Wintershed

A buck drops its antlers every winter.
Collected from the forest floor and now in my studio:

Wintershed twitter.com/buckhouse/stat…

— James Buckhouse (@buckhouse) December 31, 2011

Timing calculus

Moments before this.

How to hold a rope

Thinking of the initial vibration that first made polyphonic sound... and the overtone series. Can we imagine holding that rope and whipping it through the paces of tonal harmonics? The tonic, the octave, the dominant, the sub-dominat.

Can we imagine the first two human voices that sang together? At first they might have sung the same song. And then tried an octave apart. But then, the first polyphonic attempt—what great courage! Did the 5th come naturally? Or was there scooping and searching and tuning mid-flight?

As the tones and songs collapsed upon each other, what dissonance rubbed the right way to create some new thought for the nature of sound?

The crack of a tree limb falling in a thunderstorm, the snort of a horse sucking oxygen on a hard run, the chatter of currents carving a river bed, sound is always environmental. Art is always contextual.

Can we imagine a new art that is equal parts mathematics and experience? Can we have the courage to admit that the visual and the aural are experienced simultaneously (even if we care more for one than the other)?

Opera vs. ballet

Why do opera fans and ballet fans resist each other's art? Both seem to be an elaboration on music: an elucidation, an exaltation; and yet there is a mutual distrust among audiences. It seems out of date. Fresher would be to celebrate the genius of both forms, learning from one to inform the other. Both are theatre. Both are music embodied. Both can transform the viewer through excellence.

Both require an architecture of form and a vocabulary of norms to rub up against, to bend, to both subvert and confirm. Both are old traditions that are always contemporary. Both owe more to narrative and story than either wishes to admit. Both are complex webs of signification, looping and interlocking signs and tropes to reveal something new from the old and something familiar, loved or trusted from the new.

Both forms can shock. Both forms can bore. Both forms require a time and a place and a willing audience. Both forms unfold. Both forms exist in a moment of perpetual risk: at any moment the performance could tumble, and yet, almost always it does not. Both forms are metonymic stand-ins for life. The curtain rises, we risk, we dare, we try, we fail, we succeed, we try again and then without exception it ends. Opera and ballet both remind us to love more, try harder, and think better thoughts. What can we bring from opera to ballet, and what can we bring from ballet to opera? How can each benefit from the other?

Friends and Strangers

Friends and strangers watercolors added to JamesBuckhouse.net

All Fashion is Fiction

Serg Riva images on James Buckhouse.net

Elucidate material sensuality

I've posted a series of 20 C-prints 20"x30" of close-ups of my intaglio portfolio. The work is a deep exploration into a vocabulary of mark-making. I trained under a master print maker from Crown Point Press 15 years ago. Recently, I went back to that work to look into the rhythm, punctuation, and utterance of the mark. Teasing out close-ups that unlocked new compositions of expression, rhythm, decision-making and hope. The work parallels my recent explorations into language, narrative, and the physics of resonance, but is rendered in a direct way: explicit, direct, physical marks to elucidate material sensuality.

You can see all 20 online here:

http://jamesbuckhouse.net

Hope you enjoy.