions. Instead of a gatherer, Noah is a hoarder. His collection is his trophies and his boat is a topiary nightmare. I want to imply ecological disaster in the snowy scene (perhaps an ice age instead of a flood) but also natural cycles (it might just be winter). I want to refer to but confuse the source myth and draw out ways of looking at how interactions with nature become encoded in story and symbol.
The composition of Buddha Zodiac is based on a Sui period (6th c. China) bronze shrine depicting the Amitabha Buddha. That shrine shows the Buddha in the center under an arch of jeweled flowers. An image of this shrine appears in the 1992 edition of Richard Evans Schultes’ book Plants of the Gods in the chapter titled “Holy Flower of the North Star”. The caption for this image tells how when the Buddha preached raindrops fell from heaven and landed on Datura (a common weed that is both psychedelic and poisonous). In Buddha Zodiac, a canopy of Brugmansia (formerly known as Tree Datura) appears over the central figure.
Text floating from a translucent figure states: "We people and color the indifferent, neutral screen." This is both a spiritual axiom and a direct reference to the lack of any color in the drawing. The grayscale rainbow over the figure showing phases of the moon restates this absence. The face is mask, a terra cotta sun/garden decoration.
The setting is the beach. The scene is a man drinking from a bottle labeled Spirits out of which a ghostly Saurian is emerging. He is possibly any man who drinks at the beach but he is experiencing a holy, transcendent drunkenness and is expressing his awe in a halo of exclamatory text: God damn. He is sitting on the beach amongst agave, a tree stump, and rocks with two Shi Tzus. These dogs are associated with the Buddha and are his guardian dogs/pets. The text in the stars are an abridged quotation from Francis Thompson, a late nineteenth century English poet, ascetic, and opium addict:
All things
Near or far
Hiddenly
To each other
Linked are
That thou
Canst not
Stir a flower
Without
Troubling
Of a star