Redtree Times

In the High Country– At West End Gallery

When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave. 

–John Cage, as told to Philip Guston

I came across this quote yesterday and it hit things right on the nail for me. I recognized exactly what composer John Cage was saying.

When I start painting, my studio often feels like a space filled with people and things. There is that same list that Cage mentions– the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas — and then some. There are sometimes people there I barely knew back in the day who now are taking up precious space. Then there are amorphous shapes hovering around that turn out to be other worries and concerns and reminders of pressing obligations and responsibilities.

My studio is not small but even so, it can get pretty damn crowded.

And from last year up to the present moment, there was yet another presence crammed in among the others, pushing their way to the front of the group. Illness and cancer decided that they would join the party and bring all their friends– the doctors, nurses, techs, pharmacists, and others– who attend to their constant needs.

And they are a needy pair.

There have been times in the past year or so when I couldn’t even see my easel for all the people and things between me and it.

But slowly, day turning to week and week to month, I found ways to show some of them out the door. Maybe that is the origin of the git I have often used in the recent past to send you packing.

Yeah, you are there in the studio, too.  Don’t be offended that I need you to leave. Most days I welcome your presence, as it is a warm and sunny one. Well, for the most part. But unless I can get you out of my space, my easel sits empty and unused.

If I am lucky now, you and all the others slowly make their way out of my space as begin to work. Oh, a few pesky twits hang on in the corners, but soon after the paint begin to hit the canvas they give up and go, as well.

In the past month or so, when I am working it has been just me alone here. And on many of those days, I am not even present as I work. Those are the best days, the fortunate ones where I am totally unfettered from myself and the assemblage of ghosts and thought and things that not long before filled my studio.

Only the work then exists, a universe unto itself at the onset of its creation.

That sounds pretty grandiose, doesn’t it? It’s not meant to be. After all, everything that is created is an extrapolation from the least and the most.

I– the least— have elements of the most within me. As does my work. Same for you and all that you create.

My work, small and insignificant as it might seem, is simply a microcosm of the greater, grander universe.

A sub-universe, you might say.

But it only happens when the crowds that circulate figuratively inside my studio have hit the road. And it’s even better when I go with them.

Like I said above, the past month or so has been just like that. The work displaces everything. The nagging fatigue from my treatment has grudgingly left with the crowd and I feel refreshed. Periodically, his friend, the periodic but constant hot flashes that I have been experiencing, runs out of the corner where he has been hiding dashes out and pokes at me. But since I am not there anymore, the heat and sweat he induces go pretty much unnoticed.

This time freed from all things has been like transported from a prison cell to a cool mountain top.

Of course, when the day is done and I turn away from the easel, it only takes about a half-hour and that space is once again crowded with the old gang. Yeah, you guys, too. Worst of all, the fatigue always wants to make a grand entrance at this point. And he always does, much to my chagrin, the son-of-a-bitch.

But I know now that freedom is nearby on that easel. A portal out of here to that other universe and that cool mountaintop.

I yearn for that mountaintop at this very moment.

Take the hint.

Here’s your parting gift, one that also serves as a reminder: