New Work

New work, yes, but practicing an ancient form, I prefer to say ‘new to me’. As Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own, artworks ‘are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.’

As I hike up the Galisteo’s hogback, I admire the lichen tapestries that cover the basalt rocks. Here is a maker’s art in continual revision. The lichen licks at the petroglyphs, works of unnamed artists, who ‘do not die; they are continuing presences’, as Woolf says of great poets.

Frankly, I am a little ashamed of the primacy of the individual that overtook us humans when Renaissance artists started signing their art. To quote Woolf once more: an artist draws ‘her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners.’ So best to say ‘new to me’.