Guest Post, Mary Shindell: Inflection Point ll

My working process is influenced by my experience and interaction with the world around me.

In my studio, I produce layered, linear works that relate the terrains of the desert and outer space. I use botanical imagery of plants collected around my studio in Phoenix and also from the Herbarium at ASU, where I photograph pressed plant specimens from the locations in Arizona where the planetary discoveries were made. In drawing the satellite images of Earth and Pluto, my focus is on the similarities of surface and texture between images of Earth and the dwarf planet Pluto. Pluto was discovered at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and I have selected imagery from the Grand Canyon to represent the place of that discovery. After I combined the images, I placed a numbered grid on the surface, as pictured in the sequence of images that follow.

 

Detailed grid artwork, featuring stellar body laid over topographical map

Figure 1: Gridded satellite photographs composed by placing Pluto in the center of mirrored sections of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon

 

In process photo of transferring grid information from map to drawing

Figure 2: Here, I am using the numbered grid to draw each section from the satellite image.

Drawn piece, prepared for photograph.

Figure 3: In the above image, the hand-drawn piece is finished and digitally photographed. It will be printed as an archival Ink Jet print titled “Inflection Point II.”

Hand drawing with cacti digitally added to parts of the map and stellar body.

Figure 4: The digital drawing is then created using a combination of photographed and hand-drawn botanical images from the herbarium specimen pages. Pictured above is an early look at the process.

Close up picture of cactus

Figure 5: An enlarged example of the botanical elements in figure 4

Close up of cacti near both the Earth elements of the Grand Canyon and the map of Pluto

Figure 6: Finally, the analog drawing will be layered with drawings of plant specimens from the Grand Canyon. In this image, the plains of Pluto are on the right, the Grand Canyon’s rim is on the left, and plants from the North Rim region are suspended above the terrain.

 

As the above images illustrate, I will use the botanical elements to connect the experience of the planetary researcher with the sense of physical place from which the scientific research originated and to the physical world of the viewer. As a part of my ongoing concern for the relationship between space and detail in the environment, I am creating a connection between conventional landscape formats in art and the perspectives offered by the study of planets and outer space. By combining the two perspectives with detailed observations of plants, I am creating holistic landscapes that encompass the intimate and the vast. This connects information that we know but cannot see with the reality of the things we can see and touch.

Guest Blog Post, Anthony Varallo: SPACE, DOUBLE SPACE

Anthony E VaralloHow many spaces after a period, one or two?  Space or double space?  If you’re like me, old enough to remember typing your first research papers on your parents’ IBM Selectric, —ancient, even then, but thrilling nonetheless, the way the letters jumped from a center ball that spun and rotated across the page—then you probably prefer two spaces, even though, as you are becoming increasingly aware, typeset pages, like the ones you see in nearly every print publication of every kind, from the smallest circulation literary magazine to The New York Times, use a single space.  Only.  There is, as you must reluctantly admit, no such thing as double-spacing in print publication.  A single space presides after every period.  A space no different than the one after a comma or semi-colon.  Yes, you know this; still, you use two spaces after each period.  Why?

Because you took a typing class in seventh grade, for starters.  The class met in a room fitted out with twenty manual typewriters resting atop twenty desks, the typewriters wearing a vinyl cover that could only be removed upon the instructor’s permission and, at the end of each session, carefully replaced, requiring you to position the typewriter’s carriage just so.  The instructor was old, even by seventh grade teacher standards, and his voice shook as he called out the sentences you were to type, including—and this seems important—the spaces after each punctuation mark.  Comma, space.  Period, double space.  The sound of twenty space bars double-spacing: a basketball dribbled twice.  Failure to double space, a red instructor’s mark, a lower grade.

Because, in college, you upgraded to a portable word processor, heavy as a packed suitcase, but light enough to carry to the dorm lounge whenever your roommate had a visitor.  The word processor stored your papers—documents, you began calling them, without quite realizing it—on disks, enabling you to save your work for later, the words on the page and yet not on the page, either, since you hadn’t printed them out yet, a new phrase to put alongside documents.  Still, you wrote those words as if they would be printed out, because that’s what words aspired to, you began to realize, to be part of sentences to be printed out, and those sentences needed a punctuation mark at the end with two spaces after to give them their proper due.  A pause.  Breathing room.  Authority.

Because, right after you traded in your portable word processor—that old thing!—for your first personal computer, you began writing short stories, and sentences suddenly seemed something larger than words on a page; they became individual brushstrokes on a canvas framed by top, bottom, right and left margins.  Something to take time on, to linger upon, even for hours, as you did, drinking coffee late into the night.  A sentence was a slow-born thing, you began to understand, and to finish one was a kind of honor, one that required a double space, as if to say, There, done, yes, made it, now it is so.  The double space sent the cursor more forcefully into the blank page, to better accompany your mind, which suddenly had no idea how it had ever written a good sentence in the first place.  For each sentence completed only sent you into the next sentence to be completed, where all the old challenges cropped up again—word choice, tone, grammar, syntax, style, clarity, coherence, precision—the completed sentence offering no clues where the next was to follow.  Every sentence is a solo act.  A truth the double space only wished you to know better.  A truth a single space would rather you never learn.

Because you have tried using a single space, even though you won’t admit it.  A phase that only lasted a few months or so, right around the time you started noticing that your students, born in the era when you traded the word processor for the PC, used a single space after periods.  So you tried, for the sake of keeping up, for the sake of growing and changing, for the sake of not suffering potential embarrassment, always important to you.  You single-spaced after each period.  A feeling like walking on one foot.  Like looking left, right, but not left again.  Like parking bumper to bumper in a crowded lot.  You couldn’t get the hang of it, so back to double-spacing you went, and where you have stayed.  You can’t help it: you like the world a little bit better with double-spacing in it.

But what to do now?  You have two children, and they both use computers, both like writing stories and jokes; sometimes even a screenplay, which they film with their iPods.  Sometimes they need your help spelling certain words, help you are happy to give.  You stand beside them as they type the word and reach the end of the sentence.  You hold your breath after they type the period.  The cursor blinks.  Your children hesitate, about to ask another question.  Space or double space?

Guest Blog Post, Courtney Mauk: The Space Between

Mauk photo 1Confession: This is the first thing I’ve written in over three weeks.

In the past I might have gotten depressed over a lull in my work, but I’ve come to understand that these quiet moments (a more gentle and accurate term than lazy or uninspired) can be as essential to the writing process as those “butt in the chair” days.

Sometimes lulls are due to outside demands—after all, none of us are writers only and occasionally other responsibilities can, and should, take priority. At other times lulls are self-imposed, a clearing out of the system. Recently I had a student who threw herself into the creation of a character, entering that beautiful, agonizing manic state where she could not stop thinking about, and as, her character. When she finished her story, she felt she should get started on the next one, but thinking about other characters felt like a betrayal. She needed to take time off in order to say good-bye, reset, and begin again.

My current lull hasn’t been entirely circumstantial, nor entirely by choice. After spending five feverish months working on the first draft of a novel, I sent it off to my group of trusted readers with the intention of using the weeks before meeting with them on revising short stories. But we meet tonight, and those story files have remained closed. Unlike my student, I didn’t feel like I was betraying anyone. Inspiration just never struck—maybe I could have forced it, but I didn’t feel inclined to try. Instead I used the hours I usually spend writing in the park, reading a book that had been in my to-be-read pile for far too long and taking occasional breaks to watch the people sitting near me, the others rushing past. Another morning I wandered around one of my favorite parts of the city and bought the season’s first strawberries at the farmers market (those berries made me so happy, I texted my husband immediately and used more than my allotted exclamation points). One afternoon I walked through an area I’d never explored before, even though it runs right into my neighborhood, and reveled in its gritty beauty. I left my cellphone at home and paid no attention to the time. As I walked, I found myself taking deep breaths; I went way beyond the point where I thought I would turn back.

A lull doesn’t have to be a source of frustration or guilt; it isn’t a void, whether it lasts days, weeks, months, or even years. What it means is you’ve take a moment to step outside your own head and live your life. For writers, imagination is our greatest resource; we are compelled by the worlds we create and that’s why we struggle so to capture them in words. But every now and again, it can be helpful to step away from the computer screen, close the notebook, get your butt out of the chair, and look around, to let your imagination reset, open, and begin again.

My yoga teacher encourages us to observe the space between our breaths. It takes a conscious effort to notice and appreciate something so unconscious. But that space is there—that stillness, as essential as the inhale and the exhale, holding us and letting us go on living.

You can learn more about Courtney at her website: www.courtneymauk.com