Redtree Times

Hard Running– Part of the June Principle Gallery Show

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.

― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

I am not a sailor but I do understand the allure. The idea of the freedom of movement, the feeling of being engaged with the forces of nature, the absolute solitude and independence, the escape from the worries ashore, and the accompanying peril that requires knowledge and skill in order to survive are powerful lures.

There may be little to compare for us landlubbers. Perhaps those rock climbers who attempt free climbs  El Capitan and other great rock faced mountains without ropes. That might be close. But I don’t know if there’s a moment when they can relax and just ride for a moment with the wind in their hair as they glide over the surface.

For a free climber, if you’re gliding over the surface with the wind in your hair, you’re most likely plummeting to the bottom of the cliff.

And I’ve been told that is not a good thing.

So, not being a sailor, I am forced to be content with imagining the feel of it. Maybe this imagined feel is why I enjoy painting my boat pieces so much.

A vicarious thrill.

The piece at the top, a 16″ by 20″ painting on aluminum panel, is titled Hard Running and is slated to be part of my annual June show at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA. This painting certainly felt like a vicarious thrill for me while I was at work on it.

I tried to imagine the feeling of riding over those choppy seas, tried to imagine the sheer thrill and the sense of accomplishment as it felt as though the boat’s sails were locked tight to the winds.

Like I said, little to compare here it to here in my studio in the woods. Perhaps the closest thing I have is my imagining and the thrill that comes when it appears on a surface.

And that is often enough for me.

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ANTIGONISH

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today,
Oh how I wish he’d go away!

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall,
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door…

Last night I saw upon the stair,
A little man who wasn’t there,
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away….

-William Hughes Mearns, 1899

The poem above is said to be about ghost that haunted a home in Antigonish, Nova Scotia back int he 1890’s. It is sometimes cited as at least a partial inspiration for the 1970 Davd Bowie song, The Man Who Sold the World. You can see bits of the influence in the first stanza of the song’s lyrics:

We passed upon the stair
We spoke of was and when
Although I wasn’t there
He said I was his friend
Which came as a surprise
I spoke into his eyes
I thought you died alone
A long long time ago

The song is also said to be about Bowie’s internal conflict about how much of himself he was willing to bare in order to sell his music. It’s a question every artist in any creative field has to face and answer for themselves.

These things, his personal thoughts and feelings, Bowie saw as his world and his willingness to sell it all for money sometimes seemed a bridge too far.

After all, if you sell the world, where do you live?

When I hear the song, I often think of a different meaning for it, one that doesn’t really match the lyrics. It always makes me think of the ultra-wealthy and powerful who are so willing to trade the lives and homelands of others for their own gains, to satisfy their own thirst for acquisition.

More, more, more…

We see it time and time again. Those who are willing to sell the world are the source of most of the problems in this world now and through the ages. You see it in Putin’s War in Ukraine. You see it here in the States in the willingness of one party to throw aside all principles and morals, abandoning democracy to regain power.

So many willing to sell the world.

But again, if you sell the world, where do you live?

Here’s the song for this week’s Sunday Morning Music.

Now get off my lawn.

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Most people immediately think of Roberta Flack when they think of the song The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, and for good reason. Her 1972 version was  truly beautiful and deserved every bit of the acclaim it earned. But the song didn’t originate with her and has had many versions through the years, including one of my favorites from Johnny Cash, which you can hear below. 

The song’s history began in 1957. It was written by Ewan MacColl,  a British folk singer who is a very interesting character in his own right. He was a married man who fell in love with the much younger Peggy Seeger, the half-sister of folk icon Pete Seeger. He later married Seeger. 

MacColl wrote the song about her and for her to perform. She needed a song for a play she was appearing in here in the USA so MacColl wrote the song and taught it to her via the telephone as he was barred from entering the States because of his Communist ties. As I said, he was an interesting character.  Her original version is lovely with different phrasing than the better known Flack version. I’ve also included a similarly performed and charming version from Peter, Paul and Mary.

Cash’s version is much more ponderous. It is from his American series near the end of his life. His voice was weaker and even rawer than in his younger days but Cash used it in an incredibly expressive way, giving the song the feeling of a dirge as he looked back from a point near the end of his and his wife’s life, to an earlier time in his life and the fresh discovery of love. It is both beautiful and sad. 

Just a great song.

I ran this post on this date ten years ago and it seemed to fit for reasons that I don’t want to share here. And the reasons don’t really matter because as I said, it’s just a great song.

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Baseball is like church. Many attend, few understand.

― Leo Durocher

Looking For the Curve– Part of the June Principle Gallery Show

Leo the Lip was right.

When I flipped on the tube early yesterday morning the first thing that greeted me was someone on a news show telling me that the Yankees/Red Sox season opener was already rained out. I had been anticipating the game for weeks and was totally primed for a day in the studio with the game on, a Spring afternoon pleasure that seldom comes around.

Baseball is a game whose pace and rhythm fits perfectly with painting for me. It is, as someone noted, a conversational game, one that you can keep up with even as you are engaged in some other activity, like talking to your neighbor in the next seat or, in my case, pondering which color or brush to use next. There are useful and numerous pauses in baseball unlike most other sports whose constant motion require your full attention.

But the rains came and washed out my long-expected game. I then made an executive decision and cancelled Opening Day, moving it back until today.

Of course, my decision didn’t hold much water and the other scheduled games went on despite my edict.

But I guess I am glad they did. After all, with so much tragedy and tension in this world right now, who could begrudge anyone a respite with some Opening Day joy at the ballpark?

Not me, that’s for sure.

So, I’ll regroup and try to make today my Opening Day. I am sure it will just as sweet.

Unless the Yankees– god forbid!— lose to the rival Bosox. That could ruin a guy’s day.

Let’s hear an old baseball song to mark the day. This is a tune that is from 1912, the year that the Red Sox won the second of their 9 World Series championships and 11 years before the Yankees won the first of their 27 World Series titles in 1923. It’s been around awhile and this is a modern remake made for the great Ken Burns series on the game. It’s a mouthful but this is If You Can’t Make A Hit At The Ballgame, You Can’t Make A Hit With Me.

Oh, and the painting shown is a new one called Looking For the Curve which will be part of my annual June show at the Principle Gallery. Really enjoyed painting this piece. Maybe it was the anticipation of this day.

I don’t know.

Now, Play Ball!

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Graveyard Shift– At the West End Gallery

Some folks like working the graveyard shift. I know a number of people who have worked it and relished that shift. Less muss and fuss, especially in those jobs that deal with people. My mom worked for about a decade on that shift as an aide in a local nursing home and I know several corrections officers who have spent a lot of time working the graveyard shift in local prisons. I can understand opting for that shift in those jobs.

But I never enjoyed my experience on that shift. I am just not wired for sleeping during daylight and the way it messes with your eating patterns and such. After a while, I always felt sort of zombie-like when working on that shift.

I worked the shift as a waiter at a Perkins pancake house for many months before moving to the dayshift and eventually falling into this career. Dealt with a lot of drunk guys and idle kids who just wanted to find a place to sit and drink coffee and smoke, back when smoking was allowed in restaurants. The kids were fine for the most part, but the drunks tested one’s patience greatly. I can’t even imagine dealing with those guys now.

I also did it for a while early in my working life in the old A&P factory in Horseheads, a huge building with a 37-acre roof that processed a huge variety of foods. It was a weird vibe in that place during the graveyard shift. During the dayshifts when all the lines were running, the huge space was filled with workers and was a beehive of activity.

But at night, most lines shut down and the cavernous spaces became still and ghostlike, blackness contrasting against the harsh fluorescent lights. It often felt like the vast empty hotel in The Shining.

And I was Jack.

I worked one job there where I worked completely alone all night in a huge space making fondant. Fondant is the dense sugar/corn syrup base for many candies that were made there. Turning old cast iron valves, I would fill the large steam kettles with liquid sugar and corn syrup. Then just wait as it cooked then went transferred it to a large beater that churned it into a thick heavy paste that would empty into these little stainless-steel carts, each holding about 400 pounds of the stuff.

I would line these carts up to be ready for the dayshift when the space would come alive again with human activity.

I felt sort of like a ghost on that job. It was boring and hot and isolating. Even the breaks were weirdly different. The cafeteria, normally loud with chatter and laughter, held only a handful of workers who often seemed to sit in an absolute silence with a sort of dazed, blank look on their faces.

It was the same look I had long noticed when I worked the dayshift and would pass the graveyard shifters as they left the building, squinting at the daylight as they shuffled slowly towards the parking lot. They had a blankness in their faces that was hard to miss.

I often thought of them as empty cartridges and would always be grateful that I wasn’t on that shift at that instant, feeling that drained-by-a-vampire feeling.

I am glad there are people who like that shift and do the needed work that can only be done in those hours. I salute their efforts. But, man, it makes me appreciate what I do now.

Here’s a song from Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band. It’s called, of course, The Graveyard Shift.

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The Understanding– At Principle Gallery, Alexandria, VA

Because we want to be inwardly secure, we are constantly seeking methods and means for this security, and thereby we create authority, the worship of another, which destroys comprehension, that spontaneous tranquility of mind in which alone there can be a state of creativeness.

― Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom

I am not going to expound any more this morning. Just going to let the image of the painting and the words of Krishnamurti hang out there.

You can fill in the blanks, if you so desire.

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The sadness that there’s no way to convey a powerful memory to people who weren’t there at the same time.

–The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

I came across this word, aulasy, in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows after posting yesterday’s blog entry. For those of you wondering where the word came from, aulasy is a contraction of Auld Lang Syne, the Scottish term for times long past.

Reading this made me smile a bit wistfully because it describes a feeling I often have when I write about my work and how it came about. This is especially so in those posts that rely on memories or recollections that loom large in my mind.

I often come away thinking: Why should anyone care about this?

It’s the same feeling I have described here before in talking about sharing stories I’ve gleaned from doing my family’s genealogy. Sometimes when I am telling a tale, a certain faraway look comes to the eyes of the listener, a dull glaze that tells me that my story has overstayed its welcome. I can see that, even if it’s the story of their own ancestor, it has no meaning or connection to them.

I usually quickly wrap it up at that point. You want others to share what you believe to be a powerful memory but sometimes you can’t make that emotional link of story or image to others. So, I carry away a dull bit of sorrow at not being able to have them make that same connection.

The Dictionary description of aulasy uses the example of showing your childhood home or a family photo to a friend and realizing neither has any meaning to this friend. It’s just another house or another face to them because they don’t carry the weight of memory that you attach to these things.

Of course, it’s a reciprocal feeling. I have sometimes felt my own eyes glaze over when the shoe is on the other foot though I often do like hearing others’ family stories or looking at family photos. Their stories and photos are often interesting– sometimes funny or tragic– and informative. They provide me with further evidence of our interconnectedness.

But it’s never with the same emotional link that the person telling the story or sharing the photos possesses.

And at such times I empathize with their own sense of aulasy.

Despite this feeling of aulasy, I will probably keep on sharing stories and memories, photos and old work. Just connecting with a single person with any one of these things makes it worth the risk of feeling this small bit of sorrow once in a while.

For example, the old painting from 1994 at the top is a depiction of Eldridge Park, a small amusement park that was in the shadows of the Thatcher Glass plant in Elmira Heights. By 1994, it had fell into disrepair and was closed.

Most of the buildings that were there in 1994 are gone but it has been resurrected in a way though not as a true amusement park. It is more of a community gathering space now. But for those folks who knew the park in the many decades before it closed, there is a flood of memories, photos, and stories to be shared.

I would share some of mine, but I have had enough aulasy this morning…

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Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.

–Thomas Hardy

I am running late this morning so thought I would share this post from eight years back. It’s about coming across some early formative work and realizing the amount of time that has passed. It’s like it has slipped away while I sat here totally unaware.

But more than that, it is about the excitement that comes in the creation of new work. The thrill of seeing something tangible grow under your hand that excites your senses and speaks to you is the same today as it was when I felt those feelings when painting these pieces 28 years ago. I know because I have felt it in recent days and in my experience as an artist, it remains the driving force.

I came across a group of work the other day and realized that they were from a week almost exactly twenty years ago when I had worked on them. For instance, the piece at the top was done twenty years ago yesterday. The sheer idea of twenty years passing seemed fantastic in the moment. So much has happened and so many things changed over that time, yet I still feel new in what I am doing, still feel like the person who looked with wonder at the painting above.

There have been only a few moments, most in the last year [2014] or so, when this passing of time has fully sunk in and I feel as though I am truly a veteran at what I do, feel as though I am what might be termed an “established artist.” Maybe seeing these pieces will cement that feeling in place.

Looking at them, I can see how my confidence was burgeoning in my work as I began to better understand the materials I worked with and how to control them. It was all about learning control at that time. At the time these were painted I was still torn over how and what I would paint. I still didn’t fully understand the importance of personal vision and was only trying to harmonize forms and color in a pleasing way. The work still captured emotion, but it was simply a by-product of being immersed in the process so deeply that it could not help but reflect what I was feeling internally.

As I said, I still feel very much like that same person from twenty years ago. Outside of my marriage, this is the only thing that I have stuck at for so long and that is probably due to the ever-changing and constant sense of newness and wonder it produces. That same feeling that I felt years ago when I painted these is still felt today when I work on something new. Thankfully, that is one thing that has not changed.

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In the Pocket of Time, 2014

Time is endless in thy hands, my lord.
There is none to count thy minutes.

Days and nights pass and ages bloom and fade like flowers.
Thou knowest how to wait.

Thy centuries follow each other perfecting a small wild flower.

We have no time to lose,
and having no time we must scramble for a chance.
We are too poor to be late.

And thus it is that time goes by
while I give it to every querulous man who claims it,
and thine altar is empty of all offerings to the last.

At the end of the day I hasten in fear lest thy gate be shut;
but I find that yet there is time.

–Rabindranath Tagore, Endless Time

I think about time often. Maybe too often. I don’t know.

Maybe it’s the fact that our time here is limited. You can’t gather and hoard time and our time on this earth is finite. As Tagore writes above: We have no time to lose,/ and having no time we must scramble for a chance./ We are too poor to be late.

Unlike the deity to which Tagore is comparing his earthly self, our time is not endless.

But it must be enough.

I guess that means that we should make each moment count for something.

I don’t know anymore.

I feel guilty talking about our limited time in the light of the Russian atrocities being exposed in Ukraine in recent days. Those people, those civilians, in those mass graves or lying in the streets after being executed, with hands bound behind their backs, came unwillingly to the end of their time here. They didn’t have the luxury of thinking about the limits of time while being safe and warm and full bellied.

Was their time enough?

Makes me wonder what we can do, without sounding hyperbolic or overly hawkish. I don’t want a war, don’t want to sacrifice the time of others’ lives. But all that I can think is that something must be done now, even if it comes at a great price.

Once evil has stepped forward and shown itself, it must be confronted, or it will take us to unspeakable depths.

History teaches us that all too well. But we hold on to a belief that this time, this emergence of evil, will be somehow different, that we can just go without being affected, that we can go on worrying about our remaining time with no concern for preserving the time of others. 

That’s the same belief folks in Europe in the late 1930’s held. We here in America certainly felt that way. There was little forethought and little belief that evil was moving in on them. Just a belief that it would all work out without them needing to spend a moment of their precious time on it.

I saw a sign from a recent rally in support of Ukraine that said: If you’re wondering what you would have done against the Nazis, you’re doing it now.

That says it all. We all want to believe we would react differently if we were faced with such a situation. That we would have surely recognized what was happening and would reacted heroically.

But maybe we are facing a form of it now. Like those folks in the 1930’s, we have no way of telling what will happen, that the worst might possibly come to be while we sit, disbelieving what we are seeing.

Hindsight is of little comfort when facing evil.

History teaches that whenever evil and barbarism shows its true face, we must fight against it. To paraphrase Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Anne Applebaum: Not so that the worst might not happen again. No, because the worst will happen again if we don’t fight against it.

That’s my early Sunday morning rant for the week. Thank you for your time, if you stayed with this to this point. For this week’s Sunday Morning music, here’s a song from my beloved Kinks that I haven’t heard in years, Time Song.

Seemed to fit.

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Ascendant– 2013

Now, you can say that I’ve grown bitter but of this you may be sure
The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
And there’s a mighty judgment coming, but I may be wrong
You see, you hear these funny voices in the Tower of Song

–Leonard Cohen, Tower of Song

Feeling a little behind schedule on the work for my shows so I feel a nagging need to get to work quickly this morning.

The good part is that the work is percolating at the moment, the next piece starting to take shape in my mind while the piece I am at work on is still on the easel. I am very single-minded with my focus in most things, often to my detriment, so I am always thrilled when this multi-channel thinking arrives around this time of year.

It’s usually a good sign that everything is functioning well and that good work is ahead. Let’s hope.

Anyway, I saw that Willie Nelson just released his rendition of a Leonard Cohen song, Tower of Song, that is a favorite of mine. The original from Cohen is the gold standard, of course, but Tom Jones did a marvelous cover a few years back and Willie adds a little of his own charm to it here. I could see any aging singer adding it effectively to their repertoire.

Anyway, give a listen and let yourself out after your done, okay? I’ll be happily at work so the goodbye is implied.

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