“The real strength of America is not its professional schools…What the world really doesn’t have and doesn’t understand the importance of is the liberal arts…On a ship you needed to have somebody on the top of the mast looking out spotting the horizon or the storms. You can do that on a ship, but you have to have a virtual mind to be able to do that in business. And I think where you get trained to do that is in the liberal arts, is from people who are right brained as well as left brained. You have that answer here [in the U.S.]. I think there should be more recognition that you need right brained people, you need creativity.”

Anand Mahindra. Mahindra & Mahindra

In the last month, Spike Mafford has become part of the Oysterville community. He’s helped wrangle cattle, picked oysters, photographed long time residents, and along the way, collected the many different versions of Oysterville history. 

Seattle-based writer Charles Cross has been an Espy Resident in June 2002, March 2005, and March 2006. He has written several celebrated books, including Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain and Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix. Charles is highly regarded as an authority on Northwest pop culture and music. He will be returning to Espy during the month of October to work on a memoir about parenting and his latest biography.

Charles’s latest book, Cobain Unseen came out this month. As he describes it, the book is “a visual biography of Cobain’s creative life.” Cross explains that as a biographer, he is very limited in the number of photos he can include in a book. “This is a chance to bring together all of the visual art that Cobain created throughout his life—from greeting cards he made in the second grade and visual journal entries to undeveloped photographs that have been in storage since his death.” Cross describes the book as a portrait of a musician as a young artist. “It’s really a different way of understanding Cobain.”

Espy residencies have played a part in Charles Cross’s writing career, offering him the uninterrupted time he needed to complete Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix.

]]> http://espyfoundation.org/espy-alum-charles-cross-returns-to-oysterville/feed/ http://espyfoundation.org/beijing-oysterville-connection/ http://espyfoundation.org/beijing-oysterville-connection/#comments Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:44:18 +0000 Espy http://espyfoundation.org/blog/?p=36 Espy will host two Chinese writers during the March 2009 Residency period. We are excited to expand our program to include writers and artists from Asia and look forward to continued collaboration with the Chinese Writers Association.

Help Espy build a permanent home for resident artists and writers. A contribution of $150,000 builds one of four resident cottages. The cottage is named for the donor and available for personal use 1 month out of the year.

Ecstatic times on the endless beach at low tide, the depth of the layers of the wetland woods outside my Nahcotta cottage’s window, the transcendental light of Willapa Bay, looking east, capture my imagination and suggest color and form. Shapes may be repeated; colors lead from one to another. Just a few starts are partially known—the rest follows. Each color suggests those that follow as each layer leads my palette and placement.

This Espy Foundation residency and the use of the Sanctuary Studios have made it possible for Sandy and me to start something unique and fresh. As we go on to collaborate from our own Nahcotta studios, our dual investigation will continue.”

“Joan is very intensely focused on encaustics and color — how could we possibly meet in the middle? A backup musician at heart, I chose to make a setting for her encaustics that would present the melody of her lyrical work.

Sometimes visual art is produced to present the artist’s vision. Sometimes it is just the artifact of processes the artist happens to enjoy.

The sights in nature that give me the most joy are things like hundreds of birds flying/flashing/turning together (produced by each bird making decisions to try to stay entrained with the other birds, averaging out the distances and directions on all sides of himself), spartina grass washed up on shore in chaotic patterns that include rhythmic parallel placement determined by whim of wind and wave, anything that involves nature placing similar objects in rhythmic ways.

How many things need to be alike for unity, and how many options for differences need to be included to get that effect? In putting patterns on bowls I cut one width of tape (subject to human variation) of 2-5 lengths, and made one or two rules about how to put them on the bowl (like ‘no right angles’ or ‘no free ends’). Just these limits led to coherent designs. I collected a huge handful of buzzard feathers on the beach, then threw the whole handful into the air. The wind carried them along, all similar kites landing on a surface with little variation, and the pattern they formed on the beach displayed a similar extent of variation.

One series of tiles was 8″ squares with a 4″ window placed off center. They were all cut the same, outside edges relatively even. Then I placed spartina grass on it and pounded it in a little, which altered the inside edges of the smaller square and left the grass impression. The tiles have four 90 degree rotations, which places the small square in a different corner each time. The combination of the rotations randomly arranged presented the right amount of variability to suggest a natural randomness that we see as ‘natural.’ Joan’s smallest paintings were arranged behind the little windows, suggesting an array of impressions of natural themes here. I especially like how the piece makes valid impressions from a distance or close up.

The tiles of local dredge spoils with goat footprints is a glorious red color! Very rough, but of a sort. The last ones are firing right now. Another series of tiles reflects positive and negative impressions of the petrel. They’re in the kiln, too. I think we will be able to produce 3 or 4 more arrays in this series.”

Joan Stuart Ross:
“Yesterday, Sandy and Larry installed several wooden ledges on the studio wall to display the tiles–now we can mix and match, using them as a display aid. Sandy and I had a fruitful discussion about some of our evolving concepts, as the clay and encaustic mediums are finding new ways of working together. We discovered a working window–where the cut-out forms in the clay act as a frame for inset paintings that are revealed as a visual surprise.”

Richard Campbell’s article in the Seattle P.I. about the Espy Foundation has been postponed. We look forward to seeing this exciting article very soon. Thank you for your interest–and to all those who have already looked in today’s paper for news of the Espy Foundation, double thanks!

Look for an article about the Espy Foundation by Richard Campbell in the Seattle P.I. on Saturday, August 4. It will appear on the front page of the Arts & Entertainment section and should also be available on their website, www.seattlepi.nwsource.com/ae/

We’d love to hear what you think about the article. Please post your comments here or email us at info@espyfoundation.org.