Almost like Christmas, but not quite

My next show (at Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco) is still five weeks off but the framer has delivered all the work and it's a bit like Christmas: opening all the presents and sort of knowing what each package will contain. 

So out comes the crude cardboard model of Jack's gallery.

Little print-outs of each piece to tape onto the walls. 

Then the questions: should we show the sculptures, too? Or are they too much in the space we've got (which is actually quite large). Though I very much like that one, does it really fit? And to that question: have I framed way too many pieces for this show?

Lucky we've got five weeks to ponder the outcome.

No matter, the work feels good to me, and very much in keeping with the poem in which I first found my aesthetic:

Pied Beauty

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)

The show: Dogon Kayak, 12 September thru 17 October, 2015, Jack Fischer Gallery, 311 Potrero Avenue, San Francisco

For more of my work, please visit: https://ward-schumaker.squarespace.com

for more work: https://ward-schumaker.squarespace.com