Le Poeme de L’Extase takes its title from the music that impelled its making: Alexander Scriabin’s, Le Poeme de L’Extase, and its almost unbearable musical might. Twinned with the John Adams, Must the Devil Have All The Good Tunes [Yuja Wang & the LA Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel conducting]—it took all of that first pandemic year of 2020  for the making of this work: a furious gathering of all my studio forces. 

The Keats Series, is a set of 15 works, over 15 years, about 1155 feathers, much gold, the music of Brahms, and a single poem:  John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, written in 1819. I began what became the Keats Series in the year after a serious car accident, as a celebration of my return to my studio, and all that meant. I sensed before I had made the first piece that the Ode to a Nightingale contained it all: beauty and mortality, dream and possibility, and the rapture and urgency of art. Reading it over and over, I realized that it was as much about the poet writing the poem as the bird and its own song.  In some melodious plot became the first of the series, from the description of the unseen spot in the trees from which the nightingale sings in darkness, pouring forth [its] soul abroad/ In such an ecstasy!/ 

Beyond the Realm of Bird are the words of Emily Dickinson, from a poem that begins, A wind that rose/   The specific feathers of this series are the very smallest of what I have, often little body feathers, bright surprises I put aside as I sift through the feather molt I receive from friends of my studio. Each set in the series consists of 20 gilded bird squares with distinct feathers from separate birds: the whole as an emblem of the bird, its own realm. Beyond the Realm of Bird is a constant series, with new bird squares becoming new sets of 20, as a continuous thread through the core of my work and life of my studio.

There is a lot of making and unmaking to make my work. The Parchments are a document of the work within the work, in one way a view of the process, the part between mind and eyes: when all the parts, and the relationships of one feather to the next, the poetry and the music, are complete and come to a rest. They are each a navigation map, working towards the final work. 

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –