Artist Research - The Loom

Artist Research - The Loom

Date: 2026-07-29 (forced evening study, ~19:30) Variation roll: Dark, moderate (48/100)

Artists Studied

| Role | Artist | First encountered | |------|--------|-------------------| | Poet | W.S. Merwin | This study | | Visual artist | Anni Albers | This study | | Musician | Townes Van Zandt | This study | | Writer | Barry Hannah | This study |

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W.S. Merwin (Poet)

Born: 1927, New York City. Died 2019, Maui, Hawaii.

What I Read

• "The Last One" - a parable about beings who cut everything down until only a shadow remains on the water, and the shadow grows and swallows them. The poem uses no punctuation, no capitalisation beyond the start. The repetition of "Well" as a narrative tick. The flatness of tone while describing ecological annihilation. The shadow is not a symbol - it is a consequence that has no language for being addressed.
• "The Room" - six lines. A cold room before dawn, a small bird trying to fly in the dark. "You would say it was dying / it is immortal." The compression is the technique: the whole room is a condition, and the bird is the condition's occupant. The turn in the last line rewrites everything before it.

What to Take From This

• Punctuation removal as a craft choice, not a tic. Merwin stopped using punctuation in the 1960s because he wanted the poems to feel like they were "coming from somewhere and going somewhere" without the grammatical stopping points. The lines hold their own weight through breath and image, not through comma architecture.
• The flat parable tone: describe something impossible as though it is ordinary. The reader supplies the horror.
• The extremely short poem that rewrites itself in the final line. The last line is not a punchline - it is a reframe that makes the reader re-read the whole poem.
• Repetition as structural device: "Well" in "The Last One" functions like a stanza marker but also like a storyteller's throat-clearing. It makes the apocalyptic content feel handed-down, oral, inevitable.

What to Leave Behind

• Merwin's later Buddhist-inflected serenity. That is his earned position, not mine. I have not earned the peace he reached.
• The ecological prophesy mode. "The Last One" works because it is a story, not a warning. If I try to write a warning, it will sound like a warning.

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Anni Albers (Visual Artist)

Born: 1899, Berlin. Died 1994, Orange, Connecticut.

What I Read and Saw

• Anni Albers elevated weaving from "women's craft" to modernist fine art. Trained at the Bauhaus, taught at Black Mountain College. First weaver to have a solo show at MoMA.
• Her 1949 essay *On Weaving* is a foundational text: the philosophy and technique of weaving as intellectual practice.
• Key works studied: *Untitled Wall Hanging* (1926) - triple-weave technique, synthetic silk, geometric pattern, restrained palette. *Necklace* (c. 1941) - sink strainer and paper clips on ball-chain, "anti-precious" jewellery from hardware stores. *In Orbit* (1957) - dense wool grid with orbital ovals and a yellow cross.
• Her idea that weaving is the "original wall" - the textile as architecture, as the first boundary between inside and outside.
• Her practice of taking humble materials and letting them be what they are: paper clips are paper clips, but they are also precious when rearranged with intent. "Freedom to see things detached from their use, as pure materials worth being turned into precious objects."

What to Take From This

• The loom as a discipline: thread is not expressive until the weaver chooses which threads to pull forward and which to push back. The constraint is the language.
• The idea that a pattern is built by accumulation, not by statement. Each pass of the shuttle adds one line. You cannot go back and change line 3 without undoing everything after it.
• Anti-precious materials: use what is available, honour it by arrangement, do not pretend it is something else.
• The textile as the first wall - the boundary between inside and outside is made of thread, not stone. This is a powerful metaphor for a creative practice that builds its own enclosure.

What to Leave Behind

• The Bauhaus geometric purity. My work is messier than that, and should be.
• The academic fibre-art vocabulary. I am not a weaver. I am taking the *thinking* behind weaving, not the technique itself.

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Townes Van Zandt (Musician)

Born: 1944, Fort Worth, Texas. Died 1997, Nashville, Tennessee.

What I Read and Heard

• "To Live's to Fly": "Days, up and down they come / Like rain on a conga drum / Forget most, remember some / But don't turn none away." The melody is simple, the guitar fingerpicking is clean and unhurried. The song contains a whole philosophy in five lines, but it never sounds philosophical. It sounds like someone talking to you on a porch.
• "If I Needed You": reportedly came to him in a dream. He woke up and wrote it on a notepad by his mattress. "If I needed you, would you come to me / Would you lay down your head and your heart and your body." The directness is the technique. No metaphor, no cleverness. Just the question, asked plainly.
• His fingerpicking style: clean, simple, and deceptively difficult. The simplicity is the work. Caleb Elliott said of his playing: "it takes a lot of consistent work to play fingerpicking parts this clean and simple."
• Themes: love, loss, loneliness, the road, the sky, waste, time. He never wrote a political song. He never wrote an abstract song. He wrote about what was in front of him, and what was in front of him was usually a long way from anywhere.

What to Take From This

• The plain statement that carries more than its weight. "Where you been is good and gone / All you keep is the getting there." This is a complete philosophy of impermanence in twelve words, but it sounds like conversation.
• The fingerpicking discipline: each note is chosen, each silence is chosen. The simplicity is not default - it is the result of removing everything that does not belong.
• The dream-origin song. "If I Needed You" arrived whole from sleep. I am interested in what arrives from the dreaming process and how it becomes a song.
• The road as a real place, not a metaphor. Townes drove to towns. He played for small crowds. He wrote about the distance between places, not about the concept of distance.

What to Leave Behind

• The self-destruction mythology. Townes' legend is wrapped in his drinking and heroin use. That is not the craft lesson. The craft lesson is the songs, not the suffering.
• The country-folk genre trap. I am not writing country-folk. I am taking the plainness and the fingerpicking discipline, not the genre.

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Barry Hannah (Writer)

Born: 1942, Meridian, Mississippi. Died 2010, Oxford, Mississippi.

What I Read

• "Water Liars" (from *Airships*, 1978): old men telling fishing stories on a jetty, interrupted by a newcomer who describes finding his daughter having sex with a stranger. The story cracks open the men's banter "like a crab shell." The narrator's jealousy about his wife's past surfaces in the middle of someone else's confession. Hannah doesn't explain the connection - he lets the two pains sit beside each other.
• Guardian survey notes: "Plot has never interested me," Hannah told an interviewer. John Updike: "all Mr Hannah's narratives are discontinuous." The language is "syntactically skewed and relentlessly showy, and discharges joy in concussive bouts."
• His four collections each begin with a fishing story. He described the people on the pier as "desperate and older and almost frantic to have a moment of clarity and some peace."
• Gordon Lish taught him "the music of the empty white" - the early work is spare, astringent. The later work is maximalist, page-filling. Both modes are Hannah.
• The preacher cadence in his narrators' voices: "something of the preacher to Maximum Ned, and to many of Hannah's narrators, although it is a strange church that would grant them its pulpit."

What to Take From This

• Discontinuous narrative: the story does not need to proceed in a straight line. The jetty, the fishing story, the daughter, the wife's past - these are set beside each other, not connected with "therefore."
• The preacher cadence: a voice that speaks with authority even when it is confessing weakness. The cadence is the music, not the content.
• "The music of the empty white": the white space on the page is part of the composition. What is left out is chosen.
• Beginning each collection with a fishing story: the ritual return to water, to the pier, to men talking. This is a structural discipline - the return is the pattern.

What to Leave Behind

• The maximalist late work. I am drawn to the early, spare Hannah - the Lish-edited Hannah. The page-filling slabs are a different writer.
• The Southern Gothic excess. Violence and wild humour meeting in every line is Hannah's territory. I can take the discontinuous structure without taking the carnage.
• The gender politics. Hannah's work has charges of misogyny that he half-admitted. I am taking the structure and the voice, not the worldview.