Shuijing in Studio

It was one of those moments, talking with Shuijing, here in graduate school from the capital of China . Always a sense of the distant place she comes from, even as she makes such an earnest effort to communicate. (To make things objective, share in common.) Late afternoon, ninth floor of Wurster Hall, wide bank of windows to the south, looking out over misty winter rooftops of Berkeley and Oakland, backlit by the sun. Beautiful light. Desks still unsettled--not yet inhabited--it's just the beginning of the term. A rucksack, computer gear, pile of books and notes. Shadow opening on concrete wall--the new seismic pour--a burnished gray expanse, maybe four-feet thick, heavily reinforced... and within, another shadow, someone you almost know...

Oceanside

Pounding waves rake the pilings, white foam all across sea. Sand blowing over the road, lapping worn facades of beachfront motels--their Oceanside names--La Siesta--half a century of faded stucco, bleached tile. Not listed on any of the guides, low end-- with off season rates, some boarded up. A single shorebird at lip of incoming wave, rest of beach empty. A soccer ball--blue and white--blowing across the sand, very much on its own. Anomie--or maybe not even that. Marine Corps hair cuts, young guys in uncomfortable civilian clothes--what they've brought from somewhere else. Locals--as chalky as the walls, ungainly face of young boy at Horne and Mission--with his mother, the same features, and his mother's mother too--an ageing girl. His head at an angle, a long box, imagined future containing much of the same...

Edwin Dickinson

Fairfield Porter on Edwin Dickinson:

Dickinson makes the most out of the least, especially in Winter Woods, Wellfleet, or View of Green Island. Least is, green, flat ground and blue-green sky; or an impression of trees that gives, with trained simplicity, a single essential for landscape, namely, the presence of nature. In these little paintings, or quick ones, he is in touch with an elusive, and fleeting, essentiality. In his large exhibition pieces, he is in touch with not entirely coordinated ideas of art. In the large paintings, he expresses, like an inadequate classicist, the limitations of a formality that originates outside himself; in the small paintings he has been able to surrender to his deepest self which has a profounder form than the form one can know and understand. It is a form that does not impose itself on his subjects, nor is it outside them. Chekhov said he wrote about the inkwell, and in the same way, in Dickinson’s small paintings, there is none of the manipulation of the artist who has lost contact with himself. (Art in Its Own Terms, p. 118-20.)