Redtree Times

I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature and most often, in order to succeed in conveying what I feel, I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting, if they exist that is.  In short, I allow faults to appear, the better to fix my sensations.

–Claude Monet, 1912

Much of what is below was first posted here back in 2012, I’ve shared it several time over the intervening years, always slightly changing its wording. This particular rerun has a lot more rewriting and added content. Probably didn’t need it but sometimes I like to put lipstick on my pig. Here it goes:

I have had this little sign hanging in my studio for the last 16 years [nearly 30 years now], a rough reminder to myself when I begin to feel like my work is bending too much to the so-called rules of art or the judgments and advice of others. It reminds me that when I am working in my own little world it is my realm. Mine alone. I control the parameters of what is possible, of what defines reality in my work.

The rules of others mean nothing in my little painted world.

Over the years I have glimpsed this small sign at times when I have been feeling that my work is stagnating or beginning to adhere to accepted conventions. Maybe I have even unwittingly created my own rules that after a time have become restrictive. At those times I have been spurred to push my work in some new direction. It might come in the form of heightening the intensity of color, introducing new hues that seems improbable or incompatible with nature, or adding new elements or perspectives.

Or all of these things and a little more.

It’s as though these two small words are sharp prods that constantly remind me that nobody can control me when I am here in my created world. There’s a great liberation in this realization and I find myself trusting my own judgment of my work more and more. Because I have created my own criteria for its reality, criticism from others means little now.

I think that’s what I am trying to get at here, that an artist must possess an absolute belief that they are the sole voice of authority in their work, that they, not others, determine its validity. Maybe that’s why I am so drawn to the Outsider artists, those untrained artists who often work in whatever materials are available to them– house paint, found items, and sometimes even mud. These artists maintain total belief in their personal vision and create a personal inner world of art in which it can live and prosper.

Rules mean nothing to them; only the expression of that world of their inner self matters.

When I reshared this post back in 2016, my friend Linda Leinen, a wonderful writer and photographer, down in Texas commented:

I’ve either never read that quotation or never felt its truth so keenly. I often hear photographers talking about the rules for their art, especially the rules for composition: anguishing because they’d forgotten to “obey” them. In one or two cases, I’ve seen their level of satisfaction with playing by the rules increase, even as the vitality is drained from their work.

My response was:

I’ve been thinking about this subject this morning and I think that in art “rules” tend to be templates that can be followed to create a successful piece of work. They are templates that we know and accept. But these “rules” are only the ones that we know. There may be other ways outside of the known and they can only be found by straying from the accepted way of doing things.

I think your point about finding satisfaction by playing by the rules even while vitality is drained away makes a lot of sense. By following the rules there is a greater chance of creating an acceptable work but it doesn’t guarantee that the work will excite and inspire. The excitement that comes from the discovery of the new, something that strays from the known, far outstrips the satisfaction of following the rules.

In short, rules are like road maps. They may show you a way to get where you want your work to go. It almost the easiest and most well-trod path.

The highway.

My point is that there is almost always an alternate route. Getting off those crowded main roads often brings new discoveries, excitement, and a freshness that is lost on those bland highways. I believe that is the vitality to which Linda referred.

This ties neatly — don’t know how that happened–into a post from several days ago about the Five Habits of the Mind. It suggests five questions that anyone making a creative decision in any field or situation should ask themself.  IS THERE ANOTHER WAY? was one of those five questions.

My answer is that there is almost always another way. Sometimes it’s just a matter if you have the guts to take those winding side roads that don’t even show up on the road maps. It might take a lot longer to get where you hoped to go. Hell, you might not even get there. But if you do finally get there, you will soon realize that the trip was worth the effort and the risk.

My advice? Break some rules. Toss the roadmap aside and take the next off ramp. You never know what you mind find out there.

Here’s a song. Yes, a song. It was the first that came to mind even though I haven’t heard it in a very long time. Seems to fit though I imagine if wanted to think a little harder there might be some that fit even better. But, hey, you get what you get when you chose this back road. This is Sheryl Crow and a 2017 performance of her 1996 hit, Everyday Is a Winding Road.

You had your song. Now hit the road. Git…

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Pondering Solitude— Now at the Gmeiner

Life is painful. It has thorns, like the stem of a rose. Culture and art are the roses that bloom on the stem. The flower is yourself, your humanity. Art is the liberation of the humanity inside yourself.

― Daisaku Ikeda (1928-2023), Discussions on Youth (1999)

The other day I wrote about how art creates the artist, how the artist’s being is ultimately shaped by the art they make. How they become a reflection of their art rather than their art merely reflecting them. That very day, I came across an article on the online magazine Aeon titled How Art Invented Humanity. It basically took the same hypothesis as the one expressed in my post and expanded it throughout our history.

It went back to the Neolithic cave paintings of around 20,000 years, such as those in Lascaux, describing how these paintings first expressed the world around us, the animals and elements of nature those early humans observed. The first figurative expression of humans did not appear until 8 to 10 thousand years later. It was as though for those earlier thousands of years we were still developing a consciousness of self and the unique singularity in their world. As though during that interim we obtained a questioning sense, one that found us seeking meaning even as we struggled to survive the harshness of the world then. Though beyond mere animal instinct.

Had their art brought them to this point in our evolution?

I don’t know. It’s an interesting article and thesis. I am not going to go further into it though. That sounds a bit like a tease, doesn’t it? Yeah, probably its. I just wanted to mention it, finding the synchronicity between the blogpost and the article interesting.

To be honest, I didn’t want to write anything. Tired, as always. I keep hoping the fatigue from my hormone therapy will ease up but it keeps hanging on, especially in recent weeks as I battled lingering cold. There is good news, however. I had a great week of work in the studio, the best in quite some time. It’s been wonderful to be immersed in paint again, to have my mind run freely in those familiar tracks of pattern and flow. To block out the bullshit of disease and the chaotic world outside my studio.

I feel then a bit like that flower that the late Buddhist philosopher Daisaku Ikeda describes above; as though I have been liberated by art from the thorns of this world.

And that’s a good thing–I think. It works for me, at least.

Also wanted to remind you that this is the last week of the Big Gems exhibit that the Gmeiner Art & Cultural Center in Wellsboro, PA is hosting in collaboration with the West End Gallery. The exhibit, along with my showcase, A Seedling Returns, ends Sunday, August 9.

Here’s tune from the Beatles and their White Album. This is I’m So Tired.

No comment. Just git, okay?

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To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.

–Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976)

In some of my very earliest attempts at painting I used photo references, something I never use now. The photo that these two early pieces are based on was taken soon after I began painting in early 1994. It is of an abandoned place just a short distance up the road from us and is so overgrown now that you can barely see the structures from the road.

I don’t know why this scene intrigued me at the time. Maybe it was the geometry of the buildings and the tree. Maybe it was its state of decay. I don’t know. I just wanted something to paint, something to work on forms and colors and at that point I wasn’t yet sure of working completely from my own inner landscape. For some ridiculous reason, I think I still thought I had to work solely from life.

The bottom image was painted first and reflects the late winter of that year. The snow is gone and the maple tree next to the house is bare with the grasses around it shades of brown, not yet greened. It is painted in a more traditional watercolor style. Not very well painted actually. But I can see that I was beginning to make more complex colors. Still a long way to go but it did what I needed it to do at the time.

The top image was painted from the same photo but a few months later. I like this piece more than the earlier version. While it is still not a great piece of work, it shows considerable movement toward my individualized style. It is much more pleasing to my current eyes and those are the ones I trust. My eyes in ten years might beg to differ. But as it is now, I wouldn’t be ashamed to hang this one in my studio, even if it serves as reminder of what was in light of the what is.

There is a lot more expression in this piece, more freedom. I took artistic liberty in putting in the tree’s foliage and used a black crayon to outline it and the hill behind the house. I think I was using a spray bottle at the time to create the splatters on the grasses in the foreground.

Makes me chuckle a bit. I was experimenting with a lot of different techniques at the time like my spray bottle, scraping, masking with both fluid masks and tape, and some I am sure I have completely forgotten. I am not discounting those techniques but after a while, I just came to the conclusion that they weren’t for me, that in some ways they detracted from what I was attempting to do.

But again, they did what I needed them to do at the time. These experiments were vital steps forward. They showed me what worked and what did not. They gave me glimpses of the next step in my growth, providing just enough inspiration to move forward. My progress was fast but that was because I worked at it obsessively, moving from one needed step to the next.

There are still lessons to be learned. They come further apart now. I work slower and with an excitement that is more subtle. Even so, something new comes to light on a pretty regular basis that seems to change my work in some small way.

Thank goodness for that.

Here’s a song that I had never heard until this morning. I am a little out of the loop on much newer music, though this one is 13 or 14 years old. Getting better but still miss a lot. This song is Keep Your Head Up from English singer/songwriter Ben Howard. This video for this song has 37 million views. Like I said, I miss a lot of stuff. There is also a fine acoustic version that you might want to check out if you like the song.

And now, as if you didn’t know, it is time for you to git…

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RedTree: Continuum– At West End Gallery

Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process… Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. 

— Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)

Yesterday, I came across the passage above from Modern Man in Search of a Soul from the esteemed psychiatrist Carl Jung. It really rang a bell for me and I wondered if there was greater context that should be attached to it. I pulled up a copy of the book in a PDF online and read well beyond the passage. One part that followed was basically an examination of the artist’s psyche.

I wanted to simply dismiss it out of hand, wanting to believe that it surely couldn’t apply to all artists.

Not me. No way.

It ended up being a very difficult read and not because of Jung’s use of language, which was very clear and direct. It simply struck too close to the bone and hurt. But so often that sort of pain comes from a realization of truth. I don’t think I want to go any deeper into that part of his essay. I am not quite that transparent yet.

The part that I did want to focus on was that is stated in this passage:

It makes no difference whether the poet knows that his work is begotten, grows and matures with him, or whether he supposes that by taking thought he produces it out of the void. His opinion of the matter does not change the fact that his own work outgrows him as a child its mother.

He goes on to say that after this point, the man (his term) does not make the art, the art makes the man. Jung expressed it in this way:

The work in process becomes the poet’s fate and determines his psychic development. It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe.

That really had my head spinning with all sorts of questions and realizations when applied to my perception of my art. I don’t know that I have expressed it clearly here, but I have often felt that my work sometimes goes beyond me in many ways. It says things I am incapable of saying and has wisdom that I don’t possess.

Much as Jung says, at one point I felt that I defined and created my work, that it reflected me.  I now have come to believe that I have been shaped and defined by my work. I am the creation of my work.

I am still wrangling with this thought at 6:30 AM. It makes sense in some ways. The first half of my life was a struggle with definition of self, leaving me most always dissatisfied with who and what I was.  At the peak of my discontent, I knew –without really knowing– that I was desperately lacking a true creative outlet. Something that needed to come out, something missing that kept me trapped in that web of discontent. I was searching for a couple of years and fortunately fell, literally and figuratively, into painting. Painting has created who I am as much, if not more, as I have created the work.

As a result, I am content now in my work and in myself, as the work has defined me.

This probably sounds a little wacked out, and definitely self-indulgent. Probably more suitable for a diary than a blog. I won’t argue that point. But in a way it demonstrates Jung’s point. I am a reflection of my work now. Not the other way around.

And I am glad and grateful for that.

Still doesn’t make sense, right?

Oh, well, that’s life, kids. Not everything has to make sense.

Read ’em and weep, as the cardplayers say.

Here’s song for this Sunday Morning Music that has been making my eyes damp for over 50 years now. I don’t know if it fits this post completely but it feels right somehow this morning. This is a live performance from the late John Prine of his Far From Me from his 1971 debut album.

Now take a hint from the song title and git…

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Echoes of Time- At West End Gallery

People are always talking about originality; but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us; and this goes on to the end. And after all, what can we call our own, except energy, strength, and will? If I could give an account of all that I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would be but a small balance in my favor.

–Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann (1825)

I used to work with a guy who was also a drummer in a local rock band. Great, funny guy. He used to say that he didn’t listen to music by anyone else because he wanted his beats and rhythms to be original. I didn’t argue the point with him but even then, over thirty years ago when I was just beginning to paint, I knew this was an impossibility. Originality is the rarest of things, an act of genius that is far beyond most of us.

I know some out there might dispute this. You might be right. But I adhere to the definition of originality that Goethe expressed more than two hundred years ago, that once we are born, we become the recipient of everything the world in which we live has to offer. Everything we read, see, hear, and feel combines and our creations are a synthesis of those influences.

The sparks of our creation are lit by the fires set by others before us.

I feel that the best that we can do is transform that vast store of influences into something that can be interpreted as our own expression.

Something honest to ourselves.

Something authentic.

Maybe I am writing this because I know I am not original. My work is built on a dense foundation of the influences of other artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, animators, cartoonist, poets, thinkers, teachers, and on and on. My own work is a complex product of the work of these many people.

The only thing that is mine is how I feel and express this synthesized mass of influence and inspiration.

I believe that is unique and authentic.

Maybe I am splitting hairs here between originality and authenticity, maybe the difference them being only a matter of semantics or usage. Or maybe hubris. I think everyone would like to think, like my drumming friend, that our creations are totally original. Hell, I would like to think everything I create is something new and totally original. But I know better, know that if I can’t be honest with myself on something as basic as this, I risk losing the only thing that I have that matters– my authenticity.

I don’t know if my work will have a life after my own but if it does, I believe it will be because of its authenticity.

I came across a line from a letter that the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote to a friend in 1884 that kind of sums up the importance I feel for authenticity:

Poetry is the expression, in human language restored to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious meaning of the aspects of existence: in this way it confers authenticity on our time on earth and constitutes the only spiritual task there is.

We all experience this world and all that has influenced us in our own unique way. I have felt for some time that my work was created primarily as a yawp, to borrow my favorite Walt Whitman line, sent out over the rooftops of the world, a way to let it know that I existed, that for that short time I deeply felt the joys and sufferings of this place.

Maybe deeply experiencing this world is, as Mallarmé put it, the only spiritual task there is.

I don’t know. I’m just a tired guy sitting in the woods in paint splattered clothes drinking a cup of coffee that is quickly becoming cold with three cats gathered around my desk watching my every move. What the hell do I know?

Now that might not be original but goddamn it, it’s authentic. The best I can do this morning.

Here’s a song that I kind of hesitated in sharing. It’s from Prof, a Michigan based musician better known as a rapper. I’ve been drawn to artists who are making music independent of the influence of record companies. I think they are making some most of the most interesting music today. Definitely authentic. This is Prof singing his Garden of Eden. There is a line– I have been really low down lately/I see extinction of experience/Lost in our phones we all lost and alone the extinction of experience— that I think speaks directly to this post.

Give it a chance. It’s real and authentic.

Now here’s a thought that may not be real but it is authentic– git.

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