Redtree Times

A poem should not mean
But be.

— Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica (1926)

These are well known last lines of the 1926 poem Ars Poetica from Archibald MacLeish. The poem asks us to experience poetry as a sensory experience. To just take it in as it is, to trust our visceral reaction to it. To not lose the poem in a fog of intellectualization as we grasp for meaning.

That is very much like experiencing art of all sorts. All too often we fail to trust our initial response to a piece of art. We often require that it meet parameters we set arbitrarily or attached meaning or the validation of others before we allow ourselves to enjoy it as it is.

It always reminds me of old James Thurber cartoon at the top, one I have shared a couple of times over the years.  It’s something you see all the time as an artist. Actually, artists are not immune from overthinking about our own reaction to art. I think it’s a very human thing to not trust our own feelings at times. It seems sometimes like we only trust them at the extreme reaches of our emotions. We seldom question it when our first response is anger or revulsion.

MacLeish’s poem lines up with my own thinking which often creates a quandary for me here on the blog. I worry that my words and the meaning I attach to the work I show here may somehow hinder someone else’s response. I’d like to believe that my work remains wordless like MacLeish’s idea of a poem, as the flight of birds.

That the work will do just fine for itself without my words, explanations, or cajoling. That whatever meaning I find in it is mine alone and might not necessarily reflect the responses of others to the work.

For the most part, I believe that has been the case. I think there have been a number of times when my words here validated an emotional first response to the work and I am sure there have been times when they have soured someone else’s first reaction. But I trust that anyone who reads this blog has a pretty strong grasp on their own responses to art.

That they know what the like, regardless of my words or the words of others.

I don’t know why I wrote this today. Just one of those things that popped out in the fog of early morning light. I got a lot of fog. And I don’t mean outside my studio window. I thnk it may have come from some of the paintings showing at the Gmeiner right now. My response to many of them is always visceral. Wordless.

They just are.

On that note, let me extend my thanks to all the fine folks who turned out for yesterday’s opening reception at the Gmeiner. It was such a warm and welcoming event. I left feeling embraced.

And that’s never a bad thing.

Many thanks to Melina Moyer and the marvelous group of volunteers at the Gmeiner and to Jesse and Linda Gardner at the West End Gallery for making this event possible. I am deeply appreciative.

For this Sunday Morning Music I am going with a French flair since today is the final day of the Tour de France in Paris. Cheri and I are huge fans of the legendary bike race, which follows a brutal series of stages across the plains and mountains of France for three weeks every July. It has been required viewing at our breakfast table every July for nearly thirty years. I thought a little music from the legendary French chanteuse Edith Piaf, the Little Sparrow, might be in order this morning. This is her Non Je Ne Regrette Rien. which translates as No, I regret nothing. I think it is a good example of what I am trying to say here this morning. My limited– practically nonexistent– French language skills preclude me from dwelling too much on the lyrics or meaning. I enjoy this song simply for my visceral response to its rhythm and the power in the distinctive voice of Edith.

Just as it should be.

Oh, and the entire MacLeish poem is at the bottom here.

Now, here’s bit of French for you–le git.

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

*

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

*

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean
But be.

— Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica (1926)

In the Pocket of Time (2014)- Included in A Seedling Returns

Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.

–Muriel Rukeyser, The Green Wave (1948)

The blessing is in the seed…

Everything we accomplish or attempt has a seed, a beginning.

About five weeks back, I started a blog post with the lines above in a post titled A Seedling Returns. In that post I wrote about how instrumental the Gmeiner Art & Cultural Center in Wellsboro PA had been in my career as an artist. I was, as the post implies, a mere seedling as an artist. At that point, I was then showing my little paintings at the West End Gallery and had few expectations that this painting thing I had begun after an accident a couple of years before would become any more than a pleasant pastime or, at best, a part-time gig.

But two events at the Gmeiner changed everything for me. The first was an award in their regional at competition, something that caught me completely off guard. That was the first real nourishment for my seed, making me believe for the first time that this might actually be something, that there might be a path I hadn’t dared to consider.

This all took place around the time my mom’s life was coming to an end as result of metastatic cancer. I had painted a series of what I considered personal paintings, Exiles, expressing my emotional response to her struggle and death. I felt the series deserved to be shown together and approached the Gmeiner. I really had no idea if they would accept my proposal but much to my surprise, they did, setting me up for a solo show in January of 1997.

It was my first solo show.

That show was huge boost for me mentally. It changed my perceptions entirely. It was the first time I felt that my work was something more than nice colors and pleasant forms. It truly had something to say, something to express. Meaning and purpose. Something that reached across the space between the viewer and the painting and connected the two.

That shift of perception rattled my world.

Looking back now, I can see the significance of several moments of serendipity that have pushed me along this path. Both the West End Gallery and the Gmeiner loom large in that progression at that time. When I was asked to put together a small showcase in conjunction with Big Gems exhibit that the West End and the Gmeiner had collaborated on, I saw it as an opportunity to return to a significant starting point as an act of gratitude for all that it has meant to me over the years.

A Seedling Returns is not a retrospective in any way. The space for the showcase is too small for such a thing. Instead, it is more an expression of what has grown from the seed they first nourished.

Last week, the Big Gems exhibit, along with A Seedling Returns, opened. It is a take-off on the West End’s very popular annual show, Little Gems, but here combines the small works with much larger works of artists from the West End Gallery. The Big Gems exhibit is wonderful collection of work from eleven, me included, of the West End’s artists.

This afternoon, Saturday, July 25th, there is an Opening Reception for the exhibits that runs from 2-4 PM at the Gmeiner. There is also a painting demo from master painter Brian Keeler, whose two Big Gems glow on the wall of the Gmeiner. Brian’s demo is not to be missed.

I shared this song just a couple of years ago but felt it fit too well not to share again, This is From the Beginning from Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

Night Magic— Now at Gmeiner Art & Cultural Center

What, keep a week away? Seven days and nights,
Eightscore-eight hours, and lovers’ absent hours
More tedious than the dial eightscore times!
O weary reckoning!

–William Shakespeare, Othello, Act 3, scene 4

Couple of things on the agenda this morning so I going to be brief. Well, brief by my terms. It doesn’t work out that way sometimes, even with the best of intentions.

To begin, let’s get out the stuff that needs to be said first. This small painting, a Little Gem titled Night Magic is included in the Big Gems exhibit now hanging at the Gmeiner Art & Cultural Center in Wellsboro, PA. in conjunction with the West End Gallery. The Opening Reception for this exhibit and my solo showcase, A Seedling Returns, is tomorrow, Saturday, July 25, from 2-4 PM.

Job done. Check.

I was looking at this painting yesterday and asked myself why there were seven moons. Not five or six. Not nine or ten. Not even two or three.

Seven.

I guess the easy answer is that seven moons were needed to find the balance I needed in the composition. But I probably could have found it with any other number as well.

Maybe the number seven holds some symbolic meaning?

I don’t know to be honest. Sometimes I find things in my work after the fact that have symbolic meaning for me that was never thought of nor intended. Maybe the seven moons were something like that.

Seven days in a week. That concept derives from 6th century BCE Mesopotamian astronomers who observed that there were seven visible celestial bodies and dedicated a day to each.

Then there’s Lucky Number 7. Don’t know anything about that, especially the lucky part so I doubt that has anything to do with this painting.

Maybe it has to do with the Seven Levels of Hell? Nah, doubt that.

Maybe Seventh Heaven? That’s a concept I wrote about here several years ago. Without getting into too much detail, like the days of week, multiple ancient cultures assigned each visible celestial body its own heaven.

That sounds like a contender. But then again, what do I know? It might be, as the title infers, simply a little night magic. Or maybe like the old Moon Mullican rockabilly classic from 1956, it serves as a reminder that we only got seven nights to rock, seven nights to roll. I first heard the song Seven Nights to Rock quite a few years ago when Springsteen often included it in the encores for his shows. As my friends in Texas most likely know, Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel have performed this song on a regular basis for years.

There are lots of fine versions of it out there but I thought that the original version from a guy called Moon was most fitting for this painting.

Let’s give a listen. Okay, it might not be Shakesperean with lyrics like this but the sentiment is eternal. After all, throughout most of human history we only have seven nights to rock.

I got seven nights to rock
I got seven nights to roll
Seven nights, I’m gonna show my face
With a different chick in any different place
Seven nights to rock
Seven nights to roll

Now, be gone. You heard me- git.

In Radiance— At the Gmeiner Art & Cultural Center, Wellsboro, PA

The aim of life is to live it intensely, to be fully born, to be fully awake. To emerge from the ideas of infantile grandiosity into the conviction of one’s real though limited strength; to be able to accept the paradox that every one of us is the most important thing there is in the universe – and at the same time not more important than a fly or a blade of grass.

— Erich Fromm, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis (1960)

I’ve been writing this blog for almost 18 years now, which in itself seems ridiculous. It’s been sometimes interesting and fun but more than that, it has often been enlightening for me and, hopefully, the reader. Writing this blog has allowed me to do a lot of research and reading on subjects that interest me. Oh, I would have probably done much the same without the blog but having an outlet to pass on my thought on these subjects and get a bit of feedback has made all the difference, making me work just a bit harder. Dig a little deeper.

One of the things that becomes clear when doing research on what could considered be the deeper thoughts from the great writers and thinkers throughout history is how certain concepts emerge to become accepted truths. This truth is validated by the fact that a long line of thinkers observes the gist of the idea then passes it on, creating echoes that resonate down the ages.

I suppose that might indicate that there is actually little original thought, just a restatement and interpretation of eternal truths. We are at a point, where, as they say, everything worth saying has already been said. I know that anything I say that passes for truth or wisdom is not original but is merely an echo.

And that is okay. If it felt new to me when I wrote, it may well be new and enlightening to a reader out there. And they then may hold it for themselves then pass it on.

The great truths do not stay hidden for long.

Their echoes eventually come to all ears willing to hear them above the din of the now.

Such is the case with the passage from the late German psychologist Erich Fromm who is a seemingly endless conduit for those echoes. His thought that we humans are paradoxes that find us at once being both the center of the center of the universe and no more significant or vital than the grass on which we tread is one that has haunted my work for many years.

Each of us needs to know that we are important and unique, that the order of the world needs our presence. But, in equal measure, we must keep mind that we are totally insignificant, that the sun will rise and set just fine without us.

Forgetting that we are both and believing we are bigger or smaller than we are is the basis for so many problems in this world, at least in my eyes. We need to tread the middle ground between our largeness and smallness.

I think this is a theme that echoes throughout my work. I sometimes believe that the purpose of the work is to simply keep us aware of our place in this area between the two poles and assure us that it is just as it should be.

But maybe that just the largeness in me coming out. Maybe the work means little in the long run.

I can live with that. I have to.

The painting at the top is a longtime favorite called In Radiance that very much captures what I am trying to say here. It is included in my A Seedling Returns exhibit now hanging at the Gmeiner Art & Cultural Center in Wellsboro, PA. This small exhibit runs concurrently with the Big Gems exhibit that is a collaboration between the Gmeiner and the West End Gallery. The Opening Reception for both exhibits is this coming Saturday, July 25, from 2-4 PM.

Here’s a song that I like in just about any form. It’s Wade in the Water, an African American spiritual that has echoed down the last couple of hundred years in many different interpretations. This is a jazzy version from the late Eva Cassidy who exists through the echoes she created in her all too short life.

Now, git. I can’t hear the echoes with you lurking around…

The Call of Wonder– At West End Gallery

I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.

And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.

— Gary Snyder, Four Poems for Robin (1968)

Does the fool know he is a fool?

I mean, I would like to say that, for the most part, I have done what karma has demanded of me, that I have both benefitted and paid for the decisions that have shaped my life.

That I have not been fortune’s fool.

Can we ever know though?

Are we fools for even asking the question?

Maybe our self-examination, though it sometimes feels like a blessing, is actually a curse. Maybe those who live without questioning who and what they are or the decisions they have made are living life exactly as they should. Maybe they are achieving their purpose and meaning in this life simply by not thinking about it?

Those of us who ask questions we know cannot be answered, that seek meaning and purpose in a life that sometimes seems devoid of it– are we the true fortune’s fools?

I remember an incident in high school. Not even an incident really. A moment. There were these two kids in my class who were good buddies, always seemingly together. They were both nice guys, friendly and not abusive to anyone. Both were not what you consider bright guys. You could see that their future lives were going to be somehow limited by their intelligence and their circumstance. I can’t remember exactly where this took place at our school, but I overheard the two of them talking.

One said to the other, “I am a nothing. A big zero.”

It wasn’t said lightly or in jest. I was looking at his face when he said these words and his face was blank and absolutely forlorn as though he had total self-awareness of himself and the limitations he faced in his future life. He recognized at that young age that he was fortune’s fool.

It broke my heart in that moment over fifty years ago and it breaks my heart now. I can still see the total despair and lack of hope in his face.

Just to let you know this not a totally tragic story, I ended up working with him years later at the Perkins Restaurant where I worked before the accident that led me to this life. I didn’t recognize him at first. He was busboy/dishwasher and was a fairly happy soul who joked around and worked very hard. He had a family and found things that excited him outside of work, things that made him very happy.

Things that gave him a break from the self-awareness that hung with him like a curse, showing itself every so often in the restaurant.

He didn’t recognize me from school. I had a way of blending in that often made me feel invisible– a valuable skill in high school– which was sometimes a curse and a blessing. I never brought up that moment years before. I always was exceedingly kind to him, joked a round with him, listened to his exploits, and almost always overtipped him when cashing out after my shift. It wasn’t much of a gesture, far too little actually. But it felt good when he smiled in recognition of any kindness given. Just not seeing that face he wore many years before was ample reward.

I wasn’t planning on sharing that story today. Actually, never. But it has long lived in me and it seemed to fit whatever the hell this post is supposed to be saying. I don’t even remember how this whole thing started, to tell the truth. Almost wished I hadn’t started writing it.

I have to go now. Said too much and not enough.

Maybe I was fortune’s fool all along and just didn’t know. Would that be so bad?

No song fits this moment. You’ll have to git without exit music this morning.

The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent, we never tire of.

–Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694)

That same formula that Bashō described above might well apply to most art.  I feel my own work expresses itself most effectively when it says a little less. In the early days when I was just beginning to show my work that was actually a thought I tried to keep in the front of my mind. That reminder kept me focused on the shape, color, and rhythm of the elements, avoiding extraneous detail that might clutter or cloud whatever the painting might express.

I even had a series at the time that I called Haiku which were stripped down pieces without much detail, allowing the form and color to tell what it would. The idea was that there should be enough revealed to gently lead the viewer to filling in whatever narrative they needed to hear– or see. They remain a favorite in my mind though I have few images of those paintings. My early documentation was sometimes lacking and the slides that do have are spotty at best.

The painting shown here, One from 1997, is not precisely from that series but it upholds all the values of it. It is spare and simple. The nuance of its colors and the rightness of the curve of the tree trunk set against a horizon that shows itself in the white reveal of the paper between the sky and the yellow field tell me all I need to know.

It has a simplicity and fullness that is easy to overlook. Indeed, I have looked at this piece for many years when reviewing older work and I often glide by this one. But when I do take the time to look closer at it, I am filled with its sense of rightness.

It is exactly what it should be.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

And that pleases me greatly. And it makes me chuckle a bit because that unnamable and unknowable thing I have sought in my work for almost 30 years since this was painted was right there in front of me all the time. I just didn’t fully recognize it then.

Perhaps it took years of winding my way through the labyrinth of life and art to come back to this point, one that I had passed before. But now time and experience allowed me to see it with changed eyes. It was the same, but I was different.

I look at it now with a renewed sense of wonder and it gazes back at me with the same stoic stillness that it has always possessed. It needs nothing from me yet shares all it has with me.

And we are one.

Here’s performance of the U2 song, One, from Mary J. Blige in memory of Nelson Mandela at the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo, Norway, Dec. 11, 2013. It seems to fit well this morning.

Stick around and give a listen if you wish. Or not. It matters not.

Hey, that could be a haiku…

Archaeology: The Silence of the World— Now at Principle Gallery

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

–Robinson Jeffers, Carmel Point in Hungerfield and Other Poems (1954)

I came across the poem above from poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) written in the early 1950’s and was struck by how much it mirrored what I see in some of my work. Most specifically, I see it in the Archaeology series. Those paintings can be seen as landscapes free of all humankind, the only traces of their existence found deeply hidden under the surface beneath many layers of earth.

Earth has shaken itself loose of our pesky and destructive nature and has resumed its place in the beautiful eternal. Timeless and silent, once again shaped only by the forces of nature and their continuously balancing harmonies and rhythms.

But now, as we cut down swaths of ancient forests, deeply gouge and scar the surface of the planet, and fill the oceans with garbage and poisons, Earth simply abides. As Jeffers wrote:

It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve.

In the grand scheme of things eternal, we are little more than a minor rash between the toes of Earth– temporary and soon gone with a little patience.

Jeffers urged us as humans to recognize the temporary nature of our existence, that we are not the center of the universe in any way and will soon return to the Earthly elements from which descend. Rock and ocean, as he puts it.

This was actually a theme for Jeffers in much of his work, which he termed  Inhumanism. He encouraged us to change our perspective from that of a self-centered human to a recognition of being a small part of the greater whole that is Earth and the Universe.

He did not view this as being misanthropic or nihilism. He saw this instead as being an act of liberation, one that forms a detachment from humanity that gives an emotional distance that allows for greater mental clarity, a sense of inner peace, and a greater ability to stand in awe of nature’s beauty and grandeur.

Into the Blue Tangle– At Principle Gallery

I can get behind that and see it in much of my work, in the Archaeology pieces as I said before as well as in much of the work from last year’s Entanglement series, such as the painting shown here on the right. Not sure I would want to call it Inhumanism even as much as I agree with its premise. It implies that the work is somehow inhuman with all the negative connotations that come with that word.

And I certainly don’t see my work as being inhuman or anti-human. If anything, it is deeply human. But like Jeffers, I would like us to be more open to a different perspective on our existence, one that recognizes our temporary nature and the significance of our insignificance.

Maybe that is just what we are– significantly insignificant.

I got to chew on that one for a while. You better leave. I think better when I’m alone and you’re crowding me a bit right now. I still lack the patience of Earth and Nature.

Not yet fully inhuman…

All Embracing– At West End Gallery

Your way begins
on the other side
become the sky
take an axe to the prison wall
escape
walk out like someone
suddenly born into color
do it now

–Rumi, Quietness  

I had a post early in the year about a small painting that I title Born into Color. My friend Linda (shoreacres) from down in Texas responded in the comment section with the poem above from the 13th century Persian poet Rumi. I was unaware of the poem, but it set off all kinds of fireworks in my head. In its simple straightforward way, it said so much.

Eight lines and twenty-eight words saying precisely what I struggled to express in my work.

Every line, every word brings memories and images instantly to mind, as if they were keys unlocking some inner hidden vault containing my truth.

I tingle a bit just looking at the poem on the screen.

Dissolve (2011) At West End Gallery

For example, become the sky describes a thought that has inhabited my mind for many years, one where our corporeal selves dissolve and become one with the sky. This idea really came to form for me around 2001 in paintings like Dissolve shown here on the right.

Then there’s take an axe to the prison wall which speaks to me of the need for the individual to sometime destroy one world so that another might rise. I have described just that on this blog a few times, often mentioning the Hermann Hesse novel, Demian, in doing so.

That book contained a similar line: Whoever wants to be born, must first destroy a world. I first read that sentence when I was undergoing a desperate time in my life and that short sentence, those ten simple words, brought both clarity and peace to my mind then.

And, of course, that transitions into walk out like somebody suddenly born into color. That brings to mind the scene from The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy, in tones of a dusty sepia brown, goes the door of her tornado ravaged home into the magnificent colors of Munchinkinland.

Her old world was seemingly destroyed, and she found herself now in a new and unknown world of wonder. A new consciousness rose in her.

The poem ends with do it now. Our time here is short with nothing promised to us for our future. Tomorrow might never come. There is only today.

Like I said, a short and simple poem that says volumes about living one’s life. I wasn’t planning on going on that much about it this morning. For one thing, I doubt I can do it justice with my words, especially in this short format. But it is such a powerful piece that I couldn’t resist trying.

For this Sunday Morning Music selection, I am going with a song that I shared several years back. This is Colors from The Black Pumas.

The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him?

‘No, thank you,’ he will think. ‘Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, although these are things which cannot inspire envy.’

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)

The Big Gems exhibit at the Gmeiner Art & Cultural Center in Wellsboro, PA opens today. However, the official Opening Reception for the exhibit is next Saturday, July 25 from 2-4 PM. The Big Gems show is, as I have noted here in recent weeks, a collaboration between the Gmeiner and the West End Gallery that displays the very large woks alongside much smaller pieces– Little Gems— from 10 West End Gallery artists. From the photos I have seen it looks to be a most striking show.

My work is also showcased in the smaller Atrium Gallery in an exhibit called A Seedling Returns. I wrote here recently about the importance of the Gmeiner in inspiring my work in the first couple of years that I was painting. At that time, I had just started showing my work publicly at the West End Gallery and still had little idea what art might have in store for me.  But an award garnered in the Gmeiner’s annual Regional Competition in 1995 and a solo show there in January of 1997 proved to be what I consider turning points in my career.

The idea that I would actually even have something even resembling a career seemed improbable back then. Like the seedling as I described myself, both the Gmeiner and the West End Gallery provided the ground and nourishing encouragement that allowed my work to grow. I can honestly say that it is likely that the Red Tree which dominates the work in this showcase would not have been possible without that nourishment.

One of the paintings in A Seedling Returns is shown here. Titled And the Glimmer Returns, it is a 48″ by 24″ from 2018. It was painted specifically for a special exhibit at the West End that showed the stages that many artists follow in building a painting. By that I mean, the exhibit had a preliminary rough sketch, a painted study (this is rough painting that lacks the finish of a normal painting) and the finished painting. This show was a challenge for me since I seldom use sketches and never do painted studies. But I did a sketch and study, though the study ended up being a finished painting. Not finishing felt to me like a musician doing a rehearsal without trying. I’m there, why not do the work?

The interesting thing was that the rough sketch translated fairly well in whole to the painted study, which was titled Lightbreak. However, the translon from the 24′ by 12″ Lightbreak to the much larger And the Glimmer Comes saw a lot of changes though the basic blocking of the painting stayed somewhat intact. That larger surface, once I was on it, had much more directive power than the studies for me. I am not going any further into it today, but you can see a side-by-side of the sketch and the painted study below.

The finished painting immediately became a favorite for me. It has hung in my studio for the last six years in a spot from which I can see it throughout the day, from my desk, my easels or my painting table. It has an atmosphere, along with that particular shade of blue and a very distinctive texture, that totally captivates me. I am actually thrilled to have it out in the world again. I think it deserves to be seen.

I include the Viktor Frankl passage from his Man’s Search for Meaning, one of my all-time favorite books. It was in a post that included this painting back in 2020 and when I read it this morning it took on an even greater significance for me, given the changes in my life and perspective in the past year or so. I thought it matched the glimmer of this painting.

I have also included the same piece of music which also seems to fit perfectly. It is an atmospheric piece, Good Night, Day, from the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (1969-2018) who was best known for his scores for films such as Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 and The Theory of Everything.

It also glimmers.

If you’re in the Wellsboro area, please stop in at the Gmeiner sometime over the next few weeks. Wellsboro, for those of you who don’t know it, is a lovely and inviting village, green and leafy with gas lights running down the grassy center strip of its main drag. We used to go hiking quite often in the nearby Pennsylvania Grand Canyon. I have a lot of fond memories of that place.

I say this respectfully this morning– git.

Rough Sketch 2018

He seems to me to be headed for his ideal fate, which is compulsive psychosis dashed with a jigger of psychopathic irresponsibility and violence.

— Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)

This morning, I was looking for an image of the painting, Soul Boat, from my 2019 series, Multitudes. In doing so, I came across this photo this morning from a post back in 2022 that showed the painting on a small table that sits between my desk and the bookcase built into the fireplace here in my studio. The photo caught my eye for no particular reason. It still looks pretty much the same though the books are somewhat rearranged from use though some are in the same position.

It felt a bit like a self-portrait this morning. It’s one of those images that I feel capture me and my time here in the studio without actually showing me. Something I prefer. I guess much of my art is in its own way, a similar self-portrait. The stacks of books are a nice addition and make a nice frame here though.

Soul Boat is no longer there, having moved to a storage shelf in a back bedroom. I was thinking this morning that I may have made a mistake by not including some pieces from my other painting series in my showcase, A Seedling Returns, that opens tomorrow at the Gmeiner Art & Cultural Center in Wellsboro, PA. It is part of the Big Gems exhibit which is a collaboration between the West End Gallery and the Gmeiner, showcasing both very large and very small paintings from 10 of the West End’s stable of artists. Of course, the Atrium Gallery housing my showcase is not very large so including work from a wide variety of the shorter-lived series I have worked on would be difficult.

I am not even sure why i am sharing this photo this morning outside of it striking my fancy.

Maybe it is the passage from Kerouac’s On the Road that accompanied the photo when it first appeared here.

This has been a very weird week here. I have had a lousy sinus infection that has been with me since Sunday. Aside from the headaches and the congestion and coughing, it has triggered a lot of the side effects from the hormone therapy for my cancer treatment. I have felt beaten up and exhausted all week and the hot flashes have me waking every night on sheets that are cold and wet from night sweats. I feel most times this week like I am in zombie land.

Then Cheri came down with the same thing. Combining our illnesses that with skies that are an unhealthy yellow brown hue every day from the smoke drifting in from the Canadian wildfires that give everything an eerie, otherworldly feel and makes it difficult to go outside gives you a sense of the weirdness. Just looking out the window at it brings on a sense of uneasiness.

It makes me feel like I am in some sort of dystopian novel which is exacerbated by the goings-on from the menace in our White House.

Without going into any sort of political commentary here– though I think it has moved past the political and into the realm of the existential– Kerouac’s passage seemed to be a perfect fit this morning after the psychosis that was so evident on national television last night.

That’s the end of my commentary on that. We all know what is what without me is spelling it out anymore this morning.

Like I said, a weird week. In light of it, looking at this pseudo self-portrait felt somewhat refreshing. And that is a welcome thing this morning.

Here’s song that has little to do with anything written here except that is from Joni Mitchell whose work in both song and paint can often resemble self-portraits. This is longtime favorite. This is A Case of You.

Now, git. Your continued presence makes me feel even weirder this morning.

REMINDER:

A Seedling Returns and Big Gems at the Gmeiner Art & Cultural Center in beautiful Wellsboro, PA opens tomorrow, Saturday, July 18. However, he official Opening Reception takes place next Saturday, July 25, running from 2-4 PM.