"Resolute Ways." Plaster and acrylic on board

"For the past 25 years[ Ronald Crawford ] has had extensive experience working on Salt Spring Island with functional and sculptural stonework. […] These works are made with a unique combination of plaster and acrylic paint, resulting in a modern variation on the frescoes. The surfaces are carved, shaped, sanded and painted until they take on a rich, naturally eroded appearance. The physical depth of the plaster gives a real surface for shadow and light to alter and enrich the image. Within the plaster, natural and man-made patterns co-exist in an uneasy alliance of form." Steffich Fine Art (Salt Spring Island)

 Furrows, corrugations, grooves … meandering paths … ridges … soft waves and faint etchings blending with sharply-drawn geometrical shapes. In Ronald Crawford's landscape paintings, the natural and the man-made coalesce in "an uneasy alliance of" abstract and representational forms. 
"Although I'm put into the generalization of an abstract artist," Ron Crawford told me recently, "I do think of myself as a landscape artist." And landscape is the first thing I see when I look at  "Resolute Ways," a landscape of great intricacy -- waves and ripples, a river cascading into the sea, an underwater seascape and a twilight sky rising in the distance, or is it a forest …? Slowly, abstract forms  begin to emerge from the patterns carefully carved on the painting's plaster surface, "patterns," as Crawford explains to me, "inspired by the forces of natural erosion, water, light, and movement." I realize that, even as I try to make connections with the natural world this painting draws its inspiration from, I am also, and just as strongly, drawn to the rich abstract shapes emerging from its rugged surface. It is not that my eye cannot decide between figurative and abstract. It is the image itself that refuses to settle on either. Fixity and flux: these are the two forces coming together in an alliance that does not feel "uneasy" or forced, but necessary and organic. 

Everything flows; everything changes, as Heraclitus said. Yet nature's processes also have their own inexorable rhythms, their paths leaving indelible imprints on the earth's surface. These are the forms carved and traced in Crawford's unique landscapes. Everything changes, and yet there is much that remains unchanged, like the passing of the seasons or the rivers' compulsion to flow towards the sea. We take comfort in the idea of a natural order, even though, or perhaps because, we know  that it will lead inexorably to our own extinction. These are nature's "resolute ways." But even though we are subjected to the same constant natural forces, we are also able to alter the shape of our physical environment and its ways according to the patterns suggested by our imagination. And the human imagination has no limits.

There is something reassuring about a figurative landscape, perhaps a reminder of our permanent impermanence. At the same time, we relish the way abstraction hints at other modes of being beyond the physical and the finite.  Abstract art challenges the ways we see our immediate material reality, imbuing it with mystery and a sense of the infinite -- turning the everyday into "something rich and strange."  It is this active confluence of figuration and abstraction that gives "Resolute Ways" its particular power to engage our imagination. Whether we see the carvings and furrows as representative of specific objects or scenes in the real world or as evocations of our own fears and desires, there is a timeless quality to the painting that allows for endless interpretive possibilities. 

When I first approached this painting at the gallery, I was attracted to its rugged physical surface, its grooves and corrugations. The intricate carvings and colourful incrustations were richly suggestive of the fossils and sediments accumulated over millions of years of geological and biological activity on earth. Earth's memories. A landscape that was being drawn, a text that was being written long before the human imagination began to reshape and remould its contours, to alter its "resolute ways." Crawford's vision embodies this timeless landscape before human intervention, and does so in a way that also calls attention to its own existence as a "man-made"  object—a human creation. I think of Shakespeare's famous lines in The Tempest and how they inform my understanding of this painting:

 "Full fathom five thy father lies; 
              Of his bones are coral made; 
    Those are pearls that were his eyes: 
              Nothing of him that doth fade, 
    But doth suffer a sea-change 
    Into something rich and strange."
 "Ariel's Song," The Tempest 

Art uses reality's "fossilized" remnants as its materials, imbuing them with new life.  
The physical world dies but is constantly renewed in the "sea-change" of our imagination. Ron Crawford understands the transformative power of art, especially when this art harnesses the forces of nature and imagination together in an effort to revitalize our perception of the world. 

In ditch, the poetry that matters

Daniella Elza lives in Vancouver. This is her website: http://strangeplaces.livingcode.org

"Daniela Elza shapes an unusual format to convey the fugitive nature of words." (Hannah Main–van der Kamp, Review of the weight of dew by Daniela Elza, 2012)

Fugitive: given to or in the act of running away; moving from place to place; fleeting (OED). 

Symmetry: agreement in dimensions, due proportion. 

Symmetry "pleases/ the eye," but "barely." The certainty that symmetry provides -- everything has its due proportion, there is order in the universe—is soon, almost necessarily, followed by a bigger, more inescapable certainty: we die. Our graves trace the same motif, they  "line up/precisely      neatly" (lines 6-7) Our "bones," our "ashes/so precise." It "hurts       (to know." And, yet, we find some comfort in symmetry. It exists beyond us: "symmetry is    where    I will go/when       I die" (1-2). A statement of fact. Facts are comforting. They have their due proportion, "the way/precisely," "so precise/it hurts"(16), because symmetry is also death. We can arrange graves and bones, but they remain dead, even if the arrangement is beautiful to the eye. But the eye can also be alive. Our inner vision—our imagination—has the power to transcend our finite physical existence. In Elza's poem, the vision is Platonic. The world that appears to our senses is only a copy of a more "real" and perfect realm of forms or ideas that are eternal and changeless, like the idea of symmetry. 


Elza's vision of symmetry in this poem, however, is far from changeless; it's dynamic, unpredictable. Elza conveys this dynamism by breaking up the lines in the poem and creating three not-quite-symmetrical word columns. This pattern frees our eyes— "the eye/regimented"—so they can roam freely across the page, tracing new arrangements from left to right (the traditional way we read), but also from top to bottom, across the page, moving up and down from word to word, fragment to fragment, sentence to sentence. Read in this way, the poem becomes a chessboard, our eyes moving the pieces to create surprising combinations. Line 8 reveals a surprising aphorism: "not to waste any time is no challenge to the mind." There are also some Beckettian moments (I see Beckett everywhere), in the third column: “I will go/it pleases/in a way/what is" reminds me of Beckett's characters, so stoic in the face of death, yet so chatty, everything has to be processed through language, in the mind,  "to the mind. /any space. the bones. with the eye." So many possibilities here!

I realize I am playing with the language of the poem, "busy re-arranging the bones" (line 11), these "bones" that have escaped their symmetrical "graves," the symmetry of traditional poetic form, to roam free for a little longer, meandering, divagating, taking unexpected turns, having some fun, I hope. It must get boring, "the way    graves   line up" (line 6). 

And I think about the reviewer's words again, "Daniela Elza shapes an unusual format to convey the fugitive nature of words—not to contain but to convey, to give expression to the impermanent and changeable nature of language. Poetic form, by definition, seeks to give shape to the flow of language. Elza's poetic shapes, with their gaps and discontinuities, their unusual line breaks, their idiosyncratic use of typographic marks and their tendency to group words in new and strange combinations, are designed not only to convey the "fugitive nature" of language but also to "re-align" the way we see. After all, there is no escape from "symmetry," that much we know. But we can choose to look at it in a new and surprising way. That much she knows.