Here in Portland, we have the yearly reminder that summer is functionally over. Other than the first day of school posts on Instagram and Labor Day sales, it almost always rains this week. A switch goes off. It is a tacit reminder that we are moving fully into a new season. Adjust your wardrobe accordingly. Of course, there is no need to despair. September and October are absolutely glorious and golden.

As I mentioned briefly in an earlier newsletter, I have spent the last few months job searching. My teaching position was not renewed so it seemed time to take on a new role in the world. It is strange to be in such a liminal place. For the last twenty-five years, even though I was a provisional employee, I was either an adjunct or visitor at a university. I’ve decided to switch to the executive and curatorial roles I’ve increasingly taken on in recent years.This switch is both energizing and a bit unnerving. Energizing because I am ready to employ my experience and talent in a different context. I will be stretched and challenged, perhaps serving a new community and that is electric. Unnerving because I built an identity around being a teacher and the seeming fiscal safety it engenders. It is for this reason that I must remind myself that my studio practice is the root system. Nourishing and stabilizing, it keeps me in contact with the rich loam of my life.

The chaos of this recent period in which I am taking on a new role while watching institutions, ecosystems and the tenets of democracy assailed by a gaggle of B-movie villains is not always reassuring. Chaos can breed new growth as much destruction. When you are an artist, you are an artist. However you support yourself financially, you have a practice. This isn’t some privileged selfishness, it is necessary to soul survival. So as I wade through the morass of the times, I maintain my studio practice. On that metric, it has been a fruitful year.

After I returned from Montréal, I began a new series of paintings based on Renaissance annunciation triptychs. I have always loved the annunciation as a subject. I include a poem called The Annunciation from my book Wellspring: Poems 1996-2011. I’m not sure what sparked this latest interest. I had a sudden desire to seek out annunciations such as Robert Campin’s Merode Altarpiece. This series continues my exploration of Jack Kirby’s compositions. A cast of human/animal figures continues to populate this series. These mythical figures are not always corollaries to a specific deity but they have personal resonance. The triptych allows me to play with the almost aligned perspective seen in many altarpieces. The three panels seem to represent a continuous scene, but something is a bit off kilter.

THE ANNUNCIATION

Soft light sifts through the lace curtains
and falls in squares like holy light
on the green and white checkered kitchen floor.
Mid-afternoon the neighborhood, a ghost town,
gives itself to sparrow song.
Outside the dead flower beds decay
muffled by snow,
squeezed in by the foundation and the sidewalk.
The light illuminates the dinette set,
cleaned and scrubbed and cleaned again.
The mother dressed in loose slacks,
workshirt, works oblivious to the angel
that falls in a square on the just-cleaned floor.
The angel sits in its impotent way
trying to perform a miracle
or give her the good news of the universe.
She thinks mainly of her life,
puckered by the circumstances of dirty floors and linen,
the obligations of all the unwashed objects of affection.

This first triptych is titled, Annunciation: Passages. It grew out of a series of vague thumbnail sketches. For instance, the purple figure in the left panel began as a reclining figure in extreme perspective. Some instinct pushed me to make him airborne. This creates a looping composition that encircles that panel. Once I realized that he was being thrown into a wall, there needed to be another figure doing the throwing. The glowing orb in his hand was originally a disembodied hand akin to the Ace of Pentacles in Pamela Colman Smith’s tarot. Somehow it made sense that the purple figure should hold it.

As I worked on the three panels it became clear that this is a cosmic event. The Annunciation in question is the announcement of a shifting of the guard. It could be day to night, life to death etc.I know I am on to something when I can’t completely explain the painting and it continues to engage me. I am using acrylic for this series for two reasons: one, it is quick. I can layer it and make corrections speedily. The second is that the acrylic paint I use tends to have a higher chroma palette. This series of paintings is constructed as I go. It unveils itself through the process. I never know exactly where it will end up, so the quick drying, water based acrylic is useful for thinking through the picture.

I have several panels prepared for the next triptych as well as smaller panels in the series. I wanted to take a short detour, back to a subject I often revisit: trees. Specifically, portraits of trees that have fallen, are broken or entangled in roots. In late July, I spent a week in Lyle, Washington at Balsam Root Ranch. There is an abundance of Oregon white oak thickets. One day while walking along the road between properties, I saw a screen of white oaks. One tree seemed to have fallen into the arms of its compatriots. It was a hot, bright late summer afternoon. The thicket glowed. It also reminded me of a skein of a Jackson Pollock allover composition. I was fascinated by the impossible tangle of trees, the fugitive sense of light and the screen it created.

Whenever I begin a new work, I am convinced I will never paint again. My last painting always seems like it was the end of the road. I berate myself for not being up to the task, for choosing a bad subject and on and on. With oil, it is a slower process. I don’t get the same satisfying opaque coverage I do with acrylic. The first layers tend to be stringy and miserly. I look and wonder how I ever made a painting before. Then, little by little the picture emerges. The task of the tree paintings is different than the annunciations. For the tree, I have a model of specificity. I am trying to make the paint broadcast a sense of the physical experience of the tree, of its relationship to time and place. If the acrylic paintings are puzzles, the tree paintings are a record of beholding. I use oil for these because the palette is better suited to the unnameable color of bark and undergrowth.

Once I finished White Oak Tangle: late summer afternoon, I started the next tree painting. This was a fallen tree at the base of a hiking trail outside of Missoula. It was so figurative, like a fallen effigy. Again, I went through the painful opening stages: maybe the last painting worked out, but this one is a disaster etc. It took a little bit to pull together, but as I cleaned my brushes at the end of the day yesterday, the flesh began to grow and pulse on the bones of the underpainting.

I have the next panels lined up, ready to switch back to acrylic and a different mode of making. My calendar is strangely open at the moment. I have my list of potential positions. Each one requiring a new schedule and possibly a new location. I tend the fire of the studio practice, which will continue regardless. The early September rains will pass into golden autumnal brilliance soon enough. They serve to remind us that the season for root tending is upon us.

As I write this, I can look out of the window and see Mount Hood to my left and Mount Adams to my right with a crown of shifting clouds. I am on a ranch in the basalt hills above the Columbia River in the Columbia Gorge. Midday, a white gleam of reflected water peaks through a keyhole of cliffs and hills alerting me to the great river’s presence. Down below in Lyle, Washington, windsurfers line the weekend highway to catch the relentless vents of the gorge’s wind tunnel. Along the roads hugging the river, brown and white signs with two men pointing west; one with a tricorn hat and the other in a coonskin cap announce this as The Lewis and Clark Trail. These signs extend from Montana and Idaho all the way to the Columbia’s mouth at the Pacific Ocean in Cape Disappointment. As I sit here on this ranch with its bleach yellowed bunch grass, nubbly, squat and ancient white oaks and heartbreaking blue sky, it would be easy to be lulled into romantic revery. The Lewis and Clark signs deliver a kind of weary inevitability. The Corps of Discovery story has narratively reshaped this land.

Kevin Bell’s exhibition Western (re)Visions at Missoula Art Museum (March 5 - July 25, 2026) disturbs the placid waters of western landscape painting. Mundane western scenes depicted as barely holding together sit next to settler journals and explorers’ descriptions of the same site. The promised triumph of manifest destiny is revealed as a flimsy skin that hides Indigenous displacement and ecological ruin. The dominant story of discovery, conquest and destiny begins to become porous and insubstantial.

Bell’s paintings are masterful. Skeins of translucent color are interrupted by moments of hard edge geometry. The tension creates a perfect example of the nowheresville of his subject matter. His focus on vernacular architecture; spaces and buildings easily overlooked, gives the accompanying text its punch. The sites hold deep cultural memory. It is not an easy show. Western (re)Visions is a powerful testament for our overheated, democratically challenged summer. Bell reminds us that the physical fact of the painted image holds uneasy contradictions of beauty, witness and longing.

Each painting is accompanied by a settler or explorer quote. For a contemporary painter, this could be a tricky proposition. Does the quote locate the work as a prop in a history museum? Does the painting not “speak for itself”? The quotes are essential, not just for context, but as a speed bump against the gorgeousness of the paintings. The plaques include a small inset with the map coordinates and the name of the site. For example, one painting of what seems to be an abandoned gas station island is marked as “near Orofino, Idaho”. Over a ground of a sickly mustard yellow sky, the sparse trees and wet pavement are rendered in a range of Prussian blue to pthalo green. A dejected double line of orange plastic triangular flags pop from the blue but fail liftoff. The whole scene recalls a late night or early morning road trip stop. The architecture is ubiquitous and forgettable. As a painter, Bell keys up the chroma while also tapping the brakes of overt vibrancy. It creates a sense of loneliness, a charge of longing ungrounded, running in circles.

The accompanying quote from William Clark reads: “All are sick... Provisions all out which Compells us to kill one of our horses to eate and make Suep for the Sick men. We have nothing to eate but roots we purchase of the indians, which give the men violent pains in their bowels after eating much of them....

A number of Indians about us, gazeing...(and) The Indians who visited us set out on their return early.”

And then for context: “After a difficult trek over Lolo Pass, Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery stopped to build canoes at this spot on their expedition to the Pacific coast. Here they were saved from near starvation by local Nez Perce who provided food and assistance with canoe construction. Unaccustomed to a diet of caymus tubers, many members of the Corps experienced violent gastrointestinal distress, but remarkably all recovered.

This site is currently a gas station and convenience store.”

The loop created between image, “just the facts” tone of the text and the dramatic explorer’s quote undermines and complicates each. This site of broken down mundanity- the end point of a global economy is the same site of heroic distress. And this is where Bell’s work topples comfort and easy looking. The work then asks the viewer to take a step further, the Nez Perce, Palouse and Cayuse nations that aided the “intrepid” Americans had a millennia deep relationship to the land. The tubers were part of a seasonal round providing sustenance for the Indigenous people. The path cleared by the Corps of Discovery for US corporations irrevocably altered the ecological, economic and cultural landscape. Instead of a seasonal round of gathered foods, we have struggling convenience stores. What makes the work so poignant is that the modern structures are painted with a tender fragility. Instead of just a sourpuss finger wag we have something closer to grief.

Bell’s approach to landscape is in keeping with a contemporary engagement with the genre. Painters like Peter Doig and LA based Aaron Morse mine modernist strategies from Gauguin to Edvard Munch to Georgia O’Keefe to create unresolved scenes that sit uncomfortably within the heroic tradition of the Hudson River painters. Kevin Bell deserves to be placed in the same company as these contemporary artists. He is able to dance between process-based abstraction and hard edged geometry. The effect is the witnessing and beholding of land through a compromised genre. An artist can collapse into cynicism or blind optimism, but the best way forward is through doubt.

One example of this conviction through doubt is a painting of a parking lot and propane tank. The location is marked as near Eagle Creek, Oregon. The location was the entry point for settlers encountering the fertile Willamette Valley. It is now a propane and feed store. Bell creates a ground comprised of thin washes of color. As if channeling Joan Mitchell, the gray, blue and ochre sky and foreground refuse to resolve into a definitive statement. The ground is bound in by a strip of dark green trees at the horizon line and hard-edged gray lines indicating the boundary of the parking lot. The parking lot itself is depicted as a floating rectangle in perspective. Hard white lines mark the parking spaces. A propane tank to the right is the most articulated thing in the picture. The approach does a couple of things simultaneously. First, the placement of the basic architectural shapes on the ground unhouses their determination. The architecture appears fleeting. Secondly, the ground as wild ecology; as land with its own determination is corralled by the geometry of corporate infrastructure.

I was reminded of JB Jackson’s seminal geographical study Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. In the essay “A Pair of Ideal Landscapes” he says “ We could all agree that insofar as every landscape is a composition of spaces it is also a composition or web of boundaries.” Painters, no matter what their proclivities or subject matter, are arbiters of edges and boundaries, beginning with the picture plane itself. Kevin Bell’s project takes none of the boundaries for granted. The picture plane of his works in Western (re)Visions lifts, scrapes and troubles the boundary markers on the current landscape. And while the work, perfectly situated in Missoula where he lives and teaches might appear to be a purely regional affair, the paintings engage in a national dialogue. It asks if Manifest Destiny was worth the loss and if we can behold the actual history of this porous land.

I am writing from just above the town of Lyle, Washington where I have been for the past week. I’m dog sitting two dogs and spending some quiet time. The week has had its fits and starts. I’ve been trying to finish some writing assignments and look for a new job. That is something I have not had to do in years. The last few jobs have been offered to me. I haven’t had to go looking and certainly not in the AI flooded field of a contracting economy. It is a very dispiriting process. The exciting thing for me is that I have rethought my role in the world. I am already the founding director of The Ground Beneath Us (more on that below). Why not remember my own experience and competency? I have a few curatorial projects in the works for next year. So instead of banging my head against the closing doors of teaching in academia; I am looking for director positions, curatorial positions: in other words leadership roles.

I am a keen follower of astrology, though I must admit I’m losing my patience with the flood of astrologers who need to post daily content for pay. There seems to be a very capitalist sense that if I’m not manifesting at the right hour of the full moon than I’m done. For me, astrology is a story of the flow of time and our place in the universe. The idea of lucky days that everybody gets doesn’t add up. It stands to reason that one person’s lucky day is another’s tragedy. But when you are in the boil of uncertainty, any grasp at an exit light is welcome. I bring this up because one theme emerging seems to be rethinking sovereignty and leadership. It seems that many of the institutions I have been courting are in the grip of or have just thrown off the yoke of bad leadership. I don’t need to mention the United States. That is the most salient example of the ruin of feckless tyrants and sycophants.

Tomorrow is Lughnasadh. In the Druidic calendar it is the beginning of harvest. Barley and wheat are coming in. Dances for the late summer commence. In the high heat of summer, the acknowledgement of winter’s inevitability hums below the cicada song. Merry old John Barleycorn who was dancing and carousing at Beltane is now brown, withered and bent. I read that one Pagan tradition was to roll a flaming wheel down a hillside to symbolize the descent into winter. Today in the plateau above the Columbia River, a pall has spread. For the better part of the week I could watch the sun set on Mount Hood from one window and Mount Adams from another. Now, a ghostly gray envelops the hills. The fires that plague the dry grasslands of the Columbia River plateau are not new, but they are dangerous and widespread thanks to climate catastrophe. Another result of years of disastrous leadership. You wouldn’t want to roll that flaming wheel here. Instead of John Barleycorn, the prairie grasses are bleached ocher and brittle. In May, they were dazzling blankets of wildflowers. Along Highway 14, the harvest is apparent with farm stands offering exquisite peaches, robust corn and perfect tomatoes. I love the high winds of the gorge and the evening cricket song. My soul hums with the quiet heat of the afternoons. Tomorrow is Lughnasadh. I feel the needle point of summer longing, exhaustion and the coming rains all converging. I want to wish anyone reading this the hope that you are finding your own leader within yourself. That this weekend you can dance to the harvest. And watch out for John Barleycorn’s revenge, the next day regret after too much fermented barley.

THE GROUND BENEATH US ARTIST MENTORSHIP PROGRAM

I moved the Ground Beneath Us Artist Mentorship Program back to begin in September. There were too many summer conflicts. This is a great program for artists at many stages of their careers. Please help me make this a success by sharing with anyone you know who could use guidance, consultation, critique or inspiration.

An informational session will be held on August 12, 2026 10 AM PST email dduford@groundbeneathus.org for a link.

September 15, 2026 to December 15, 2026

The Ground Beneath Us Mentorship Program is a four-month studio mentorship for artists building a serious practice outside the structure of school. It is for recent BFA/MFA graduates, self-taught artists, teaching artists, and artists in transition who need rigorous feedback, intellectual companionship, structure, and practical guidance around grants, residencies, proposals, and sustaining a studio life.

Who this is for: recent BFA/MFA grads, self-directed artists, artists returning to practice, artists not ready for grad school, teaching artists, public artists, artists working across image/text/object/story.

What you will leave with: clearer sense of purpose in the studio, stronger language around the work, a tailored reading/artist list, feedback on proposals or applications, a 3–6 month studio plan, and cohort connections.

What makes this different: Daniel’s practice moves across murals, ceramics, comics, public art, books, and mythic/historical storytelling; Ground Beneath Us is explicitly about image, story, place, embodied learning. He has twenty-five years of experience teaching at the university level as well as a vigorous exhibition, research, writing and curatorial practice.

Application process: send 5–10 images, short artist statement (1 page), 3 questions about your goals.

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This final dispatch was a bit delayed due to some other writing projects I had come up. So at long last I present the final dispatch from my trip to Montréal. I had many other exhibitions and experiences I wanted to write about, but I think I will wrap up with this final Montréal dispatch. I’m working on new writing which you will see in the coming weeks.

On the Wednesday before I left Montreal, I began my day at the Musée d’art contemperain de Montréal (MAC) where Francois Morelli has a long mural installed on the outside wall. The museum is undergoing renovations so the mural is accessible all days. Le chant de l’aube was created during the Covid lockdowns. The mural is a facsimile of the original sketchbook of Francois’s. The work unfolds as a private cartography that maps solitude and its airborne connection to the wider world. Improvisationally using rubber stamps and ink drawings, the work flows as a contemporary codex bringing in Mesoamerican story, explorer’s maps, automatic writing and dream fragments. His gestures are recorded in the fragmentary space of the pages.

I then met Francois at his studio. I got to see some of the new work as well an archive of multi-disciplinary practice. We stopped at the Olympic Stadium built for the 1976 Olympics and then had tea at the botanical garden. Francois pointed out the tile mural in the cafe: Deux Murales: Histoire de la restoration à l’époque de la Nouvelle France from 1956 by Robert Lapalme. Francois talked about the influence that mural had on his early ideas of art. It is a testament to the importance of local art culture. Before we’re told what is the right thing to be influenced by, we are caught by what is not and the images get inside us. The mural’s take on French Canadian history is filtered through 1950’s modernism by way of Hannah Barbera cartoons.

Later in the evening we made our way to Montréal, arts interculturels, (mai). We saw the first program of two (the second program was on Friday the 19th, the day I left the city) in a film series called An Image Before Last brilliantly curated by Lynn Kodeih. The films act as essays and provocations to consider the image as resistance to the obliteration of memory. This was some of the most powerful work I’ve seen in a long time.

The first half of the evening consisted of a trio of short films: On Love, and Other Landscapes (2011) directed by Yazan Kahilli, our songs were ready for all wars to come (2021) directed by Noor Abed and The Bunker, The Barracks and the Base (2023) directed by Batoul Faour. Together, they created a triptych that focuses on the battered earth itself. This first series of the program was a kind of panel discussion where Palestinian and Lebanese soil, memory and image hold the stage.

On Love and Other Landscapes takes the form of a photo album. Overlaid text creates a narrative of departure and failed relationship: the end of a love. But the subtext is the Israeli Wall. The landscapes are heartbreakingly beautiful. The blue sky and red rock, the long vistas are marred by the scars of war barrage and colonization.

Our songs were ready for all wars to come begins with a similar red rock landscape of caves and buttes. Where On Love used the structure of the photo album, travelogue and “Dear John” letter, our songs goes into mythic territory. Employing super 8 film and choreographed scenes, the film is a reminder that folklore is the voice of the earth speaking through a culture. Water holes and wells in the desert are places of power. In one of the most arresting images, a group of Palestinian women lay on the ground on their bellies, staring into holes in the sun drenched earth. Subterranean knowledge and the power of the matriarchy animate the image.

The third film The Bunker, The Barracks and the Base takes a more documentary form, but it is fragmented into a three channel installation. The film tells the story of a series of hidden bunkers built in south Lebanon by the British and French during the second world war. The bunkers were abandoned after the war. For a time they were a space where children played. A plan to make it a cultural center ran into the Israeli occupation. One of the more arresting lines from the film is “the bunker was hidden under olive groves for decades, the bright paving stones built to make a cultural center led the bombs directly to them.” The bunker then became a notorious prison where locals were tortured. In some sequences, former prisoners tour the ruins of the site that is still filled with gruesome contraptions of torture and occupation.

The three films taken together manifest an image of a beautiful and battered land. The Earth is so present and material in all the films. From the lover’s loss in the first film to the folkloric memory in the second and finally the broken bodies of former prisoners, the cost of unfettered aggression is ever-present.

The second half of the evening was taken up by A FIDAI FILM (2024) directed by Kamal Aljafari, a Palestinian filmmaker. The film is comprised of footage looted from a Palestinian archive in 1982 by Israeli forces. In 1982 when Israel invaded Beirut, it destroyed civilian homes, obliterating infrastructure. The Israelis raided a building filled with Palestinian historic archives. There are films of boxes of files and films being loaded into military vehicles. This attempt at erasure; physically in the form of the bombing and destroying memory in the theft of historic documents forms the basis of the film. Employing intercut images, text and historic footage, Aljafari redacts certain phrases and images with a neon, blood red mask. The soundtrack is a low ringing, a dread inducing harbinger of incoming destruction. As the film moves from the bombing of the city to scenes of giant rubble on the seashore, the bone weary sickness of incalculable loss sets in. This was a city, a home to generations. Woven into the archive are films for Israeli propaganda and home movies. One sequence of women trainees for the Israeli army wouldn’t be out of place in a Nazi training film. I will let the irony, if that is what it is, sit there. One other repeated image haunted me: a woman whose scream is silent wailing in the rubble of her destroyed apartment building.

I couldn’t really speak after that. I didn’t have the capacity to ask any questions during the Q&A. Francois and I walked to the metro station in the warm summer night. Neither of us said much. We stopped at a new middle eastern restaurant, a testament to the rich culture in Montréal of immigrants from all over the world. Where I began this exploration searching for my own ancestral roots through Québécois history, I encountered a multivalent, cosmopolitan city; full of immigrants from places with complicated histories. From the proselytizing of the French who came to convert the Indigenous populations and those varied and rich nations that held and were beheld by this land, and still speak its language to the waves of immigrants as brick buildings and ports grew, I felt that this, like many cities imperfectly holds all the traumas, grief and joys of hybrid convolutions. We reached our station, still too tired and emotionally rung out, I noted the huge crowds congregating around a series of outdoor stages throughout downtown. I was seeing that evening’s edition of Francos de Montréal, a month long, free music festival celebrating Francophone music. The city turns downtown into a summer party where all are invited. None of this is simple or easy. All earth holds memory. We walk on its scars and like uneven terrain we feel the contradictions in our strides. It is art and music that processes these uncomfortable truths. Not to provide answers, but to honor and be alive to each other.

Happy Canada Day! And welcome to all the new subscribers. Thank you for taking the time to read and support this newsletter.

My last dispatch gave some historic context to Montreal. Today I will focus on the energy around contemporary art in the city. My first day on the ground in Montreal began with a trip to Complex de Gaspé, a building that houses several contemporary art galleries. My first stop was Dazibao. On view was Phillipe Aubert-Gauthier and Tanya St.-Pierre’s Intact a milieu des flammes-Dans une série d’architectures vivants. It was a sign of the quality to come. The artists created a multi-channel video built on collages of vintage architecture and home decor magazines. Extreme closeups of the dot matrix of four color printing turn the slick images into pock marked lava scapes oozing with creeping unease. The work is mesmerizing. The collages take dream interiors from 1970s and 1980s and rupture them with geologic intrusions. In the videos they morph and melt changing from stable scene to uncertain ground. The soundtrack of old vinyl and crackling fireplaces accentuate the sense of conflagration. The fantasy of modernity’s original dream becomes a hypnotic hells cape, one in which the floor no longer holds and the anxiety needed to maintain such wealth dominates by flame.

The next gallery I visited was Atelier Circulaire, which besides the gallery hosts a printmaking residency. On view was Résilience des bois a collaborative piece by Gilnaz Arzpeyma, Zahra Nabavi and Shabnam Zeraati. They created a delicate, ghostly tableau in the gallery. At first glance, it presents an intricate lace-like stage set, almost winsome. Quickly, the hauntingly mythic scene becomes a different type of ghost story. The three artists, all Iranian immigrants to Canada, explored the devastating effects of white tailed deer introduced to Anticosti Island in the boreal forest of Quebec. In the nineteenth century, wealthy industrialist Henry Mercier brought the deer in for sport hunting. They have since wrecked the ecosystem of the island. They describe their visit as “Deer bones and vegetation coexisted: life and death seemed to transform into one another.” This scene of devastation is linked to the bombing of their homeland by US and Israeli forces in 2025 and 2026. Using projected animations and bleach white cutouts, the boreal forest’s fragility becomes another language, one which addresses the generational price paid by feckless power.

Lucky for me, I caught Street Actions: Women Performing in Montreál and Toronto (1970-1980) curated by Francois and Diane’s son Didier Morelli. Pulling together documentation, interviews and objects from a decade of feminist street actions and installations, Morelli makes the case not only for reevaluating the importance of of Quebec’s history of radical feminist performance but its relevance in 2026. Many of the works felt as fresh as if this were the work of newly minted grad students. Francine Larivée’s La Chambre nuptiale from 1976 is shown in fragments and contemporary documentation. In the center of the room a sculpture of the bride lies in a vitrine like an expectant Sleeping Beauty. The full installation contained multiple waxy figures depicted in scenes of sexual pleasure, birth canals and other critiques of the marriage bed. La Chambre nuptiale is a grittier, more honest reply to Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party.

That evening we went to see three performances at Espace Transmission, part of Viva Art Action’s Writing/Listening/Action series. The evening began with a sound performance by Stephanie Castonguay from Québec. Her performance soft_cuts unfolds from a spare soundscape and rises and falls like breath. Using altered turntables, handmade vinyl and other objects, Castonguay manipulates the turntables lit from below in the darkened room. She becomes conductor, puppeteer and one person orchestra. Some objects glow, some move into view to play a role and then step back. The materiality of the performance stands in contrast to the fleeting sonic net it casts.

In the dead end street adjacent to the main space, in the dusk of a gorgeous summer night, Joy Boissiére stepped into the space in a black suit and massive high heels and began drawing a giant figure on the street with chalk. At different moneys during the performance, audience members would step up to a locked box and withdraw a piece of paper from which they would read. The entire performance was in French so I had to wait until later to get the gist of the words. Even without the context of spoken language, Boissiére’s ease and confidence as a performer telegraphed the abject tenderness of perceived monstrosity.

Finally, Marina Barsy Janer from Puerto Rico and Catalonia returned us to the now dark interior of the space. The only lights were emanating form a pool of water filled with algae. Barry Janer clued us into the relationship between performer and algae as collaborative. The other than human beings were not just props. Entering slowly, completely naked she lowered herself into the pool. As she floated, the room quieted except for te the soundtrack of the projection overhead. Her breathing vibrated the water’s surface ever so slightly. I was less interested in the projection and found the power of the performance residing in her physical presence in communion with the algae.

It was a full day. We finished with a trip Le Bilboquet ice cream. I, of course, had a maple ice cream in a cone. In the evening, after all was settling down, the connections became clear between the history of Street Actions and the energy of the performance I had just seen.

Other performance happening while I was there included the Montreal Fringe Festival. The night after the Viva Art Action evening I went to see Ballet des Ombres at O PATRO VÝŠ , a performance using a light table, sand and the artist’s hands. Catherine Gignac transformed these simple ingredients into a magical work. Timed with pre-recorded music, Gignac created images in the sand that were projected behind her. A story of love and betrayal flowed from the shifts in the sands. The alchemy of the piece resided in its seeming simplicity. Watching both the projection of the light table and Gignac’s movements was like seeing a master conjurer. Images morphed and disappeared only to resolve again. It combined shadow puppets, Etch-aSketch and animation.

The next night, I returned to the same theater to see Painting Moments: The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Gay Man. The play by Mary Melfi and Sharon Malone and starring Nick Fontaine tells the story of Nick Palazzo. Palazzo was an up and coming self-taught painter in Montreal in the eighties who’s life ended before was thirty due to AIDS. Using projected paintings from Palazzo’s career it reminds us of an art scene from a different time, but one whose foundation is necessary to understand the present. Palazzo’s really works are raw and a bit naive, but his last works show unrealized maturity. All I could think about on the metro ride home was the loss of a generation of bright young gay artists who never got to see their work fully blossom.

I have only touched the surface of what I saw in terms of contemporary art. I will finish this series of dispatches focusing on An Image Before Last a film series spotlighting Palestinian and Lebanese filmmakers and the Biennale d’art contemperain autochtone (BACA).

I have been home for a week from my trip to Montreal. My first intention was to write a single dispatch connecting all the experiences an d encounters from the full week. Thanks to my hosts artist Francois Morelli and curator Diane Charbonneau, I was immersed into the rich art world of the city from the first day. It soon became clear that I would have a lot to digest. I arrived with only a vague idea to connect with my French Canadian ancestry and maybe meet with artists and curators in the city. I wasn’t sure where the entry points would be for that community. My initial research was very helpful for contextualization. However, things didn’t really coalesce until I was on the ground. I encountered a richer, deeper city than the uncertain vision that emerged from my preparatory reading.

I will admit, I tend to fall in love with certain places when I visit. This felt different. Usually, I am a floating interloper, an outsider plunked down into a history not my own. Here, I have ancestors that go back to the earliest days of New France. Growing up in Connecticut, I was told that we were French Canadian. We didn’t speak French other than a few phrases and traditional dishes. The remnants of French Canadian culture didn’t always make sense as a whole. Being in Montreal, so much about my roots became clear. As a result I began to make sense to myself in a way I rarely feel.

This will be the first in a short series of dispatches from my trip to Montreal. Rather than write these chronologically, they will be connected thematically. This first dispatch will be the sketchiest of overviews to give a sense of the layers of history whose life force still presses on the city’s living soul. Later dispatches will be reviews and overviews of contemporary art exhibitions, reviews on performance art and theater performance, the presence of contemporary Indigenous art and culture and the influence of immigrants from the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean.

Montreal is an island bounded by the St. Lawrence River. Long before Europeans arrived, the island of Montreal (Tiohtià:ke in Mohawk) was an important meeting place for several First Nations. The island occupies a bend in the river and is topped by a small mountain; Mount Royal from which the city derives its name. The first French settlers to arrive in what is now Montreal had the very specific goal of Christianizing the Indigenous peoples of the region. Unlike more commercial colonizing ventures in Quebec City and Trois Rivières Montreal started specifically as a Catholic project of proselytizing. Soon though, its fortifications and proximity to river trade brought more activity. The city grew as an important anchor in New France. During the Seven Years War (locally called The French and Indian War), Montreal fell to British forces in 1760. Soon New France was folded into the British Empire. The French refused to give up their language or Catholicism. For two centuries, English and Scottish families controlled the resources while suppressing the rights of French Canadians. My own family emigrated to the United States in a couple of waves. One part of the family were Acadians. They were violently displaced from their lands and expelled to distant points in the British empire. Some ended up in New England. Another wave arrived in the late nineteenth century due to poor working conditions and a crashing economy in Canada. This population coalesced around the mills and factories in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Like their relatives left in Canada, the French Canadians (really Franco Americans) maintained tight Catholic French enclaves. Jack Kerouac, not much older than my parents, was part of this community. His novel Visions of Gerard tells the fictionalized story of the death of his beloved older brother at a young age. The novel tenderly sheds light on the French community of that time.

Montreal, until the sixties was the commercial hub of Canada. It’s port moved agricultural products and other goods from the interior out to the Great Lakes and to destinations further. It was a working class city. Francois and Diane explained to me that upper and lower class were literally enacted in Montreal. The lower the ground and the closer to the ports were the lower classes. Moving up to the higher points towards Mount Royal meant an elevation of class and status. The working class nature of the city is beautifully illustrated in Gabrielle Roy’s novel Bonheur d’occasion or The Tin Flute in English. The neighborhood of Saint Henri during the last days of the Depression and the beginning of World War 2 was a rough but close knit community.

During the 1950’s and 1960’s Québécois separatist groups began to form. The French population began pushing back against Anglophone suppression and the control of the Catholic Church. After the 1960 election the population became more secular. In what is now called The Quiet Revolution, the province of Quebec began programs for the social safety net and nationalizing industries. Separatist groups, some inspired directly by global revolutionary projects such as the Cuban Revolution, began agitating for secession from Canada. Some of those groups were violent, such as the Front de Libération du Quebec (FLQ) and others less so. The Parti Québécois won in elections in 1976. This began a push for French to be the official language in Quebec. In 1980, a referendum made Quebec officially French first. Anglophone businesses began to migrate to Toronto, which is now the banking capital of Canada, a distinction Montreal once held. Many of those stately banking buildings hold court in Old Montreal. But Montreal remains a cultural powerhouse.

What I have laid out above hardly touches the surface of the city, but I think it is helpful for some historical context. On my third day in Montreal, after a previous day walking through torrential rain and going to three museums and a theater performance, I decided to go for a walk in the woods. I wanted an overview of the city. I took a Metro and a bus to Belvédere Kondiaronk, the highest point in the city on Mount Royal. In the nineteenth century as wealthy families continued to build higher and higher, the city recognized the need to preserve something of the remaining woods. Frederick Law Olmstead designed a park with hiking trails around the high point. The whole city is visible from this point. It is named after Kondiaronk, the orator and chief who signed the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701 between the French, the Wendat and Iroquois. It is also the site of Denys Arcand’s 1989 film Jésus of Montréal. From here, I can see the land that shapes the city, the bend in the St. Lawrence, the rises and valleys and the overlay of industry and commerce. On top of Mount Royal stands a massive cross with bright lights. It is visible from almost anywhere in the city. The cross makes appearances in several films and books, including Dany Laffiére’s How to Make Love to a Negro with Getting Tired or in its original French title; Comment faire l’amour aves un Nègre sans se fatiguer. The cross becomes a beacon from the tenement window of the main character’s apartment.

I walked down Chemin Olmstead through forests and meadows, past runners and walkers, bird watchers and picnickers. Eventually I came out into the city not far from Leonard Cohen’s old haunts. I made my way to Librairie Drawn and Quarterly. I was very excited about this visit. Drawn and Quarterly has been producing some of the greatest works in comics since the late eighties. It is a great bookstore, but since I live in a city lousy with great comic shops, most of the English title books were available to me in Portland. I did manage to get my hands on Dany Laffiére’s new book of drawings and writing L’obession du Rouge. After a great conversation with two of the guys at the store I found a few zines fresh from the Toronto zine fest. At that point, I was très fatigué.

Montreal is a city not unlike Paris or New York whose literary avatar is rich and varied. It is a bookstore town. I was able to find some great Québécois writers in stores like Librairie le Port de tête and Librairie Bertrand. Even though my French is still embryonic, I wanted to find books that I could only find there. Call it aspirational reading. I loved speaking in French even if I could only get one or three sentences in. Something stirred in me when I would connect in French. I have a long way to go however before I am fluent.

The next day, I decided to head right into the ancestral and historical. I started in Old Montreal at the Notre Dame Basilica. The site had been used since the city’s founding as a church but its current form was completed in 1830. It is a magnificent church. I have my own problems with Catholicism but it is what I was raised in. A sacred space is a sacred space. It was a good place to begin my day– not in the secular but in the sacred. Aside from the vaults and the decorative elements (all stunning), the paintings flanking the interior tell the stories of Indigenous conversion and French Canadian martyrs. It is a friction I feel in such places. I lit a candle for my parents and sat in the pew. I wanted to see if Jesus had anything to say to me. I’m still a stranger in these spaces, a way I felt since I was a kid. I loved the holiness of the building.

Back out in the bustling street, I made my way to Pointe-a-Calliere the archaeology and history museum that stands atop the original fort of Montreal. The museum takes you through an original sewer pipe that connects to the Little River, a tributary of the St. Lawrence. It is the oldest collector sewer in the Americas. With dioramas, artifacts and digital projections, it brings to life the original fort. It gives context to the Great Peace of Montreal only hinted at the day before on Mount Royal. The best part is the glass floor over which you walk on the archeological dig of the original fort. You can see early Huron campfires, original rooms and the remnants of the first trading post. One criticism is the over reliance on digital projections, including a couple of displays where life-sized digital renderings of historic figures would answer your questions. Total uncanny valley. When I said earlier that I began to make sense to myself, this was one of the sites where something grabbed me. In a display case of unearthed artifacts were two earthenware bowls, cracked beyond repair, hardly enough to see what it looked like. I recognized that as the bowl form and glaze treatment that I often turn to in my own work. There was an instant kinship between this unknown maker and my own ceramic sensibility.

I ended my day on the river. I had planned to go to Boucherville, a suburb of Montreal. My cousin sent me information on a park which is the site where the first Duford is known to have come to the Americas in the early 1700s. However, Boucherville is a Metro and two buses ( an hour travel both ways). I figured any ancestral spirits would understand that what I would be doing is just standing in a suburban park. I made a split decision to find a tourist sight-seeing boat since I was at the port. I booked one for happy hour. Soon I was on the river looking at the city from the water, on the other side of the view from the day before on the mountain. It was an excellent way to sense the original land underneath the city. Layers of industry and history flowed by: the old port, the new port, Expo 67 and the 1976 Olympic Stadium. Old enclaves and new developments pressed against each other. Between those two days I felt a sense of the shape of the land (as best one could do in a week). It is here that I will leave this first dispatch. It was a lot of compressed history I know. Montreal is a city that wears its history, its present and its future on its sleeve. The next dispatch will be entirely about the contemporary art I encountered.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, my instinct to return to The North American Codex feels urgent. Currently, the fascist, Christian White Nationalist regime pushes a narrative of racial purity and divine inevitability. The seed of The North American Codex lies in an awareness of the Columbian Exchange, the mingling of disparate ecologies and cultures. Firstly, “America” in this view is not synonymous with the United States but refers to the Americas as a whole. I’ve mentioned in earlier posts the influence of Greg Grandin’s recent book America, América spotlighting Latin America as well as the research I have been doing into my French Canadian ancestry. White Protestants tend to overstate their own importance, whiting out the contributions of many other groups.

Secondly, the Columbian Exchange is not a one-way street flowing from colonized to colonizer but a tangle of hybrids, ocean crossings, vagrant phrases and new beings who defy national boundaries. Some of that movement can be grotesque land killers but many others are liberatory. It is impossible to imagine Dutch still life painting without the materials and wealth of the Americas. While the Constitution of the United States is generally thought of as a product of Enlightenment thinking, it owes as much of a debt to Indigenous political precedent.

I am going to Montreal in the next few days. It will be my first trip to the city. I can’t wait. I have a few agendas. The first is to connect with my ancestral history. My family extends to the early days of New France. That history makes connections with voyageurs in the Pacific Northwest where I live, with the diaspora of Franco-Americans like my parents who lived in New England as a permanent working class to the influence of French and Indigenous cultures that arose throughout North America. I don’t know exactly how this research will manifest in my studio work. I am also going to Montreal because it is a storied North American city with a vibrant contemporary art and literary scene. It is interesting to me that the compliment often paid to Montreal is that it is the most “European” city in North America. It seems to me that it offers an alternative example of a hybrid, one not entirely governed by the precepts of US capitalism. I anticipate plugging into some potent experiences.

I have been in constant motion the last couple of months, finishing up at Reed College where I will no longer be teaching after seven of the last ten years. I had to move my entire office into my studio. Besides the sadness of being finished with part of my life that meant a great deal to me, I had to shoehorn the last five years of two work spaces into one. The good news is that it initiated a massive cleanup and reorganization. Along with last week’s Open Studios, my studio is humming with energy and possibility. Something that came up over the last couple of weeks, particularly in many conversations during Open Studios. That is that a space for reviews of regional work barely exists anymore. I was asked by a few people about including more reviews here. I have been working on an essay about regionalism for the last couple of months that I will post soon. So when I return from Montreal I will begin to include more reviews of exhibitions and books from regional artists.

Finally two announcements:

If you are in Portland this week, I will be giving a talk at PNCA about my dear friend David Eckard. I curated the exhibition Don’t Be Clever, Be True: Late Works by David Eckard. The details are below:

The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA proudly presents a talk with curator Daniel Duford on Thursday June 11at 6pm.

Join us in discussion with Daniel Duford, the curator of the exhibition Don’t Be Clever, Be True: Late Works by David Eckard.

This memorial exhibition honors the artistic achievement and community impact of David Eckard, a visionary artist and educator who touched the lives of generations of students, having served as Associate Professor and Head of PNCA’s Sculpture Department from 2000-2025. David was an integral part of Portland’s thriving arts & culture community, whose kindness, humor, technical virtuosity and improvisational intelligence made him an exemplary teacher. As an artist, David created a body of unique work that sprang from his own authentic voice and experience, combining beautifully crafted objects with performance. David’s work always contained some combination of grace, the grotesque, strength and tenderness. His earliest works arose from Queer protest groups during the AIDS epidemic, and he carried forward that mix of poetic form, political action and bodily identity into his subsequent works. Throughout his long tenure as an artist, David was the recipient of many prestigious grants and awards, and his work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally.

This lecture is free & open to the public! RSVP to attend on Eventbrite.
Presented in person and live streamed to the PNCA Live Youtube Channel.

Pacific Northwest College of Art
Shipley-Collins Mediatheque
511 NW Broadway, Portland, OR 97209

The Ground Beneath Us Mentorship will begin again in August. Please spread the word to anyone who might want to to build or strengthen a studio practice or find community among other artists outside of existing institutions.

The Ground Beneath Us mentorship program is designed for artists who are seeking guidance, feedback and mentorship for their studio practice. The program consists of 8 biweekly, one hour zoom meetings from April to June 2026. Are you an artist at the beginning of your career? Are you trying to find a new path in your studio work? Are you not ready to go to art school but want feedback and community? Are you looking for structure after getting your BFA or MFA? Each meeting will be tailored to your questions and goals. In addition to our one-on-one meetings, you will be connected with others in your cohort for group critiques.

You can expect:

• Feedback and critique on your work

• Readings and artist suggestions

• Tailored guidance for your studio practice, meeting you where you are

• Connection with a cohort

• Guidance for finding grants, fellowships, residencies etc.

Tuition: $1200

Hello everyone. I’ve been painting quite a bit the last two months while I try to shape the next arc of writing for The Whole Live Animal. In that time, my visiting professorship at Reed College has come to an end. I had to move out of my office by last week. I’d been in that office for five years. There was quite a bit of accumulation. It gave me an opportunity to cull my books, materials and pieces that weren’t quite successful. The good news is that after rearranging my studio, it’s invested with fresh energy.

A bit of news:

My painting Escape Velocity: After Jack Kirby was acquired by The Hallie Ford Museum in Salem, Oregon for their permanent collection.

My painting Jaguar and Border Fence was sold through my Divinations show at Mark Moore Fine Art.

I will be live tomorrow morning on KOIN 6 as part of the segment Kohr Explores for this weekend’s Open Studios at NW Marine Artworks.

And that leads to this weekend’s event. This is the 9th year of Open Studios at NW Marine Artworks. I moved into the studio in 2018 and have participated in almost every one since. It has gotten bigger every year. I will say that it is not easy to open my studio to hundreds of strangers but I have had good conversations and connected with collectors. If you are in the Portland area this weekend come on down. This is a great way to directly support the work of people making art in the city. I am upstairs in Studio #325. Here are the details:

Artists at NW Marine Art Works are opening their studio doors for a two-day event on Saturday, May 30th and Sunday, May 31st from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Guests will have the opportunity to see artists at work, watch engaging demos, talk with makers and check out the spaces where some of Portland’s best art is created.

NW Marine Artworks, 2516 NW 29th Ave., Portland, Oregon

With more than 75 local artists and artisans participating, visitors will find everything from jewelry and apparel to paintings and printmaking, ceramics, photography, sculpture, accessories and housewares — it’s all here. Artists from North Coast Seed Building, Carton Service Building and River St Studios will be joining us to show and sell their work as well.

Visitors can listen to live music and enjoy food and drink while watching artists demonstrate their skills and process. You won’t want to miss this vibrant event that embodies Portland’s creative spirit.

Get your foot in the door early by attending an exclusive Preview Night on Friday, May 29th, 5 - 8pm. CLICK HERE to get you tickets in advance. Ticket quantities are limited.

Above is a painting that I began in 2024 to be included in my exhibition American Underland. It was meant to focus on a procession from photos I took while participating in BLM marches in 2020. The painting never came together. I pulled it out last month and at last it was resolved. I am still looking at it and thinking about it.

I will also have ceramics available and my Ground Beneath Us Publications The Naked Boy and Four Scaffold Visions.

I hope to see you this weekend!

Writing has been cramped for me these past few months. Whereas, when I started The Whole Live Animal, the words flowed for the most part. I am currently working on the manuscript of those collected writings. I am hoping to publish the essays along with short comics in fall 2026 as the third publication of The Ground Beneath Us Books (the first two publications are available through Lulu, see below. It is an excellent way to support my work). Ted Gioia posted a timely defense of and call to arms to step aside from the big five publishers in a recent newsletter titled

The Honest Broker

Montaigne and the Origins of Substack

Michel de Montaigne may be the most influential essayist in history—even Shakespeare borrowed from his work (taking some passages almost verbatim). But if Montaigne were alive today, this famous essayist might be mistaken for just another slacker living in his parents’ basement…

Read more

5 months ago · 476 likes · 67 comments · Ted Gioia

Montaigne and the Origins of Substack. Maybe it is that I am in editing mode with the earlier essays, or that my psyche is clogged with slop, anxiety and dread but writing has been slow.

Painting has not, however. I have been on a roll in the studio. Every time I enter the studio and engage one of my self-assigned “shoulds” I begin painting. There is real fire for me right now. I don’t quite know what is happening in these new paintings, but something magical is occurring for me. At the beginning of the year I switched back to acrylic simply for the speed of drying. Knowing I had a busy semester, I wanted to work more quickly. I had been copying panels from Jack Kirby’s New Gods comics from the early seventies in my sketchbook. His sense of composition is magnificent. I was becoming too tight. I have already mentioned my new small, quick paintings. In that same spirit, I continued on.

Each painting has its origin as a little seed, a thumbnail sketch with very little detail. I look through my sketchbooks and find one that seems viable. Each of these paintings began as unpromising messes. Each one I would start and think, “Well, the lightning has struck, you’re done now.” Then I would wrestle with it a little bit and the painting would begin, like a forest squirrel in a folk tale, to lead me deeper into the woods. By the time I finish, I am smitten and perplexed. I share some of these new paintings without much comment on them individually.

In a bit of news, the small paintings I worked on last fall make up an online show at my gallery Mark Moore Fine Art on Artsy. These paintings have been chosen to be spotlighted on the site. A very encouraging validation for this new work that I am so excited about that also eludes my conscious categorization.

AND A REMINDER:

Order a copy of my new book Four Scaffold Visions: Poems and Pictures from Lulu. This is the second of my books from Ground Beneath Us Books.

Also available: The Naked Boy Graphic Novel

PRAISE FOR THE NAKED BOY:

“The Naked Boy retains a classic feel as Duford pulls Native American creation myths and superhero comic conventions into a rich (and strange) tapestry. Duford’s artwork, which sets blotchy black-and-white figure drawings against imposing warped-perspective architecture, is reminiscent of fine comics artists like Ben Katchor and Jeff Lemire. That free-flowing, unpolished style allows all these strange characters and cross-cultural story elements to intermingle pretty seamlessly. It’s hard to guess at where The Naked Boy is headed, but the bumpy road that takes you there is hard to turn away from.”

Casey Jarman in The Willamette Week

Two weeks ago, I introduced The Ground Beneath Us Mentorship Program. The description was very brief so I want to go a little more in depth here. If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you will recognize a thread. I first conceived of The Ground Beneath Us as an alternative to more professionalized art schools. It morphed over the next decade. That decade also coincided with the rise of MAGA and the quick dismantling and discrediting of institutional pillars. It saw the rise of rageful alienation and fractured citizenry through ever more potent social media. Finally, like a building whose support beams have had an invisible termite infestation for decades, the last year saw collapse after collapse of basic support systems. AI grows and continues to eat energy and jobs. None of this inevitable, nor is it irreversible.

I believe in art. I believe in an expansive idea of art school. Some people thrive in degree seeking structured institutions, some don’t. As a field however, there should be room for those who want more than weekend workshops (nothing wrong with those, I love participating) but also don’t want or can’t afford to enter into a full program. Their practice might be well underway, they just lack community or feedback. They might know that they want to get to a particular place but the gap between here and there seems insurmountable. They might have gone to art school years ago and need some structure to return to an abandoned practice. Legitimacy comes from within. That is the purpose of this mentorship. It is to give you a full one-on-one experience, the same I give to thesis students and grad students.

Since I posted this two weeks ago, the economy has gone bonkers, thanks to a foolish war. I am lowering the price to $1200. I am also opening up more spots. That way hopefully more people could participate. In pricing this, I am trying to balance affordability with my own needs. This is not funded by anyone else. This, like the name implies is from the ground up. I have been teaching for twenty five years. I was a non-traditional student. It took me a long time to finish my degree and I never received an MFA. Nonetheless, I created a vigorous studio and writing practice. I have always taught as an adjunct or visitor in college level classes. I love doing that, but I recognize that not everyone fits that same mold. So this mentorship brings that experience to you and is tailored for you.

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You can expect:

• Feedback and critique on your work

• Readings and artist suggestions

• Guidance for finding grants, fellowships, residencies etc.

• Connection with the larger cohort

• One on one discussions about studio practice and professional practice

Depending on where this goes (I’m loathe to predict anything these days), in the future there could be in person components such as intensive atelier, workshops and cohort conferences. More on that later.

I will be holding an informational online session on March 20, 2026 at 10AM PT. Email me at dduford@groundbeneathus.org for a link and more information.

I will be returning next week with another installment from The North American Codex.

AND A REMINDER:

Order a copy of my new book Four Scaffold Visions: Poems and Pictures from Lulu. This is the second of my books from Ground Beneath Us Books.

Also available: The Naked Boy Graphic Novel

PRAISE FOR THE NAKED BOY:

“The Naked Boy retains a classic feel as Duford pulls Native American creation myths and superhero comic conventions into a rich (and strange) tapestry. Duford’s artwork, which sets blotchy black-and-white figure drawings against imposing warped-perspective architecture, is reminiscent of fine comics artists like Ben Katchor and Jeff Lemire. That free-flowing, unpolished style allows all these strange characters and cross-cultural story elements to intermingle pretty seamlessly. It’s hard to guess at where The Naked Boy is headed, but the bumpy road that takes you there is hard to turn away from.”

Casey Jarman in The Willamette Week

Session 1 April 2026 ends June 2026

Session 2 August 2026 ends November 2026

The Ground Beneath Us mentorship program is designed for artists who are seeking guidance, feedback and mentorship for their studio practice. The program consists of 8 biweekly, one hour zoom meetings from April to June 2026. Are you an artist at the beginning of your career? Are you trying to find a new path in your studio work? Are you not ready to go to art school but want feedback and community? Are you looking for structure after getting your BFA or MFA? Each meeting will be tailored to your questions and goals. In addition to our one-on-one meetings, you will be connected with others in your cohort for group critiques.

You can expect:

• Feedback and critique on your work

• Readings and artist suggestions

• Tailored guidance for your studio practice, meeting you where you are

• Connection with a cohort

• Guidance for finding grants, fellowships, residencies etc.

Tuition: $1600

Register here

About Daniel Duford

Daniel Duford has twenty-five years of experience teaching at the college level. He has designed curriculum in ceramics, graphic novels, sculpture, intermedia and drawing. He has taught at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Reed College, Portland Community College and Lewis and Clark College. Daniel has an extensive national exhibition record in spaces such as MASS MOCA, Orange County Museum of Art, Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU. He has curated exhibitions in several museums and contemporary art spaces and written about contemporary art for several publications and catalog essays. He is a Simon J. Guggenheim Fellow, MacDowell Fellow and Hallie Ford Fellow. He is the founder and Executive Director of The Ground Beneath Us.

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AND A REMINDER:

Order a copy of my new book Four Scaffold Visions: Poems and Pictures from Lulu. This is the second of my books from Ground Beneath Us Books.

Also available: The Naked Boy Graphic Novel

PRAISE FOR THE NAKED BOY:

“The Naked Boy retains a classic feel as Duford pulls Native American creation myths and superhero comic conventions into a rich (and strange) tapestry. Duford’s artwork, which sets blotchy black-and-white figure drawings against imposing warped-perspective architecture, is reminiscent of fine comics artists like Ben Katchor and Jeff Lemire. That free-flowing, unpolished style allows all these strange characters and cross-cultural story elements to intermingle pretty seamlessly. It’s hard to guess at where The Naked Boy is headed, but the bumpy road that takes you there is hard to turn away from.”

Casey Jarman in The Willamette Week

What does an artist do with history? What I mean is History with a capital H, the academic discipline that describes the past in a very specific way. History has been fertile ground for artists since the beginning of art. Think about the role that history painting played in France during the Revolution and counter Revolution or the US Capital, the one defiled by an insurgent mob of thugs in January 2021. The artists of the Mexican Revolution used public murals and other popular art forms to posit a Mexican history continuous with the Indigenous past, not broken by Conquest but containing a through line. The contention in racist pro-Confederate monuments is that they are depicting history but in fact are tools of propaganda for the Jim Crow south. All of the above examples are fairly recent. They exist within a particular historic moment, one in which “history” as a subject is shaped by Enlightenment ideals and colonialism, empire and the modern state.

Historians look through the human past, sifting through written records, material culture and corresponding archeological evidence to construct a coherent narrative. The discipline is specific, using its own methodology. However to be a historian requires the ability to tell a story. Things must be proven, even in conjecture. This differs from myth, which is all true but its truth comes from metaphor. The historian implements a direct gaze, examining only the provable concrete data. The myth teller cannot look directly at the myth, but like Perseus must view the subject askance through reflection and peripheral vision. It doesn’t make it any less true, in fact it can get much more quickly to the heart of things.

I have been reading a lot of history lately as research for The North American Codex. As riveting and illuminating as much of what I’m reading is, it is often difficult to find the image. Because the image is the heart of the work and the image is the building block of story. I often state that I am not a historian, I’m an artist but I love the work of good historians. My job is quite different. If truth is the goal, truth is not always served by recitation of facts, but by leaping images (as poet Robert Bly called them). Many of the nineteenth century artists I mentioned above created very political, historical works to serve an ideology or a social purpose. Jaques-Louis David created some of the most iconic images of the French Revolution. As the arts authority of the Revolution he controlled the image world. His paintings of Napoleon Crossing the Alps and The Death of Marat are the icons of that era. Do the paintings mean the same thing to us as they did when painted? Marat is taught in every survey of art history and it is masterful but does it land the same without the historical context? During Napoleon Bonaparte’s reign, the Spanish painter Francisco Goya painted scathing critiques of French cruelty and Spanish resistance in print series such as The Disasters of War and the painting The Third of May. Even if the particulars of the historic events depicted are fuzzy, the raw power of the images still thrill contemporary viewers.

This returns me to my current project and practice. It brings up the uses of research in the studio. I think one of the reasons that academics in the social sciences and humanities (even art historians!) are dismissive of artistic practice is that it doesn’t look like research as commonly understood. As data driven and methodologically catholic disciplines, what looks like contaminating the crime scene is actually a form of conjuring. What I have not been able to do quite yet in this batch of research is locate the image, the imaginal world that allows the disparate to dance, and thereby make contact with hidden resonances.

One of my great companions I mentioned in an earlier post is Greg Grandin’s excellent new book America, América: A New History of the New World. Grandin is a masterful storyteller and manages to sweep the reader along from the Spanish Conquest to the election of Donald Trump. What is quite clear is that Spanish America exerts much more gravity intellectually and spiritually on the Americas than is given credit. So much of the current administration’s border obsessions and musty old rhetoric has been pulled out of the United State’s attic closet and moldering basement boxes. In some sense, the graceless obviousness of Trump’s policies only serve to shed light on centuries of oppressive tactics, unwarranted Anglo Saxon self-importance and incessant meddling. It’s land grab, real estate deals and resource extraction all the way down. They don’t even have the good sense to gussy up their bigotry with the kind of polite tone that creates plausible deniability. Grandin’s book re-centers Latin America and as a result, opens up a richer image world. I cannot recommend it highly enough to give a fuller context to our current time. Bad Bunny’s half-time performance was a great example of manifesting this overlooked but essential history. Speaking of images and history, once you are aware of the simultaneity of Spanish held countries’ independence movements with Napoleon’s dictatorship, Goya’s work takes on even more depth.

I realize this past week that I need to compost what the historians are telling me. As admirable as they are, and as informative, I need the voice of poets and novelists. I need fellow image makers who could leap across millennia and across species and connect the invisible strands of meaning that can elude academic methodology. In my studio, something unexpected and strange is emerging. I am excited but unsure of it. I keep waiting for the research to yield more “important” paintings and drawings instead, a shamanic, earth bound world keeps popping up. This month’s ink drawing at the top of the newsletter is from a dream I had about this time last year. The crux is this: I find myself floating in a deep, ancient bay. The waves are high but I am not afraid. I am surrounded by a circle of massive turtles who are floating upright with their heads sticking out. The man in the boat is Gustave Courbet, the French painter known for his progressive politics and adherence to social realism. Courbet was active in the Paris Commune that sought to overthrow Napoleon III. His work electrified the generation of artists we now call the Impressionists. He pushed against the academic conventions of artists like David. History for Courbet was not great heroic figures but ordinary workers. His was a flesh bound and muscular world. In the dream he and I were rowing together on the waves before I found myself among the turtles. They seemed to be summoning some sort of vibration from the depths of the ocean. I’m not sure why I left Courbet’s boat, but it seems there was some deeper work that needed to be done. I seek among the waves for the connected dots of all of this human story.

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AND A REMINDER:

Order a copy of my new book Four Scaffold Visions: Poems and Pictures from Lulu. This is the second of my books from Ground Beneath Us Books.

Also available: The Naked Boy Graphic Novel

PRAISE FOR THE NAKED BOY:

“The Naked Boy retains a classic feel as Duford pulls Native American creation myths and superhero comic conventions into a rich (and strange) tapestry. Duford’s artwork, which sets blotchy black-and-white figure drawings against imposing warped-perspective architecture, is reminiscent of fine comics artists like Ben Katchor and Jeff Lemire. That free-flowing, unpolished style allows all these strange characters and cross-cultural story elements to intermingle pretty seamlessly. It’s hard to guess at where The Naked Boy is headed, but the bumpy road that takes you there is hard to turn away from.”

Casey Jarman in The Willamette Week

“I will tell you something about stories/[he said]/They aren’t just entertainment/Don’t be fooled. /They are all we have, you see, /All we have to fight off/ illness and death. /You don’t have anything/ if you don’t have stories”

Leslie Marmon Silko from Ceremony

Tell me a story. A story with many strands, some intimately entwined, some never meant to touch but do so inadvertently.

A great cave bear awakens to follow underground caverns along alluvial routes, glaciated mountainsides and underground streams. It emerges in the dreams of many peoples: as a sigil, as a shamanic totem, as a constellation, as the intermediary between the Otherworld and the waking world. Its route is circumglobal and takes eons.

A she wolf suckles twins. One twin takes the milk to see and hear the wild voices of the living world, the other is corrupted by a desire for singular power. The latter kills his twin brother and creates an empire. That empire begets empire after empire.

A sky god erases his family history and declares himself the creator of everything. His story spreads, absorbing all other stories. It is single minded. He rides the trade routes infecting all in his path.

A matrilineal people are absorbed by imperial appetites. In turn they create empire, one more virulent than the last. They make a kingdom that looks to colonize the world. Over time they create alliances with other people of the land. Something in them remembers the time before colonization. Another rival empire expels them from their homeland at gun point. They are spread throughout the Americas.

Expulsion after expulsion, the empire’s story dominates, but underground the bear has been cultivating an emergence. The people in all their forms blow on the embers of the old stories and burn the paper facade of colonial power. A multiplicity of stories form an entangled multivalent cacophony. Joyous, raucous and ill behaved, it at last drowns out the one eyed, usurping story of empire. In the end, each person is a vessel for their rowdy, unmappable ancestral story. Each community is a conductor of their vibratory lives as connected to the ever shifting land. Untamable, contradictory and alive to the resonant and living world.

Stories have their own agency and trajectory. They stick like burrs to the pant legs of immigrants, find fertile soil where they take on the taste of the land and act as intermediaries between the human and non-human. Some stories seek to collaborate while others rush headlong over conquered peoples erasing all other histories. I am picking up a thread that I dropped a decade ago. I was working on a loose series of works collectively called The North American Codex. Each series has its own flavor, its own approach to medium and narrative. Given the dismantling of American democracy and the spotlight shown on an Americas wide history, this seems the time to reenter this territory. The various “chapters” or series of the codex will be developed simultaneously. The Whole Live Animal will be the site where I post essays, research and parts of the project monthly. Some of these will be a series of paintings, some drawings, sculptures essays etc.

There are two books I am currently reading which helped spark and articulate the path I am now taking. I will write more on them specifically in a later post. The first is The Serpent and the Fire: Poetries of the Americas from Origins to Present edited by Javier Taboada and Jerome Rothenberg and America, América: A New History of the New World by Greg Grandin. Both are generous in their scope and realign the story of America away from the United States and English Protestant triumphalism. Resonances with falsehoods and tactics employed by the current regime and white nationalists are revealed to be deeply embedded in the history of conquest. However, particularly in Serpent and the Fire, a multi-lingual, deeply animist soul is also present.

In the spirit of those books, I begin The North American Codex. There are many roads to walk, many territories to visit. I hope you will come with me.

“Karhu - Bjorn - Braun - Bear/ [lightning rainbow great cloud tree dialogs of birds]/ Europa. ‘The West’./ the bears are gone except Brunhilde?/ or elder wilder goddesses reborn - will race/ the streets of France and Spain/ with automatic guns -/in Spain,/Bears and Bison,/ Red Hands with missing fingers,/ Red mushroom labyrinths;/ lightning-bolt mazes,/ Painted in caves,/ Underground.”

Gary Snyder from The Way West, Underground

Expulsion: A Story Goes Walking

I am not a historian. I am an image maker and storyteller. I began the research for this part of North American Codex when I realized that there was a strong French-Canadian presence in the Pacific Northwest where I live. Growing up, we were one of only two or three French Canadian families in the working class neighborhood of Bridgeport, Connecticut. My parents carried some cultural traditions into the house: tourtière, crepes and a smattering of French words. They were adamant about assimilation. I was the youngest of seven, born long after the first six were on their way to adulthood. When I met an uncle of my father’s, he was exotic. He spoke only French and brought with him a squiggly, mimeographed family tree that put my father’s side of the family back to the founding of New France. It was an itch that I tried to scratch over the years but never fully pursued.

In January 2020, just before covid lockdowns, I attended the North American Rewilding Conference in Portland. One of the workshops was on Chinuk WaWa, the Indigenous trade language of the Columbia River Valley. I learned that many French words made their way into the linguistic stew. The history of many of my ancestors was right there in place names and histories. Much of it has been white washed, erased or buried by English speaking Americans telling a particular, triumphant nationalist story. This project grows out of that initial contact with a history embedded in the soil.

I am a descendant of the Acadians. The Acadians lived in what is now Nova Scotia. They lived in proximity to and allied with the Mi’kmaq. The Acadians were pawns between the English and French empires, passed back and forth between each kingdom based on the fortunes of wars fought on distant lands. The Acadians were staunchly independent and neutral. In 1755, the British crown carried out a brutal expulsion of the Acadians. Their lands were seized and the inhabitants arrested and put on ships to be dispersed to places where they had never been and were not wanted. Many died in wretched conditions on overloaded ships. Many were forced to forget their language and culture. Reading this history, one can’t help but see the parallels in ICE raids and the flimsy, wildly false accusations and justifications for mass arrests and deportations. The stories echo across the centuries wherever empires move in to take over land and people. For this project, I am using my own ancestry to trace a story that goes back far before there was a France or a Rome or a United States and see where those embers of animism and an impure, hybrid and many voiced story could emerge in this time of ecological collapse, fascism and techno-theocracy.

This is a form of time travel from the deep past to the distant future. Simultaneous times and characters will coexist like upended geological strata. Images from Chauvet cave, Breton folk stories and Voyageur chansons will sit side by side with contemporary scenes of expulsion, Roman conquest and ecological complexity. Characters move through the stories in the guise of different figures. It is a warning from the Ice Age, a wake up call from the future.

“The only way I can think to find them, the only archaeology that might be practical, is as follows: You take your child or grandchild in your arms, or you borrow a baby, not a year old yet, and go down into the wild oats in the field below the barn. Stand under the oak on the last slope of the hill, facing the creek. Stand quietly. Perhaps the baby will see something, or hear a voice, or speak to somebody there, somebody from home.”

Ursula K. Le Guin “Towards An Archaeology of the Future” from Always Coming Home

AND A REMINDER:

Order a copy of my new book Four Scaffold Visions: Poems and Pictures from Lulu. This is the second of my books from Ground Beneath Us Books.

Also available: The Naked Boy Graphic Novel

PRAISE FOR THE NAKED BOY:

“The Naked Boy retains a classic feel as Duford pulls Native American creation myths and superhero comic conventions into a rich (and strange) tapestry. Duford’s artwork, which sets blotchy black-and-white figure drawings against imposing warped-perspective architecture, is reminiscent of fine comics artists like Ben Katchor and Jeff Lemire. That free-flowing, unpolished style allows all these strange characters and cross-cultural story elements to intermingle pretty seamlessly. It’s hard to guess at where The Naked Boy is headed, but the bumpy road that takes you there is hard to turn away from.”

Casey Jarman in The Willamette Week

Share The Whole Live Animal

I wanted to share a few highlights from the studio for 2025. We must remind ourselves of every bit of light that comes our way. The image of the double faced god Janus has been prominent in my work for the past two years. Janus is the Roman god of doorways, of past and future- of time at the pivot point. It stands to reason that this is the god of this moment; not only the calendar year but of a time that feels like a past is falling away while a new future emerges.

I began the year in the invitational ceramics exhibition at Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, Washington Build Me Up, Tear Me Down, Why Don’t You Love Me Babe Like There’s No One Around curated by Stefano Catalani. I was honored to be included with such great artists as Iván Carmona, Emily Counts, Claudia Fitch, Ariana Heinzman, Holly Hudson, Ryan W. Kelly, Dirk Staschke, Chris Theiss, Timea Tihanyi, Tip Toland, and Patti Warashina.

Matthew Kangas in a recent review in Ceramics: Art and Perception said “Among the others, Ivan Carmona, Ryan Kelly, Daniel Duford and Dirk Staschke stand out. More in the Funk art vein of subjectively created inner worlds, Duford’s Janus series repeats two Funk art tropes, the self-portrait (see Arneson) and the self-contained tableau (see Roy De Forest and David Gilhooly). Duford supplements these with large-scale paintings.”

In February I was invited by painter and professor Kevin Bell to be a guest artist at University of Montana in Missoula. It was great meeting with all the grad students and seeing their work. This led to an invitation for a month long ceramics artist-in-residency from Julia Galloway. I spent the month of July in monkish delight working in the ceramics studio. I was able to produce a new series of sculptures that opened up possibilities for the direction of the work.

In November, I released the second book, Four Scaffold Visions: Poems and Pictures for my publishing project The Ground Beneath Us Books. It is available from Lulu Publishers here.

I took a short break from writing for The Whole Live Animal on Substack. The noise and despair of the past year reminded me that sometimes the most powerful act is refusal. I didn’t want to add to the cacophony. I will return to writing on a monthly basis in January.

Finally, I began a new series of small paintings. I took my own teaching advice and decided to work through the stack of small nested panels and canvases in my studio. I went in search of the images below the surface of the times. I began working on several at once, not questioning them or talking myself out of a painting. At this point I have almost thirty of these 12 by 12 inch and 9 by 12 inch panels. The images come from dreams, quick thumbnails or improvisational exercises. No one has seen them yet. Here is a glimpse of the panels in progress. I am spending these floating days between Christmas and New Year’s Day sitting with the pictures to see what they have to tell me.

In 2026, I aim to make work that comes from the depths, not chases market trends. In the face of AI slop, fascism and algorithmically clogged veins it is the thing that doesn’t fit, the pictures that don’t reveal everything in an Instagram post and the work that comes from the embodied, flawed human hand that is the ember for a living culture. Happy New Year! I wish you hope and strength in the year to come.

Note: The last in this three part series originally published in 2023. Have a very Happy New Year!

It is almost upon us. The end of the calendar year. The cosmic, astronomical year began last week on the solstice but the Gregorian calendar that shapes our lives holds that day on January 1st. Tomorrow night is the end of the line for 2023. It is the time of year for accounting and remembering. What happened this year? Who are we after that twelve month journey? What promises were kept and broken? Those promises were made to our future selves in the cold dark of late December. Here we are face to face with the future and the past.

In the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the poet says “No year ends the way it began.” After the initiatory awakening of the Green Knight’s Christmastime challenge, the holiday decorations are put away and the champagne bottles are empty. Gawain then must spend his year; from the pale green light and heavy dark of January and February to the thawing and budding of March and April to the warm blossoming of summer to the wheel’s turn back to winter in a state of suspended dread. That year, he, like all of us do, tries to act as if; hoping that by engaging in the mundane tasks of the court he will stave off the inevitable. As the time comes closer for him to set off, unease leaks into daily life. He vacillates between the joy of immersion in the moment and girding for an unknown certainty. 

Gawain must go through the bumbling journey to the Green Chapel in order to be changed; to be stripped of convenience, to face death, to leave space for an ill-fitting youthful skin to slip off so that all of his tendrils and new branches of experience can unfurl. He arrives at Bertilak’s castle as a mendicant. The threadbare knight has been primed for initiation. As with our own New Year celebration a feast must commence. Lord and Lady Bertilak play their exchange game. The merry making is a prelude to the final test. 

When Gawain leaves the rural castle to go to the Green Chapel he wears beneath his armor the secreted green garter given him by Lady Bertilak. She tells him that it holds protections from harm. She swears him to secrecy using him to violate the terms of the exchange game with the lord. Arriving at the moss covered rocky outcrop ready to accept the invoice due from the previous year he finds the great Green Knight resplendent in his emerald armor whetting the great ax amidst forest song. 

The Green Knight readies to give the return blow. There are three attempts. The first one is stayed as Gawain flinches. The second is a feint on the part of the Green Knight. The final one is a nick on the neck. The Green Knight drops the ruse. He is in fact Bertilak himself. He and the Lady and the Crone who is none other than his aunt Morgan Le Fay are all in on it. Gawain conducted himself beautifully except for keeping his talisman hidden. Hence the nick. The arboreal giant laughs and invites Gawain back to the castle to see the New Year in. Gawain thanks him and decides to ride back to Camelot with his scar, green garter and story.

It is worth noting that in the poem and in Joseph Campbell’s retelling on the Bill Moyers special The Power of Myth that the conclusion of the garter is the treachery of women. Lady Bertilak is exposed as a temptress and Morgan Le Fay the shadow to Arthur’s light. Gawain returns to Camelot with his story; a story meant to transform and teach the court. The green garter became a sigil of shame and triumph even inspiring an Order of the Green Garter reflecting virtues such as celibacy and marriage. It is a very typical hero story. Stories, like images, as I’ve written before are wild creatures. You can break some and tame them, try to breed them, but deep bone knowledge of the wild always remains. Domestication is a two way street. The domesticator also gets domesticated. Maybe a better of way of stating it is that the act of domestication is a form of being trimmed and molded by the thing that seems to be domesticated. Underneath the very Christian and patriarchal conclusion of the poem is an old and wily tangle of roots. And they are still sending up shoots.

Morgan Le Fay is so named because she is part fairy. Not in the Tinkerbell sense but as a denizen of the Otherworld. Avalon is the place just beyond the fog of ordinary perception. She is painted in later stories as a corrupted manipulator. In some versions of the Arthurian lore it was she who imprisoned Merlin in a tree after getting him to cough up all of his magical secrets. In Gawain and the Green Knight she changes Bertilak’s form and sends him to King Arthur’s court. In a traditional reading of the story, the reason for the test is to check out Camelot’s virtue. Are they really all that? Being tricksterish means that Morgan would be just as happy to trip up the smug, high-minded Round Table as to help them right the ship. Morgan is a surviving figure from a matrilineal, magical culture. One that recognizes the reciprocal pulse of the living world. 

The structure of the game in which one is beheaded and beheads in return comes from antique Celtic sources. The king was literally a figurehead who needed to be renewed yearly. Our image of Father Time and Baby New Year is an example of symbols that have morphed and survived through myriad polemics. In the old stories a young hero would come to “rescue” a princess or queen. He would need to fight a monstrous gatekeeper or defender. The beheaded old king would be reborn symbolically as the solar child who becomes the hero. The hero then goes on an adventure where he finds himself confronting the once-hero who is now the wizened defender. He who was once the supple shining star is a time hardened burl full of middle age’s contradictions and aches. The only constant is the queen who is really the great Goddess. This is her game. Renewal can only begin when the old year king is beheaded. 

So as we listen for the ancient songs embedded in the medieval poem, we can reconsider the exchange game and the intent of Morgan Le Fay and the Bertilaks. I see the Green Knight’s entry into the halls of Arthur as a reminder and a challenge to the court. Wisdom comes from the wild, multivalent edges not the center of power. If it is not renewed then the court becomes necrotic and unstable, a brittle autocracy. It is no accident that the main image of the French Revolution was the severed head. The head is literally and metaphorically the capital. The challenge to the court needn’t be a storming of the castle (as romantic and heroic as that sounds. It is also the impulse of despots) This is where true mythic thinking, understanding picture making and story come into play. The beheading game is a game but it hurts. It is ceremony, and ceremony only works if the stakes are understood.

The Green Chapel is the forest. The forest in all its complexity embodied by Morgan Le Fay and the Bertilak castle is a kind of alternative society; a new model. It is a reminder of the covenant with the living world. State power is nothing if it doesn’t take into account all the interconnected and conflicting lives that hold it up in the first place. The green garter then, is not a sigil of virtue, but of the green pulse of the forest. It calls on us to behold the world not grasp it or tame it. Behold it. The green garter is a token of understanding. 

As we enter into that suspended moment between the old and new year, it is worth considering what is rigid and brittle in our own court and what needs the reinvigorating removal of an old king’s head. The climate crisis is a warning. The forest is sending envoy after envoy to remind us of the reciprocal game we’re in. When it is your turn to bow your head to the Green Knight’s ax, don’t flinch, just say Happy New Year. He’s only trying to release the energy of a renewed and refreshed world. 

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AND A REMINDER:

Order a copy of my new book Four Scaffold Visions: Poems and Pictures from Lulu. This is the second of my books from Ground Beneath Us Books.

Also available: The Naked Boy Graphic Novel

PRAISE FOR THE NAKED BOY:

“The Naked Boy retains a classic feel as Duford pulls Native American creation myths and superhero comic conventions into a rich (and strange) tapestry. Duford’s artwork, which sets blotchy black-and-white figure drawings against imposing warped-perspective architecture, is reminiscent of fine comics artists like Ben Katchor and Jeff Lemire. That free-flowing, unpolished style allows all these strange characters and cross-cultural story elements to intermingle pretty seamlessly. It’s hard to guess at where The Naked Boy is headed, but the bumpy road that takes you there is hard to turn away from.”

Casey Jarman in The Willamette Week

Note: Continuing a repost from 2023 for the Solstice

Today is the solstice. Light and dark stand tiptoe on a point in the shadows. Soon the needle imperceptibly tips toward the light. The holly branch that the Green Knight holds as he enters the feast halls of King Arthur is a peace offering. The holly holds both winter and summer. Its sharp evergreen leaves are a reminder of winter’s bite and the red berries the warmth of summer. This time of year the market is flooded with Christmas stories; most of which are interchangeable treacly vehicles for a bland Capitalist spirituality. All those stories focus on the night before Christmas and Christmas Day. This narrative turn that melts down the old pagan images into toothless mutants (such as the inflatable lawn ornaments that seem to have metastasized in the past few years) is good for the market. It’s not so good for the psyche or the planet. These image markers followed colonial roots from England: the fir tree, the holly, the yule log etc.These are Northern forest symbols and they mark Northern time and logic. One isn’t meant to pine for a white Christmas in the tropics. The images are not the colonizers and would rather be tucked in near a stone hearth with its ancestral bones beneath its earth. 

Aside from the Silent Night and the story of the manger the whole thing is a pagan solstice event. What solstice looks like on the steppes or in a prairie or the desert is not the same as what solstice looks like in northern Europe. There is some speculation that Santa Claus comes from a very old shamanic tradition; a visionary who speaks with the spirits of reindeer. I like the story, but I think there is a tendency to tie our symbols too neatly to our ideology. While it is certainly incontrovertible that if someone brandishes a certain symbol at a certain time there is no room for doubt. Images have a tendency to slip the reins we put them in. Images are patient and can outlive entropy. They are also fungible and dynamic. However, they always carry the meaning germ of their natal narrative imprinted on their skin. Place resonates if even faintly no matter how far afield they travel.

Global markets warp many things. In delivering a ubiquitous product everywhere they flatten cultures and places. Flattening occurs with the sameness of different regions and it occurs in the hunger for raw materials. Local economies are destroyed, landscapes denuded and memory is broken. The gift economy that is meant to be represented in Christmas, one that is local, specific and generative becomes a manic inflammation of shipping and economic anxiety. All this pressure put on a single day and with a stable set of images all over the world creates fissures. It is the opposite of sitting in the dark with community and understanding that each of us brings a light. 

The compression of the events of Christmas into one day at the same time the world over while simultaneously leaking Christmas images earlier and earlier in the year confuse what solstice should be. Solstice is a marker of light and time. It is a moment of a specific occurrence. A moment arrived at through lived experience that aligns with a cosmic event. When the Green Knight bursts into the hall he is a reminder of two things: that the weeks of celebrating the season are mythic time. It exists outside of everyday structures and as such needs to be attended to in that spirit. Not as an obligation or a box to check but what the Earth tells us: rest, tell stories give gifts. The second reminder is that the celebration is earned through the body’s experience of the full year. There is no life hack for the mythic.

Gawain’s encounter at the  Green Chapel only has meaning because he traveled over all the seasons. His initiation could not be compressed or multitasked. Culturally we put a lot of pressure on a single day (which is not even the solstice itself) to deliver everything. These days it is a literal delivery of goods in cardboard boxes. What if we cast off the weight of the market narrative of this time of year? What would it mean if we truly allowed ourselves quiet, revelry and togetherness over a stretch of weeks? What would happen if instead of importing fir trees to the desert and imposing arctic shamanic familiars into the plains that we allowed the places themselves to tell us how to be present for the solstice? The images can travel. They always do. They pick up new flavors and habits. When we truly give into the Earth’s rhythms we find release and agency. The stories and images tell us that. But they have been yoked into the service of a time flattening dictator. 

The act of the Green Knight bursting open the doors let in cold and winter, but also light. He reminded the court of their obligations to the time. The time at hand. His was a light of understanding. The green light of the living world flickers in his eyes. He also reminded them that nothing of worth comes unearned and that darkness and light are siblings. You cannot have one without the other. The light we bring to this day of fertile darkness is not from borrowed electricity or someone else’s idea of light. It is the light you bring, an illumination ignited by the understanding of a year lived and experienced on a specific patch of ground. Scratch away the plastic coating of the images we are bombarded with and taste the nutritious germ inside. It is old. It tastes of a snowy northern forest. 

Share

AND A REMINDER:

Order a copy of my new book Four Scaffold Visions: Poems and Pictures from Lulu. This is the second of my books from Ground Beneath Us Books.

Also available: The Naked Boy Graphic Novel

PRAISE FOR THE NAKED BOY:

“The Naked Boy retains a classic feel as Duford pulls Native American creation myths and superhero comic conventions into a rich (and strange) tapestry. Duford’s artwork, which sets blotchy black-and-white figure drawings against imposing warped-perspective architecture, is reminiscent of fine comics artists like Ben Katchor and Jeff Lemire. That free-flowing, unpolished style allows all these strange characters and cross-cultural story elements to intermingle pretty seamlessly. It’s hard to guess at where The Naked Boy is headed, but the bumpy road that takes you there is hard to turn away from.”

Casey Jarman in The Willamette Week

Note: I thought that I would repost this three part essay about Gawain and the Green Knight and the winter solstice. I will post the next two over the next few days.

“Shadows can be playful, elusive, but also hungry; at times they absorb all form and color and light to themselves. Shadows are also something to feed on, a strange, insubstantial but nourishing kind of food. “

from the chapter “Shadows” from Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life by Kenneth Gross

In the first act of the alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the titular Green Knight busts open the great doors of Camelot to issue a challenge. The Christmastime feast is meant to exist out of time, part of a seasonal round. Closed within the womb of complacent celebration, the court is content with its plenty. The center of power, the cogs of civil structure housed within the building and bodies of the Round Table had relaxed into their feast. The intrusion of the knight is a shock to the system. Truly, the Green Knight was called by Arthur himself when he challenged the court to show him a marvel before he would have a bite to eat. Arthur called Green Knight consciously or unconsciously as one would a spirit guide. It was he who opened the door metaphorically by conjuring the Otherworld. Clearly, it was a sign that something needed readjusting.

The Otherworld in Celtic myth crackles with the living energy of the Earth. It is the domain of fairies, gods, tricksters and all of the gossiping trees, murmuring birds and prophetic winds that occasionally make themselves visible to the quotidian world. It isn’t in the sky or far away but rubs up against the gray, anxiousness of daily life. At certain times of year and places the veil that separates us is worn thin and becomes a porous skin between the two. One might call the Otherworld a shadow world, but there are many cultures who see us as the shadows of that world. After all in that world the scintillating forces of creation are always humming.

In the most famous part of Plato’s The Republic, Socrates uses the metaphor of a cave full of chained prisoners who watch shadows on the wall. They were raised by birth there and chained in such a way as to only be able to watch the wall in front of them. “Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Imagine that along this road a low wall has been built–like the screen in front of people provided by puppeteers, and above which they show their puppets.”

This parable is woven into the fabric of Western philosophy. The shadow puppet show is used as a description of poor education. The shows being a lesser form of knowing. He goes on to describe an elaborate society of the enchained shadow watchers. The set up is to arrive at the idea of the philosopher who escapes the bonds and goes into the light. After adjustments to staring at the sun, the literally enlightened one returns to try and teach his former compatriots the wrongheadedness of their assumptions. It is a very workable, evergreen parable.

The en-lighten-ment of the man in the sun, who becomes a vessel full of light appears in many religious and philosophical constructions. In Buddhism the casting off of illusions is to become enlightened. We talk about those with pity who are “in the dark” and can’t “see the light”. Shadows in Christianity are the province of demonic forces. To be a shadow of oneself is to be diminished, not altogether present. Peter Pan loses his shadow and it is the lack of the shadow and therefore substance that binds him to arrested development and a denuded version of the Otherworld. For Carl Jung we all have a “shadow self” that must be integrated. Ignore it and it comes back with a vengeance.

The South African artist William Kentridge has been invested in the power of the shadow for decades. His recent traveling exhibition In Praise of Shadows at the Broad in Los Angeles earlier this year displays the power of the shadow as image. In his talk of the same name from Six Drawing Lessons, he uses Plato’s cave as a starting point. The procession which passes endlessly behind the prisoners became the main image of several of his works. He begins to complicate the conclusions of Plato: “We the audience became the performers, our act that of believing and disbelieving in the same moment. There is something emerging here, a separation from Plato. The movement of ourselves as more or less enlightened observers toward an awareness of ourselves as agents of understanding. The pleasure in the moment of us believing and not believing at the same time is a jolt of self-assertion. The split, believer and disbeliever, becomes a crack in Plato’s edifice.”

Western philosophy demands we accept unassailable truths. That line of thinking has made it all but impossible to hear the trilling song and roadside whisper of the Otherworld let alone have the big doors opened during our holiday feasts by an agent of the forest. Kentridge has shown again and again the power of the conjurer, the sleight of hand image maker that tells the truth through illusion. Staring in the sun might fill you with light but it blinds you as well. Focusing light so that shadows become image and image becomes story opens up understanding instead of closing it down. There are many solar addled prophets whose burned out retinas mistake their sun spots for holy missives.

Throughout Southeast Asia the tradition of wayang kulit (which means shadow play) has existed as long as Socrates’ metaphor. Using thin leather puppets, stock characters and a repertoire of poem and song the wayang kulit tradition continues to this day. The performances are central to village life. They mark births, deaths, official holidays and so on. Often performed by a single puppeteer and musicians the screen is lit with candles creating a flickering scrim through which the insubstantial becomes substance. Great bowls of rice, bananas and sweets are served. Far from being a display of ignorance or child’s play, the performances manifest the spirits of the personages in the play. Kenneth Gross says: “In wayang kulit, by contrast, the shadows are taken as avatars of the really real. They mark the presence of truth rather than that which conceals or takes the place of truth. If the illuminated screen defeats the darkness, the shadows that move across that screen yet recover and redeem the dark; they take pieces of the night and make them speak for older stories and myths.”

The simplicity of shadow play is part of its magic. With a flimsy paper, cardboard or leather form a character comes to life; a personage poking through to the mundane. Gross later quotes a wayang puppeteer by saying the shadows of the puppets are more real than the puppets themselves. What if Plato’s cave dwellers were watching a wayang kulit performance? Unlike the philosopher squinting in the newly found sunlight, the shadow play reveals a distillation of image. Contemporary neuroscience tells us that our brains are not the only seat of understanding, that all knowledge is embodied and that we don’t so much see the world as project onto it and distill information. The shadow play is the ultimate in image distillation. The image is boiled down to its essentials of shape, light and shadow. With the addition of music and poetry you have the building blocks of understanding. The spaces between voice, sound and light open up lines of communication with the Otherworld. Is it possible that the unshackling of the cave dwellers might lead them to take the hand of the sun worshipper and lead him deeper into the cave? In those depths they would show him with their torch light and old, old songs a world of bison, cave bears; a wildness that has been down there all along.

We are approaching the winter solstice. The Green Knight appears when he does, holding his holly branch of peace because that is when the veil between the Otherworld and ours is thinnest. At the solstice the seasonal pivot is at attention. Light and shadow converge into shadow just as its compliment, the summer solstice, light and shadow converge into light. The difference is that the shadow of winter solstice while the darkest and coldest night of the Northern year is all seedful. It is the dark ground of yet to be germinated dreams. Even through the rough cold and growing sludge of early spring, possibility awaits. In those shadow plays are seeds of becoming.

Plato’s sun drenched philosopher, while basking in the full light of reality, also loses differentiation. He is subsumed in light and object. The summer solstice is raucous and joyous, but like winter’s twitching possibility; summer’s full light contains the other side of apex. The slide toward decay begins that day. We need them both in due time. Our lives are seasonal. Our bodies live in concert with the light. Our souls are seasonal too. My winter solstice might be your summer.

As we dance and merge with our shadows we wonder who is the shadow of whom? In a dark time of year when Hanukah is a celebration of light, Christmas, a celebration older than its namesake god uses images of yule logs and guiding stars we must remember to welcome the shadow. It is an image of us and we of it. It is a thin veil behind which is a richer world. The animals are hibernating and the ponds are frozen. When the Green Knight busts open the doors of our feast, it is merely a reminder of that other world. He brings the bite of winter night and the possibility of a new season.

AND A REMINDER:

Order a copy of my new book Four Scaffold Visions: Poems and Pictures from Lulu. This is the second of my books from Ground Beneath Us Books.

Also available: The Naked Boy Graphic Novel

PRAISE FOR THE NAKED BOY:

“The Naked Boy retains a classic feel as Duford pulls Native American creation myths and superhero comic conventions into a rich (and strange) tapestry. Duford’s artwork, which sets blotchy black-and-white figure drawings against imposing warped-perspective architecture, is reminiscent of fine comics artists like Ben Katchor and Jeff Lemire. That free-flowing, unpolished style allows all these strange characters and cross-cultural story elements to intermingle pretty seamlessly. It’s hard to guess at where The Naked Boy is headed, but the bumpy road that takes you there is hard to turn away from.”

Casey Jarman in The Willamette Week

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I am pleased to announce that Four Scaffold Visions: Poems and Pictures is now available. This is the second publication from my publishing project Ground Beneath Us Books. The book is beautifully designed by Tracy Schlapp from Cumbersome Multiples.

The poem is told in words and pictures. The watercolors act as visual stanzas in communion with the text. On December 2, 1859, radical abolitionist John Brown stood on a scaffold in Virginia, awaiting the drop of the gallows floor. A month and a half earlier, with the aim of instigating an insurrection that would forever eradicate the Slave Power, he had taken over the federal armory in Harpers Ferry along with a mixed-race group of radical abolitionists. For this he had been sentenced to hang. Brown stood for a full ten minutes with the hood over his head and the noose around his neck. He waited patiently as the military gathered in formation to witness his execution. He had already issued this final statement: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” This work imagines what was envisioned in that ten minutes beneath the hood before his hanging. The vision stretches from the deep past to the present day.

I began working on these watercolors and poems concurrently with my exhibition John Brown’s Vision on the Scaffold that was shown at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU and The Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon in 2020. I finished the bulk of the poems in early 2025. I’ve posted a few of the poems here on The Whole Live Animal.

You can purchase the book from Lulu Publishers here: Four Scaffold Visions: Poems and Pictures.

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This post is in honor of my third anniversary on Substack. It seems as good a time as any to take a step back. It might seem evident from the last few posts that I have been feeling like there is too much noise. After this weekend’s triumphant No Kings March, one can feel the power of the people rising up. As I walked through the joyous cacophony of protesters along Portland’s waterfront on Saturday, I was overcome with hope and joy, and pride for my city. Visibility was absolutely the point of the protests, feeds were filled with massive crowds, wry signs and peaceful power at work. Nonetheless, major news outlets downplayed the largest single protest in the history of the country. The New York Times posted a wan little article stating “thousands” gather. Not millions, which by any count was the case, but thousands. The protests are a tool of attention in a culture that is ruled by corrupted and manipulated attention spans. No Kings was a public spell casting, a ritual summoning of the deep spirit of the people. For myself and perhaps many others, the power of transforming our world will need to be done outside of social media algorithms.

Martin Shaw in his book The Snowy Tower discusses the idea of magical privacy as a state in which vital work is being done outside of the public eye. Think of Odysseus on the island of Calypso, hidden from the world for seven years, think of the gooey metamorphosis of the butterfly in the cocoon or the baking bread in its cloche. Like everyone else with Instagram, I regularly posted artworks in process, carefully curating the hashtags in hopes of getting enough likes and followers. Everything from underpainting to almost finished paintings, I would post the work in various states of undress. Some of it was sharing a moment, but some of it was wanting credit for a picturesque life or hoping to influence an art world influencer to notice me. Social media is controlled by corporate and oligarchic interests, the internet itself is now a dead zone full of phishing traps and surveillance. Don’t get me wrong, I still surf, still scroll, still purchase things online but there is very little joy. I think it’s time for a version of magical privacy.

My studio work needs to grow on its own time and outside of external judgements. I am very proud of the writing I’ve been doing here on The Whole Live Animal, but I need to refill the well. I’m working on editing the first two years of posts for a book of essays that will be published by Ground Beneath Us Books. I’ve removed the pay options for now so anything I post will be free. My posts will be sporadic as I feel any urgency to write and as the new work I’m doing tells me its ready to be seen. I am not withdrawing. This is a strategic move. This regime and its enablers thrive on poisoned attention and pull us all into believing we too must give up every bit of our psychic space to their nonsense. One way out of this madness is to withdraw our attention from the machine, to return our attention to our lives and friends. Our attention is a power source. We should reserve it for ourselves and communities.

I thank you all for subscribing and supporting this work. All posts will be free. If you remain a subscriber I will on occasion, send updates but will not fill your inbox. Maybe we can meet in the physical world soon.

I do have some projects which I will promote here. In the next month, I will release Four Scaffold Visions: poems and pictures the second book published by Ground Beneath Us Books. I’ve posted a few of the poems from the book on The Whole Live Animal. If you want to support my writing, purchasing these books directly from Lulu printers is a great way of doing so. I will provide a link when the book is finalized. The Naked Boy graphic novel is available here.

AUTUMNAL EQUINOX

“The wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:

‘What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”

From The Wind, One Brilliant Day

By Antonio Machado, translated by Robert Bly

For the past month and a half, I have allowed myself to fall into a deadlocked despair. The summer has been an effort to stay psychically afloat in the flood of overflowing sewage that is the news and its response. I would sit down to write and talk myself out of it. Do we need more noise? More opinion? Meanwhile, questions of vocation, employment, being resourced and identity conjoin with the authoritarian moment as I gulp air-thieving mouthfuls of rising turbulent waves. Creative constipation results. Last weekend, in a fit of rut-stuck pique, I walked from my studio to Forest Park. I didn’t allow myself the haranguing internal monologue that is a condition of this psychic state. Every time the nattering voice would rear up I would call my attention back to the forest. Eventually as I moved along Balch Creek up the Wildwood Trail, I began to tell the story of “The Three Spindles” to the trees, ferns, birds and slugs that surrounded me. For a moment, the clouds cleared. I could see beyond the smoke and floodwaters of the media image world.

I begin with this because at some point, I forgot why I started writing The Whole Live Animal in the first place. It used to be a pleasure. I looked forward to writing. I am coming up on my third year anniversary of starting the newsletter. At some point this year I had the perception that I needed to always respond to the latest news. In a past essay I mentioned the idea of sipping the poison of the world from a straw in order to process it and not take it all in at once. I seemed to have forgotten that and began imbibing the malefic brew. That will kill you.

We just passed an eclipse season that astrologers are saying is an era changing time. We’ve also entered into autumn, the Autumnal Equinox having just passed this weekend. This is the time to pack away the hot, sweaty impulses of summer and begin the work of watching the sap retreat into the roots of the trees. For me, I need to re-engage this space and the ideas that animate me, my practice and my teaching regardless of who, if anyone, is reading.

SHADOW INSTITUTIONS

In a January 6, 2025 post on Substack, Timothy Snyder wrote about a tradition in British politics wherein the opposition party, out of power created a shadow cabinet that was an alternative to the party in power.

“Shadow meant follow. The shadow ministers “shadowed” the actual ministers, in the sense of following their every move, criticizing policy and offering alternatives. Importantly, the shadow minister was always available to offer commentary to the press on his or her area of expertise. This greatly enriched public life. At any point a journalist, and thus the public, had access to an alternative point of view, one which was both pertinently expert and politically relevant. Shadow ministers did not always become real ministers after the next elections, but often they did.”

And later: “And a shadow cabinet would remind us of how much better things can be.”

This idea intrigued me at the time. We are no longer in a theoretical authoritarian state. We are in an actual authoritarian state, albeit one still weakened by its own incompetence and uncritical self-regard. As the wrecking ball comes for institutions, especially education and the arts, it is time for us to create shadow institutions. If we begin building new structures now, we will be ready to put them in place when this regime inevitably falls. The wreckage done to our schools, museums and media will be considerable. But, it seems we little piggies have been building our institutions of straw instead of brick, which is why when the big, fat wolf blows at the door it so easily topples. We need to build many at once; institutions supple as saplings that bow gracefully and then bounce back.

Earlier this year, in my essay “Support Systems” I talked about the importance of art school. Not a quasi-professional training ground for “creatives”, but an honest to goodness art school. A place of weirdos who simultaneously pursue the intellectual, the material and the aesthetic. The ideal is a mix between a vocational school, a monastery, a liberal arts college and a fermentation chamber. Art schools seem like the least important endeavor when so much is under attack. I would argue that it is precisely those skills that are necessary right now.

Here I open this up too the community of readers. How might we begin building a Shadow Art School and a Shadow Art Institute? Our existing institutions are struggling mightily but they have bee weakened by years of corporate strategy and political enmity towards their mission. I start with two themes.

CREDENTIALS

I never did get my MFA. I have taught at the college level for twenty-five years and have a strong exhibition, publishing and curating record. The institutional rules of current higher education values credentials over experience. I see the value of the credentials. It keeps out charlatans and snake oil salesman. But it also stifles real equity and diversity.

How would a Shadow Art School approach this issue of experience and credentials? How do you ensure quality and celebrate diverse experience?

Does it need to be degree granting? Can we have an institution that honors the many points in a person’s life where they would need concentrated art instruction?

A further question of credentials is linked to accreditation. Accreditation keeps institutions from misrepresenting what they deliver. This is the mechanism the new Department of Education is planning to pervert to defund liberal arts colleges. Even before this era however, accreditation represented an onerous and often restrictive set of prescriptions that kept colleges from being responsive. Accreditation increases the cost exponentially for colleges.

How can our Shadow Art School stay fleet footed and rooted in good practices? A truly successful Shadow Art School would be affordable, accountable and equitable to faculty.

PRESENCE

There are many versions of online, Zoom workshops and mentorship programs. The fastest growing MFAs are Lo-Res, meaning you meet in person in the summer and do coursework elsewhere. To make a viable Shadow Art School that doesn’t have access to big buildings, how important is physical presence? I would argue that is paramount, but I am interested in hearing other views.

What is the length of time needed for a Shadow Art School? Does it follow a traditional BFA or MFA or can it be intensified and shortened? Or lengthened over several years? What is the goal of this Shadow Art School?

Let’s begin there and see where we get.

More will come next week.

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