Word: wood
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...inspiration for the pieces on display and their artists' statements certainly reflect a shared intent: he is experimenting "in an attempt to see if everything can inhabit the same visual space," she calls her sculptures "collages," each one "a conglomerate of many passing ideas." Burckhardt works with enamel on wood-his paintings, all roughly the size of a sheet of notebook paper, are slick, colorful meditations somewhere between Dr. Seuss and Kandinsky. He often allows shapes in the underpainting to flicker through the top layer of images, struggling for more dimensions than his medium allows...
...atavistic, pre-petroleum winter. I stand in the yard, knee deep in bright orange maple leaves, and study the grain of the firewood, lazily choosing the straight grains first, the ones without knots or ropy torques that will clutch the blade and hold it, stuck like Excalibur. Splitting wood is a crude, rustic version of diamond cutting. Read the grain right, strike it there, and the wood bifurcates (chunk!) with algebraic cleanness...
Keeping warm can be a primitive but pleasing science. In a fireplace you organize the logs in harmonious balance between wood and air--fuel for the flames to lick and curl about and combust, encouraged by just the right oxygen and draw. A good fire is self-consuming architecture...
...basic idea remains Paleolithic. There have been times during subzero winter power blackouts when we have pulled a futon next to the fire and slept there, curled up as close as we could get to the heat without igniting the blankets. On the other hand, the wood stove in the kitchen radiates efficient gemutlichkeit--a cloying heat, like the house on a Thanksgiving afternoon that has gone on too long...
Keeping warm, if you must work at it over a period of time, is an exhausting business. It's hard to stay clean. The effort (chopping wood, building fires, heating water) coats you with a fine sweat, like a delicate machine oil, which then acquires admixtures of woodsmoke and ash. If the hot-water heater is gone, you don't wash much, or thoroughly...