Redtree Times

Zsa Zsa 2020

Farewell, my dearest sister, fare thee well:
The elements be kind to thee, and make
Thy spirits all of comfort! Fare thee well.

–William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

We knew something was wrong on Sunday evening. Zsa Zsa was not next to me when I woke up on the couch that evening. We were couch buddies, a habit formed over many years. Whenever I sat down on the couch, no matter the time of day, she would make a beeline to come curl up next to me. I was as hooked on this practice as she was. Her low grinding purr of contentment was mine as well.

She came to us about 17 years ago as a very young stray cat, one that followed us on our walks, running from tree to tree for cover. It was a pretty effective strategy. We sensed that something was there and sometimes caught tiny glimpses of a shadowy critter but was never quite sure. As is the habit of stray cats once they have vetted you for civility and kindness over a period of time, she made herself known. Over the following months, she would come to us and let us pet her outdoors.

Trying her to come inside was a different proposition altogether. We tried unsuccessfully a number of times as the winter approached. She had that feral skittishness especially about being placed in any form of confinement. And to her a house, though she knew nothing about how one worked, was a big cage. But Christmas Eve that year was bitterly cold and we worried about this little cat, who was then probably only eight or nine months. She was at our back door late that evening and I opened it for her. She wanted companionship but was not going to come through that door under any circumstance. I laid down across the threshold of the door, the frigid air filling the house, and put my head down. She approached and pushed her head against mine. I extended an arm and she let me pet her back while softly headbutting me.

I tried moving further into the house but that a was big no go for her. I moved back to where I was straddling inside and outside and we resumed our prior arrangement. This went on for a few minutes and at a certain point I felt that she could easily be swept into the warmth of the house if I were to make a grab.  I lurched, grabbing her and pulling her tightly to my head, trying to quickly pull her in.

Bad move. I had her but she kicked off from me in trying to get herself free. Blood ran down my face and hands. But she was inside.

I won’t go into her long transition into becoming solely a housecat which occurred a few years later.  For the last fourteen years or so, our home was her home. We were her family and she was ours. She was forever skittish, hiding when strangers were in the house. She also had little tolerance or warmth for our other cats.  That was reserved for us. And she gave it freely, with almost what I sensed to be a form of loving gratitude for pulling her in on that Christmas Eve so many years ago.

She was old now and had ailments, of course. She had gone to Cornell Veterinary several years ago for thyroid problems that threatened her life. Without the radioactive pellets that were inserted, she had little time left. The treatment gave her about five more years and she made the most of it, soaking up a constant stream of affection from us both.

But yesterday morning, sensing that something wrong after her absence on the prior evening, I noticed that her eye was almost closed and there was swelling underneath it. Cheri called our vet and took her in immediately. She called me a bit later in the morning. She was bleeding into her eye, and they had done ultrasounds and x-rays. Cancer had spread throughout her body.

Fucking cancer.

She came home for the last time yesterday in a small cardboard coffin.

I buried her, crying all the time, in the woods next to another loved cat, Tinker, putting a cairn of large stones over her grave. She’s at home among the trees she once knew so well.

I wasn’t going to write this today. To be honest, I was exhausted this morning after yesterday’s emotions and the physical effects of losing and burying Zsa Zsa. My walk to the studio was more akin to the movement of a slug than that of a human. There is probably a slime trail through the woods. But I have promised myself that I would write every day for a year– almost halfway there– and besides, my Zsa Zsa, like all living beings, deserved to have a bit of her story told.

There’s more that could be wrote about this simple, little cat. I am grateful that she came into our lives. For today, I am content in just remembering all the love she gave to us.

As is the case with all love, we are better for it.

Thank you, Zsazie. Good travels, my sweet baby. Fare thee well.

Here’s a song that just came on as I was finishing this. Made me bawl like a baby. This is Bonnie Raitt and John Prine singing his Angel From Montgomery.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1995)

You can’t judge a book by its cover.

— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)

I’m about a month out from the opening of my 27th annual solo show at the Principle Gallery, which opens on Friday, June 12th. I deliver the show to the gallery in two weeks so I am deep in prepping and framing the paintings for this show. It has been a sometimes grueling process this year as the effects of the fatigue from my treatment and back pain brought on by standing on a concrete floor to build and stain my frames have slowed my pace considerably. Everything is done in short spurts of activity followed by a period of resting. Hard to get a great rhythm going.

The only benefit of this that I can see is that trying to get through this has kept me from worrying about the details of the opening at the Principle Gallery. I used to have pretty high anxiety about the openings, about how I would come off to others in appearance and manner. That train has pretty much left the station in recent times. There are much bigger things to occupy my mind these days than whether I am wearing the “right” clothes or if I might come off as a little crazy to people there.

I have learned that it doesn’t really matter. Some will judge you and many will not, no matter how much effort you put into blending in. So, I don’t give much thought or effort to appearance these days. Right now, I am wearing a dirty, paint splattered flannel shirt along with what I call old man work pants, the kind of khaki chinos that I remember my great-uncle Otto wearing. The ones I wear are well worn with a large horizontal rip across the right knee that includes a long vertical tear that goes halfway down the front of my calf. I might just wear these to the opening.

Thinking about this brought back a story I told here back in 2009, not long after I began writing this blog. I was prepping for what was then my tenth show at the Principle Gallery. I have told this story a couple of times at Gallery Talks but can’t find any mention of it here after that 2009 post.

In it I recounted an episode from an opening I attended there in 1998. In my early days at the Principle Gallery, I was included in a group of five artists called the Finger Lakes School. It included Tom Buechner, Marty Poole, Tom Gardner, Rudy Gyr, and me.  With Marty Poole’s recent death, only Tom and I remain from that group that was named for the lovely region in which we live.

I was kind of the oddball in the group as the others were all more traditional representational painters with much longer careers than mine. I was just glad to be included on equal footing with this group of esteemed artists.

We did two shows as the Finger Lakes School at the gallery before I broke off and began my solo shows there in 2000. There is one moment from our first show that stands out for me. There was a great turnout for the show and the gallery was crowded as several of us from the group mingled, answering questions and such.

I had a small break in conversation and stepped back to take it all in. I then heard a female voice from behind me ask her companion where we were from, where the Finger Lakes were. Her friend answered that the Finger Lakes region was in western New York. He explained that it was a mainly rural area with a lot of wineries and farms.

“Well, you know, they do look like farmers,” she replied.

I think I might have done a spit take on hearing that. Maybe not but I chuckled pretty hard at that moment. Over the years I often think back to that lady’s comment and still sometimes laugh. Maybe we shouldn’t have all worn our overalls and John Deere caps that night. Or maybe it was the piece of straw I kept in my mouth.

It just reminds me how we often judge others by that initial glimpse and how we often end up being wrong. If people judge me to be a farmer, I’m okay with that. Though I am more comfortable in calling myself an artist than I once did, I still generally think of myself as workingman. To be honest, I am always a little suspect when someone has the deliberate look of being an artist, like they are trying too hard to play the role.

So, if you can make it to the opening, don’t look for someone who looks like an artist. I’ll be the uncomfortable guy there who looks like a farmer.

That brings me to this week’s Sunday Morning Music. It is You Can’t Judge a Book, that was originally written by blues great Willie Dixon and made popular by Bo Diddley.  My favorite version is from Long John Baldry, one of the pioneers of the British blues/rock movement in the early 60’s and a guy who had real panache. Both Rod Stewart and Elton John, both mentioned in this song, started their careers with Baldry’s band. My brother introduced to me to his music in the early 70’s and I have enjoyed it ever since.

Plain good stuff. Now git– I need to get out in the fields. Got to get those crops in.

The Sky Is Always the Sky (1995) – Coming to Principle Gallery, June

One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Don’t hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The very impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful; it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

–Annie Dillard, A Writer in the World (1989)

It seems to me that most everything Annie Dillard writes about the act of writing has some application to all the other arts. I read so much from her that could pertain to painting. At least, in the way I paint. Every artist has their own way of working.

This particular passage didn’t really apply to my painting. I seldom hold back anything when I am working, never withhold something for some later and hopefully better painting. I view whatever I am working on at the moment to be the only thing that matters. It is the most important thing to me then and receives every potentiality I can offer it. I think that is why I generally don’t do studies in my work. What might start out as study usually turns into a full-bloomed painting.

What caught my eye and mind in this passage was sparked by my recent excavation of older work to fill out my upcoming solo show, Flow, at the Principle Gallery in June. Pulling out these older pieces, I had long held assumptions on so many that I felt were untouchable, pieces I could not possibly give up. 

But this time it felt different. Maybe it was the reminder of the impermanence of this life that I took from my recent health issues. I don’t know. But much like Annie Dillard wrote, I found myself feeling as though I was hoarding them. For what reason or purpose, I do not know. 

Her last two sentences struck a chord with me: Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

What good were these pieces serving for me now? I do like going through them periodically and having them reignite memories of how they came about or how they were painted or how I felt when they were done and how I feel about them now. But I do the same thing with images of paintings that left the studio long ago. I didn’t need to have these in my grasp to do that.

And if I were to die tomorrow, what then becomes of these works?  What assurance do I have that their voices, small as they may be, are heard in the future beyond me?

Will these be the ashes found in my safe?

I don’t know. Maybe.

The thought of that irks me. After all, the reason I began painting was to communicate, to give expression and air to some inner voice that I felt needed to be heard. To live and speak in the open air is the ultimate purpose for every piece I have ever painted. They were not meant to dwell in the stale air of boxes, folders, or shelves in the small back bedrooms of my studio.

And they are not meant for me since they are already of me and will always be so. They are meant to be sent out into the world, like little space probes sent into distant galaxies with the hope of making contact and letting the voice of my planet be heard and not forgotten.

They are not meant to be ashes.

So, as I prepare for my show, I look at each piece with a different eye than in the past.  And the thought from Annie Dillard echoing in my mind that what I do is not for me to hoard but should be given freely and abundantly so that it might live and speak long after I have ceased to be.

That being said, I’ve decided to include the small painting at the top, The Sky Is Always the Sky from 1995, in the Principle Gallery show. A few years back, I wrote about this painting, saying: I stumbled across it the other day and it thrilled me, much as it did when I first painted almost 28 years ago. I see things in it that I would struggle in recreating. The colors, the sedimentation of the pigments, and even the organic feel of the linework would be much different.

I went on to mention that I had no reason to give for why it had never been shown. And I have no reason now that it shouldn’t be seen and heard. 

It is not meant to be ashes.

Okay, here’s a song about ashes that has absolutely no bearing to what I have written. But it does have ashes in it. This is an impromptu acoustic cover from Glen Hansard in what appears to be a hotel room of Ashes to Ashes, the David Bowie song from way back in 1980.

Wow, time flies. Speaking of time, my 27th annual solo show, Flow, opens in less than four weeks, on Friday, June 12, at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA. That might seem like a long time, but I have much still to do while working with reduced energy levels.

So, get the hell out of here and let me get to work, okay?

A Little Peace in the World— Coming to Principle Gallery

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

–Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (1670)

I was surprised this morning to find that I had never shared this painting, A Little Peace in the World, on this blog. Though it has been around for a while, it is one of those pieces that jumps out at me– simple but with a strong profile and immediacy of message. But it somehow existed under the radar at the few galleries where it had shown.

When it recently came back to me after a long sojourn out of sight in storage at a distant gallery, I was thrilled to see it again.  I knew immediately that it had to be part of my June solo show at the Principle Gallery, especially since the show is a hybrid retrospective, combing new and older work. It fits perfectly as when it was painted in 2008, I had been painting a small series of similarly composed pieces. It well represents that time and the work I was then producing yet fits snugly in the continuum of my work. That makes sense as that is the basis for this show, titled Flow.

When it was painted, the overwhelming feeling I took from this was one of calmness and a peace of mind. I still get that feeling from this painting, along with a sense of a warmth of spirit. The Red Tree here actually has a more golden appearance, as though the years it has seen have awarded it a precious sort of wisdom. I don’t know that I saw it that way when I painted it. It was 18 years ago so I was still but a child, as far as wisdom is concerned.

The attitude of the Red Tree here reminds me greatly of the state of mind mentioned in the passage above from Spinoza— a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. I would like to say that same disposition applies to myself and all my work but one can never be sure how one comes across, both as a person or in a painting. My painting definitely displays more confidence than I do most times, but I would like to think that most of it possesses a warmth of spirit.

Getting back to Spinoza’s words, the world would be far better off if more of us, particularly those we choose to lead, this virtuous state of mind. There would certainly be more peace, both in the absence of war and in the state of mind of most people.

Imagine a world where benevolence, equality, tolerance, and justice were the ruling passions.

It seems like such a far-fetched notion at this point, doesn’t it?

But it has to be kept in mind as an ideal and a goal if we ever hope to achieve even a fraction of such a world. And we will have to accept that small fraction with gratitude. Such a transformation only occurs one person at a time.  Humans, as we know all too well, generally learn and follow the behaviors they witness. Let Spinoza’s disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice be that example we follow.

Like a pebble thrown into a vast pond, its ripples will spread and reach others, causing more pebbles to be tossed into the pond. Soon the ripples will cover the whole pond.

Sounds like a plan to me.

Okay. Let’s attach some music to this thing, shall we? Here’s a longtime favorite from Cat Stevens that, like this painting, I am surprised to have never shared here. This Peace Train from 1971.

Born Into Color— At West End Gallery

Oliver rose next morning, in better heart, and went about his usual occupations, with more hope and pleasure than he had known for many days. The birds were once more hung out, to sing, in their old places; and the sweetest wild flowers that could be found, were once more gathered to gladden Rose with their beauty. The melancholy which had seemed to the sad eyes of the anxious boy to hang, for days past, over every object, beautiful as all were, was dispelled by magic. The dew seemed to sparkle more brightly on the green leaves; the air to rustle among them with a sweeter music; and the sky itself to look more blue and bright. Such is the influence which the condition of our own thoughts, exercise, even over the appearance of external objects. Men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision.

–Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838)

Very short on time this morning but wanted to share the above lines from Oliver Twist to accompany this painting. It’s a great reminder that our own attitude affects how we perceive this world. Not everyone notices the variety and depth of colors or the graceful lines and forms that are around us every day. These unfortunates miss perhaps the greatest gift of this world, its inherent beauty, and live in a world that lacks subtlety and room for imagination and thought.

When I think about it, I feel so fortunate to know and be moved by color and beauty.

There’s a lot more that could be said but that’s all I will say today. Like I said, much to do and I am working with a battery that runs short on power too quickly lately so I must go. hang around if you like and listen to this song, Colours, from Donovan in 1965.

Just don’t touch anything or bother my cats. You’ve been warned…

Mother’s Day, 1994

So you think you know
How to wipe your own nose
You think you know
How to button your clothes
You don’t know shit
If you hadn’t already guessed
You’re just a bump on the log of life,
Cause mother knows best

— Mother Knows Best , Richard Thompson  (1991)

All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.

-Abraham Lincoln

It’s always hard on Mother’s Day, as it probably is for most whose mothers have long passed. It’s an unfortunate fact that most of us experience our parents’ passing at some point so my bit of sadness is no greater or different than that of most other folks.

My Mom passed away back in 1995 at age 63. It’s hard to believe that it has been so many years now and that I’m now several years older than she was when she died. Hardly a day goes by that the thought of her doesn’t enter my mind in some way. A memory of her movement, her voice, her good and bad points– they are all set off by suddenly noticing how deeply they are all ingrained in myself. When I am walking, I see my mother walking. When I am angry, I see her anger.

For me, it is often a day filled with regrets for words, both said and unsaid, and actions. Regrets for not speaking more words of love and appreciation. Regrets for speaking words as a selfish child that may have unknowingly hurt her. But, like most days, these regrets fade away and are replaced with only the memory of her– a simple yet complex woman to whom I owe all that I am or hope to be, as Uncle Abe said.

A Hard Past (2006)

When I am sitting alone in a pensive mood, I see her sitting at her kitchen table with a cup of tea and her ever-present Camel cigarette, in absolute stillness with a thousand-mile stare. I often wonder where she was in her memory in those moments. That look is one that makes this piece from my 2006 Outlaws series, Hard Past, forever remind of my mom. It’s not a flattering painting but it captures what I consider to be a poignant and important aspect of her.

She was an interesting case. As I said, simple and complex, a mass of paradoxes. She was battle-hardened from what I can only describe as a hard life, one that gave her an extraordinary toughness that was well-known to those who knew her. But she was also fragile and generous to a fault. Uneducated but highly intelligent. Stubborn but always willing to change. Deeply private yet still loved parties. Loyal and surprisingly fair-minded and principled.

She was also funny and loved to laugh. I often felt that my job as kid was to make her laugh. I think that is where I first realized that laughter was love.

I wish I could have seen her live into old age–it would be wonderful to sit with her once more and have a cup of her coffee. Ask her all the questions that went unasked, to say all the words of love and gratitude that should have been spoken but went unsaid.

But life is like that, leaving us a handful of memories that leave us feeling both empty and full. While it is often bittersweet to look back on them, it’s been good doing just that this morning.

Most of the above was pulled from earlier Mother’s Day posts. The painting at the top was one I did in my earliest days of trying to paint, one of the few of mine that she ever saw. I had been showing my work publicly at the West End for only a few months when her cancer was diagnosed. She never got to see my work hanging in a gallery or museum. I think it would have made her very happy.

This might not seem like the most sentimental of Mother’s Day songs, but I like it and, for this morning, that’s all that matters. I think Mom might have liked it since it has a driving beat– she loved to hear a drumbeat. Plus, the lyrics like this might have brought a smile from her. Hope so.

So you think you know
How to wipe your own nose
You think you know
How to button your clothes
You don’t know shit
If you hadn’t already guessed
You’re just a bump on the log of life,
Cause mother knows best