burning alphabets...and alphabestiaries

Having gone out to dinner with Barry Dempster and his burning alphabet several days in a row, I was extremely disappointed to hear today that due to illness he will not be appearing in Winnipeg after all...

Though my desire to learn from Dempster, to spend time within his work while also simultaneously in his presence is of no consequence next to the pressing needs of his illness, I still needed consolation.

I figured that a dose of the The Living Prairie Museum website, entitled landscape change: landscape loss would do.

The Living Prairie Museum was the recipient of a grant from the Department of Canadian Heritage as a part of the Virtual Museum of Canada project. What they've managed to craft with the money is, in my opinion, a website that provides both depth and breadth, science and art, dullness...and the best kind of beauty. It pushes the limits of what the web can do the same way that the now-defunct CBC Radio 3 magazine did.

And, speaking of missed opportunities, they're also collaborating with the Winnipeg Arts Council to host an artist-in-residence over the next year. This is in addition to the art projects they've already fostered and posted on the website.

Sigh...five years from now, I might have been ready to take on this kind of opportunity. But given my preoccupation with Assiniboine Forest, a similar space in Winnipeg, and my current spurt of ambition, a part of me wished that I could apply for the gig now...

And so, still in need of consolation, I dipped back into the Walton Ford interview in the recent issue of Border Crossings: A Magazine of the Arts. I just got a subscription to this magazine, based out of Winnipeg, and the first issue that came in the mail was on the topic Animal.

It included what they call "The Winnipeg Alphabestiary" that features a intriguing piece called Unicorn by Sarah Anne Johnson - and, in case you're wondering, her much-hyped exhibit Tree Planting, currently on at Platform Gallery, is a startling yet natural mixture of image and artifice - as well as a wonderfully textured piece by Aganetha Dyck called Bees, The Ancients.

But what really consoled was the interview with watercolourist Walton Ford, entitled Misadventures along the Nature Trail, opening as it did with the following snippet: "For Walton Ford, the 'perfect combo is things that are beautifully made and that are hard to look at.'"

While I can't hope to encapsulate the range of thought and the luminous grotesquerie of his images in the interview, I found enough in Walton's description of a visit to a Balthus exhibit to lessen my impatience at the stop-start jerks of this life:

I remember when I was in college, I really liked Balthus. I'm not as crazy about him now but he was somebody who seemed to bridge the gap between older techniques and a way of looking at the world now. So I went to the Met where they had his retrospective and I was disappointed in his individual works. I'd been to Europe already so I'd seen Piero della Francesca and the other stuff he was looking at. Walking around, I thought, not one of these paintings adds up as a single work, but altogether he has created a really intense universe with European ennui and decadence and precocious sexuality and all these hothouse things he'd illustrated when he was young. He illustrates the kind of overwrought romanticism you get in Wuthering Heights and he really nails it collectively as one big body of work. But not one picture alone works. He's awkward and there are parts that are chalky and tight and overworked. But it was a cumulative thing. In my upcoming exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2006, I'll be able see if the work from that last ten years looks okay or if I have been hitting the same note over and over. I am curious to see if there's enough variety, if it feels like an interesting thing to look at. I thought, I'll just keep at it in the same way, and if none of them quite works, cumulatively maybe they'll create some sort of atmosphere that will be worth looking at.

So here's to Barry Dempster and his poems about illness, to Walton Ford and his individual paintings, and to whoever gets the Living Prairie Museum residency.

Here's to consolation and atmosphere!