Author Archives: Bev Byrnes

on the secret of seeing

photo of morning tree at Magnuson Park, Seattle

photo of morning tree at Magnuson Park, Seattle

(the following is excerpted from “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” by Annie Dillard)

“If Tinker Mountain erupted, I’d be likely to notice. But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present… Like a blind man at the ball game, I need a radio. When I see this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head.

But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut.

When I see this way I see truly.  As Thoreau says, I return to my senses. I am the man who watches the baseball game in silence in an empty stadium. I see the game purely; I’m abstracted and dazed. When it’s all over and the white-suited players lope off the green field to their shadowed dugouts, I leap to my feet; I cheer and cheer.

But I can’t go out and try to see this way. I’ll fail, I’ll go mad. All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod. The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.

The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise… I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.”

 

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Show opening — Yakima Valley Museum

My work is currently on view, through September 30th, at the Yakima Valley Museum. Below are photos from the opening night, a well-attended event thanks to the patrons and outreach efforts of the Yakima Valley Museum and the Yakima Light Project, as well as a wonderful article in the Yakima Herald Republic talking about my work and process. The show also features the work of artist Erin Schulz who paints beautiful still life and figurative works, much in the same style as my own work. At the start of the evening, Erin spoke to the attendees about her work and the recent resurgence of the genre of classical realism, and I spoke a bit about my painting process and the matter of making my own painting oils and pigments. By the end of the evening many of the paintings were sold. Of the ten paintings I have in the show, nine have now sold, so it’s back to the studio now to create new work. A big thanks to all who made this show happen, and to all who attended (many thanks to Dianne LaBissoniere and David Lynx who provided some of photos below).

display showing some of my pigments and oils and the tools I use

display showing some of my pigments and oils and the tools I use

picture of myself and the new owner of the painting, "Blouse"

picture of myself and the new owner of the painting, “Blouse”

 

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. . .

© Bev Byrnes

“As each pot is trimmed on the wheel, as I place the chattering tool to its surface, as I listen to the sound of its rhythm, I am in the moment. An adjustment of speed, a change of angle, a touch more pressure, and magically the rhythm becomes a clear hum, and for these few seconds I hold to this course, from the centre to the edge, striving not to break that rhythm. When the wheel stops, when the silence falls, then I find the evidence of those moments, the accumulation of a life time of moments, a gift of beauty.”   — Euan Craig

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painting oils aging in the sun

painting oils aging in the sun

The Creation of the Inaudible
(by Pattiann Rogers)

Maybe no one can distinguish which voice
Is god’s voice sounding in a summer dusk
Because he calls with the same rising frequency,
The same rasp and rattling rustle the cicadas use
As they cling to the high leaves in the glowing
Dust of the oaks.

His exclamations might blend so precisely with the final
Cries of the swallows settling before dark
That no one will ever be able to say with certainty,
“That last long cry winging over the rooftop
Came from god.”

Breathy and low, the vibrations of his nightly
Incantations could easily be masked by the scarely
Audible hush of the lakeline dealing with the rocky shore,
And when a thousand dry sheaths of rushes and thistles
Stiffen and shiver in an autumn wind, anyone can imagine
How quickly and irretrievably his whisper might be lost.

Someone faraway must be saying right now:
The only unique sound of his being
Is the spoken postulation of his unheard presence.

For even if he found the perfect chant this morning
And even if he played the perfect strings to accompany it,
Still, no one could be expected to know,
Because the blind click beetle flipping in midair,
And the slider turtle easing through the black iris bog,
And two savannah pines shedding dawn in staccato pieces
Of falling sun are already engaged in performing
The very same arrangement themselves.

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