…here is a poem by Robin Robertson…

New Gravity

Treading through the half-light of ivy

and headstone, I see you in the distance

as I’m telling our daughter

about this place, this whole business:

a sister about to be born,

how a life’s new gravity suspends in water.

Under the oak, the fallen leaves

are pieces of the tree’s jigsaw;

by your father’s grave you are pressing acorns

into the shadows to seed.

Most of the work pictured is very much work in progress and still has a way to go until I feel it is finished-I am learning patience!

silly pretty things & crosses, et vous, et vous !

I would like one room that smells like cinnamon, a job developing film and looking at sentiments, a place to walk to with water and a ghost story about it, some peppermint tea and apples,

maybe a desk and a dog or a spice finch, my old books all stacked in the refridgerator, a bathroom has a portrait of an english setter instead of a mirror above the sink and a wall mapping the constellations, a trapdoor to an attic with a lamp and an accordian

and feathers everywhere on the floor, a collection of different types of moss on the window sills,

crosses in the corners, a tiny bed with big boxes under it, with notebooks and wigs and photographs of strangers in them and

Someoone else who likes fireflies much too much and cold water, someone who has a pillow built in and

we’ll leave notes on the threshold for the old women on our street and we will not say a word about it, same with streetlights and forgiving because we know and we can sit in fields and make little things like drawings of characters from strange stories and sing into tapes in the basment to show each other over breakfast

and when we die they can dig them up and take down all the jars filled with things that we hung in the trees and they’ll wonder about us because we, we snuck out somehow.

maren hoopfer 2007

…have had a successful few days in the studio.  Beginning to realise what a difference it makes to spend a few days in a row on paintings to get a real continuity and sense of progress with both the style and the concept of the work.  I really felt today that I was starting to get somewhere, and its so frustrating to think I will not be back in the studio again for another two weeks.  Well, I’ve got to earn a living too.  Such a difficult balance.  I have been developing my ideas on the windows and light project, and picking up an idea I had many months ago regarding stories, poems, lyrics and music as inspirations for paintings.  Don’t have any new work to post up but this is some work I did back in the summer that is being hung this week in the mixed Christmas Show at Stoneman Gallery.

It was pointed out to me that my linocuts are like of the work of Arturo Di Stefano, an artist I had not heard of before but who also has prints held by Stoneman Gallery.  His woodcuts are beautiful, check out his body of work held at Stonemen’s here.