By Brian Bouldrey, South 85 Artist-in-Residence
The old saying goes, “religion is for people who don’t want to go to hell, and spirituality is for people who have already been there.” Ruined abbeys, empty dungeons, grassy former battlegrounds. Video essayist Matthew Donaldson made a series of video essays following artists from home to their work. In “Getting There” he films artist Ed Ruscha driving to his L.A. studio. In the voiceover, Ruscha complains about a pothole he would hit every time, en route. He says, “It irritated me no end, and finally I began to anticipate it as I was approaching it, and then I started to change my attitude toward it, and it started feeling good, and I was looking towards, looking forward, to having my left front tire roll over this little depression in the road until it sort of registered to me as a spiritual hot spot.” There are hot spots in my life, like the rat hole in the Chicago sidewalk, or the permanent damage to paintings in the Capitol after January 6, or, on a daily basis, a mylar balloon that got caught in a tree outside my window two years ago—I have growled at its shiny unnaturalness every morning I see it, but this summer the tree was exceedingly lush, and I lost sight of the tattered mess; I had wondered whether it had finally shredded in a storm, and felt something next to sadness that I didn’t see the last bit of it go; and then the leaves began to fall this autumn and there it was, still annoyingly there in the tree, thank goodness for that piece of junk.
They call Mark Rothko a spiritual painter for his effort to depict differently proportioned rectangular fields of color over and over, and I might say the same for Hokusai, that Edo surfer trying to catch the perfect wave. Monet, too, with his exhaustive haystacks, trying to discover different moments of light. I’m not sure whether Warhol was thinking himself spiritual when producing all those Maos and Marilyns and soup cans, but I do see the attraction. Have you ever had that urge to continue engaging with something—an artist, a landscape, a friend’s aloof cat, knowing that each engagement will be a little different?
At the end of my street in north Chicago are two islands made of rocks, some project of the Army Corps of Engineers decades ago to keep the beaches and buildings from erosion. One has an erected metal column—its use may be for water intake, for making sure boats don’t run ashore, or perhaps as a way to keep the stones in place, because the lake can get rough. The other rock breaker has a column unerected, on its side, sitting there as if waiting to be put up soon. It will happen soon, I’d think, for the last fifteen years. Its unfinished quality has created in me that itch, another hot spot. Over the years, I have photographed this island (and not the other, finished one) over and over in every season and every weather.
I suppose these photos are akin to Monet’s haystacks or Hokusai’s waves, but it’s not a “naturemort” rotting I’m looking for, fleeting nature in a still life, but an enduring, orienting, grounding spot in an ever-changing world, like a church spire in the distance or a rampart flag still there, oh say can you see. It will be there long after I am gone. But even that serious house on serious earth will not be there forever.
Listen, then, to the lappings of the lakes in these images; it’s the sound of your partner in bed, snoring annoyingly away; lap after lap until there’s a break, experiencing a difficulty in respiration, as if they were a comatose carpenter with a hand plane encountering a knot. Don’t wake ‘em! You may have never listened to the lapping lake in subzero February or deluxe September, but snoring, lapping, dear reader, how annoying, until the snoring stops—please, continue with your snores, old friend. And as with so many woods you try to smooth with a hand plane, there are times when your beloved, or the carpenter, or the plane, or the actual gigantic sweetwater lake, must wake, or not.
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Brian Bouldrey is the author of ten books, most recently, of Good in Bed: A Life in Queer Sex, Politics, and Religion (ReQueered Books). His novel The Good Pornographer will be published in March 2026 by University of Wisconsin Press. He teaches fiction, nonfiction, and literature at Northwestern University, and is pleased to have had several excellent writers in his classroom over the past 25 years, including Karen Russell, Mary South, Rita Chang, Eric Dean Wilson, YZ Chin, Will Butler, and Michael X. Wang. Read Brian’s Artist Statement here.