RED XII: MEDITATION

"Red XII: Meditation."

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A meditation in floral form.

Mindfulness in the color red.

Ways to focus and leave the world

while the world resonates right there.

RED XI

"Red." Clockwise from upper left: Butterfly flower (schizanthus); red hook sedge; mossy saxifrage; Martha Washington geranium.

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The mindfulness of late autumn blows across the cold of winter and into early spring.

Even though unnoticed and without announcement.

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In the name of the Bee —
And of the Butterfly —
And of the Breeze — Amen!

—Emily Dickinson (F1 Sh1)

MERIAN

"Merian," number 6 in The Grand Armada series of the Inktopodes. Original: watercolor ink, India ink, gouache, and iridescent calligraphy ink on 8" x 10" watercolor paper. Scanned reproduction: in digitally colored frame.

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Merian is inspired by late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century illustrator and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, as well as her watercolor works depicting pineapples and attendant insects, especially "Ripe Pineapple with Dido Longwing Butterfly" and "Pineapple with Cockroaches," both printed in Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium. Merian appears as an inverted pineapple with the body of the pineapple making up her mantle and the fruit leaves transformed into her arms. The colors of Merian are rich and vibrant, more so when the original is viewed, since some of the color is dulled during reproduction. The natural vibrancy of the Hydrus Fine Art Watercolor inks—rich gamboge that glows against Hansa yellow medium and brilliant sap green—is a wonderful background for the India ink maps drawn upon them.

The inked "boxes" on the mantle are inspired by a map of Berlin circa 1900. The patterns on the arms are reminiscent of the contour lines of topographic maps, especially of those representing peaks of the Cascade Mountains. The orange gouache eyes simulate the caterpillars that climb up the sides of the pineapple in Merian's painting.

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"Merian" appears in the Strange Gliding Things show by Troy Kehm-Goins, which is on display at Puyallup Valley Dental Care during April, May, and June 2019.

FORTITUDE

I'm six episodes (of ten) into season one of Fortitude. I'm just starting to get my footing.

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Implications. Infidelities. Loyalties and shifted loyalties.

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Visual rhymes. Visual slant rhymes. (Emily would be proud, if she could imagine television.) Pushing toward things. Pulling us from things. But not always necessarily where we should be. Subterfuge.

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"For an instant I thought the Gulf Stream in my head was whirling me away to eternity..."
—page 98, WHITE JACKET by Herman Melville

(This is what I'm reading. Somehow it feels like it fits with what I'm viewing.)

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The scene between Sheriff Dan Anderssen (Richard Dormer) and Detective Chief Inspector Eugene Morton (Stanley Tucci) in the hotel restaurant over a bottle of whiskey is absolutely bonkers. Just watching Dormer's face in close up was worth admission to the entire season. The entire landscape of his face is tectonic.

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Blood on the ice. Blood on the snow. Blood on floorboards and clothing and potato peelers.

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Why is it that we are so fearful of the polar regions, the Arctic and the Antarctic?

I'm thinking of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. 2018's The Terror on AMC. Ivan Doig's "Winter of '19." The Endurance. John Carpenter's The Thing.

Perhaps because there is so little life in these regions, but much of it consists of apex predators—polar bears, whales, and the like.

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Long buried things now thawing and emerging once again. From the ice. From the people we once were.

Thousands of years of ice. Seven years of atoms being replaced.

Warming of a world. Warming of passions.

Is there a connection?

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Rilke just won't let go. The angels cry out to be noticed, recognized, categorized. A Monster Manual for the heavenly and infernal realms. (And The Duino Elegies have nothing to do with Fortitude, but Fortitude has brought them to the forefront of my imaginings again.)

THE FINEST MIND

"Is it possible now to have any doubt as to what Melville had in mind when he wrote Moby-Dick? These early books of his are not an account of his life from 1839, when he first shipped, to 1844 when he returned home. They are an account of the development of a mind from 1844 to 1850, the finest mind that has ever functioned in the New World and the greatest since Shakespeare's that has ever concerned itself with literature."

—page 84, chapter IV, "Fiction and Reality," Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In by C. L. R. James

STRANGE GLIDING THINGS

The "Strange Gliding Things" show by Troy Kehm-Goins / Troy's Work Table is up at Puyallup Valley Dental Care for April, May, and June 2019. It consists of various members of the Inktopodes, from the small to the four newest members of The Grand Armada, and a recent series of Christian mystics.

All are created in watercolor ink, India ink, iridescent calligraphy ink, and gouache on watercolor paper; and all mixed media pieces created in a combination of painting and pen-and-ink techniques.

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Here is the artist statement for the show:

Troy Kehm-Goins is a poet and artist residing in Puyallup, Washington. In his work, he seeks to discover the holy within the everyday and ordinary. His pieces of art are a mixture of watercolor painting and pen-and-ink drawing, with inspiration derived from Chinese calligraphic paintings, late nineteenth century street maps, literary and speculative fiction, the Fauvists, rock posters of the 1960s and 1970s, and, of course, octopuses.

The Inktopodes (pronounced ink-TOP-uh-deez) grew out of a set of poems written to wrestle with his mother’s seventeen-year-long struggle with Parkinson’s Disease. Originally rather small in size, these paintings have grown larger over time as he explores the colors and patterns that are prevalent on the skin of octopuses and other cephalopods. Watercolor ink, India ink, iridescent calligraphy ink, and gouache (opaque watercolor) give birth to what Herman Melville called Strange Gliding Things.

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And, of course, some inspirational quotes that inform the show:

“Every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.”

—“The Mast-Head,” chapter 35, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

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“Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”

—“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman

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“[W]e glide adown the present, awake, yet dreaming, but the future or ours together—there the birds sing loudest, and the sun shines always there!”

—Letter to her brother Austin, A572 by Emily Dickinson

LUCILLE

Lucille India Pale Ale by Georgetown Brewing Company.

12 ounce can served in a shaker glass.

7.0% abv.

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This is very likely my favorite IPA. It is both bitter and buttery. Yes, buttery. The mouthfeel is a bit thick and oily for an IPA, but I think of it as buttery.

The floral, pine, and citrus notes of bitterness are not over-the-top but rather well balanced, juxtaposed against butterscotch-leaning malt notes. Excellent in all regards, when it comes to aroma and flavor.

This really is a wonderful beer and nothing I write about it can really capture its essence. It simply needs to be experienced.

ON THE WIND

ON THE WIND

Breathe the trees and breathe
the bushes and

breathe the flowers and herbs and spices—

Birth the mushrooms and birth the fungi—

Be a seed

a spore

on the wind.

Settle into a fold in the soil
or a crack or crevice in a weathered rock

or fallen log.

Be. Birth. Breathe.

© 2019 Troy's Work Table.

NIGHT

I'm awake.
I'm up.
In the middle of the night.
In the wee hours of the morning.
Seated on the couch.
In the quiet and still house.
Everyone else asleep.
Hibernating.
Dreaming.

I'm reading about schizophrenia.
Praying.
Reading poetry.
Thinking about the Divine.
Writing.

Waiting for sleep to come again.
To return to the dark.
The warmth of the bed.
To slumber.

TROY'S WORK TABLE

Troy's Work Table is now an actual location in space-time!

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For more than twelve years, Troy's Work Table has been a blog, a concept, a way of living, and an independent press. But it has never been a tangible, in-real-life worktable. Until now.

In the midst of my home library, I now have a place to sit and create, to paint and draw. I am no longer in exile, having to move from kitchen table to coffee table to lap desk to drawing board. I have a place to have all of my pens and inks at hand. I have a place to leave paintings while I'm working on them.

I now have a place to sit among my books, while I create art, and enjoy beer.

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Thank you to everyone who has supported my art and helped to make this next step a reality!