From Scratch musing
I began the From Scratch series in November of 2017. I had neither words nor a plan, just a strong desire to release the disquieting energy that I felt as I stayed attuned to the news via the radio and daily newspapers. Naturally, I turned to my work in the studio to see what might come through me. Abandoning my brushes, I scribbled, scratched, and dug deeply into each surface, excavating and revealing what lay beneath, out of view, unknown. The small scale of these works provided me with little worlds that I could break apart and mend, ever so slowly, over the course of the next 7 months. Joan Wickersham’s column arrived while I was mid-way through the series and echoed my felt experience.
Repairing a broken government is going to be a long, slow, laborious process.
I thought of all of this recently (I think about it all the time, actually) while I considered refinishing an old table. To strip the cruddy old paint off, I would have to start with coarse grit sandpaper, to get down to the basic bare wood. Only then could I shift to fine-grit sandpaper, to polish, to refine, to attend to the details.
In any area of public debate, things can get complicated and heated very quickly—heated because people are looking for politicians who agree with them on every single issue. But we are in a time of crisis, and before we reach for the fine sandpaper, we need to grab the coarse-grit sandpaper—to find a few rough-and-ready principles that a broad majority of people can unite on.
“What do we do?” we have been asking. “Run for office,” we are told. And a lot of good people are now running for office. But what can the rest of us do?”
Vote.
Joan Wickersham, “In a time of political crisis, reach for coarse-grit sandpaper”, The Boston Globe, February 23, 2018.
I began the From Scratch series in November of 2017. I had neither words nor a plan, just a strong desire to release the disquieting energy that I felt as I stayed attuned to the news via the radio and daily newspapers. Naturally, I turned to my work in the studio to see what might come through me. Abandoning my brushes, I scribbled, scratched, and dug deeply into each surface, excavating and revealing what lay beneath, out of view, unknown. The small scale of these works provided me with little worlds that I could break apart and mend, ever so slowly, over the course of the next 7 months. Joan Wickersham’s column arrived while I was mid-way through the series and echoed my felt experience.
Repairing a broken government is going to be a long, slow, laborious process.
I thought of all of this recently (I think about it all the time, actually) while I considered refinishing an old table. To strip the cruddy old paint off, I would have to start with coarse grit sandpaper, to get down to the basic bare wood. Only then could I shift to fine-grit sandpaper, to polish, to refine, to attend to the details.
In any area of public debate, things can get complicated and heated very quickly—heated because people are looking for politicians who agree with them on every single issue. But we are in a time of crisis, and before we reach for the fine sandpaper, we need to grab the coarse-grit sandpaper—to find a few rough-and-ready principles that a broad majority of people can unite on.
“What do we do?” we have been asking. “Run for office,” we are told. And a lot of good people are now running for office. But what can the rest of us do?”
Vote.
Joan Wickersham, “In a time of political crisis, reach for coarse-grit sandpaper”, The Boston Globe, February 23, 2018.
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