Redtree Times

Archaeology: Deja Vu

If I had ever been here before
I would probably know just what to do
Don’t you?

If I had ever been here before
On another time around the wheel
I would probably know just how to deal
With all of you

And I feel
Like I’ve been here before
Feel
Like I’ve been here before

And you know
It makes me wonder
What’s going on
Under the ground

Do you know?
Don’t you wonder
What’s going on
Down under you?

We have all been here before
We have all been here before

We have all been here before
We have all been here before

–David Crosby, Déjà Vu

David Crosby died yesterday at age 81. Lived one of those lives that was probably three or four jammed into one. Probably better to say that with the life he lived, he probably could have died three or four times before yesterday. Hard to overstate his influence. Even if you weren’t a big David Crosby or CSN or CSN&Y or Byrds fan, there is no disputing the distinctive sound and weight of their music. One of the defining voices of the Woodstock era and beyond.

I decided to play one of his songs below, the title track from Déjà Vu, the first album in 1969 from the band newly constituted as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. It works out especially well because the new painting at the top is titled Archaeology: Déjà Vu. 

This piece is my first new Archaeology painting in a several years and probably the smallest of the series, coming in at 3″ by 5.” Like the painting from yesterday’s post, this new piece marks a return to watercolor on paper and is headed to the West End Gallery for their annual Little Gems show that opens in February.

I have been itching to get back to this series for a while and thought a piece or two for the Little Gems show would be a good way to begin revisiting the Archaeology series, which first appeared in 2008. I am pleased with this first foray back into the series. For me, it takes a different sort of concentration and approach than my normal work. It works in a different headspace with a different focus which is probably why I drifted away from the series over the years.

I knew it was always there waiting when I wanted to venture back into that space. Now seems like the right time. Doiing this first new piece certainly gave me a feeling of déjà vu. Felt familiar but new. Like the song says- And I feel Like I’ve been here before.

RIP David Crosby. Here’s his song, Déjà Vu.

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The Song That Brought Me Here

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

–Martin Buber, The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1955)

Been busy trying to get a new group of small paintings together for the annual Little Gems show at the West End Gallery, which opens this year on February 10. This year will be my 29th year showing in the Little Gems show which was the first show, back in 1995, in which I ever displayed my work publicly. It’s been a favorite show ever since.

That brings me to the little piece shown here, a 3″ by 4″ watercolor on paper. The first of my pieces I am displaying for this show, it is a return to my roots in a way.

Just some water, pigment and a bit of paper.

Those things that set me on the journey that I have been on for the past 29 years or so, the things that brought me here. I certainly had no idea back then that a bit of paint and something on which to put it would end up being my life, would provide for me a way of living and thinking that I never knew of beforehand.

Fittingly, this small piece is titled The Song That Brought Me Here.

29 years ago, that song was still forming, the tune not quite fully composed. I don’t know that this song will ever be complete. And maybe that’s the way it should be. Maybe it’s a song that keeps adding verses, shifting its notes and sometimes changing its tempo and timing.

The same but never the same song.

Whatever the case, it’s the one song I know inside and out.

Here’s a song from longtime favorite Martin Simpson. The title of this song inspired the title for this painting. This is Trouble Brought Me Here.

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Bruised Orange-At the Principle Gallery

Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.

-John Quincy Adams

I don’t what made this pop into my head but I was thinking about a conversation from a few years back that I had with a friend who is also a painter. He has been a working artist for almost his entire adult life, fairly successful for much of that time. We both agree that we are extremely fortunate to have found the careers that we have, one that feels like a destination rather than a passageway to some other calling.

For me, I knew this was the career for me when I realized I no longer looked at the job listings in the classified section of the paper. For most of my life, I felt there was something else out there that would satisfy me but I didn’t know what it was or how to find it. Maybe it was as simple as finding the right job. Or so I thought.

When you don’t know where you’re going, any direction feels like it might be the right direction.

But during this particular conversation this friend asked, “What would you do if you suddenly couldn’t paint? What if you were suddenly blind?”

For him, it was unthinkable. His life of creation was totally visual, based on expressing every emotion in paint.

I thought about it for a second and said simply, “I’d do something else. I’d find a way.”

In that split-second I realized that while I loved painting and relished the idea that I could communicate completely in paint, painting was a mere device for self-expression. But it was not the only way to go. I knew then as I know now that the deprivation of something that has come to mean so much to me would, in itself, create a new need for expression that would somehow be satisfied. I have always marveled at the people who, when paralyzed or have lost use of their arms, paint with their toes or their mouth. Their drive to communicate overcame their obstacles. Mine would as well.

If blinded, I could or do something with words or sounds, using them to create color and texture. Perhaps not at the same level as my painting but it might grow into something different given the circumstance. The need to communicate whatever I needed to communicate would create a pathway.

It was an epiphany in that moment. Just knowing that I had found painting gave me the belief that I could and would find a new form of expression if needed.

I did it once and I could do it again. And I found that greatly comforting.

Yes, I’d find a way…

This is one of my more popular posts, originally running here back in 2009.I rerun it every few years, mainly as a reminder to myself to appreciate those things that sometimes become taken for granted in our lives– our health, our senses, our abilities, and so on. Losing any of these things requires a change of course on our journey and few of us enjoy the idea of change.

But it is the only path we have and the only thing I know is to then keep pushing on. Whatever is lost, the power to change and adapt remains.

I looked for a song to add to this post and came across one from Beck. I had been a fan of his work in the 90’s but he fell off my radar over the years. I discovered that he had suffered a serious spinal injury while filming a music video in 2005. It caused him great pain to move or sing and, after a while, he stopped touring and performing live. He was forced to change his output, moving more to the production side of the business, producing records for other artists.

I came across an article that described the new path he faced:

Beck admits that he wondered if he’d ever return to the form which catapulted him into the spotlight as one of the fresh, new, postmodern artists of the 90s. “An executive said he thought I was better as a producer than as an artist… I kind of took that to heart. I considered doing other things, like putting out books, or I don’t know, making T-shirts?”

In other words, he would find a way. After a period of musical inactivity, Beck released Morning Phase in 2014. It won the 2015 Grammy for Best Album. Beck did find a way. This is Waking Light from that album.

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James McNeill Whistler- Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Chelsea Snow, 1876

Why should not I call my works ‘symphonies’, ‘arrangements’, ‘harmonies’, and ‘nocturnes’?… The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell. My picture of ‘Harmony in Grey and Gold’ is an illustration of my meaning – as snow scene with a single black figure and lighted tavern. I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that spot. All that I know is that my combination of grey and gold is the basis of the picture. Now this is precisely what my friends cannot grasp.

–James McNeill Whistler, In a letter to ‘The World’, London 22 May, 1878

The painting at the top from James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) is called Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Chelsea Snow. He originally called it Harmony in Grey and Gold and has also used the titles Nocturne: Grey and Gold Snow and Chelsea Nocturne.

But the fact that the title jumped around a little bit is not the point here. It’s his description of how he viewed his work during the process of creation as compared to how others viewed it after it was complete that interests me.

He often described and titled his work in musical terms such compositions, harmony, nocturne, symphony, and so on. His work was very much more about capturing rhythms, mood, and harmonies than on narrative or subject matter.  He describes just that in the excerpt from his letter to a London newspaper shown above. He doesn’t care that the dark figure in the snow approaching the light of the Chelsea pub creates a narrative.

His interest in that figure is in how it creates a balance and harmony within the composition. The storyline means nothing until the harmony and balance is created.  The narrative is formed afterwards and is as much the creation of the viewer as it is of the artist.

This is a way of working and creating that I can understand. Generally, the driving concern of my painting is to find rhythm, harmony, and balance on the surface. Or mood. Sometimes in doing this, elements are added to the painting that give rise to a storyline. But that doesn’t matter at that point in the process because the primary purpose for that element at that time is as a way of creating balance or harmony in the composition.

Like adding a note or phrase that seems to be missing in a line of music.

I’ve always admired Whistler’s Nocturnes and Harmonies, especially those that had no apparent narrative. They are all harmony and balance, pure mood and feeling. No story needed. It’s good to spend some time looking at these now. They remind me of the aspects of painting that sometimes get less attention than they deserve or need. There’s always something to be taken away from such work.

James McNeill Whistler- Nocturne in Grey and Silver,1875

James McNeill Whistler- Nocturne in Black and Gold, 1877

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Marc Chagall– The Betrothed and Eiffel Tower, 1913

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

–Marc Chagall

Monday. Let’s just look at a couple of Chagall paintings, okay? Can’t go wrong that way.

Plus, his advice above is some that I have found to be true and try to emulate in my own work. I have found that concepts that form intuitively in the moment almost always prove to be more natural and lasting than those that are thought out in the mind. Work formed in and directed by the unconscious part of our brain usually possesses an organic reality that can’t be matched by the workings of our conscious brain.

I have talked about this in past gallery talks. Instinct over intellect– the fact that we our conscious mind can’t match the power of our intuitions and instincts because we are simply not as smart as we believe ourselves to be.

The work of the heart always outshines that of the head.

If you need further proof, just look at these Chagalls.

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             Seasons of Hell (?)

I ran down to the levee
But the Devil caught me there
He took my twenty dollar bill
And he vanished in the air

Set out runnin’ but I take my time
A friend of the Devil is a friend of mine
If I get home before daylight
I just might get some sleep tonight

—Friend of the Devil, Grateful Dead

As I have mentioned earlier, I’ve been cleaning up my studio. Throwing out junk that piled up over the past couple of decades. Some of it is stuff whose format and use is now outdated. Some is just stuff who I thought might someday prove useful. Twenty years has proven that it is has not been useful at all except to clutter up the place.

I ended up with a huge pile of 4″ x 6″ sheets of photo paper. I used to buy packs of HP printer ink that would include these large packs of this photo paper and while I seldom used it, I could never bring myself to just throw it out. But now I was facing a pile of hundreds, if not thousands, of sheets of this paper with no intent of printing photos on them.

Yet I didn’t want to just throw them out. I began to wonder if I could employ them somehow in my work. Maybe use them to create a series of small pieces like the ones I have periodically done for myself over the years. These are usually done quickly and with short slashy marks, starting with one quick slash then inevitably turning into the same faces that populated my Multitudes series of a few years ago. Faces that have been with me my whole life.

Occasionally, there have been bits of profanity scrawled on these pieces. It’s a kind of release, a scream into the void.

Maybe I could do something similar with these sheets of photo paper, if only for myself?

        Seasons of Hell  (?) No.1

I started by putting a quick layer of black watercolor paint down. Then, after they black has dried, a quick mark. It was the beginning of a nose. Slash followed slash and a nose, brow and face began to emerge.

In the moment, I decided that there would be at least the whites of the eyes in these figures. The faces of the Multitudes series had black voids for eyes, which gave them a more masklike appearance. That’s how I have come to see them– as being masks rather than faces. Having the whites of the eyes allows the face to show more thought and emotion.

I wanted these to be done with quickness and not a lot of thought. I wanted them to feel instinctive rather than studied. Coarse, not fine.

To that end, I decided in the moment to have a simple line of fire in the background for this piece and all the ones to follow. Simple yet compelling, an element that the figures could react to. It gave this first piece a sense of doom, like a character trapped in Hell, or at least his own form of Hell.

It worked for me. I immediately attached the title of the Arthur Rimbaud book of poetry, A Season in Hell, to the series. While I like much of it, I am an overly enthusiastic fan of Rimbaud’s work and didn’t see or desire these pieces tied to his work. But that title speaks volumes on its own. Rimbaud, who died in 1891 at the age of 37, wrote this book when he was 19 and never wrote any more literature after the age of 20. A Season in Hell has been very influential with artists and poets over the past century.

I ended up compromising and referring to these pieces as the Seasons of Hell. There are 15 of them right now and I am sure there will be many more before I move past this. I don’t know what will become of them. This post may be the only time I show any of them. They might be just for me or for someone in the future after I am dead and gone. Maybe someone will be cleaning out the detritus of my studio and come across a box with 100’s of these faces staring out at them. Maybe they will mean something to that person or maybe they will just get a glimpse before chucking them into the dumpster.

Who knows?

I like creating them and for now, that is enough. I get the feel I am liberating both them and myself in the process. The benefit is that this sense of liberation transfers to my other work. We’ll see where that goes as well.

For this Sunday Morning Music, here’s the Grateful Dead with their classic Friend of the Devil. The guys in these new pieces are undoubtedly familiar with the song. And the Devil.

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Absorbed– Now at Principle Gallery

And really the purpose of art – for me, fiction – is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have.

–Jerzy Kosiński, Conversations with Jerzy Kosiński, 1993

Awareness of possibility.

Maybe that’s the purpose of art, much as late author Jerzy Kosiński points out above. Sounds right to me. It does seem like the potential for meaningful moments is always in the present– if we are alert to the possibility.

In our day-to-day struggles, our senses often become dulled and our eyes soon pass over the moments without actually seeing what they contain. Beauty. Poetry. Music. Drama. The gamut of emotions.

Art of all sorts is an attempt at giving us back that vison of the possibility. The possibility of meaningful moments. Magic moments.

Okay, this was all a guise to get to play This Magic Moment from the late and great Ben E King from his time with The Drifters. But even so, the sentiment holds real truth. Stay alert– there is magic in every moment.

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Paul Klee, Blossoms in the Night

I was asked yesterday if I talked to my paintings.

Interesting question.

I talk to myself. I talk to animals. I talk to the trees and plants in the surrounding forest. I talk to my car. I talk to my studio, which actually has a name. I talk to ghosts, present or not. Whether any of these things or creatures listen is another matter.

But talk to my paintings?

It immediately brought to mind a section of a famous lecture that I had been reading recently and had really resonated with me. It was On Modern Art, delivered in the 1920’s by Swiss artist and a personal favorite of mine Paul Klee:

Paul Klee, Small Picture of Fir Tree, 1922

May I use a simile, the simile of the tree? The artist has studied this world of variety and has, we may suppose, unobtrusively found his way in it. His sense of direction has brought order into the passing stream of image and experience. This sense of direction in nature and life, this branching and spreading array, I shall compare with the root of the tree.

From the root the sap flows to the artist, flows through him, flows to his eye. Thus he stands as the trunk of the tree. Battered and stirred by the strength of the flow, he guides the vision on into his work. As, in full view of the world, the crown of the tree unfolds and spreads in time and space, so with his work.

Nobody would affirm that the tree grows its crown in the image of its root. Between above and below can be no mirrored reflection. It is obvious that different functions expanding in different elements must produce divergences. But it is just the artist who at times is denied those departures from nature which his art demands. He has even been charged with incompetence and deliberate distortion.

And yet, standing at his appointed place, the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him from the depths. He neither serves nor rules–he transmits. His position is humble. And the beauty at the crown is not his own. He is merely a channel.

This very much sums up how I’ve always felt about art, especially my place as an artist– a mere channel or transmitter.  And when I look at my paintings, the crown of my tree, it is not in the form of a conversation so much as listening to what the paintings have to tell me. I paint because I question and, at best, the paintings provide some answers and insight that I might not find or see otherwise.

So, do I talk to my paintings? Not so much. But do they talk to me? Yes. And I do my best to listen…

This post originally ran in 2010 but I like Klee’s thoughts and run it back out every four or five years. I’m adding some music this time around. The song is I Talk to the Trees from the musical Paint Your Wagon. My choices came down to the movie version from Clint Eastwood or an instrumental version from Chet Baker and Bill Evans. Not a hard decision to make. Here’s Chet and Bill.

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Struggle and Will– At the West End Gallery

I don’t care about the rules. In fact, if I don’t break the rules at least 10 times in every song then I’m not doing my job properly. Emotion is much more important than making mistakes, so be prepared to look like a chump. If you become too guarded and too processed, the music loses its spontaneity and gut feeling.

–Jeff Beck

Jeff Beck died yesterday at the age of 78 after contracting bacterial meningitis. Been a fan of his music almost all my life. He was always at the leading edge of rock music, creating new fields with his forays into jazz fusion. One comment about his career was that it was self-definable, a unique one that played to its own tune, unconcerned with how other viewed it. I liked that description.

I was equally impressed whenever I read excerpts from interviews with Beck. Said a lot of things that I could relate to as a person and an artist. Like the statement above about having little concern for the rules of his art. Substitute the word painting in for music and it matches the attitude I carried with me from my earliest attempts at painting.

Then there’s:

I cherish my privacy, and woe betide anyone who tries to interfere with that.

Or:

If you were to plot my success or failure, it goes, it very seldom stays on a high plateau.

Or:

I like an element of chaos in music. That feeling is the best thing ever, as long as you don’t have too much of it.

That really hits close to the bone.

The world lost an original.

Here’s one of his better-known compositions, Beck’s Bolero. It’s a take on the famed Ravel piece and really pushed the boundaries of the rock genre when it was recorded in 1966.

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Max Beckmann- Still Life with Three Skulls, 1945

All important things in art since Ur of the Chaldea’s, since Tel Halaf and Crete, have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being. Self-realization is the urge of all objective spirits. It is this Ego for which I am searching in my life and in my art. Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement, for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our Ego that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make.

–Max Beckmann, On My Painting, 1938

Max Beckmann- Beginning

Everything intellectual and transcendent is joined together in painting by the uninterrupted labour of the eyes. Each shade of a flower, a face, a tree, a fruit, a sea, a mountain, is noted eagerly by the intensity of the senses to which is added, in a way of which we are not conscious, the work of the mind, and in the end the strength or weakness of the soul… It is the strength of soul which forces the mind to constant exercise to widen its conception of space. Something of this is perhaps contained in my pictures.

–Max Beckmann, On My Painting, 1938

Max Beckmann- Synagogue

Learn by heart the forms to be found in nature, so that you can use them like the notes in a musical composition. That is what these forms are for. Nature is a marvelous chaos, and it is our job and our duty to bring order into that chaos and – to perfect it.

–Max Beckmann, Three Letters to a Woman-Painter, 1948

Max Beckmann- Departure, 1935

A human face, a hand, a woman’s breast or a manly body, an expression of conflicting joy and pain, the infinite ocean, savage crags, the melancholy speech of black trees against the snow, the fierce power of spring blossoms and the heavy lethargy of a hot summer noon when our old friend Pan is asleep and the ghost of noon are murmuring – all this is enough to make us forget the sorrows of the world, or to give them form. In any case the determination to give form to things brings with it part of the solution for which you are seeking. The path is hard and the goal can never be reached – but it is a path.

–Max Beckmann, Three Letters to a Woman-Painter, 1948

Max Beckmann- Blind Man’s Bluff, 1945

What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality. I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality. It may sound paradoxical, but it is in fact reality which forms the mystery of our existence.

–Max Beckmann, The Actors, 1942

Max Beckmann, The Actors, 1942

Wasn’t going to write anything, just let Beckmann’s words and images stand by themselves. But I came across a video with the proper Germanic feel for Beckmann’s images and thought it was worth inclusion. It’s a version of Mack the Knife (Mackie Messer) from Swedish jazz musician/multi-instrumentalist/dancer Gunhild Carling. Exuberant.

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