The Oracle Pool

Top Hat Pool season is OPEN!

Meaning, I’ve pulled-out the miniature kiddie-pool from under the deck, tried to pressure-wash off some of the mold, and have set her down in the yard in my celestial gravel pit… Voila! 

The Oracle speaks!  It works every time.

This plastic pool is really only big enough for a foot bath but the cool turquoise shape it makes in my yard brings me great pleasure and is often a cause for celebration. I love being able to host “pool parties” in my yard: a foot bath and a cold drink with a good friend. I believe in the simple, transformative experience of being present.

For me, the poetics of color has been the most useful language for me to enter-into the form and meaning of life. My backyard is a series of props set-up to inaugurate good living. My Oracle Pool is yet another yard prop, like my mannequin legs, that rides the elusive line between the meaningful and the mundane.

I’ve spoken to you before about this liminality. Art shifts our perception of ordinary things-  knocking-them back into a certain “primary-ness” where they again become building blocks for constructing new meaning. The paring-things-down to an edge of experience where all of our symbols ride the edge of the sacred and profane with great clarity. A mutual transparency. A simultaneity.

We love Cezanne because he revealed his building blocks with a courage and vulnerability that continues to strike us as evident and clear.

The experience of these primary blocks is also why I love listening to Bach and Black Sabbath. It is why I love Giotto and Emily Dickinson.

I think there might be an element of this idea in what Richard Shift describes as “infinition” in Braque’s work. I am thinking of Braque’s late interiors where multiple layers of space are revealed, without losing structural integrity. The layers are the integrity.

For me, there is a kind of morality here. A generousness in the reveal. Something to do with the artist’s active role as revealer. As one who is committed to living on that line, continually exchanging the parts, making sure that reality remains flux, refreshed, flowing, moving, growing, primary.

And yet I am not sure “revealer” or “committed to” are the right words as they connote a certain agency, and I am not fully convinced of the choice. I know for me, as an artist, I am a porous vessel. The flow of reality maintains the shimmering integrity of the whole.

It is a matter of life and death.

The gathering of multiple layers of meaning into a harmonic whole is my life, is my form.

I am picturing prismatic water droplets in the atmosphere, a rainbow shimmering in the shape of

a grecco-roman urn.

 ***

Years ago, in the Alentejo countryside, after warming myself on the spring grass I would rise and splash cold water on my face from the free-standing basin in the garden. I recall this simple gesture with great clarity because it is one of the happiest of my life.

And so, I was charmed by this ordinary, baptismal object: a simple 2-tiered, metal stand that holds an enamel bowl up top, and a bucket and pitcher down below. I began noticing these objects for sale amid the rows of venders on market day.  Precious, portable sinks.  Little altars.

 ***

I love sitting in my backyard in late summer, after a full day in the studio and garden, and cooling down with my feet in my Oracle Pool. I hang sheets from my clothes-line to create a private “bathing” room. It is a peak experience when there’s a country song on the neighbor’s radio in the distance. This is my Alentejo.  

Right now, this aqua blue circle is covered in small pink petals from my cherry tree. Some mornings she is full of mud and raccoon paw prints from a late-night pool party.

I love imagining my metal garden pig and goat taking a sip from her when I’m not noticing.

I love seeing the sky reflected on her surface. Sometimes even the moon.

And sometimes, the top edge of the backyard fence is reflected. Reminding me of that boundary between things, that shimmering edge where meaning is born.

I go to the Oracle Pool and ask for Renewal.  

She answers with Great Generosity.

I have an entire, ongoing series of paintings that honor the Oracle Pool’s role in the theater of my yard.