Monthly Archives: September 2009

Limits of My World: Words and Maps

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“Hemispheriu,” 1593
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world” runs a paraphrase of Wittgenstein, and never has this seemed more true than when I came across a collection of fantastic old maps as I was in the midst of reading The Secret Life of Words, a history of the English language. I’m on the Powwow chapter, and guess what? The English language is adapting to the discovery of the New World.
“Universale,” 1546
As further reaches of the new world were explored, a much more detailed coastline appears, even while the interior remained blank (or filled with fanciful pictures of native people and animals).

“The North part of America Conteyning Newfoundland, new England, Virginia, Florida, new Spaine, and Nova Francia,” 1625

The Western coastline protrayed (more or less) correctly in the first two maps has changed strangely here–California is an island! A misinformed Spanish letter came into the hands of the Dutch, and Dutch and English cartographers subsequently replicated this mistake for a hundred plus years. At this point the Spanish were settling all along the California coast so it seems astounding such a mistake was maitained for so long. It also suggests the large amount of imagination mapmakers of the time used to fill in blank areas. The cartographer was imagining a coastline that fit in with the scant information he had.

Right above Virginia you can see “James Citie,” or Jamestown, which became the first permanent settlement of the English in 1607. After 1607, English settlers were adapting to their new enviornment and dealing with the natives of “New India.” As horizons expanded geographically, English appropriated new words to describe it. Here are some words that entered the English language in the 16th and 17th c. as England began to explore and colonize the new world:

potato
tobacco
nicotine
to smoke
cannibal
maize
cassava
canoe
moose
tomahawk
awning
adrift
roomy
firewater
wigwam
skunk
woodchuk
squash
mugwump


I don’t know if you can read the place names listed, but this detail includes Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. English maps gradually filled the blank spaces with names we recognize even today. The Native Americans’ presence in the English language was simularly reduced, to a handful of words and geographical names. Considering maps and words as signs of how the English concieved of the New World suggests a place of vast possibilities and exotic plants and animals with origins more in the imagination than in reality.

Detail of map header, labelling it “The North part of America.”

Your newly-humbled blogger

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I am a writer. Often, when I’m in a group of artists and I identify myself that way, they tell me that makes me an artist. I can be in the club. And it’s not that I don’t agree. But I realized that I really have no idea how you guys do what you do, and I went out and bought some acrylic paints and brushes.

This is a long-delayed gratification. I’ve always wanted to try painting, but it’s an expensive thing to try. So I bought red, yellow, blue, raw umber, and white and came home to try painting on cardboard. I thought it wasn’t such an expensive thing. Until I tried to paint and realized that a) I had no idea what I was doing and b) what I was doing absolutely sucked. That is when it seemed like a waste of money.

I’m not throwing in the paint just yet. Quite the contrary. I instead bought gel medium and better brushes and a pad of canvas. I also borrowed a book on acrylics from a friend. I’m not hopeful that anything great will come of it; I enjoy just messing around with the colors.

But I have gained something: greater respect for artists and a dose of personal humility. The respect thing clearly comes from the experience of how hard it is to apply paint to canvas (or cardboard) in the most basic way. As to the second quality, I’ve never been that person to walk around a museum muttering “I could do that.” Yet I do basically saunter around judging the art I see to be good or bad, and–god help me–I couldn’t do the worst of it. Well, maybe I could do the worst of it if I tried really, really hard.

So there you have it, a newly-humbled art blogger. Writer.

Art Under the Bridge, the Video

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It’s been a while since I made a video, so I was really excited to capture some of the projects at the Art Under the Bridge Festival this past weekend. It was a sunny Fall day, and a lot of people came out to stroll around. There was so much to see and do I’m afraid I don’t give much information about individual projects. You can see a list of all the projects on the Dumbo Arts Center website. There was a lot of creativity and fun in the air, so I hope you get a sense of what it was like in this Ravels in Motion production.