I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
―T.S. Eliot
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I’ve read these lines from T.S. Eliot before but it was only this morning that I equated them to the creative process. Well, so far as I see it in my own experience. You see, you can struggle to describe in words how things come about, how things finally appear.
You might describe an inner process of visualizations and intricate thought synthesis, of pulling deep emotions to the surface and so on. Maybe that is so but I think it is not really part of the process but is rather an interpretation of what you believe happened.
I think the real creative aspect occurs in a way much like the words above describe– in the stillness and darkness of a meditative void. The mind emptied and all thoughts of the past and the future are set aside. No hopes or desires. Just a quiet dark blankness that waits in endless patience for the first crackling of light to pierce through.
But there are times when the light doesn’t come and you lose patience in the waiting. So you start without the light and occasionally, nearing the end of the process, you find that your mind has emptied and the light has caught up with you. What you are looking at it something quite unlike what you thought it might be when you struggled to begin.
I know this all sounds pretty esoteric, pretty out there and maybe it won’t make a lick of sense to most who somehow slog through to this point. But really it comes down to the idea that you clear the mind and let it just happen.
If it happens at all. Sometimes the light doesn’t find you. But on those times when it does, it is like the freshest clear air has wafted over you and left you with a feeling of ethereal lightness. The clearest air. And I guess that is why I keep doing this and probably will until the day I die.
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The painting above is a 16″ by 20″ canvas titled Into the Clear Air and is included in Part of the Plan, my show that opens tomorrow, Saturday, October 29, at the Kada Gallery in Erie. The reception begins at 6 PM. Hope you can make it!
Introspection, or ‘sitting in the silence,’ is an unscientific way of trying to force apart the mind and senses, tied together by the life force. The contemplative mind, attempting its return to divinity, is constantly dragged back toward the senses by the life currents.
For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.
This painting is 8″ by 24″ on canvas and is titled, of course, Watchman. It is coming with me to the Principle Gallery this Saturday, September 17, when I give my Gallery Talk there beginning at 1 PM. There will be a group of new paintings including this piece as well as a group of selected pieces from my studio that will only be available for that day. 
For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.
despite that, Schiele created, to my way of thinking, one of the most provocative and distinct bodies of work in modern art– all before an all too early death from the Spanish Flu in 1917.
There’s a good possibility that you haven’t heard of Harald Sohlberg, a Norwegian painter who lived from 1869 until 1935. I know he was not on my radar until I stumbled across a few of his images. In fact, there is not a lot of info about him outside of a short perfunctory bio.
He also introduces us to the word autotelic, taken from the book, 
Redtree Times 