Landscape and Sill

Landscape and Sill. The word Sabina always used was tilth. That was ten years back. I don't think I'd heard it before, but the meaning--in the context of farm and field--was soon enough quite clear. A set of associations that had to do with the larger business of growing things. Crops. Sustenance and nurture--what Wendell Berry called The Gift of Good Land. 

However, the starting point here is different--the wildness of a certain unknown, more Gary Snyder--where trees disappear in morning mist, and the edges of pastures become meadow. It's a small painting, made in class--one of those afternoons where conditions were just right--the hooded desk lamp, the music, the shadows. A piece of cardboard with crumpled  corners--hand-cut above, so that then line of the material echoes the slope of the land. A place I know? That would be hard. Maybe all the places I know...

Funny, to see it leaned against the parapet this way--the edge of the sill, with its line of black caulk against a run of industrial aluminum window frame. The concrete is from the original Wurster pour. Joe Esherick and Don Olsen were very particular about details like this--the slightly eased edge, the trace of wood grain from the forms. Open-ended but precise. A kind of teaching in itself--in the materials...

Making a place for work like this to feel at home...

We must thank them, too...

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