·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
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My new book is out! For ordering, blurbs, etc. details. Best to take a look on the BlazeVox Publisher’s website:

http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/news/after-language-letters-to-jack-spicer-by-stephen-vincent-now-available-63/

Haptic: Dubuffet [16 x 20"; oil pastels]

When I make marks, as a working poet, I imagine I work in the way a poet would paint. As in the case of “Dubuffet” [the work shown here] I approach each stroke as I would a syllable, or an accent or a consonant. It is, I assume, my way to inhabit, to live within the space of the drawing surface what one  part of me sees/experiences  as a page, as if the work is part of a conversation with the substance, the materiality of the paper; I work this space – as I would a poem – in which the paper is a potential, continuous field of rhythm, of color, of and a delight  in its resistances, its choices, and a  humility, as if the pens are having a conversation with God, or a series of gods, some who dance, who play, who challenge, sometimes darkly and seriously, ones, for example, who pull the oil pastel crayon in a dark descent or a luminous one; who make each new space, each field, into  a journey, a way in, a way out – much the way in which a book unfolds – this forest of marks, living – indeed,  its entirety, an extended conversation.

(further thought)

I call the piece “Dubuffet” not that it looks like what might be commonly called “a Dubuffet”, but more as an homage to Dubuffet’s kind of attention to color, to materiality, to going inside to bring up whatever is inside me or collectively “us” to create marks that correspond to the heat, the velocity, the shapes, forces and colors of a cosmos that is both internal and external. Actually, when I step back and look at this piece, the spiraling black ‘rib’ lines appear to barely contain (encase) while at the same time heighten the centrifugal force of the color bearing marks.

Haptic: Dubuffet  [detail]

I remember first seeing Dubuffet’s work on posters announcing shows in Paris in 1960-61.  I was 19 year old student and living on the Isle St. Louis; the posters energized the streets, as well as provided me with some kind dearly needed beacon during those days in which Paris was politically fraught by Algeria’s war of independence from France’s colonial power. Demonstrations, often violent, were common. Rifle toting policemen in full riot gear controlled street corners,, government building facades and gates to the homes of politicians. Dubuffet’s bold colors & strokes  practically taunted all that was worn out in the gray, repressive & repugnant colonial palette. Young, much lost and confused, it was exactly what I craved. If this piece, “Dubuffet”, carries any of that force into these times,  I am grateful. If you find it “beautiful” or ” successful”, I am grateful for that, too.

[Note: My NYC drawing show at the Jack Hanley Gallery, closes next weekend May 28; if interested in detail, or a least seeing installation photos, check out the blog entry below this one.]

Over the weekend I made haptic drawings during the three related & awesome performances of  Teatr Zar, a Polish theater troupe – from the Wroclaw based Jerzy Grotowski Insitute -  here in San Francisco(through this Wednesday, I believe) as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival (www.sfiaf.org):

The Gospels of Childhood Triptych:  Created and directed by Jaroslaw Fret. The first & third parts are performed in St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church and the second part is up the hill at the Portrero Neighborhood House. Without going into the detail each performance deserves; if you are at all familiar with Growtoski’s vision of the theater the works immerse you into a world of physically and sonically riveting voices & gestures & movement. Their subjects draw from the study of myth, ritual and ancient choral practices in Georgia (Russia), Corsica and Poland. These folks are absolutely brave and fearless about taking their explorations to the darkest depths. As a witness, it is almost impossible to remain an ‘objective witness’ to what proceeds, instead, at least in terms of my experience, I came out of each episode with what I described in my journal, as an electric sensual cleansing. I made the following drawings for each part:[It is possible to make the drawings larger with a double-tap on the drawing. They are at 300 dpi, so they take a little while to unfold, but, so much better to see the fuller body!]

Good review in SF Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/05/20/DDM11JH31V.DTL#ixzz1NCVC3kkW

The poet/artist holding a bottle of Stephen Vincent wine at the Gallery Reception

Haptics: Poetry By Other Means
Jack Hanley Gallery
Friday, May 06 – Saturday, May 28 2011
136 Watts, New York, NY 10013 (Tribeca)
For views of the installation and directions go to:

http://www.jackhanley.com/current.php?site=ny

(For directions to the Gallery, etc.)

panel selections from the accordion fold book:

Haptics:Times Square, New York City

3 Sites, 23 Drawings. March 17 – March 23, 2011

(1) Spring & All, 30 x 22″; work in progress
By training of most sorts, I am not a visual artist. So my emergence as someone who is becoming known for making marks and exhibiting drawings is both an adventure and a continuously unfolding mystery. When people look at my work – which is non-representational – a frequent question is, “How do you know when to stop?”
In truth I kind of both know and don’t know. In truth, there are always a number of places in which I am pleased with a figuration or series that appears to hold its own.

(2) Spring & All, 30 x 22″; work in progress
At the same time I am frequently taken with a kind of greed where I want to see what will unfold if I keep hand and pens moving. If I am initially comfortable with the figuration, I am driven to see what will happen when the forms get broken. Indeed, it is as if I am having a conversation with the paper – its very fibers – into and over which I ply the play of ink. On a more metaphoric level, the drawing process is like a cave in which the clarity of objects at the entrance begins to take on different shapes as the pens (and I) go deeper into the space. That becomes the mystery of the process. Ironically enough, most of this time I am lost and unable ‘to read’ or see any apparent formal organization of shapes. Going ‘darker’ into the ‘cave’ releases a wall of visual strangers to which I can only entrust some sense of integrity. My only mantra in these circumstances is “Trust the hand, trust the hand.” Which is really another way of saying that there is a (higher?) intelligence at work that belies my ‘conscious’ intelligence – a deeper web within the web, so to speak.

(3)Spring & All, 30 x 22″; work in progress
But, also, ‘in truth’, as this process eventually exhausts itself; I do step back and examine the marks that have been produced while I have blindly kept moving into this labyrinth. At that point, a formal awareness, or the desire to see form, resumes. If I see places that appear incomplete, or seem to beg for marks that will resonate with other marks or figures, I go back in with my pens. This ‘balancing’ is what leads me to the piece’s closure and kind of fulfillment. Though I must admit, when I look back at the photographs of the early stages of the works development, I get nostalgic and bemoan a bit the loss of what I have destroyed!


(4) Spring & All, 30 x 22″.
Somehow this is not a good photograph of the piece. It was surrounded by too much morning light on the dining room wall. It does not render the depths and play of the lines, shapes and ladders of black ink. However, a thought which involves Plato crosses my mind. It could be that this work is not really about figuration; it is about the way the light – the negative space – reveals itself to the eye. In reference to Plato, I am thinking about his allegory of the cave in which it is forbidden that anyone look direct into the source of the light that creates the shadows on the wall. The light would be blinding and erase consciousness. So one might think then that it is the duty of the conscious eye to look at the shadowed shapes formed by the light. But now I am thinking to the contrary. The function of the shapes – those figurations – made by ink in the drawing make it possible to look – at least get multi-varied glimpses- at the presence of light. One can take the meaning of that light as far or as little as possible. Without ever having thought of it in the context of drawing, and at the risk of sounding spontaneously mystical) I am wanting to believe (or, at least, think) the presence of this light is central, at the source if not birth of everything material, biological and human in the world. Not negative space ever.

Pomelos on the rail of our back porch!

Our new pomelo family! “Winter Solar Beacons”, I say! Harvested yesterday from a ‘free’ public basket during a visit to Locke, up there in the Delta, now – bare bone trees, empty fields and hovering fog alongside the Sacramento River – looking much like 16th Century Delft. Also, belatedly found by her niece, Dona, in the poet Laura Uewicz’s house – now passed away since 2007 – three 1966 tapes for radio of Kenneth Rexroth reading translations of Pierre Reverdy, then just published by New Directions. (Laura hosted “Writers Circle”, a regular program on KQED Radio Station from 1966 to ’68. True or faux, Rexroth wouuld have recited the history of the Chinese and their use of the pomelo!
Locke was started in the 19th Century as a Sacramento port and company town for Chinese only – the men worked the local fields, harvesting et al

Haptic: What Interferes / Pleases In Response to Selected Works by Evelyn Ficarra, composer December/January 2010

The mystery of unidentifiable script. Where and why does legibility begin? Is it a conservative gesture – legibility – whose initial creation was meant to regulate relations between governing entities and constituents. (Property law et al). When did love come into it – ‘the letter I just wrote you’?

‘Scriptural heresy.’

(Detail)
In December (already last year!) during my Djerassi residency, for several hours each day I roamed up, down, over and around the 500 acres of forests(Redwood, Oak, Pine, Madrone), late fall grass meadows, rocky mountain tops (from which I could see the Pacific Ocean some 10 miles away), deep canyons, and a deep creek filled canyon. Light varied from luminous to the darkest of Redwood forest shades. With me I carried an array of pens and, at the start, a blank accordion fold book. Composed of 46 adjoining panels, each one 3.5 x 11.5″ (vertical).
In advance, without exactly knowing where, I decided go to 20 different sites and make 2 haptic drawings for each site.

(Detail)
I envisioned my task as a way of taking the pulse of each of the sites. Primarily I would work by becoming as silent and listening as closely as possible to whatever I found active within the site: bird sounds, chill of shadows, intensity and angle of breezes, presence and pressure of clouds and/or sunshine. Of course, I was also listening to my own interior pulse, that is, from a visceral perspective, how I was literally responding and interacting with each site. I suspect, in terms of my plan, the idea was that facing panels would draw out the contrary impulses and energies that occupy us when we sit and take in the manifestations of any space within which we are variously embraced.

Usually I do not think my haptic drawings as in anyway representational, at least in any documentary photographic sense. However, occasionally I find myself contradicted. Below is not a very well focused photograph. But I do find some echo or mirroring between the twists & curves, even the rhythm of the fallen twigs on the ground and the shapes and movements in the drawing.
In what some might call ‘transcendental’ moments I believe it’s possible that our psyche and neurological systems become totally at one with the physical space that surrounds wherever we may be standing. That there is no bodily separation, for example, between an outside and inside sound. Similarly the gesture of a hand making a drawing is also ‘at one’ with the material space that extends out from the pen. The drawing is a manifestation of everything that is viscerally sensed by the hand including the psychic register of what is being sensed. In that way, the drawing becomes a ‘real’ representation of what is there – tho not, again, in any traditional documentary sense. An abstraction made real – as well as the reason why we respond to abstract work as “real”.

The art for the final 40 panel piece – if it were stretched out flat – is a little less than 12 feet long. I find it impossible to photograph all in one shot. (The additional panels will be used for front and back matter, particularly to identify the trail sites around the property, many of which are occupied by sculptures made by previous artists in residence).

Haptic: Under Brandenburg Gate December 2010

I completed this piece earlier this month during my stay at the Djerassi Resident Art Program – a 500 plus acre site south of San Francisco off the Skyline Highway west of Woodside. It was composed while I listened – over and over again – to the Brandenberg Concertos #1 – 3. This absolutely glorious music saturated and brimmed through my studio as my haptic marks took off in both concordance and opposition the play of so many different textures of sound, rhythm, counterpoint and melody. A kind of heavenly charged experience, to say the least, the overall direction and shape of which I had not a clue. Enjoy as you may!

Below here is a picture of part of the Djeassi land. The octagonal structure is the barn with which I had my studio and lodging.

A brief moment here to wish all of you various readers of this blog Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year with pleasures, challenging/fun projects and good friends on your side and beyond.

Stephen Vincent
& if you need to email me, my email address is up in the left hand corner/margin of this blog.