Redtree Times

Diamond in the Moonlight– Coming to Principle Gallery, June 14

Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. Within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That’s why they say, “the game is never over until the last man is out.” Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game.

–W. P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe (1982)

While the Red Tree is the focus of my upcoming June exhibit at the Principle Gallery, I couldn’t resist including a pair of new paintings in the show that feature the baseball diamond.

Deep Right Field- Coming to Principle Gallery, June14

I produce a handful of these pieces every year and they are always among my favorites to paint. I think it might be from the associations formed in my mind from a lifetime of following the game, of rooting for teams and players, of reading about the history of the game, of memorizing stats, and just being captivated by the game.

Even now, while I sometimes struggle to remember details from a week ago (or yesterday!), I still easily remember that Ty Cobb ended his career with a .366 batting average, that the 1941 season featured both Ted Williams achieving the last .400 batting average for a season and Joe Dimaggio having an incredible 56 game hitting streak. 83 years later and both still stand.

Or maybe it’s that Walt Whitman put it in an interview near the end of his life: Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic!

Or maybe it’s the timelessness of the game. While there is now a pitch clock for individual pitches, it is still an untimed game. You go until the last out is called. As the late great baseball writer Roger Angell wrote:

Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.

There might something to that. Angell lived until the age of 101, recording his last out in 2022.

That timeless quality also connects us to tradition and history in a very tangible way. While the game has changed in some ways, it remains the same game played by generations of our ancestors. I found a box score in an old newspaper from a game played in a local industrial league in 1905 where my grandfather was listed as playing outfield. The idea of the guy I knew only as old man roaming the outfield on some diamond as a youth sparked my imagination and made me see him in other ways. Made me wonder what he was thinking in that time and place. It was a connection that I might not make without baseball.

Again, more eloquently put from Roger Angell:

Baseball’s time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors. This is the way the game was played in our youth and in our fathers’ youth, and even back then… there must have been the same feeling that time could be stopped.

These pieces capture that feeling of timelessness for me.

And that’s good enough for me. More than I could ask.

These are from Continuum: The Red Tree at 25, my 25th annual solo exhibit at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA. The show opens with a reception on the evening of June 14, 2024 that I will be attending.

The painting at the top of the page is Diamond in the Moonlight and is 16″ high by 8″ wide on canvas. The one below is Deep Right Field which is 20″ high by 10″ wide.

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First Peace (Wakan-Tanka)— Coming to Principle Gallery, June 2024

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is known that true peace, which, as I have often said, is within the souls of men.

—Black Elk, The Sacred Pipe (1947)

This is another new painting headed in June to the Principle Gallery for my 25th annual solo show. This is a 24″ high by 48″ wide canvas that is titled First Peace (Wakan-Tanka).

The title is taken from the passage from Black Elk, the Oglala Lakota medicine man who died in 1950 after a most interesting life that saw him taking part in some of the important events in the history of the Native American people. As a youth, Black Elk fought at Little Big Horn then later survived the Indian Wars that took place in the aftermath of Little Big Horn as well as the Wounded Knee Massacre, in which he was wounded. He also performed with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, traveling to Europe to perform for Queen Victoria. After his time with Buffalo Bill, he later converted to Roman Catholicism though he still embraced his Native American beliefs and the visions that made him a medicine man. He was able to rectify the seeming differences between the two in such a way that a case for his beatification (sainthood) has been opened by the Catholic Church in recent years.

His words above spoke to me as to what I was seeing in this painting. I saw it as a deep meditation, a finding of some vast inner peace which reflects outward to the world. And in response, the world reflects back in kind. In short, there is beauty and tranquility in this world for those with beauty and tranquility in their souls.

This piece might well represent my own version of Wanka-Tanka, which translates from the Lakota as Great Spirit. Or at least, recognizing that first peace within myself.

It certainly feels that way.

First Peace (Wakan-Tanka) is included in Continuum: The Red Tree at 25 which opens with an evening reception on Friday, June 14, 2024, at the Principle Gallery in beautiful Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. I will be attending the opening. Hope to see you there.

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Anchor- Soon at Principle Gallery, Alexandria

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

–Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

I look at this new painting a lot here in the studio. It’s 30″ by 24″ on canvas that is headed soon to the Principle Gallery in Alexandria for my annual June exhibit there. It’s a piece that gives me great satisfaction. It has a stilling effect on me.

It feels like a piece of Craftsman-style furniture– its beauty not in adornment but in its simplicity, strength and stability. For me, it has the feel of one’s home, no matter how humble it might be, serving as an anchor for their life.

A place of refuge and safety. A place of contentment.

I suppose that is the reason behind the title of this new painting– Anchor.  The Red Tree here serves as a symbolic pillar of strength for the little community of Red Roofs that represent home. The anchor for the anchor.

I thought the passage at the top from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was fitting for this piece, especially that last line: Happiness is never grand. We so often look past the happiness that is at hand and seek it in other places, envisioning how happy we would be if we only had a magnificent house and yachts and planes and all the other trappings of wealth. We don’t just look past the contentment that is available to us at any time– we deny it as we spend our time desiring more and more.

This piece is about recognizing our own contentment in where we are and what we are. About identifying that anchor. It’s a piece that has made me realize how happy I have been in recent days when I took a minute from being busy to simply look at the trees I pass by every day. They often become an unnoticed background as I pass by throughout the day. This piece serves as a reminder to stop and notice them so that I might realize how fortunate I am to have such beauty around me to serve as an anchor.

And I am content in that moment.

All I can ask.

Anchor is included in Continuum: The Red Tree at 25 which opens Friday, June 14, 2024, at the Principle Gallery in beautiful Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. I will be at the opening on the evening of the 14th so I hope you can make it into the gallery so that we might chat.

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Another Memorial Day weekend. The day we remember our fallen soldiers, those who gave their lives to serve and protect this country, this democracy. I’m no historical anthropologist so I can’t be completely certain when I say that I don’t believe there is any one group of people on this planet who have not been touched by war in some significant way.

The history of this world has been written in the bloody ink of war.

A few years back, when I began doing genealogy for the families of my wife and myself, I was surprised at the many, many generations in each of our lines who had taken part in the wars of their times, putting their lives aside to give so much of themselves– in some cases, their very lives– for causes that often might have been mere abstractions to them. I was surprised at the number of our relatives who had died in combat on the soil of this land. In some cases, some were buried far from their homes near the battlefields of the American south.

Part of me is proud that these people have answered the call to be a small part in something bigger. But another part of me is simply sad to think that they were called on to give so much in order to satisfy or deny the baser motives of those in power. War has usually been about greed and acquisition, nationalistic pride or ethnic and religious hatred– in each instance proposed with the greatest conviction and certainty by the leaders of each side of the cause.

And on Memorial Day, we remember the people who actually fulfilled the pleas of these leaders, be they right or wrong. These citizens did what they were asked and what they felt was necessary in their time and place.  And I have nothing but respect for that.

For today’s image, I chose the daguerreotype of the Civil War soldier at the top because there was something in him that seemed to show the sacrifice of war. Maybe it’s the steely stare of his eyes. Or maybe it was his belt that is cinched in to what looks to be a ridiculously tiny diameter, showing how emaciated he appears to be. I’m not exactly sure but there is something in him that seems contemporary, less dated. He looks like he could be the guy behind you in line at the local convenience store.

And for today’s Sunday musical selection, I have chosen the song Ben McCulloch from Steve Earle. It tells the story of two brothers — the guy above was no doubt like them– who enlist in the Confederate Army in the Civil War and discover the hard realities of war as they serve under General McCulloch, who was a real person who died in battle in 1862. The chorus probably echoes the sentiments that many soldiers through time held for their commanding officers as they face overwhelming odds.

I hesitated when choosing this song because I didn’t want it to be seen as glorifying the Confederate dead. I read a couple of Frederick Douglass speeches given in the 1870’s and in that time, there was a growing movement to create an equivalency between the two sides of the Civil War, an effort that continues, unfortunately, to this day.

Douglass pointed out that it was acceptable to honor the courage of the fallen Confederates but it should be forever remembered that they were trying to destroy everything this nation had stood for since its formation and that it should be clearly noted that there was no equivalence between the two sides. Morally, there was a right side and a wrong side.

As Douglass put it:

It was a war of ideas, a battle of principles and ideas which united one section and divided the other; a war between the old and new, slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization; between a government based upon the broadest and grandest declaration of human rights the world ever heard or read, and another pretended government, based upon an open, bold and shocking denial of all rights, except the right of the strongest.

We should never become a country where the rights of the strongest outweigh those of the weakest among us. Hopefully, fewer folks will have to sacrifice their lives to ensure this. So have a good Memorial Day, hopefully one filled with some appreciation of what the day really encompasses.

I run this post every few years on Memorial Day. I thought that Frederick Douglass’ words had added relevance for our current political and cultural moment.  

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Something Beyond– Coming to Principle Gallery, June 2024

“Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of–something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it–tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest–if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself–you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the things we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

I didn’t know how to fully describe what I was seeing in this new painting until I came across the passage above from C.S. Lewis a few weeks ago. That one phrase in it– the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want— very much sums it up for me.

It is the thing that drives the search and fuels both our hopes and doubts. The thing that has us forever scanning the far horizon and continuously listening for that eternal echo that does not die, that stays forever in our ears and mind. That thing that pulls us along with momentary hints hidden in certain aromas, tastes, movements or shapes or shades of color.

To catch a mere glimpse or hear a lingering tone of its echo is enough to propel an unending search, knowing that it is that thing that is always just beyond the next hill.

And the one past that.

It is much like the two-line from Walt Whitman, The Untold Want:

The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted,
Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.

I don’t know that it’s something that can be fully explained in a few paragraphs. It is, after all, the secret signature of each of our souls alone. Only you will know if to speaks to you.

That being said, this painting, Something Beyond, was one of the first paintings completed for this show and it set the tone for me, as far as its intensity of color and feel. It is 30 inches by 20 inches on canvas and is included in my upcoming solo exhibit, Continuum: The Red Tree at 25, at the Principle Gallery, which opens June 14.

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Night’s Dream— At Principle Gallery

The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve;
Lovers, to bed; ’tis almost fairy time.

–William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Been really busy as I prep for my upcoming June show at the Principle Gallery. Of the 25 shows there, this might be the most immersive show I have done. That’s saying something because I generally try to be pretty deeply invested in every show, as far as effort and emotion are concerned.

This one feels like it is somehow different, that it requires more. Not to satisfy anyone other than myself or to somehow validate the past 25 years. I just want to put out a show that feels more definitive– singular and focused. Something where I can say that it was just what I wanted it to be with few if any concessions.

It’s a difficult thing to describe, made even more so by the fact that my writing here has been somewhat set aside as I put more time into the work and the other prep that is required. The work becomes so ingrained that it is hard to put much of it into words. At least, in the short time I am allotting for such things these days.

I thought I’d share one of the few non-Red Tree pieces from the show this morning, a smaller painting (12″ by 16″ on canvas) that I call Night’s Dream. I am just going to leave it without any comment except to say that, for me, the color of the clouds is the icing on this cake.

Here’s a song to accompany your midnight wandering. Here’s Shoot the Moon from Norah Jones. Maybe that would have been a better title for this year’s show? Hmm.

Continuum: The Red Tree at 25 opens Friday, June 14, 2024 at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA. The exhibit runs until July 3. I will be in attendance for the opening.

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American Art Collector Show Preview, June 2024 Issue

Mere change is not growth. Growth is the synthesis of change and continuity, and where there is no continuity there is no growth.

–C. S. Lewis

The new June issue of American Art Collector arrived yesterday. In it there is a pretty good preview of my upcoming show, Continuum: The Red Tree at 25, at the Principle Gallery. By pretty good I mean that that the feel of the images together on the pages truly seem to reflect the visual tone of the show as a whole, which doesn’t always happen. As it says in the opening paragraph, I am seeking maximum visual impact with this show and the group of four images very much represent that aim.

It was good to see them maintain the same effect on the page as they do here in the studio. I view this as a big show for me, one that hopefully punctuates the quarter century run of solo shows at the Principle Gallery with an exclamation point.

The beauty in having this string of solo shows going back to the RedTree show of 2000 is that it demonstrates the synthesis of change and continuity that C.S. Lewis mentions in the quote at the top. I believe there has been real growth in the work over these past twenty-five years that might not have appeared without the continuity of the goal that each year’s show has provided. The goal of this year’s show is to demonstrate the fullness and growth in the work brought on by this continuity.

I think it will do just that but I am usually suspicious of my own impression of such things. I am just too close and invested to the work to be truly objective. But seeing this spread made me feel better about my gut feeling for this show.

Hopefully those who get to the Principle Gallery during its run there will see it the same way.

Continuum: The Red Tree at 25 opens June 14, 2024 at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA. The exhibit runs until July 3.

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Comes a Time– Coming to Principle Gallery Alexandria

Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.

–Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (1988)

There’s an idyllic quality to this new painting that somewhat masks the underlying desire that I see in it. I think that a first glance would lead one to believe this was a dream achieved. In reality, it is only the representation of the dreamer’s hoped-for destination– the imagined and vaguely defined object of the dreamer’s search.

It is an elusive thing, this object of desire that drives the search. Most likely, the dreamer will get but a fleeting glimpse of it. But that momentary burst of its transcendence is ample reward for the travails endured that it took to reach that moment.

When all is said and done, the dreamer finally discovers that the importance comes not in attaining that which you seek but in simply having and maintaining the dream. The search ultimately reveals so many things that the dreamer never thought to imagine in their initial vision and brings an awareness of such things in their life in the real world. 

The search clarifies and deepens. 

I might represent the object of my search as an idyllic landscape but it is probably better defined a search for understanding. And maybe that is what this painting represents for me– the time of arriving at understanding.

There’s more to be said about this painting but I am going to leave it at that this morning. Let’s add a song for this week’s Sunday Morning Music that will make sense since I borrowed its title for this painting, Comes a Time. The song is a longtime favorite from Neil Young and there’s something in it that feels akin to the feel of this painting.

Comes a Time is 36″ high by 18″ wide on canvas and is included in Continuum: The Red Tree at 25, this year’s edition of my annual solo show at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA. This show, which is my 25th with the Principle Gallery, opens June 14, 2024. 

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Held By the Moon-– Coming to Principle Gallery, June

But if you build your life on dreams it’s prudent to recall; a man with moonlight in his hands has nothing there at all.

—Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605)

I wanted a quote or literary passage to open this post about the new painting above and came across the line above from Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It gave me great pause, not only for how I saw it in relating to this painting but in how it might have echoes in my own life.

I have built my life as an artist on the pursuit of dreams, in creating imaginary landscapes, in searching for impossible intangibles that I can’t define, describe, or explain. I seek that things that may not even exist.

Like Don Quixote, it sometimes appears that I might be tilting at windmills.

It makes me wonder if the wooden carved figure of Don Quixote that stands on a stone shelf above me now, given to me by my sister 50-some years ago, was an unconscious hint as to what was in store for me. 

I don’t know how this makes me feel. There’s an aspect to it in which it is sad, much like the seeker who looks to hold the moonlight in their hands finding that they hold nothing at all. There are certainly days when it feels as though the years spent painting have left me with little more than that. But part of me is okay with this idea of appearing as some sort of mad knight on a misguided but chivalrous errand.

There are worst things to be in this world. Or in my imaginary world, for that matter.

I see this painting, Held By the Moon, as being much like Don Quixote. Like him, it has a romantic and larger than life feel to it, probably from the fact that it is a large painting, 48″ high by 36″ wide. The tens of thousands of brushstrokes that make up the sky represent for me the futility of holding on to moonlight. 

It is there but then again, it is not.

You cannot hold it. But it certainly can hold you.

This painting, Held By the Moon, is part of Continuum: The Red Tree at 25, which opens at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA on June 14, 2024. This show marks my 25th solo show at the Principle, a streak that began with my RedTree show in 2000.

I somehow have been holding on to the moonlight for a quarter of a century. Or so I believe…

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On the Blue Side— Included in “Continuum: The Red Tree at 25“, Opening June 14 at Principle Gallery, Alexandria, VA

I once wrote a short story called ‘The Best Blues Singer in the World,’ and it went like this: ‘The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.’ End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I’ve been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story.

–August Wilson

I came across quote above from playwright August Wilson recently. It struck a chord with me, especially as I am in the hectic midst of prepping work for my annual solo show next month at the Principle Gallery. Sometimes when I am surrounded by new work at this point in getting ready for any solo show, the idea that I am constantly rewriting the same story over and over in my own work seems too obvious to ignore. Even more so for a show that focuses strongly on my signature element, the Red Tree.

It used to bother me. I worried that the story I was writing wasn’t good enough or not interesting enough to hold a viewer for too long or that they would simply tire of that ubiquitous Red Tree. 

But over the years, that worrying has faded a bit. Not fully, especially at this point in prepping for a show. But it has become less bothersome. I think some of this has to do with looking at the work of other artists across a variety of mediums. I found that many– maybe most– tell the same story with their work with slight variations and changes. Small additions and subtractions, changes in tone and location, speeding up and slowing down. 

In a NY Times article from April of 2000, Wilson explained that this is because the artist works, like the Balboa in his story, in their own private ocean, one that is fed from tributary streams of their personal and cultural identity, their experiences, thoughts, and beliefs.

Their ocean is their story.

All they are and know. And as they say, a writer should write about what they know firsthand. Wilson put it this way in the article:

Before one can become an artist one must first be. It is this being in all its facets, its many definitions, that endows the artist with an immutable sense of himself that is necessary for the accomplishment of his task. Simply put, art is beholden to the kiln in which the artist was fired.

In short, the story my work attempts to tell is a representation of my personal ocean. I guess in my case, it is more of a landscape than an ocean. It may seem narrow at times but it tells the story I need to tell and in the only way I know how.

As I have recognized this, it feels as though the years have allowed me to hone my story, to fine tune it as though I am constantly rewriting and reediting it.

Or maybe it is more like genetic natural selection. When a piece works in a way that excites or please me now, it feels as though it is a result of the many other paintings that came before it. As though it were an ancestral descendant of those earlier pieces, taking what was best from them and enhancing those things. Maybe making them better or, at least, telling the story is a clearer and more direct way.

That’s kind of what I see in this new painting, On the Blue Side. It’s a simply composed painting, like a story I have told innumerable times before. But it takes that same storyline and embellishes it with new nuances and touches that result in it feeling like something new, all unto itself. Something that moves and surprises me.

Yet, I see the same story in it.

How could I not? It’s my story. My ocean. Or should I say, my hillside, my fields, my Red Tree?

I call this painting, 18″ by 18″ on canvas, On the Blue Side. It’s a title I took from a song, Blue Side of the Mountain, that Chris Stapleton wrote with Mike Henderson, in 2008 while both were members of the bluegrass group, The SteelDrivers. It felt like the song related to this painting in that, while I have often dwelt “on the blue side of that mountain where the sun don’t ever shine,” I now know that even though I can’t see the sun directly, I can still see the light from it above me.

And that gives me the hope to keep hanging on. To keep telling my story. The only one I know.

Here’s that song from The Steeldrivers from a 2008 performance.

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