On the Sunday morning sidewalks Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned Cause there’s something in a Sunday That makes a body feel alone And there’s nothin’ short of dyin’ Half as lonesome as the sound On the sleepin’ city sidewalks Sunday mornin’ comin’ down
==Kris Kristofferson, Sunday Morning Coming Down
Another Sunday morning. Coming into the studio early this morning. I was struck by the need to hear Johnny Cash sing Kris Kristofferson‘s Sunday Morning Coming Down.
It just felt like one of those Sundays. One of those days that have the feeling of that song aa well as that of the Edward Hopper painting above, one of my favorites by him. It has a quietness tinged with melancholy. It is filled with a bright sunlight that doesn’t sanitize or wash away the shadows but only serves to highlight the sadness that covers everything like a fine coat of dust.
It has the feel of the calm before the storm. Or maybe after.
It represents those Sunday mornings in the past when the world seems to be shifting radically or has shifted for me, and I am trying to come to terms with the change. Mornings when the realization sets in of something lost or beliefs shattered.
I’ve known those Sunday mornings.
This morning has that same sort of feeling.
Not going to go into why this might be. With the madness taking place in this country coupled with dealing with the cancer while still trying to be a productive painter, there are a lot of obvious choices.
Let’s leave it there. On these Sunday mornings such as this, all you can do is gather yourself up in its quietness and try to steady yourself so that you can carry on.
Put on your cleanest dirty shirt, wash your face, comb your hair and stumble out the door to meet the day. I took some liberties with the song’s words since I didn’t shave this morning. To be honest, I didn’t wash my face yet. And I guess I didn’t comb my hair either. But you get the gist.
For this Sunday Morning Music here’s that song. Something solid to hold to this morning. This is a live version from Johnny Cash that I very much like. I think it’s the fact you can see him sweat, that this guy is working to please and connect with that audience. It has a sense of vulnerability and authenticity to it that certainly connects the song to me– a dirty-faced, unshaven, wild and white-haired older guy sitting in the dark on an ominously dead still Sunday morning.
What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (1762)
I thought that I’d take a bit of a break from the dark clouds that are milling around outside and share a post from a number of years back that emphasized one of the better, if not the best, traits available to us humans: kindness. For many folks it sometimes feels as though it has become a rare bird these days. So much so that when it does make an appearance it takes your breath away in wonder.
I’ve been extremely fortunate to have seen this rare bird several times over the years.
Running this older short post turned out to be not so simple. It featured the quote above and attributed it to the wonderful artist Henri Rousseau, a favorite of mine. It seemed right at the time this post originally ran but now something seemed off. I began to question when and where Henri Rousseau uttered or wrote this. At the time it originally ran I sometimes made the mistake of blindly trusting what the Google machine and the internet as a whole told me.
Someone out there had to be doing the due diligence in verifying these things, right?
Well, over the years I have learned from such incidents that this is not the case. Sometimes– often actually– wrong info is adopted as fact by a wide swath of the internet. As a result, I have begun to try to locate and verify the source of the quotes and passages I use here.
Looking at this quote this morning, I decided I better do that due diligence. Took a mere minute to discover that the quote was not from the French painter Rousseau but was instead from a book by the 18th century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was a leading light in the Age of Enlightenment and had a huge influence on modern thought. His writings on the social contract between the people and government had a great effect on Thomas Jefferson as he wrote the Declaration of Independence.
I would have liked to believe it was Henri Rousseau’s thought. It seems like something he might have said, based on the feel I get from his work. There’s a kind of inherent kindness in it. But it makes more sense that it comes from the great philosopher.
That kindness in itself is a form of wisdom is surely a philosophical concept.
Anyway, my break, where all I wanted to do was share some Rousseau paintings that I love, turned into this.
Oh, well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
Please don’t ask me where that phrase comes from or who said it first, though I think it was Plato.
Or Groucho.
We’ll let that one go for today. That would be the kind thing to do.
Here’s a song, (What’s So Funny ‘Bout?) Peace, Love, and Understanding, that was a hit in 1979 for Elvis Costello. While I love that version, I also love the original from Nick Lowe who wrote and recorded the song in 1974. This is a more recent performance from Lowe. It has a gentleness and quietness that differs from the original, having more the feel of the wisdom of which Rousseau wrote. He is accompanied here by Los Straitjackets adorned as always in their Mexican wrestling masks. They have been around for a very long time and are an instrumental group that primarily plays surf rock. Fun stuff.
When they must despair, men will always prefer kneeling to standing. It is their cowardice, their fatigue that aspires to salvation, their incapacity to embrace comfortlessness and in it find the justification of pride. Shame on the man who dies escorted to his grave by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.”
— Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born (1973)
I started putting this together yesterday while watching the furor grow over the ICE shooting of Renee Good in Minnesota. I debated writing let alone sharing this post since I espouse the idea of maintaining hope in much of my work and writing. I use the word hope a lot. Probably too much. It emerges reflexively and without thought now, taking away much of whatever power it holds.
And hope has some power. It is a noble concept, one that has helped many people through trying and dangerous times. But there are times when hope fails and even hinders the chances of survival. We sometimes hold on to hope like it is some sort of lifesaver keeping us from drowning, believing that if we simply hold on, someone else will come along and rescue us.
Recent history has shown us that is not always the case. Sometimes those who come along are not going to attempt to rescue you. Sometimes they are there to finish the job they started, as we bob helplessly on the waves.
Those are the times when hope be abandoned, along with the idea that there is someone else to come to our aid. Hope must be replaced with thought, action, and the will to overcome. This moment seems like an inflection point, one that brings us closer abandoning the hope that the checks and balances, guardrails, and legal constraints that serve as the lifesaver of hope to which we cling so desperately.
It is a time to rely on the power of hopelessness.
I know that sounds awful and darkly depressing. Well, these are deeply dark and depressing times.
I debated using the passage above from the 20th century Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, who is known for a brutal pessimism and cynicism towards man that borders on total misanthropy. I can only read snippets of his work without wanting to open a vein though while I am repulsed, I sometimes finding myself laughing. For example, from the same book as the passage above comes this dark thought:
“Sometines I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.”
But in this book Cioran puts forth the idea of the belief in hopelessness as a sort of religion. And for this moment, that is how I am beginning to view it.
Below is a post from 2020, in the final year of trump’s first term at the beginning of the pandemic. Good times. It is about the power of hopelessness. It might even be our superpower if we can come to better understand what every authoritarian/fascist regime has failed to recognize: that the hopelessness and desperation they create makes their repressed citizens take risks and actions that would seem unthinkable in normal circumstances, that desperate times make for desperate actions.
Hopelessness is the seed of courage.
From 2020:
“The Americans have no sense of doom, none whatever. They do not recognize doom when they see it.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
At the bottom of the moods swings that occupy my waking days and dreaming nights as of late. In the studio at 5:30 this morning, a Tom Waits song playing with huge clunking beats and his coarse, smoke burnt voice yelling over it all, And the earth died screaming/While I lay dreaming…
Shuffling through things, trying to find something to hold on to and I come across this little painting at the top, one that I quickly did years ago for my eyes only. Never meant to be shared, just a private reminder to myself of those days when the dark crows of doom have gathered around my door. Meant to keep me aware of the signs that appear when these crows are coming back, to remind me of the immense fatigue and sense of doom they bring with them so that I might be able to stay clear of them this time.
To avoid hopelessness.
But sometimes hopelessness cannot be avoided.
If you have been at a point without hope, you know there are only two outcomes: to succumb to the doom or fight. You realize that hope, at that point, has become your enemy, a distraction that weakens your resolve and keeps you from being fully engaged in the battle.
Hope is a tool used by agents of doom, to tyrants and despots who tie themselves to religions that keep the masses passive with promises of better days ahead and in lives after this one on earth. Hope makes you look forward when you need to be only in the here and now. Hope makes you sloppy and inattentive, willing to surrender to nearly the same terms and conditions– and often worse– that have brought you to this point.
Hope is a promise unfulfilled, a wish without action.
No, in times of doom, hopelessness is your greatest ally.
Hopelessness demands action.
Hopelessness is the greatest agent of change.
Hopelessness is fearless, with nothing left to lose.
I wasn’t planning on writing this this morning. God, I want to be cheery and optimistic and, dare I say, hopeful. I have always preached hope on this blog but that was in times when I thought the future was still a bright sky, not a dark and foreboding one like the one I see now, where the storm clouds have been amassing for the last four years. I’ve watched them gather but hope made me think it would somehow resolve without me engaging, that the sky would brighten of its own accord.
But I was wrong to trust hope. I can’t turn to hope this morning.
No, I am looking to hopelessness as my savior. I’ve have sometimes visited that abject blackness down where hopelessness dwells and it has always sent me back upwards. It has invariably set me in action and stiffened my resolve. It has made me realize that this life is a precious thing that is worth fighting for, against all hope.
Against all hope. I never thought about that term before, though I have used it on more than one occasion. I think we are at that point, where we must struggle against all hope with hopelessness as our great ally.
So, for the time being, I am setting hope aside. Oh, I’ll hope you’re doing well and staying safe because I want us all to have a brighter future at some point soon. But I will not depend on hope or trust that it will bring that desired future.
I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that—I don’t mind people being happy—but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness. It’s a really odd thing that we’re now seeing people saying “write down three things that made you happy today before you go to sleep” and “cheer up” and “happiness is our birthright” and so on. We’re kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position. It’s rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don’t teach us much. Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say, “Quick! Move on! Cheer up!” I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace it with the word “wholeness.” Ask yourself, “Is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is.
~Hugh Mackay, The Good Life (2013)
I came across the passage above from Australian psychologist Hugh Mackay recently and it pretty well summed up a thought that has been with me for some time. We downplay the value of those less-than-happy moments that are simply part of the human experience. We raise this idea of happiness high above us as an ultimate goal. As a result, we view our failures, losses, and disappointments as a source of shame, evidence of our weakness and intellectual deficiency. Something that marks us as being somehow inferior and incomplete. Something to hide away and try to forget.
In my own way, I have long embraced Mackay’s concept that it is our wholeness as human beings that is more important than our happiness, which is a temporary emotion. I see wholeness as an understanding that life will give us both giddy highs and dismal lows and being accepting and appreciative of both.
In my life I have had plenty of these failures, losses, and disappointments. I’ve went through bankruptcy, foreclosure, repossession, firings, loss of loved ones, and illness– physical and mental.
Did they make me happy? Of course not. At the time each was a horrid experience. But each carried with it a lesson that could only be learned from that experience. Each lesson brought new perspectives and understandings. Each changed me in some way, some more than others.
These were lessons that taught, collectively, that in order to find any contentment in this world, one has to understand and accept that these down moments are, like happiness, temporary. Knowing this, it becomes much easier to accept and tolerate– and even find humor– in the bad times.
These lessons were invaluable in becoming what I hope is a more whole human being.
Mackay’s concept of wholeness rather than happiness as a goal makes sense to me. Sure, I want to be happy. When I am happy, I now recognize and appreciate it for what it is. I accept it gladly but don’t expect it all the time. And when I am not happy, I recognize and appreciate it for what it is, as well.
And with those moments of non-happiness now, there is a sense of contentment and moderation that comes in knowing that it is just part of our being a more whole human being.
I had a goofy little anecdote that I was going to include here but it will have to wait until another day. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe not.
Who knows?
Here’s a song that is kind of in this vein. It’s Happy from the Rolling Stones off their classic 1972 album Exile on Main Street. For this moment it makes me happy. And contented.
Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain Behind every beautiful thing, there’s been some kind of pain She wrote me a letter, and she wrote it so kind She put down in writin’ what was in her mind I just don’t see why I should even care It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there
— Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet (1997)
Woke up at 4 AM this morning tired and bleakly grumpy. The tired part is not unusual– it is 4 in the morning after all– but the grumpy part seemed out of place since I have been feeling pretty good over the past couple of weeks. I have been tolerating my treatment exceptionally well and I actually feel healthier, more vibrant, than I have felt in a few years. Things seem to be going relatively smoothly and I find myself enjoying and appreciating small things once more.
In fact, there have been days when I have felt sublimely content with my life as it is at the moment despite the best efforts of the darker forces of this world to fill me with dread.
This morning’s dark tone thus felt strange and unwelcome. I know this feeling all too well. It was a companion for much of my adult life, especially those years before I was forty. I learned over time how to deal with it and for the most part have banished from my kingdom. But every so often it creeps in through the back gate and jumps on my back until I can shake it loose and give it the old heave-ho.
It was clinging to my back as I crossed through the woods in the dark. I came into the studio and performed my usual routine of chores and coffee. I then decided maybe I could find something in my new work that might shed some light or at least help me loosen this critter’s grip.
I finally got back to work in the past week. The past few months have been a barren desert of creativity as I dealt with my health issues. But I had a deadline for the annual Little Gems show in February at the West End Gallery and my June show at the Principle Gallery staring me in the face, so I had no choice but to get back to work.
Thank god for deadlines.
It was such a long time away from the work that I felt like I was in some ways starting over. Awkward. As in the past when I have taken short breaks, I decided to begin with small simple pieces in tones of gray and black. It usually takes a while to get my color groove back and the black and gray work allows me to work on composition and blocking in forms without worrying about color. That comes back in its own way and time frame.
I looked at the first piece of this first session back to work, the first of 2026. It is the painting at the top, black and gray with a tiny touch of color. This first effort had not come easy. I never felt totally comfortable and second-guessed every move. But I knew from decades of experience to trust the piece to show me what it wanted to do, where it wanted to go. I didn’t try to force it to go one way or the other and let it grow and form on its own.
I needed to look at it this morning. It very much had that same feeling attached to it that was clinging to me now. But it also had a way out, an escape hatch.
A glimmer of hope. A bit of light against the darkness.
It was just the reminder I needed in this moment.
I can already feel that little bastard losing its grip. Just writing that sentence made me smile. That’s a good sign.
He’ll be thrown outside the kingdom walls– with extreme prejudice! — by later this morning. Guaranteed.
I am calling this little gem Not Dark Yet after the Bob Dylan song from his 1997 Time Out of Mind album. The lyrics and tone of it seem to mesh with this piece well, at least as I see it. I am including a cover of this song from Americana singer/songwriter Shelby Lynne. To be honest, I don’t know much about her or any of her other work. But I came across this version of the Dylan song performed with her sister, Allison Moorer, and thought it was exceptionally well done. Effectively lovely.
Like the painting, it has some darkness yet still holds on to a bit of hope.
Sometimes the tiniest sliver of light, of hope, is all that you need…
My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. I said O.K. My children didn’t think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, it’s for later, years from now. And besides, if I get it right it might be helpful to you kids in time to come.
They said, Really?
My father wanted to begin as soon as possible.
[…]
Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.
That’s a metaphor, right?
Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.
Talk? What?
Say anything, but be respectful. Say — maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember.
–Grace Paley, My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age (2002)
Crossing the path through the woods to the studio I was already beginning to think of what I could write for this blog. I got up late, so in my mind I was rushing. Late is a relative term for me. It was 5 AM before I stepped out into the darkness to head to the studio this morning, already starting to fret that time was flying away.
I’m living with a weird time cycle now that would have been unthinkable years ago, rising in what some would consider the middle of the night and sometimes falling asleep before what most people would consider dinner time. I feel this insane need to write something, knock back a couple of cups of coffee, and do at least a 30-minute workout before heading home for breakfast so any loss of time puts my fragile mind into panic mode.
I digress.
Coming into the studio, after taking care of the studio cats and putting on the coffee, I am remembering that I have some half-written posts waiting to be used. Not even half-written, just snippets and passages from other people that I have come across that interested me. Some pertain to art, some don’t. They just need to be filled out and given a rough polish before I hit the publish button. I say rough polish because that is all I have time for even on my regular schedule.
It often shows. Again, I digress.
It was this passage at the top from the late writer Grace Paley that was freshest in my mind. It was from a story she wrote at age 80 for the New Yorker in 2002. My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age was about an experience years before with where her father was trying to instruct on how to grow old.
Her father was Jewish and had been born in 1880’s in Ukraine while it was still Czarist Russia. He and Paley’s mother (also Jewish and Ukrainian) came to the USA in the first decade of the 1900’s. He learned English by reading Dickens and eventually trained and became a doctor.
Her father is also the subject of another piece, A Conversation with My Father, that is a wonderful short piece about him, at age 86 and ailing, wanting her to write a real short story for him. It has the kind of back and forth that one would expect between an old father and a loving child trying to please him while still trying to not be something they are not.
I think I got that right, but who knows anything at 6:30 in the morning?
I now notice that I have spent too much time on background info. The clock is racing against the schedule that is concreted into my brain and winning. I am starting to panic, trying to figure out how I can wrap this up without it seeming like a hairball that one of my cats just hocked up on the floor.
I then come back to what it was that attracted me to this passage from Grace Paley in the first place. It was this idea of taking the time to gently rub your heart. To put your hand on it and speak gently to it, to ask it to continue to work. To ask it to remember those times before when it worked so hard for you and to let it know how much you care for and appreciate its efforts.
The idea of an old man telling his grown child this lovely thought has a beautiful intrinsic naivete that I found touching when I first encountered it. And as the clocks furiously away, I find it even more so as it calms my own heart a bit. Makes me appreciate all the hard work my heart has done on my behalf. Makes me want to give it a break for this moment, to let it relax and enjoy the moment with me.
I find myself whispering, Remember, remember…
I am not yet an old man– though I am well on the way to it– I find myself being a little embarrassed by this. But in the end, I don’t care if it seems foolish or naive. It’s my heart and I will do what I will with it.
You take care of your own heart.
Mission accomplished for this morning. Now time’s a-wasting and I have things to do. You better get out of here before I actually become an old angry old man shaking my fist at you, demanding you stay off my lawn.
One thing I have learned in my painful career as a gambler is that bragging when you get lucky and win a few games will plunge you into gloom and unacceptable beatings very soon. It happens every time.
–Hunter S. Thompson, Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness (1904)
On Friday, I proposed running a post every week that looked back at my earliest efforts, the work that never made it out of the studio but were vital to my artistic development. This is the first official post of the A Look Back series and it features a favorite older piece that I have featured in two prior posts in 2009 and 2015. I have merged those posts below, added the very appropriate Hunter S. Thompson quote above (his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a favorite book around the time in my life this painting depicts) and an equally appropriate song at the bottom from Sister O.M Terrell, The Gambling Man.
FYI: Sister O.M. Terrell was born in 1911 and died at the age of 95 in 2006. She had a short-lived recording contract in the early 1950’s but was primarily a Southern street corner guitar preacher, part of what is known as the Holiness Movement that eschewed the formality of traditional Baptist and Methodist churches, instead going out onto the streets and making joyful noise with their street gospel music.
Here’s the mashup of those earlier posts:
This is an older painting of mine from back in 1994. I was in the transition from trying to simply replicate the work of others to developing my own visual voice. I wasn’t sure where it would go from there and didn’t even have an idea of how to proceed. I just painted and painted, letting each piece be the guide for the next. Sometimes it brought forth breakthroughs and sometimes not. But this time and this work still brings back that excitement of the unknown that was so present in that time.
This little piece is a favorite of mine from that time and is painted in a more traditional watercolor style that I was dabbling in at the time. It is titled Railbirds and depicts a scuffle between the inhabitants at the rail of a horse track. Perhaps there was a dispute over a mislaid wager, a mumbled insult, or which jockey looked sharpest in their colors. Who knows?
The culture of gambling played a major part in my youth. I spent an inordinate amount of time at racetracks and taverns as a kid, reading the DailyRacing Formand drinking watery Cokes. There are a lot of stories and details I could add that might make this a personal mythology piece but I think in this instance, the less said the better.
One summer, my father and I were at the track on average 3-4 times a week. We would make the hour and a half drive, often stopping in at one of the taverns on the way to the track so he could knock back a beer and study the Racing Form while I played whatever game was at that tavern, usually an electric bowling machine. I can’t remember the name of those machines. It was a strange time, one where a 13-year-old kid could lay wagers, sometimes for hundreds of dollars, at the betting windows without any questions. I would often act as a runner of the wagers for my dad and uncles my dad. And my own.
I was, and still am, surprised that summer at how many of the same people were there every day, sitting in the same section of the grandstand as we were. To the point that we were on a first name basis with some.
That time was a great experience in watching people and how they click and interact with one another. It was a virtual laboratory and showcase for human behavior.
I was exposed to a world where adults were often at their worst.
Drunk. Angry. Greedy.
I learned a lot of lessons there besides the fact I was a lousy gambler. It stirred in me the beginnings of a realization that I didn’t want to spend my life in that way. I saw lives that were heavily addicted to gambling and alcohol and it seemed like such a waste of time in what even then seemed like a too brief lifespan.
There had to be a better life than this. Of course, I had no idea what that better life might be or how to get to it.
That took some time. A lot of time and many of what I have come to refer as beatdowns, breakdowns, and meltdowns.
Maybe these lessons and the behavior of many of these people formed the darkness that I use as a base for my work. I often think it is the contrast between the underlying darkness and the overriding light of my work that sometimes makes it effective, makes it feel hopeful without being naive or Pollyannaish.
I don’t know for sure. But I do look at this piece quite often in the studio, studying its rhythm and flow while thinking of those times and the lessons learned. As I’ve pointed out before, you can’t appreciate the good without knowing the bad -or the light without having been in the dark.
The Heart Warms— Now at Principle Gallery, Alexandria
This morning of the small snow I count the blessings, the leak in the faucet which makes of the sink time, the drop of the water on water.
–Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems (1960)
Came out the door of the house a little before 5 this morning and was greeted by a couple of inches of snow I hadn’t been expecting. Guess I should pay more attention to the weather reports.
The snow was lovely though. It was light and fluffy and filled with frozen, shiny ice crystals, the kind that glimmer on the surface like gems in the moonlight.
When I walked it made a crunching sound under my foot. There was no wind nor even a breeze and the trees were quiet as though they intently listening. This made me aware of the surrounding absolute quiet that allowed me to hear the crunch of my footsteps.
Listening deeper now, I could hear the sound of falling snowflakes coming to rest on the ground.
It’s such a delicate sound. Hearing these tiny soft taps has a calming, slowing effect on me, allowing me to take a more relaxed stance that makes the cold feel less biting.
I no longer feel the need to hurry through the snow to the studio. Instead, I linger for a few precious moments in the woods and absorb the blessing of the snow quiet.
For that brief instance, I feel gloriously and placidly distant from the woes and worries of the world.
And I know in a flash of realization that is just what I needed this morning– an elixir to reset and resync the inner self that had been knocked out of rhythm in recent days.
There’s some sort of magic in the snow quiet.
I may not be certain about much in this world, but I am positive about this.
Let’s have a song for the first Sunday Morning Music of the New Year. I was planning on playing a different song from one of my favorites, the Irish singer/songwriter Lisa Hannigan, but this particular song and performance is such a natural partner for the words above that that other song will have to wait for another morning. This is her song Snow. It has that snow quiet feel. Just lovely.
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
–John Updike, Buchanan Dying (1974)
I had planned on sharing and writing a bit about the combination of the verse from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon RiverAnthologyand a painting that seemed somewhat relevant to it. Both seem worthy of discussion.
However, coming into the studio before 5 AM I soon found out that the US was bombing Venezuela and that Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro had reportedly been captured and, with his wife, whisked from that country.
I am not going to go into why this egregious act of war (without a declaration of war) is so wrong in my eyes and those of most of the world.
I am going to simply say that it created a great and turbulent ball of anxiety in my gut, a potent mixture of rage and dread.
It’s the feeling you might bet if you found yourself in your kitchen and an obviously imbalanced guy bursts through the door with an open 5-gallon can of gas and a Zippo. You want to bellow at him to get the fuck out of there, but you see that the Zippo is open and his finger is twitching on the flint’s wheel.
Your rage suddenly is tempered with the realization of what could happen if this madman in your presence flicks his thumb on that Zippo.
Questions race through your mind like wildfire.
What can I do now? Will he really blow up this place? Why would he do that?
Is this how my house is destroyed and my world ended?
It all brings back the question that haunted me in the early morning soon after the November election of 2024 standing outside the studio watching a strange and ominous sunrise: Is this who we are now?
For the moment it certainly seems that the answer is yes, even though I don’t think that answer is final in any way.
Can we change that answer?
I don’t know. We have responded in such a tepid manner collectively as a people to the atrocities set upon us and others this past year that I have begun to doubt our willingness to engage in the fight that is needed.
I say that with a great deal of sadness. And shame.
I truly thought we were better than this.
Okay, I have had my say for the time being. I am going to lock the kitchen door here in the studio in case that son of a bitch tries to get in here with his gas can and Zippo.
Ain’t gonna happen in my kitchen, if I have anything to say about it.
Here’s song that fits the mood I am feeling this morning. I last played it back in 2009 so you might have missed that post. It’s the classic murder ballad Dehlia from David Bromberg. I first encountered when I won 25 albums from a local radio station in 1972. They were all promotional albums sent to the station by record companies and almost all never saw a single track make it on air. Some were not good but there were a lot of gems in that group including David Bromberg’s self-titled first album. It has been a favorite of mine since 1972. His version of this song is special. Its refrain seems to fit this morning:
I finally started painting again this past week. I had been on a hiatus brought on by the distraction and uncertainty of dealing with my cancer. I just didn’t have the focus to work. At least effectively work. However, the treatment has gone well and has fallen into a predictable pattern that allows me to begin to focus on something other than the illness and what I can do to minimize its effects. That included getting back to focusing on new work.
So, as 2025 dwindled mercifully down, I finally picked up a brush again. It wasn’t easy. Any kind of break throws off my rhythm and flow. I think it has to do with how I paint. My process is constantly shifting and evolving. It never remains static. That’s one its attractions for me. But it is also daunting after a break since much of what was in my mind when I last worked– color combinations and even how I was applying the paint– has completely fled my mind.
The first weeks are a sort of refresher course. Kind of awkward and out of rhythm. I work small at first which is perfect since I am producing some new pieces for the annual Little Gems show at the West End Gallery in February. I also tend to begin with the transparent watercolor-like process with inks that marked my early work, often beginning with pieces that are rendered in shades of grays and black. Allows me to work with form. Color comes on in its own way later, the form dictating the colors for me.
It’s at this point that I often revisit my boxes of old work here in the studio, looking for something that will spark something– anything– that I can run with. There is a large assortment of small and tiny work from the first year or two years when I began painting after my accident. Most are from 1994 and 1995.
So, at 5 AM this morning I am on my knees going through a box of old work. Some of it not good, maybe even awful, and should be destroyed. I never do that though, feeling that I learned something in doing it and it thus deserved to be spared the trash heap. And some of it jumps out at me, sometimes with an appreciation I didn’t have for it when it was painted. I almost always find something in these boxes that spurs me in a direction or form that I had veered from long ago.
While I was going down memory lane this morning before the sun had even opened its eyes on this part of the world, a thought came to me. Why not feature an early piece of mine each week here on the blog? I’ll call it A Look Back and show and discuss those pieces that hold meaning for me as well as those that frustrated me then and now.
I think I’ll do just that. The first in this series is actually a blog post from four years back about the early piece, The Sky is Always the Sky. It’s a small painting that was very representative of my early work, several years before the Red Tree made its first appearance. It has those qualities of quietness and empty open space that marked my early work. This early always makes me wish to make my work even simpler and sparer in form. The post below speaks of that.
[From 2021]
I’ve been looking at some early pieces lately, trying to differentiate in my mind how the work has changed over the years. I always come back to pieces like the one at the top, The Sky Is Always the Sky from back in September of 1995.
These early pieces focus on the emptiness of open spaces. I use the term emptiness because it seems to be devoid of all matter, save the space between the earth and sky. But I think a better term might be the Buddhist term sunyata which the Encyclopedia Brittanica defines as:
…the voidness that constitutes ultimate reality; sunyata is seen not as a negation of existence but rather as the undifferentiation out of which all apparent entities, distinctions, and dualities arise.
That infers that nothing — including human existence — has ultimate form or substance, which means that nothing is permanent and nothing is totally independent of everything else. Put in simple terms, everything in this world is interconnected and constantly changing, in a state of flux. To fully accept this concept of emptiness thereby saves us from the suffering caused by our egos, our earthly attachments, and our resistance and reaction to change and loss.
I think it was something close to this concept of sunyata that inspired early pieces like the one at the top even though I wasn’t aware to that term at the time. I do know that I felt there was more to the emptiness of vast space than met the eye, that there was meaning in the void.
As the Heart Sutra, the best known of the ancient Buddhist texts, states: Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
Without knowing it at the time, I think this concept provided the strength in these early pieces. Their emptiness gave them form.
The reason I write about this today– and I have most likely wrote about this before as my memory is not what it once was– is that I was comparing work from back then and now and it has changed. Looking at this early work makes me realize that I was often more confident then than now. I wasn’t afraid to show emptiness with the thought that others would be able to see it as I did.
I don’t feel that I have that same confidence now.
And I wonder why this it is like this. It’s 26 years later [over 30 years here in 2026!] and I have made a career out of my work. Shouldn’t I be even more confident, more assured in my message and how it will be perceived?
I don’t know that there’s an answer. Not sure I want or deserve one.
Things change. That is the natural course for all things. To fight against this change is an attempt to fill the emptiness.
And that can’t be done.
I may be talking through my hat here. I am trying to think out loud about concepts that are far beyond my meager mental skillset. But maybe just wrestling with this idea for a while will spark something that will show itself in some new form that I can explore.
Redtree Times 