What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
–Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
What is the meaning of life?
If you’ve read anything here in the past, you know I don’t have an answer to that question. Oh, I try to come up with answers. No doubt about that. And I inevitably come up short.
Maybe there is no real answer.
Maybe we are left with just vague and fleeting hints of some sort of meaning behind the scenes of this ongoing production. Maybe it comes in small acts of love or compassion. Or in a simple word or glance from a stranger. Or in the recognition of your own emotions hidden in a piece of art.
Maybe it as simple as laughing when you’re happy and crying when you’re sad. Or laughing when you’re sad and crying when you’re happy. Either way, works, I guess.
Maybe it is just in feeling something.
Again, I don’t know. But we keep trying to find an answer. Hopefully, we can savor the small glints of light in the darkness…
In Radiance— Now at Just Looking Gallery, San Luis Obispo CA
The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?
–Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1897)
Things to do so I have to be short this morning. Recently sent a group of work, including In Radiance(shown above), out to the Just Looking Gallery in beautiful San Luis Obispo, CA. It’s a longtime, well-established gallery headed up by Ralph Gorton that has represented my work on the West Coast since 2012. They do a great job for me out there.
I thought the passage from Oscar Wilde from the letter, De Profundis, written during his incarceration in the Reading Gaol, served as a fine companion to In Radiance, a 24″ by 24″ canvas, as well as the song below, Beginning to See the Light, from the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed from 1969.
Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
I recently came across the passage above from The Book of Disquiet, the “factless autobiography” of Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet/author, that was published after his death in 1935. Reading it made me look further into the book and I was surprised at how his description of his internal travels lined up with my own. He wrote of the landscapes he saw within while I paint mine.
There is another similar quote from Pessoa that is supposed to come from The Book of Disquiet as well:
The true landscapes are those that we ourselves create. I’ve crossed more seas than anyone. I’ve seen more mountains than there are on earth. The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.
I haven’t been able to find this specific passage in the book yet. I believe it has to do with the variance between the several translations of the book from the Portuguese. However, this one rings even more true for my work. That sentiment of traveling the internal landscape has been the driving force behind my work for my entire career. It manifested itself in the large painting from 2012 shown at the top, The Internal Landscape.
It’s an image that has been shown here a number of times over the years and remains what I would consider a signature piece, a truly representative image of my inner world.
It felt like it needed to be seen again this morning.
Have to run because there are new places to see and explore this morning. In parting, here’s a song that feels like it fits. This is Wide River to Cross from Mavis Staples and the late great Levon Helm.
The great Overdog That heavenly beast With a star in one eye Gives a leap in the east. He dances upright All the way to the west And never once drops On his forefeet to rest. I’m a poor underdog, But to-night I will bark With the great Overdog That romps through the dark
–Robert Frost, Canis Major (1949)
At last weekend’s West End Gallery Talk, I spoke a bit about the ‘I’ll show you’ factor. It was in reference to my experience showing my work for the first time in a gallery back in 1995. Though I had plenty of people stop and examine the work as well as compliment me on it, it was the people who walked by without a glimpse that affected me the most in that moment.
Their casual disregard felt dismissive, making me feel small and overlooked. I felt that my work was not being seen and the voice contained in it was not being heard. I felt a bit bruised in my feelings but at the same time was stirred and angered by the insult of it. I made a vow in that moment that sometime soon my work would make them stop and look, that my voice would be heard.
I know that this sounds small and petty, that I was taking it too personally. And maybe that’s right. But in that moment, the insult of their disregard felt like an existential challenge to my validity, not only as an artist but as a human being.
I was the overlooked underdog at that moment, but I would show them.
You would think almost three decades later that this I’ll show you factor would no longer have a place and would have faded away.
You’d be wrong.
For as much as I often feel seen and heard, there are many times when I still feel the overlooked underdog, both as an artist and a human. I believe this can be a great motivator, making one push beyond one’s perceived boundaries and limits, requiring them to exert maximum effort. It shoves you roughly out of that comfortable feeling of self-satisfaction in your work and yourself that sometimes becomes too much at home.
Again, it might sound small and petty and maybe not conducive to artistic creation. But I have always felt that artistic creation was a matter of showing other people how the world appears to you, what your voice and mind has to offer.
A way of being, as you know it.
And to do so, you sometimes, as an artist and a human, have to be willing to grab people by their collars and yell out your truth.
Maybe the Underdog’s Bark is much the same as Whitman’sBarbaric Yawp?
Riding Rhythm– Now at the Principle Gallery, Alexandria VA
Adventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result—and have been since at least the time of Odysseus—of the fatal act of leaving one’s home, or trying to return to it again. All adventures happen in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one’s home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had: then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret.
–Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road (2007)
It’s one of those August mornings when I woke up feeling a bit unmoored, as though the rootedness I’ve described here recently had slipped away somehow. It’s a feeling of being both antsy and queasy, an uncomfortable one that has my eyes darting and my eyes straining for some undefinable and unknown thing. Something that most likely is not at hand.
Hard to describe, especially if whoever might be reading this has never felt that same sort of anxiety that make you feel as though you are lost in a storm at sea with no shoreline in sight and a sky that gives no clue to where you are or where you’re heading.
Fortunately, I have made it through multitudes of such mornings. To add to the Odysseus reference from the Michael Chabon passage above, it’s a matter of lashing yourself to the mast so that you don’t do something rash and just riding it out. Eventually the sea calms and the skies indicate direction.
Soon, home and all the rootedness it offers will be in sight.
To tell you the truth, just writing this short bit this morning has calmed the seas. Home is at hand.
Here’s this week’s Sunday Morning Music selection, a song that is right in line with this post. It’s a great cover from Bonnie Raitt in 1972 of the classic Steve Winwood song, Can’t Find My Way Home.
He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.
–Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Busy morning and not enough to say to take the time. Instead, here’s a favorite version of the oft-covered classic I’ll Fly Away from Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Good stuff.
I got into the ocean and played. I played on the land too. I also played in the sky. I played with the devil’s children in the clouds. I played with shooting stars in space. I played too long and years passed. I played even when I became a tottering old man. My beard was fifteen feet long. Still I played. Even when I was resting, my dream was playing. Finally I played with the sun, seeing which one of us could be redder. I had already played for ten thousand years. Even when I was dead, I still played. I looked at children playing, from the sky.
–Tozu Norio, There are Two Lives: Poems by Children of Japan, 1970
While Eye in the Sky, this year’s edition of my annual solo exhibit at the West End Gallery, may have ended yesterday, this morning I came across a poem that might have captured in great part the theme of that show. It’s a poem written by an 11-year-old child from Japan, Tozu Norio, published in a 1970 book called There are Two Lives: Poems by Children of Japan.
I could very well envision the ten-thousand-year-old narrator of this poem as the peering eye behind the clouds in a dream from several years ago that provided the basis for this show. The dream was described in the statement for the show that accompanied the blogpost for the title painting from the exhibit, shown here at the top.
I was just struck this morning that a child from Japan, who would now be about my age if the poem was written in the same year as the book’s publication, wrote such a poem as an 11-year-old. The idea that we might share a vision of an ancient overseer who was not a god-like character looking at us from a distant perch in the sky after playing for eons with the sun was an interesting one.
I was not able to find any more info about him and only one citation of the poem itself. Nonetheless, the poem rang bells for me. I enjoyed it very much and am glad to have stumbled across it.
The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy, the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage.
–John Galsworthy, Over the River (1933)
Well, today marks the end of this year’s show, Eye in the Sky, at the West End Gallery. The exhibit comes off the gallery walls after today.
The remaining paintings are taken down and stacked and stored and some are rehung in other parts of the gallery. It is a disassembling of the whole and is, as Galsworthy wrote, an untidy undertaking, the finish to this particular journey.
But it has been a good voyage, one with lessons learned and one that sets up new endpoints for the next. A heartfelt Thank You to all that came to see the show and to those who made it to the Gallery Talk. Your support and encouragement have meant the world to me. Inspiring.
And that sentiment extends and multiplies to Jesse, Linda, and John at the West End Gallery.
They make the untidy undertaking look neat and easy. And that, as you know, is not a small thing.
If you can make it into the West End today, please do before the work in this exhibit begins the next stage in its journey.
It was difficult choosing but I thought this might be a good song to end this exhibit. It’s the great old Woody Guthrie song, Dusty Old Dust, also known as So Long It’s Been Good to Know Yuh. Of course, there’s a world of difference between chased from your home and on the road by the dust storms of the 1930’s and an art exhibit ending. But that final line- I’ve got to be driftin’ along– fits like a glove.
Journey and Light– Show Ends Thursday at West End Gallery!!
Every moment was a precious thing, having in it the essence of finality.
–Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938)
We’re in the last few days of the Eye in the Sky exhibit at the West End Gallery. It comes off the walls after this Thursday, August 24.
It’s always a bittersweet feeling near the end of any show. The finality of the ending begins to set in at this point as the removal of the work from the gallery walls looms. Any artist wishes their work to continue to be featured front and center all the time, so to relinquish the wall space is looked upon with a mix of sadness and begrudging acceptance.
But at the same time, there is a feeling of liberation in the shape of a shift from the present– the work that has been done for these shows– to the future and the new work that has been waiting to get past the obligations of the show so that it might emerge.
Doing two shows every year that are only separated by 5 or 6 weeks makes for a very demanding schedule in the first 8 months of the year. There is a push to produce the needed work followed by the obligatory promotional push that comes with each show. Both are taxing in their own way though I view the promotional part, of which this blog is a big part during the shows, as the more demanding of the two. The creation of the work is energizing and self-propelling. It feels natural and ingrained.
On the other hand, the required writing and posting is a very difficult task for me, often feeling unnatural and awkward. I suppose that is why I gave up the idea of being a writer long ago. Writing even short posts is usually a struggle, leaving me feeling as though I am out of my lane.
Writing simply doesn’t create the same sort of joy in me as does the painting. So, removing it as a promotional task solely about my work and making it more about things that inspire and interest me is a relief around the time this show ends.
I am freed.
But, even so, seeing the show come down is always a bit of a downer. But not in a big way. As you all know, there are much worse things in this world. I certainly do. If this is the biggest downer in my life, I am leading a most enchanted life.
Maybe I am. So don’t expect me to be sobbing any more about it.
I am going to take the advice of Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders with their cover the old Kinks song, Stop Your Sobbing, and start moving ahead into that freed up future.
Well, moving on after telling you once more that my show ends Thursday, August 24, at the West End Gallery.
Redtree Times 