To navigate this work, wait for the text to advance, or click on the lexia you
want to follow. The work begins with
a series of lines of poetry from the
narrative. Click or wait for the text to change. After the narrative
begins, to read where every luminous landscape, click on the text in any
of the displayed lexias and/or wait for the text to change. Occasionally there
is a "timeout" on one or more of the lexias. Use "reload" to fix this.
where every luminous landscape was written for Firefox. It also works on
Microsoft Explorer, but the sound should be turned off to avoid Explorer's
audible link changing sounds.
About This Work
Flowing blue paint. Blue sky.
White paper. Clouds.
The colors like jewels
in my white paint tray.
Small brushstrokes. Pine needles.
Grass on the hillside.
where every luminous landscape is a work of new media poetry that
is composed of composite arrays of hypertext lexias. Parallel trails of
lexias lead to different parts of a narrative told by Dorothy Abrona McCrae,
a Bay Area Figurative painter.
The main narrative thread takes part in the San Francisco Bay Area
in the years beginning with World War II. But the narrator also relates
other aspects her life and work, recollects the lives of California
artist adventurers, and describes her paintings of historical artists
and writers.
The reader views multiple paths through narrative information. Color and
design contribute to a reading experience of successive text-paintings that
chronicle the changes in a painter's work, beginning with her background as a
landscape painter. Blue lexias begin in the present, yet are recollections
of the lives and work of California landscape artists; blue-green lexias
begin in 1944; and yellow, black, purple lexias are descriptions of Dorothy's
paintings -- past and present -- of historical artists and writers.
Informed by successive layers of Dorothy's life and art and by my own life
as a poet -- who at one time bicycled around the New England country side
with watercolors and sketch pad, at a later time created a series of small
paintings, photographs, and texts that were presented in
"card catalogs"
and
landscape projects,
and who now (on crutches for over fourteen years)
walks the hills of California with my notebook and sketch pad --
where every luminous landscape is composed with interlocking
texts that I/the reader shuffle and reshuffle until the effect is
exactly what is desired.
where every luminous landscape is part one of the trilogy,
Paths of
Memory and Landscape, that also includes an
interlude composed of three recollected scenes,
when the foreground and the
background merged,
and a closing text-based trio sonata with the same name as the trilogy,
paths of memory and
painting.
Interface and Poetic Devices
The interface is a variation of the interface I designed for the
opening section of The Roar of Destiny. (1995-1999)
It also builds on my parallel text paintings such as those I developed for the
installation of its name was Penelope at the Richmond Art Center in 1989
and on some of my sculptural work, such as
Romeo and Juliet. These works,
in turn, were influenced by the photography of John Gutmann and the work of
contemporary conceptual photographers, such as Lew Thomas, among others.
A way to view and select individual lexias is available in
a "lines" interface
where the reader can select lexias to appear in the upper right section by clicking
on any line in the other sections of the array. This interface also provides a
larger print and more static version of the main thread of the narrative.
The "lines interface" and the use of "lines" poetry in the preludes to all
the parts of Paths of Memory and Painting were created using "lines"
from individual lexias in the work to create a new work, a device I first
used for
one of the interface entry ways
to
l0ve0ne, (Cambridge, MA:
Eastgate Web Workshop, 1994) where instead of using one word or partial
phrase as a link, as I had in Uncle Roger, I used an entire phrase
or line, creating an evocative "lines" interface and/or poetic prelude,
depending on how I used this device. For more examples of my use of this
device, see my interface to
The Roar of Destiny (1996-1999) and any
one of
the interface entry ways to the (created before the blog era)
fictive journal
Dorothy Abrona McCrae. (2000)
Display
It displays most effectively on a screen that is 9x12 to 12x15 but should
work on any screen that is 9x12 or larger. On a very large computer screen,
links to different iterations of the array may be visible that are not visible
on most screens. They are included because computer searches can bring the
reader into an individual frame that is isolated from the display,
and there needs to be a link that returns to the main array.
Notes and Resources:
The Title:
The phrase "luminous landscape" is, in art usage, sometimes employed
to describe American landscape painting and/or photography. It is less widely
used and less precise than "impressionism" and has been applied in a variety
of ways.
The Narrator:
In
Dorothy Abrona McCrae, the first work narrated
by the artist of that name,
Dorothy confronts her past and the events that shaped her life. in the process,
her attitudes towards her friends, towards other artists, towards her relationship
with Sid undergo a sympathetic change. Her work is exhibited in her home state of
New Hampshire, a series of events help her to move beyond the long ago death of her
first husband in World War II, and she and Sid reconcile.
Now once again, Dorothy returns to her past, and we follow the development of her
work, beginning with a recollected return to her background as a landscape painter.
California Landscape Artists
Nancy Boas
Society of Six, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997
Hearst Art Gallery, St Mary's College of California,
Publications.
__William Keith, The Saint Mary's College Collection
edited by Ann Harlow, text by Alfred C. Harrison, Jr.
Second Printing with Supplement
Moraga, CA: Hearst Art Gallery, Saint Mary's College of California, 1994
__Early Artists of the Bohemian Club
Moraga, CA: Hearst Art Gallery, St Mary's College of California, 2002
Essay by Ann Harlow, exhibition curated by Julie Armistead and Nancy Ferreira
California Historical Society
Grafton Tyler Brown:Visualizing California and the Pacific Northwest
William H. Gerdts and Will South, California Impressionism,
NY, London, Paris: Abbeville Press, 1998
Edan Hughes
Anna Althea Hills (on the CalArt website)
Impressions of California, Early Currents in Art 1850-1930, Irvine, CA:
The Irvine Museum, 1996.
__Elmer Wachtel, pp. 38,39, 187-188
__Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel, pp 188-189
__Anna Althea Hills, pp. 175-176
Clarence King, "Mount Shasta" from Mountaineering in the High Sierra,
in the Sierra Nevada. In Jack Hicks, James D. Houston, Maxine Hong Kingston,
and Al Young, eds, The Literature of California, Volume 1, Native American
Beginnings to 1945. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 2000.
pp. 184-191. King was accompanied by painter Gilbert Munger and Photographer
Carleton Watkins.
Susan Landauer, California Impressionists, The Irvine Museum
and the Georgia Museum of Art, A Presentation of the Atlanta Committee
for The Olympic Games Cultural Olympiad, 1996.
Gordon T. McClelland and Jay T. Last
California Watercolors, 1850-1970:
An Illustrated History and Biographical Dictionary,
Santa Ana, CA: Hillcrest Press, 2002.
__Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel, pp. 16,17, 204
John Muir
__John Muir, "A Near View of the High Sierra",
in John Muir, The Mountains of California, pp. 48-73, Berkeley,
Ten Speed Press, 1991 (facsimile edition of the original work that was
published in 1884)
__
John Muir, "My First Summer in the Sierra", Yosemite Online
includes sketches made by Muir in 1869
__Sierra Club,
John Muir Exhibit
Chiura Obata
__
The Great Nature of Chiura Obata
__Kimi Kodani Hill,
Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata's Art of the Internment
Berkeley, CA: Heyday
__Obata's Yosemite, The Art and Letters of Chiura Obata from his Trip
to the High Sierra in 1927, Yosemite Association, 1993
with essays by Janice T. Dreisbach and Susan Landauer
Granville Redmond (Wikipedia)
Worth Allen Ryder, Art: Berkeley, University of California, Calisphere
Jean Stern, Joan Irvine Smith
Reflections of California, The Athalie Richardson Irvine Clarke Memorial Exhibition,
The Irvine Museum, 1994.
Elmer Wachtel and Marion K. Wachtel
___
Elmer Wachtel (1864-1929) (Fleischer Museum)
___
Marion K. Wachtel (1876-1954)
Berkeley
Charles Wollenberg
Berkeley - A City in History, Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2008
__
Chapter 7: "World War II Watershed"
(Berkeley Public Library website)
covers the presence of the military on the Berkeley campus
during World War II.
Blondel
"Or perhaps we should explore the idea that there
may have been secreted children in eras where there was
no telling what could happen to the Little Princes or the
children of Dissidents. In such cases, clues to their
identity might have been 'planted' on children hidden in
foster families, and the histories of persecution in
Renaissance England might be recorded in personal as
well as public records."
Judy Malloy,
About The Wedding Celebration of Gunter and Gwen
In the section of where every luminous landscape that begins with Blondel's
story, Dorothy relates the histories that informed a series of drawings and paintings
made early in her career. Like opening an album of photographs from another era
in search of formative events, her return to the past sets the stage for the
transformation of her vision that is related in Paths of Memory and Landscape.
L. K. Alchin,
"Blondel the Minstrel", The Middle Ages Web Site
"Following the footsteps of St Patrick,
some of my ancestors
would be attending Mass this morning,
while others would be on their way to The Kirk.
But I'm in the mountains with my watercolors."
Dorothy's words are sometimes meant to raise questions -- such as here
where readers might react in one way or another to the analogy
of the spiritual act of landscape painting with going to Church --
perhaps thinking of what our ancestors did on this day,
perhaps considering what *we* do on Sunday mornings,
or wondering how we might think of spiritual or moral values on this day.
It should be noted that in the 19th century, the spiritual nature of landscape
painting was an integral part of the work of the Hudson River School.
"....a continuing emotional and spiritual development of the American ethos,
deeply interwoven with literary thought..." is a part of John K. Howat's
description of American landscape painting in his introduction to
American Paradise, The World of the Hudson River School.
In the same reference, Lauretta Dimmick attributes to George Inness
the Hudson River School's two essential traits: "the primacy of landscape
as subject and the belief that in landscape one could find higher, moral truth."
(p. 234)
If Dorothy's statement is challenging even now, how were the beliefs of the Hudson
River School considered in their time? Are the spiritual qualities of
landscape painting still considered? These are some of the questions that her
statement raises.
It should also be noted that there is a cogent possibility that in some places
and eras the work of woman landscape painters may not have been
adequately recorded in history because there was prejudice against
women painting spiritual subjects.
Sources
American Paradise, The World of the Hudson River School,
NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987. Introduction by John K. Howat.
p. xvii
Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Amy Ellis, with Maureen Miesmer,
Hudson River School: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
,
New Haven and London, Yale University Press in Association with the Wadsworth
Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, 2003
Lee A. Vedder,
"Heeding the Call of Nature: Asher Brown Durand's Communion with the American Landscape"
Traditional Fine Arts Organization Resource Library, July 14, 2005
with permission of The New York Historical Society
Emily Dickinson
"In my drawing,
Emily Dickinson's image,
is beside the National Gallery portrait
of William Shakespeare.
Their haunting resemblance,
speaking,
with Shakespeare's words from Sonnet 30:
'When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past...'"
Sources
Shakespeare, Sonnet 30
"But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end."
Dickinson Electronic Archives
"Can you render my Pencil?
The Physician has taken away my Pen."
Emily Dickinson, letter to T. W. Higginson, Cambridge, June 1864
In Kirsten Silva Gruesz,
"Imprisonment and Captivity in Dickinson and Whitman,
during the Civil War ...and After", "Dickinson's 'Captive Consciousness"
Homer
"Wine dark Aegean Sea.
My father's world. Made real in my childhood
by his evening reading of epic poetry.
I am painting a poet, veteran of war. In ancient Greece.
He is looking out to sea. Writing."
Dorothy's father was a professor of philosophy, whose main area of study
was the Greek pre-Socratic philosophers. Her interpretation of Homer's life,
based on how artists work, is a different starting point - an artist's
interpretation of Homer's life and creative process.
Homer as Hostage
Informed both by the meaning of his name and by the history of hostage taking
in ancient cultures, the idea of Homer as a hostage that underlies her interpretation
dates back to antiquity, mentioned as early as Lucian. Interpretations differ as to
his original homeland -- from Babylonia to William Harris' suggestion of Troy.
Dorothy's interpretation -- based on Homer's pervasive identification of Ithaca
as homeland, on his strong identification with Odysseus' longing for return to Ithaca
-- is that Homer was from the place he represents as Ithaca. However, Dorothy is
aware that in some instances, poets and writers transpose their own experience,
and remembered detail of one locale might be utilized in a fictionalized account of
another locale if there were similarities between those locales, even if/particularly
if the writer has actually lived in both these places.
Thus the debate as to whether or not the place now known as Ithaca was Homer's Ithaca
(Kefalonia and even the Western coasts of Ireland and Scotland or Barra off the coast
of Scotland have been suggested based on his descriptions of coastline) is made more
complex because we do not know if Homer transposed remembered experience of his original
homeland or of his travels when describing Ithaca. As many writers could attest,
Schliemann's finding of Troy using Homer's description does not mean that the poet
described Ithaca in the same precise way, particularly if he was thinking of his own
homeland. For instance, of the series of places where Dorothy has lived in the works I
wrote concerning her story, some are real and are so identified, some are undisclosed
reality, (ie they exist, but I changed the name) and some are imaginary. For the most
part the "imaginary" places contain elements of transposed memory of other treasured
places where it is now difficult to go.
Parallels Between New Media Writing and the Introduction of Writing
"...Not the usual way that poets compose
in these times of remembered narrative,
but either there is a family memory of writing,
or he learned to read and write
years ago in another place."
Dorothy takes a straight path through Homer's possible use of writing to create
complex, structured narrative. But the unknown truth may be somewhat more complex.
An analogy with the backgrounds and knowledge that new media writers bring to
emerging
forms of poetry, fiction, and community storytelling
may be of interest in this respect.
Sources
Homer, The Iliad: The story of Achilles, translated by W.H.D. Rouse,
New York: New American Library, 1938.
Homer, The Odyssey, translated by W.H.D. Rouse,
New York: New American Library, 1937.
Gustave Glotz, Ancient Greece at Work, New York: Norton, 1967
First published in Paris in 1920 and in London in 1927.
William Harris,
Greek Language and Literature
William Harris,
"Homer the Hostage, A Bicultural Epic Poet".
Oliver Taplin, "Homer", in John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray,
Greece and the Hellenistic World, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
pp. 44-71. Pope is quoted on page 44.
Judy Malloy,
"Hypernarrative in the Age of the Web" -- National Endowment for the Arts NEA arts.community, 1998
Judy Malloy,
"Notes on the Creation of its name was Penelope"
Judy Malloy,
"Between the Narrator and the Narrative", based on a talk presented
at the Modern Language Association Conference, NYC, December 29, 1992
Hiram Powers
"I painted Hiram Powers looking. At me with recognition
as I struggled to portray a sculptor's life and work
in his own expressive face."
Begun in 1841, Hiram Powers' The Greek Slave was about the enslavement of
Greek Christians by the Turks and about the enslavement of African Americans in
America. Dorothy follows the theme of opposition to slavery in the work of
Hiram Powers and in terms of deep family memories of slavery. Powers was a
descendant of Walter Power(s), from County Waterford, probably an Irish slave,
who arrived in Massachusetts in 1654 on The Goodfellow and was one of the Irish
young people captured and enslaved by Cromwell, as related in my
From Ireland with Letters.
Powers' The Greek Slave, a work whose body and face were created from many models,
including the Venus de Medici, was exhibited across America in the years
before The Civil War.
"To so confront man's crimes in different lands," his friend Elizabeth Barrett Browning
wrote in her poem about the work.
Sources:
Hiram Powers
Hiram Powers,
The Greek Slave, Brooklyn Museum
Richard P. Wunder, "The Greek Slave", in Richard P. Wunder, Hiram Powers, Vermont Sculptor.
1805-1873, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1991. pp. 207-274.
James F. Cavanaugh,
"Irish Slavery"
(Race and History)
Shakespeare
"The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,
The plain-song cuckoo gray,
Whose note full many a man does mark,
And dares not answer nay..."
"I pray thee gentle mortal, sing again..."
from William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
Dorothy's unorthodox reuse of this exchange between Bottom and Titania
subverts the usual interpretations, calling attention to
the weaver's song in the context of unwanted disguise and imprisonment:
"I will sing, that they shall hear I am not afraid".
And as my voice may sometimes surface in Dorothy's narratives,
so it is possible that Shakespeare's own voice may sometimes surface
in certain seemingly out of character segments of his plays.
There is much that we do not know about about the official response
to Richard II, which was probably the play he wrote before
A Midsummer Night's Dream, or about his life in religion-torn
England: "I will sing, that they shall hear I am not afraid".
In where every luminous landscape, if Blondel sings to free another;
Bottom sings to free himself, and in the coming together of these stories,
all who are in such situations.
Text and interface for where every luminous landscape - c2009
Judy Malloy
Cover and other images: copyright 2008,
Judy Malloy
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where every luminous landscape
