Posted in Motivation, Quote, tagged Dr. Seuss, Quote, Theodore Geisel on March 16, 2016| 2 Comments »
Say what you mean and act how you feel,
because those who matter don’t mind,
and those who mind don’t matter.
–Dr. Seuss
*************
I think these words about sincerity from the wonderful and wise Dr. Seuss are good advice for just about anybody. For myself, I pass this advice on to young artists. Your own meaning and feeling– make that the focus of your work…
Posted in Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged Franz Marc, GC Myers, New Painting, Patterns, Quote on March 15, 2016| 2 Comments »
Today we are searching for things in nature that are hidden behind the veil of appearance… We look for and paint this inner, spiritual side of nature.
-Franz Marc
************
This is a new painting, a 36″ by 12″ canvas piece that I am calling The Veil and the Heart. It is a continuation of the patterned sky series that has been occupying me as of late, a group which will no doubt play a large part in my annual June show at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria.
I see the red sun here as a symbol for the type of truth that can’t be veiled, can’t be covered. While there are forces and powers beyond our perception, as I have written about concerning the thought behind this series of patterns and veils, there are also certainties and truths that cannot be obscured in any way.
It may be our own truth, who we really are as a person and how that forms the way in which we maintain a relationship with the world in which we exist. It may be how we come to accept our place as a tiny piece in the puzzle of a universe that seems vast and largely unaware of us.
Maybe that red sun represents the universe, for a brief moment, being aware of us.
I don’t really know.
I’ve said those words so many times over the years, especially in regard to my work. You would think after all this time that I would be able to say definitively what is contained in my work. But I can’t. Just about every piece has a mystery in it, a veiled thought or meaning that shows just enough of itself to let me know it is there but remains elusive. Even this painting has a meaning that seems easily within my grasp one moment and has another in the next.
Like that red sun, you see it and understand it but you’re not sure why. And maybe that is the way it should be, the way it is meant to be.
I don’t really know…
Posted in Favorite Things, Music, Painting, tagged GC Myers, In the Windwo, Mavis Staples, Music, Red Tree, The Staple Singers on March 13, 2016| 2 Comments »
Last week, we watched the HBO documentary Mavis! which is, of course, about the career of singer Mavis Staple. Ever since I have been going to YouTube to listen to her early gospel work with her family, the Staple Singers, in the 1950’s. It’s just great stuff, a little gritty and blues-edged beneath with her vocals soaring above it all. It seemed so ahead of the time, especially given what was being played on pop radio at that point.
I thought for this Sunday morning music I would keep this simple and play one of my favorites, I’m Coming Home from 1959. I think it’s a great example of what they were doing then.
I picked the painting above for this song.The painting at the top is from my In the Window series from back in 2005 and is titled In the Window: Worlds Beckon. I chose it for this post because it reminded me of the thought of going home in the way of this song, that there is another world beyond this one. We may exist in this room, this life, now but there’s a whole different one just outside the window. That’s how this painting always struck me and it jibes with the song, at least for me.
Anyway, enjoy and have a great Sunday.
Posted in Biographical, Favorite Things, Recent Paintings, tagged 98th NY Infantry, Civil War, Icon, Icon Series on March 11, 2016| 4 Comments »
I thought I had put the Icon series on hold for a bit as I moved more heavily into the work for my upcoming shows in June and July. But the other day I just had an itch to jump quickly into one of the ancestors who remains prominent but a bit of a mystery for me. It was painted quickly without hardly any dawdling over it and by the time it was blocked out in the red oxide paint that I use for my underpainting it felt like it was coming to life.
The painting is a 12″ by 12″ canvas that is titled Icon: Martin P. It is my depiction of my 3rd great-grandfather, a man born in Canada sometime around 1800. I have seen his birth year listed as 1798, 1800 and 1802. His name is also somewhat up for debate. It has come down through time as the anglicized Martin Perry but I have seen the last name listed as the French-based Paré, Parent and Poirer. He was of French-Canadian descent, that is without dispute. Outside of this and a few other facts, there is little else to go on besides assumptions that can be gleaned from what little is known and rumors from the family that remains in the far north of New York state, near the Canadian border.
For instance, there is no known record of the name of his wife, my 3rd great-grandmother. I have heard rumors from the family there that she was a maiden from the Mohawk tribe that occupied a reservation in the area where Martin came to live but there is no evidence of this, either in records or in DNA. I have heard from a professional genealogist who ran into this dead-end and was unsuccessful in uncovering anything.
Martin was not known to be a farmer though his children all ended up as such. He was rumored to have been a coureur des bois, literally a wood’s runner or woodsman, which was basically a frontier figure who lived as a hunter and sometime guide. In the few records I can find from his later life, he is listed simply as a laborer, no doubt at a time when the idea of being a woodsy, especially an old one, was on the decline in the quickly settling areas of the east.
But one thing I do know is that he must have been a tough old man. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he enlisted in late 1861, along with son of the same name, at the age of 60 years old. He served in the 98th New York Infantry and in the following year, saw action at the Battle of Williamsburg and the the Battle of Seven Pines. which was at that time, early in the Civil War, the largest conflict of the campaign.
I don’t know how he came through it all except to note that he was mustered out later that year, 1862, due to disability. The idea of a 60 year old man marching a thousand or so miles and fighting in battles that were often at close range seems pretty wild in these times but I don’t think it was such for a man raised in the northern wilds. He would have been used to tough conditions, to wet and cold and a spartan lifestyle. For him to have been pulled from the conflict points to a real injury, illness or wound of some sort.
I have yet to find the date of his death. Records in that time and place are often iffy at best but I continue to search.
So, in my depiction of Martin Perry I see him as that coureur des bois, bearded and dressed in buckskin. From what I can tell, he lived on the fringes of the civilized world with a foot always in the wild.
Posted in Biographical, Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged Benjamin Franklin, GC Myers, New Painting, Quote, Red Tree on March 10, 2016| 6 Comments »
The early morning has gold in its mouth.
—Benjamin Franklin
*******************
I am an early riser.
I guess that I’m here in the studio at 5:30 in the morning is a testament to that fact. It’s always been that way for me even as a child. The prospect of what the new day might bring has always been exciting enough to rouse me in the early morning. On those days when I have a less than thrilling or an even dreaded task before me, the thought of getting started on that task so that it will just get done and out of the way does the same.
At times in my life when I worked the overnight third shift at other jobs, the idea of going to bed when the day was breaking seemed awful and the day always felt already spent when I eventually woke up only a few hours later, as though all possibility was drained from it while I slept. I could never get used to that.
As an early riser, you get used to seeing the day unfold and the light changing as the sun rises. Each morning is teeming with the potential of the new. Even when things aren’t going well, there seems to be the possibility that this next new day will bring that change that alters one’s course in a better way.
I think that’s what I see in this new painting, a 24″ by 30″ canvas that I am calling Early Riser, of course. The sun and its rays seem new and different but filled with a potency of possibility for the eagerly waiting Red Tree. Meanwhile, the neighboring community slumbers, not witnessing the breaking wonder that is the new day.
This was a difficult painting. By that I mean it took several attempts to achieve a sky that served what I felt as I laid out the initial underpainting or bones of the piece. Twice I got quite a ways into the sky, spending many hours each time, before painting it over and restarting. They were patterned skies but never captured a rhythm that synced with my own emotions in the piece. As soon as I set out the first rays of this last attempt, it felt right for this painting and everything fell into place.
And early this morning, I feel this captures my eagerness to greet the day. Now, I have to go– there are things to be done.
Posted in History, Neat Stuff, Painting, tagged Hilma af Klint, London, Piet Mondrian, Serpentine Galleries, Sweden, Wassily Kandinsky on March 8, 2016| Leave a Comment »
Just a few days ago, a new exhibit opened at the Serpentine Galleries in London. It features a group of abstract and symbolic paintings from a Swedish painter by the name of Hilma af Klint who lived from 1862 until 1944. The images of her work on display are quite captivating and intrigued me enough to look further into her work. It’s an interesting case.
She was trained in the 1880’s in Sweden as a traditional artist and for most of her life supported herself with naturalistic landscapes and portraits. This work is well done and attractive but unremarkable. She considered this conventional work as a means of supporting her “life’s work” which were the many spiritually inspired abstract pieces produced from the 1890’s up to the time of her death in 1944.
Interested in spirituality and theosophy, Hilma formed a group of women who met on a regular basis to hold seances to attempt to contact and channel the spirits from other dimensions. She claimed to have been “commissioned” by one of these spirits to create a series of large paintings which occupied her for a number of years. These paintings consisted of geometric and organic forms and a distinct visual vocabulary expressing a deeply spiritual element.
At the time of her death, there was a huge group of work, over 1200 paintings of varying. Some are epic in their size, measuring over 10′ in height. However, none were ever displayed publicly in her lifetime and she stipulated that it not be allowed to be exhibited until twenty years after her death. for fear that it would not be understood in that present time. Little did she know that it would actually be more than forty years before it came to light in an exhibit in 1986. In recent years there have been two major exhibits of her work, including this current show at the Serpentine Galleries, which have really pushed her work into the spotlight.
Her recent discovery and the depth of her work has created a quandary fo art historians who struggle to place her in the timeline of art history. Her work was formed independently of and, in most cases, before the abstract movement pioneered by Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian. They don’t know how to categorize her: Is she a pioneer or simply an outsider?
I don’t think this categorization matters. Just take a look at some of these works on display and most likely you won’t care either. The work definitely is in the present and alive. And that is all that matters.
Posted in Poetry, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged Arthur Rimbaud, GC Myers, New Painting, Quote, Red Tree on March 7, 2016| 4 Comments »
I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.
—Arthur Rimbaud
*****************
I was looking for a title for this new painting which is a 24″ by 12″ canvas. I was seeing joy and exhilaration in it as well as the Red Tree being at the pinnacle or highest point. Looking at a list of synonyms for the word pinnacle, I spotted the word steeple. At first I thought it a bit odd, thinking of a steeple only in the context of a church’s architecture.
But then I realized that a steeple is built to be the highest point, reaching upward toward the heavens. I began to think of the many times I had painted my Red Tree on sharp sided mounds that attempted to push it further upward, above the surrounding earth. Was that mound not a steeple of some sort? Were not many of these paintings ultimately about reaching out to unknown forces as well as seeking inner peace?
Looking at this painting, I began to see it clearly as a steeple. A steeple for a place of joy. I guess that’s why the line from poet Arthur Rimbaud at the top fit so well, Though most of the poetry from his very short career is dark and brooding in its imagery, I found the image put forth in this line bright and joyous. It is filled with the energy of self-realization, of the awareness of one’s connection to the cosmos.
Perhaps those swirls in the sky are ropes waiting to be stretched from this steeple to the next…
Posted in Favorite Things, Music, Video, tagged Music, Nina Simone, Sunday Morning Music, Video on March 6, 2016| 1 Comment »
There’s been a huge resurgence as of late in interest in the music and life of the great Nina Simone, who died in 2003 at the age of 70. You hear her music on all sorts of movie and television soundtracks and commercials. There has been a couple of documentaries made of her life ( this includes the highly acclaimed What Happened, Miss Simone? on Netflix) and there are a number of big screen biopics in the works.
The most current and yet to be released project is titled Nina and features Zoe Saldana as Simone. There’s been a lot of controversy over this film as Saldana altered her looks by wearing a prosthetic nose and darkening her skin with makeup. Plus the Simone estate disavows this film and disputes much of the story as it is to be presented in the film.
Even in death, Nina Simone can stir up a hornet’s nest.
She was a unique talent– classically trained as a pianist, supremely gifted as a performer/vocalist and militantly proud of her black heritage during the height of the civil rights era. But she had many other demons and her life was never simple or easy, filled with super highs, crushing lows and many conflicts along the way. It’s no wonder that we find her story perfect fodder for the movies.
Myself, I just love her ability to take a song from another artist and just transform it into something that feels altogether new, feeling like it is her’s alone. She was just a rare talent.
So, for this Sunday Morning Music let’s listen to her take on the Bee Gees’ To Love Somebody. Enjoy and have a great Sunday…
Posted in Current Events, Opinion, tagged Politics, Republicans, Warren Buffett on March 6, 2016| Leave a Comment »
I don’t want to turn this into a political debate but watching the Republicans lately (or for that matter, over the past several years) is a lot like seeing a terrible car wreck. You want to turn away. You want to cover your eyes and make believe it’s not happening. You try to think happy thoughts but, oh, the horror of it all, it won’t go away.
So you have to look, just to see if anyone can somehow miraculously climb from the carnage. All the time there’s this gaping pit of sickness pooling in your gut even while a small grain of self-satisfaction appears as you tell yourself that this was inevitable, that for someone driving that recklessly and with so little regard for others on the road this was bound to happen.
You feel bad for the folks in the car just along for the ride but you know that it was their decision to trust this group of questionable characters (yes, I mean this to be plural) to steer their vehicle.
There was no need for this, no need to drive like maniacs and, despite what they claim, they were not forced off the road by a black man in an Escalade. They were just blinded by their own fears.
Unfounded fears.
Think about it, folks, and try to be honest in remembering how things looked in 2008. We were looking at the collapse of our stock markets and our housing markets while unemployment had skyrocketed in the prior years. Lives were in disarray. Do you believe that things are as bad after the past seven years as these reckless drivers claim? The only thing keeping us from realizing how close we are to some form of prosperity is this promoted and irrational fear.
That’s what Warren Buffett believes and I tend to agree with him. As he said in his 2015 letter to his stockholders in which he makes a compelling and detailed argument (please read it) against this overstated fear that we are on the brink of disaster: while it would be irrational to be excessively optimistic all the time, it’s useful to remember that the greatest deterrent … remains their excessive focus not on what can go right in the future, but on what might go wrong.
Get that? Focus on what can go right, not only on what can go wrong.
Before you go crazy and point out how awful the world is in your eyes, let me point out that I understand that things are not perfect right now. The point is that no time has ever been perfect and none ever will. That is simply the nature of life, especially life in a large and constantly evolving country that has interests all over the world. It’s a shifting puzzle that looks different from day to day. But if you are always told and believe it’s going to look bad, it will look bad.
But some will always see the end of the world coming in the present and some will try to benefit from this. They’re going to want to drive the car, say they know a quicker route and that if you don’t let them at that wheel now you’re all going to die soon.
But give it some thought and trust your own mind, people. The sky is not on fire and the four horsemen are not scourging the land yet. Take the wheel and go with the flow…
***********
The painting at the top is an old piece from about 20 years back that I call The Angst.
Posted in Motivation, tagged Advice, Advice to Young Painters, Kevin Ashton, No, The Power of No on March 3, 2016| 4 Comments »
I spoke informally with a group of college students yesterday during their visit at the West End Gallery in Corning. I was asked to speak briefly about a career as an artist and the absolute need for hard work in achieving this. Whenever I do these things I come away feeling that there were many points that I failed to make, that I somehow left out that one little bit of advice that one of them might find crucial in moving ahead.
I know it’s foolish to think that way. You can’t possibly put all the things you want to get across into a fifteen minute belch of words and even if you could, how much would get through in a meaningful way?
While I did focus on the need find something they can express with passion and the need to work hard, I forgot one thing that I really wanted to stress– the sacrifice that is required for excellence. The sacrifice that requires one to learn how to say “No” to many things.
To that end, I thought I would rerun a post from a few years ago that features a most enlightening article. Hopefully, one of those students will read this and find something in it:
There’s an interesting article on the website Medium by tech pioneer Kevin Ashton (best known for coining the phrase “the internet of things“) called Creative People Say No. In it he talks about how productive creatives —productive is the key word here– understand the limitations of their time here and as a result weigh every request for their time against what they might produce in that time. It immediately struck a chord with me as I have known for many years that my time as both a living human and artist are limited and that for me to ever have a chance of capturing that elusive intangible answer that goads me forward, always just a step ahead of me and just out of sight, than I have to mete out my time judiciously. We have X numbers of hours and doing something other than that which I recognize as my purpose represents a real choice.
Ashton echoes my own feelings when he writes: Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the work of becoming expert through study and practice, the work of finding solutions to problems and problems with those solutions, the work of trial and error, the work of thinking and perfecting, the work of creating. Creating consumes. It is all day, every day. It knows neither weekends nor vacations. It is not when we feel like it. It is habit, compulsion, obsession, vocation.
So, over the the last 15 years, I have wrestled over every choice that takes time away from the studio, in most cases declining invitations to all sorts of functions and putting off travelling and vacations. Even a morning cup of coffee with friend or family requires serious debate. For a while I thought I was agoraphobic but I know that’s not the case. I just view my time here on Earth as extremely limited and shrinking at a constant rate with each passing day
It reminds me of a conversation I had with a painter friend a number of years ago. He had brought up the name of a well-known artist whose work he admired who was incredibly productive. My friend bemoaned the fact that he himself wasn’t as productive and wondered how this person could do so much. In the conversation he told me about all the activities that his life held– traveling , classes, music sessions with friends and time with his kids. I couldn’t bring myself to point out that he would have to start sacrificing something in order to be as productive as this other artist. It was obvious that his X amount of hours were spent differently than the other artist, who I should point out also had a studio staff with a manager and several assistants to boost his productivity. My friend made the choices that he felt were right for him and who could argue that his kids didn’t deserve even more of his time?
I think of this conversation quite often when I am faced with a choice other than spending time in the studio. Even writing this blog entry is gnawing at me because it has exceeded the amount of time I want to spend on it this morning. That being said, I am going to stop right here and get back to that thing that I feel that I have to do.
Read the article. It’s a good essay.
Redtree Times 