Lawren Harris- Ice House, Coldwell, Lake Superior 1923
Art is the distillate of life, the winnowed result of the experience of a people, the record of the joyous adventure of the creative spirit in us toward a higher world; a world in which all ideas, thoughts, and forms are pure and beautiful and completely clear, the world Plato held to be perfect and eternal. All works that have in them an element of joy are records of this adventure.
—Lawren Harris
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I love this quote from the great painter (please note that I didn’t preface it with Canadian) Lawren Harris. I know that whenever I am working and am excited with the joy of what is unfolding before me, I feel closer and more connected to some sort of power that is beyond my knowledge. It’s as though I feel tapped in to that winnowed result of the experience of a people as Harris puts it. That is a great feeling, exhilarating and calming at the same time. It is ultimately the feeling that brings one to art, both as a viewer and a creator.
Unfortunately, in the course of creating, it is sometimes a feeling that is forgotten, put aside for ends other than this element of joy.
It’s easy to do, believe me.
But rediscovering that joy is like coming across it for the first time. Even though you know you have experienced it before, it feels all new and shiny, full of promise.
Effervescent– that is the word that comes to mind when I think of these moments of joy.
So, let me stop right here. I am close to my own joy and don’t want to delay it for another minute. Effervescence will not wait around too long, you know.
Hope you find some of your own today.
I wrote last year about a couple of places where my work has ended up in one way or another. Recently, I received some material from a couple of these places that show how my work is being used.
Finding some sort of joy in one’s life might well be the answer to most of life’s questions. It nourishes us and gives meaning to the moments of our lives. It makes us want to face the new day.
Sometimes when I am walking over to the studio in the morning I will have a song stuck in my head. Sometimes it is one that I recently heard, something from the radio. But sometimes it’s one that just springs deeply from the past, something I haven’t thought of in some time. That’s how it was this morning. And thinking of that song linked me to a small painting that I did many years ago.
I was listening this morning to the song 20th Century Man from The Kinks. Released in 1971 — don’t do the math, it’s a long time ago– it is a song of a man decrying his existence in a time in which he feels he doesn’t fit. Ray Davies may have felt that he would have been more at home in the 19th century but the odd thing is that the song’s words still fit very well for someone like myself whose life consists of mostly time spent in the 20th century.
He also introduces us to the word autotelic, taken from the book, 
My current Icon series has been a real pleasure for myself in that it’s refreshing to work on pieces that I realize are only for myself, not worrying if they strike a chord with anyone else. For me, it’s fulfilling to flesh out some of my ancestors and their stories, to give them an image that I an hold on to. As I’ve said these are meant as symbols– I’m not trying to recreate their actual appearance. In most cases, there is nothing to work with, nothing that would give me a clue as to how they might really look. So, this is how I see them in my mind.
Well, it’s time for Sunday morning music. I don’t keep up with music as closely as I once did. My mind is occupied in different ways these days and I tend to hold on to music and artists that I know, only stepping outside my comfort zone occasionally to seek something new– at least new for me. Sometimes I just stumble across it. Such is the case with Rhiannon Giddens.
When you delve back into your ancestry you often uncover surprises, some pleasantly exciting and some a bit disappointing. In some cases, it’s a bit of both. Such is the case of the person behind this latest painting from my current Icons series. This piece is 24″ by 12″ on masonite and is titled Icon: Eleazer.
I posted a picture on social media a few days ago of a tree that had been recently visited by one of the several large pileated woodpeckers that reside in the woods around my home and studio. Earlier that day I had been coming through the woods to the studio in the early morning, As I passed this tree I stopped because it looked like the tree was casting a shadow in the moonlight which wasn’t unusual except for the fact that there was no moon out. The light around the base of the tree turned out to be a large piles of woodchips created by the woodpecker.
In the first few years we lived here they seemed very evasive and we seldom caught sight of them but as we settled in and they grew accustomed to us, the sightings increased. I think they see us now as part of the forest and we definitely see them as an integral part of the woods. And while they appear to inflict damage on some of the trees of the forest, we know that the trees they work on are already being damaged and destroyed from the inside by boring insects, most often carpenter ants.
Redtree Times 