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You are here: Home / Archives for Christian contemplative art

Marking Time: Tracy Simpson and the Contemplative Art of Potato Printing

April 17, 2013 by Iskra 6 Comments

May Days Tracy Simpson
“May Days,” 18.5″ x 26″, Potato Print,  Tracy Simpson

I have been looking for an opportunity to interview Tracy Simpson about her extraordinary potato print “calendars” for quite a while. As a member of the six-person print arts salon Painters Under Pressure, I have watched her work grow and evolve over the course of a decade. Just after opening our current salon exhibit at Phinney Gallery we had the time to sit down at length and talk about her process. What follows is a combination of conversation and correspondence.

From the beginning I have seen connections between your work and that of John Cage. Cage’s work evolved to be the product and process of impersonal systems of chance. This is one way in which he expressed his own sense of spirituality or “zen”:  as a path of divorcing his work from the normal sense of self and identification of self with personal preference and personal history. Did this lead to automatism? Coldness? Abstraction only? Hard to say. His music can be aggressively difficult to listen to. But what always comes through to me in his writing, his visual art and his persona is not the automatic or the “no-self,” but a sense of empathy and embrace. There is a kindness in letting go of the personal identification with making art. It can be liberating.

Also, Cage’s work in music is all about time, and not-time, noise and not-noise. In marking time with the structure of a calendar you are indirectly noting its absence and its impending endings. Every month ends on a note, so to speak. The grid structure is not unlike a musical structure, a grid/signature/score with notation. The calendar is scoring the month, even as you physically score the paper. I am interested in how you have chosen a very impersonal structure, the eternal unchanging numbers and grid of the calendar and made it your system. Can you talk about that, about what is impersonal and what is not?

Seven Planets Tracy Simpson potato print
“Seven Planets,” 18″ x 24″, potato print © Tracy Simpson

You are right that time is about as impersonal as it gets; time stops for no one, it’s inexorable.  And while we may individually have the sense now and again that time is standing still or speeds up for a bit, we know both are illusions or tricks of attention. You are also right that the way time is traditionally organized in terms of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and so on, is impersonal. We really don’t get to say hey, I think I’ll step out of time in general or, I’m tired of how we collectively organize time and, really, my way is better so I’ll do that for awhile. For the most part, to exist in the world along with everyone else, we have to surrender to how our particular culture relates to time. So yes, in our culture there is a very set, impersonal structure that developed a long time ago that is partly related to the sun rising and setting and how the moon travels around the planet and partly related to what the collective consciously or unconsciously decided works.

I do like thinking about all that, stepping back and considering what is “natural” in terms of how we as humans relate to time and what we have constructed or imposed for convenience. And what I find even more interesting is how we interact with time. Not only is time the context in which everything happens for us as individuals and for us collectively, but I think there is nothing more personal than how we confront the inevitability of time passing whether it is during a given day or over the uncertain length of a lifetime. What has evolved for me with my art is an ongoing conversation about how I relate to time, its passage, anniversaries, the future, its apparent infinity and my obvious finiteness, how a moment in the morning may color another moment in the afternoon, how a moment in the evening may color my memory of a moment in the morning.

January Bamboo Tracy Simpson potato print
“January Bamboo,” 18″ x 26″, potato print, © Tracy Simpson

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Filed Under: Artist Studio Visits, The Mystic Muse: Artists Working in the Contemplative Traditions Tagged With: art at the kitchen table, artists influenced by John Cage, Christian contemplative art, contemplative art, craft & art, John Cage, Painters Under Pressure, potato prints, print quilt, Tracy Simpson

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Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I sta Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I start my morning pages with barely formed questions: 

What is a dream? Is a glass house safe or waiting to be broken? What is the effect of layering and repetition, a note repeated more and more softly without elaboration?
I am getting ready to start a new photographic-bas I am getting ready to start a new photographic-based series that I’ll be working on for the next six months. A friend here on Instagram gave me these praying hands years and years ago. They are quietly gaudy, and awful and simultaneously completely wonderful. I see them every day when I wake up in a house that I will confess is filled with devotional objects. This image is composed of two photographs, the sculpture and a street kiosk. When I walk down the streets, I cannot resist documenting kiosks, particularly when they are empty. The shredded strange paint residues and the battered metal frames are just waiting to be re-purposed as though the entire street was my personal goodwill junk department. Or you could call it a library. My cross training for the series is reading Virginia Woolfs stream of consciousness, novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf’s writing gives an artist permission to own their interior world. Of course, letting the exterior world in on the secret can be quite a task. That is, what studio time is for…
I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendsh I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendship, even when they are asymmetric; for the guidance of those in the temple, who have practiced for years and send us their notes and their breathing lessons; thankful for the leaf that my friend saved for me of all the leaves in her neighborhood and thankful to the man who came yesterday when my back had laid me flat to sweep and to blow, as he noted in his documentation, 95% of the leaves in my garden, into piles then compressed with military precision into small liftable bundles stacked like muffins under the eaves. Now we can look out at the spare empty spaces. Feel the freedom of silence and space between branches. Rest, as growth goes quiet and invisible in the best growing season of the year.

May your Thanksgiving be bright✨
Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Art Museum First Avenue level, 2-4! Hope to see you there for our group show celebrating 50 years(!) This piece is called Water Kimono, a reverie on the ever-changing patterns of light on water.
My Narnia My Narnia
Last night I tried to get through more than 20 min Last night I tried to get through more than 20 minutes of the Golden Bachelor. It was Pickleball-date afternoon. The Golden Bachelor, truly a lovely man to observe and listen to under normal circumstances delivered this line: “Pickleball is a regular part of my life. Any woman who is going to share my life must also share Pickleball.” 

God help us. I’ve never been able to hit a ball with a paddle or a sock or a bat or anything else. Combat sports, like music, are abstract. No matter how much I pre-visualize the zen moment, the ball somehow remains in the air unrelated to my weapon of choice. I want to see the next Golden Bachelor rewritten for painters. “He said, fingering the smear of cadmium on his eyebrow, “Painting is a very big part of my life, and any woman who marries me is going to have to live with Painting.” Will he also say “I hope she paints too?” And we’ll have a full time maid and cook? Or will he say “She must be able to bring me my pipe and my slipper at the end of the day. And take the dogs for long walks alone while I try to decide the color of the sky?”

Feel free to write the script below.

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