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Archive for the ‘Biographical’ Category

In These Days

Posted in Biographical, Event, Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , , , on July 13, 2020| 2 Comments »

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“That is how I experience life, as apocalypse and cataclysm. Each day brings an increasing inability in myself to make the smallest gesture, even to imagine myself confronting clear, real situations. The presence of others — always such an unexpected event for the soul — grows daily more painful and distressing. Talking to others makes me shudder. If they show any interest in me, I flee. If they look at me, I tremble. I am constantly on the defensive. Life and other people bruise me. I can’t look reality in the eye.”

― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

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The painting above is from my new solo show, From a Distance, that is now hanging at the West End Gallery. The show officially opens Friday, July 17, but can be previewed beforehand. Jesse and Linda are doing a marvelous job in maintaining a safe yet welcoming environment for those that come to the gallery during these times. They have been extremely conscientious and have fastidiously followed the most stringent protocols to ensure the safety of their patrons so if you can, please stop in to see the show.

This piece, 22″ wide by 36″ high on wood panel, is titled In These Times. I think most people will see an air of warmth and friendliness in this painting that is welcoming. The sun here gives this painting a sense of communion, a sense of certainty, with the greater powers of the universe. There is comfort to be found in this piece but there is also an accompanying darker edge that lulls underneath everything. Maybe this comes in the  treatment of the sun’s rays, those squiggly fragments of radiating lines that counter the certainty of the sun with an uncertainty and foreboding. It creates a sense of remoteness, one that keeps the viewer at a distance even as they attempt to get closer.

At least, that’s how I am seeing this piece. It feels easy and simple at its surface but it has many undercurrents. Hard to get a handle on. I think that’s how I came to the title, In These Times. It seems to echo the feelings of this complex and treacherous time for myself and it makes it perhaps the most autobiographical piece in the show, the one that mirrors most my current state of being.

These is a time of great trial that is sending many of us to the far reaches of our personalities. Every trait in us, good or bad, seems to respond at amplified levels. There is little middle ground remaining for anything and we retreat to our own zones of comfort.

I know when I read the passage above from the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who I wrote of last year, I saw in it my own reaction. My default reaction to the world is one of withdrawal but I normally tolerate and enjoy many interactions. But these times have amplified that feeling of withdrawal in myself and Pessoa’s words echoed very much my current feelings. The remoteness seems deeper now with an added layer of defensiveness and, like Pessoa, I find myself much more uncomfortable speaking with people.

Even writing this brings on an increased level of anxiety. So, I am going to stop now.

As I said, this is a painting that has much more going on than you might ascertain with a cursory glance.

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Pollock’s State of Being, Again

Posted in Biographical, Painting, Quote, tagged , , , on June 29, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Jackson Pollock -Convergence 1952

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Painting is a state of being…Painting is self discovery.  Every good painter paints what he is.

–Jackson Pollock

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In an article in The Guardian yesterday, there was a review of a current exhibit [July, 2015] at the Tate Liverpool of Jackson Pollock paintings.  Writer Jonathan Jones describes Pollock’s work around 1950, in the period when he was briefly liberated from his chronic alcoholism,  as being the pinnacle of his career. As he put it : Pollock was painting at this moment like his contemporary Charlie Parker played sax, in curling arabesques of liberating improvisation that magically end up making beautiful sense.

GC Myers-Under TextureThat sentence really lit me up, as did the words of Pollock at the top of the page.

In Pollock’s work I see that beautiful sense of which Jones writes. I see order and rhythm, a logic forming from the seemingly chaotic and incomprehensible.

The textures that make up the surfaces of my own paintings are often formed with Pollock’s paintings in mind, curling arabesques in many layers. In fact, one of the themes of my work is that same sense of finding order from chaos.

Or that the grace and beauty of the mark belies the chaos that you perceive. That what you think is chaos is really part of a rhythm that you haven’t quite caught up with yet.

To some observers, however, Pollock’s work represented the very chaos that plagued the world then and now. But true to his words, Pollock’s work was indeed a reflection of what he was– a man seeking grace and sense in a chaotic world.

Painting is, as Pollock says, self discovery and indeed every painter ultimately paints what they are. I know that in the work of painters I personally know I clearly see characteristics of their personality, sometimes of their totality. At least, to the extent that I know them.

I believe that my work also reveals me in this way. It shows everything– strengths and weaknesses, hopes and fears. You might think that a painter would be clever enough to show only those positive attributes of his character, like the answers people give when asked to describe their own personality. Nobody ever openly claims to being not too intelligent or paranoid or easily fooled. There are artists that try present themselves other than as they really are but more often than not it comes off as contrivance.

Real painting, real art, is in total revelation, in showing all the complexities and hidden rhythms of our true self and hoping that others see the order and beauty within it.

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This post first ran in 2015 and has been slightly updated.

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Everything is Broken–Yesterday, That Is

Posted in Biographical, Current Events, tagged , on June 26, 2020| 5 Comments »

We must be measuring time in dog years.

I say that because it struck me that that we’re not even halfway through this memorable year. So much has happened– is happening– that it sure feels like a lot more, maybe even the 3 1/2 years that it would be if we were dogs.

I checked this morning and was sadly disappointed to find that I wasn’t a dog.

Oh, to be a baying beagle or a happy, goofy Golden Retriever right now.

So many moving parts right now and there seems to be no rhythm or reason to most of them.

But maybe it’s just me. I am trying to finish the final pieces for my July West End show so I am kind of scattered anyway. Plus, I am hobbling around in a walking boot that I am wearing for a chronic ankle problem and  I scare the hell out of myself when I look in the mirror anymore. I decided to not cut my hair or shave when this whole thing took hold and now I find myself staring down the Unabomber’s weird older brother whenever I go into the bathroom here in the studio.

And while the work is a healing balm there are limits. For instance, yesterday was a good day of painting. The work was sharp and had a feeling of rightness off the brush. But at the end of the day yesterday, even after this positive day of painting, something felt wrong. My nerves were on edge and tense. Things just felt broken.

I looked around for what might be bothering me. Oh, the news feeds were not helping, of course. And while working, I had been rewatching the series Boardwalk Empire. If you don’t know the series, it takes place in Prohibition era Atlantic City and focuses on the power brokers, bootleggers and criminals of that place and era. It reminds you that the good old days weren’t all that good.

I had immensely enjoyed the series when it first aired. It has a great cast with wonderful performances, great production values and top notch writing with compelling storylines. But yesterday,I determined that this might well be a contributing factor to my tension. For as much as I liked the show and its qualities, nothing about it made me feel good about anything. It raised no feelings of hope and I needed that yesterday. In fact, it depressed me that a hundred years later, we’re still battling the same kind of insidious greed and corruption from power hungry money grubbers.

So, today it’s just music in the studio. Maybe something uplifting and positive.

Here’s a favorite of mine, from the wide and deep Bob Dylan songbook. It’s Everything is Broken.

Oops.

Actually, it’s more uplifting than you might think. Just knowing that things are broken means that there might be a way to somehow fix them.

So let’s use this as the baseline for today. Everything gets better from this point on. I am going to play two versions here. One is from the late great Bluesman R.L. Burnside and the other from Jazz/Rock keyboardist Ben Sidran, who always puts an interesting spin on the work of others.

I used the image of the burning locomotive because I saw it in a meme yesterday that said: Here Comes July!

Well, bring it on, July. I am ready for you and determined to have a good day today, damn it all. Hope you do the same.

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How to Grow Old

Posted in Advice, Biographical, Quote, tagged , , , on June 23, 2020| 3 Comments »

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Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

–Bertrand Russell, How to Grow Old

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Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) is one of those names I come across whose words seem to always make incredible amounts of sense. That is, the words and thoughts that my pea-sized brain can comprehend. Russell was one of those multiple threats, with great proficiency and expertise in a number of fields– history, mathematics, philosophy, logic and political activism, to name just a few. I guess you might just call him a deep thinker or a great mind.

The words above are from a short selection, How to Grow Old, from a collection of his essays, Portraits From Memory and Other Essays. It’s a surprisingly down to earth collection of observations about facing the aging process.

It was the section featured at the top that caught my eye. I was entranced by this idea of going through life beginning as a narrow, rushing stream that gradually widens and slows into a river that heads to the gathering of waters that is the sea.

It made me think of my own father’s life and how he never actively tried to widen his course, never sought to expand his interests in his later years. If anything, his stream somehow became narrower, even as it slowed.

That might sound like harsh criticism to some but it’s a simple observation and I think if it were presented to him at a point when he could still understand what you were trying to say, he might even agree. He might not like it and might tell you to mind your own effin’ business but he probably wouldn’t argue the point. Not much interested him as he aged and the things that once brought him a degree of enjoyment, such as sports, no longer interested him.

Not much did. His stream narrowed and slowed.

It is one of the things about my dad’s life that sadden me. On Father’s Day, I see all of the glowing tributes to other people’s dads, about all the good traits handed down to them from their dads and I am a bit embarrassed. Because for all the worthy traits I have inherited– and there are a few– it is the object lessons learned from the deficits in his life, behaviors and traits I want to avoid, that I find most valuable.

And while there are more than a few of these from which to choose and which I will not go into here, this narrowing of one’s stream is the one I seek most to avoid. I think I have been able to do it thus far. But, even so, though there are days when some genetic predisposition start whispering to me to stop paying attention, to show no interest.

To just sit and stare into the void. To slow my stream and narrow the banks.

But I fight that feeling. Fight it hard.

Years ago, I echoed Russell’s words, writing here that I sometimes see myself and my interests and knowledge as a river– a mile wide and an inch deep. I am still as shallow but I am forever trying to carve my course wider and maybe just a bit deeper.

I am shooting for two miles wide.

And two inches deep.

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I Don’t Hurt Anymore

Posted in Biographical, Music, tagged , on June 21, 2020| 2 Comments »

Well, it’s another Father’s Day. The picture here on the right is my dad, on the right, and his late friend, Jesse Gardner, leaning on a sharp blue Impala when they both worked at my uncle’s used car lot in the early 60’s. The three– my uncle, Jesse and dad– went on to have long careers at the sheriff’s department. Jesse, by the way, was the father of my friend and painter Tom Gardner and the grandfather and namesake of Jesse Gardner who now owns and operates the West End Gallery. Small world, eh?

Father’s Day feels somewhat bittersweet this year, given the the quarantine still in effect at the nursing facility where my dad resides and the fact that will most likely be his last Father’s Day. Between the progression of the dementia which has wreaked havoc on his awareness  and the skin cancer which has metastasized while ravaging the rest of his body, he is now nearing the end of his journey. Upon consultation with the doctors and staff, we have decided to forego further intrusions and procedures on him. They will simply try to keep him comfortable in his final time here and we will probably be able to see him one more time as he nears the end.

It was not a decision I wanted to make and it has weighed on my mind in recent days. Nobody wants to have to decide on the fate of your parents. You always hope for a painless, graceful exit for those you love. Unfortunately, the wheel of fortune doesn’t always fall in your favor so you deal with what is at hand and hope that with it some small bit of grace comes your way.

So, on what will likely be his final Father’s Day, I’ll be thinking of my dad. I will try to think about the better aspects of what I know and remember of him, trying to not focus on his flaws and imperfections, which were many. As it is with most of us.

Please don’t send any sympathies. They aren’t necessary. We all are fated to have to endure certain parts of life and that’s just how it is. All part of the bargain.

For this Sunday morning music I am choosing an old Hank Snow song, I Don’t Hurt Anymore. I don’t know if I ever did but I can hear my dad singing long to this in the car when I was a kid, tightening his voice to make it sound like the Singing Ranger. And now, hopefully the title applies.

Have a good day.

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Duty and Joy

Posted in Biographical, Motivation, Poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on June 19, 2020| 4 Comments »

“Hunkered Down”- Now at the Principle Gallery

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I slept and dreamt
that life was joy.
I awoke and saw
that life was duty.
I worked — and behold,
duty was joy.

–Rabindranath Tagore

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When I first read the short poem above from the great poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore some time ago, it struck a chord with me. It so simply, in just a few lines, put across an observation that takes most of us a lifetime to realize. That is, if we ever do realize it.

Duty was joy.

But what is duty? Is it in being a good parent? A faithful spouse and a loyal friend? Is it in what we do to make a living? Or is it in being decent and caring human being?

Perhaps, it is how our lives touch the lives of others? Could that be a duty?

I don’t know for sure. Most likely joy is not a one size fits all proposition.

My own feeling is that duty is much like having a purpose, a reason for living. I remember reading Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl‘s transcendent book, Man’s Search For Meaning, which described his time in the Auschwitz death camp. He observed that those who were able to survive the horror were those who somehow had a purpose for their life, who saw a future that they needed to reach ahead for. This purpose, even a modest one, often gave them the drive needed for survival, creating a path forward for them.

In the year after being liberated from Auschwitz, Frankl gave a series of lectures that were the basis for his book. In one he spoke of Tagore’s poem and that final line: Duty was joy:

So, life is somehow duty, a single, huge obligation. And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be “willed into being” as joy; rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise: Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome; the outcome of the fulfillment of that which in Tagore’s poem is called duty… All human striving for happiness, in this sense, is doomed to failure as luck can only fall into one’s lap but can never be hunted down.

In short, lasting joy and happiness cannot be pursued as a goal on their own, without a responsibility to some higher purpose.

I am writing this because sometimes I need to be reminded of this. I have been struggling at times recently in the studio, seemingly fighting with myself to find something that just doesn’t seem to be there. The harder I tried to find it, the further away it seemed. It was like I was looking for something to quell my anxieties and bring me some form of easy happiness. To bring me effortless joy.

I should have known better. Yesterday, I just put down my head and worked without thinking about the end result. I focused solely on my purpose in each moment, the task at hand. Concentrating on doing small and simple things with thought and care was my duty, as it were. As the day went on, my burden felt lessened and I began to feel joy in the work, joy in small aspects that I had been overlooking in prior days.

It was a satisfying day, one that left me feeling that I had moved in some way toward fulfilling a purpose. It may not be a grand, earth-shaking one but it doesn’t need to be. It is mine. My purpose. My duty.

And that is enough to bring me a bit of joy.

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Age, Art, and Life

Posted in Biographical, Event, Quote, tagged , , , on June 16, 2020| 2 Comments »

Black Fish- Georges Braque

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With age, art and life become one.

—Georges Braque

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I have been very busy working on my upcoming annual West End Gallery show, From a Distance, that opens next month on July 15. Yesterday, in emails with the gallery, while we were going over some details for how the show would safely go on given the current situation with the covid-19 pandemic still in progress, I was reminded this was my 25th year showing with the gallery.

Of course, I knew this as a fact. But just reading it yesterday really brought  the point home for me.

Twenty five years. A quarter of a century.

While I was very pleased to have been with them for so long, it made me feel kind of old, to tell the truth.

While I understand that I am now one of the elder statesmen in the galleries that show my work, I still feel like a young painter most days, both for better and worse. I am often as excited by the work that emerges as I was 25 years back, still am in wonder at times that these paintings that sometimes seem far beyond my own meager understanding are products of my imagination.

And I am also as uncertain and doubtful of my abilities as I was all those years ago. Actually, maybe more doubtful than I was then. Hardly a day goes by now where I don’t say to myself in frustration, “You stink!”

And some days I find myself going from one extreme to the other, from the abyss of pure self-doubt to wondering how something so alive and vibrant came from my hands and mind. Sometimes in just an hour or two. Yesterday was one of those days.

Makes me think that Braque is right, that with age, art and life become one.  If my age, my twenty five years of doing this, has taught me anything, it’s that this time spent creating art has been the best and the worst all wrapped in one big messy, sometimes beautiful, and almost always imperfect package.

Just like life.

 

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Bacon’s Nervous System

Posted in Biographical, Motivation, Painting, Quote, tagged , , on June 13, 2020| 4 Comments »

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Painting is the pattern of one’s own nervous system being projected on canvas.

–Francis Bacon

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Ain’t it the truth?

The words of the late painter Francis Bacon certainly holds true for me, at least in certain times. There were several such days during this past week, if you need an example.

On these days I spent hour after twaddling in paint that directly reflected my own flatness of spirit, my own frustration and confusion. My reaction to the work I was producing was a dull mix of despair and anger. I sensed that it, the work and my reaction, was just a mirroring of my own reaction to the world as I was currently seeing it.

My own nervous system.

I hoped that recognizing this despair and anger would somehow provide a spark of its own. A reaction to my reaction, if you will.

But it was like throwing new colors into the mix with the result being an even more gross and ugly shade of brown and gray. No clarity or sharpness, neither in color nor in thought. The frustration grew even more.

These days reflected the pattern of my own floundering nervous system. I just wished I didn’t bother to project them on canvas.

I sit here this morning and still have the same feelings sparking dully through my synapses, making me both dread and welcome the hours ahead of me here in the studio. The dread is that these feelings will remain and show fully in the paint. The welcoming aspect comes in the hope and possibility that something in the paint– a color, a tone, a contrast– will create new sparks that will push out the dullness and flatness.

Something that will express itself in a new pattern being formed in my nervous system.

It’s this hope and possibility that comes with the beginning of every new day of painting that makes life more than tolerable. It makes it worth living because even on the worst days there is the hope that comes in the next.

I am moving on to to my next day now, filled with hope and possibility.

Hope yours is the same.

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With Machete in Hand

Posted in Advice, Biographical, Quote, tagged , , , , , on June 12, 2020| 6 Comments »

“And Dusk Dissolves”- Now at the Principle Gallery

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Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain’t no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction — you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.

–Ursula K. Le Guin

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I felt compelled to put up a piece of new work from my current Principle Gallery show along with a piece of advice for aspiring artists from writer Ursula LeGuin. Make your own road, baby.  Do the heavy lifting and don’t depend on any one person to guide you through. There are no shortcuts– no hitchhiking as she puts it. You’re on your own so learn to hear what you have to say to yourself.

Show who and what you really are then stand tall. Own your road.

That’s it. I’m going to be concise because it’s a busy day for me. While my show at the Principle Galley is ongoing, I am working hard on new work for my next show which opens in July at the West End Gallery. Plus this morning I am leaving the safe bubble of my studio and home to accompany my dad on his first radiation treatment for a cancerous growth on his temple.

It’s the first time in 13 weeks that I am seeing him as the nursing facility where he resides is under lockdown from the covid-19 virus. I am both looking forward to and dreading seeing him. The dread comes from anticipating what changes may have taken place in this past quarter of a year from the dementia and skin cancer that plague him. Perhaps his awareness and power of recollection has eroded even more? Will he even recognize me now, especially with the mask I will be wearing?

I guess I’ll soon find out.

Odd days, indeed. Have a good one, folks.

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Where Can I Feel at Home?

Posted in Biographical, Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , on June 11, 2020| Leave a Comment »

“The Exile’s Wilderness”- Now at the Principle Gallery

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“From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes ‘responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.’ It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, ‘the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?”

― Albert Camus, The Rebel

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I came across the excerpt above from The Rebel from Albert Camus while searching for something to accompany the painting at the top, The Exile’s Wilderness, which is part of my current exhibit hanging at the Principle Gallery.

This short paragraph stopped me in my tracks and I found myself reading the words and phrasing of it over and over again this morning. It summed up so well the feeling that I take from this painting and that sense of exile, of separateness, that I have often experienced.

The search for justification, the sometimes pointless nostalgia of memory, the feeling of being responsible for everything alive and for setting things in some sort of order– they all feel too familiar.

But it’s that final question that stirred me most: Where can I feel at home?

It is a heartbreaking question. I believe most of us take for granted that feeling of comfort and of being at home. But for the Exile it is an elusive thing, perhaps even an impossibility. In the absence of the real comfort of home they settle for the security found in hiding or in blending in, hiding in plain sight with large and faceless crowds.

That’s the wilderness to which I refer in this painting– a place for the Exile to hide and find security in a world where they may never feel truly at home.

And odd as this may sound, there is great comfort in this. Just having a place where one feels safe and secure is a desirable state of being for most of us because in such an environment we can create and define our own sense of home.

If you think about many of the problems facing us today, most come down to conflicts between people rightly seeking that sense of home, of safety and security, for themselves and those who would deny them that right.

There’s a lot to read into this painting, more than it lets on at first glance. Much like the Exile walking unseen and unnoticed among the crowd.

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