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Living History

Posted in Current Events, Opinion, tagged , , on January 22, 2011| Leave a Comment »

John Dingell

There was a short article on the Huffington Post this week from Amanda Terkel that has stuck with me.  In the light of this being the 50th anniversary of JFK’s inauguration, Terkel spoke with Rep. John Dingell to compare the rhetoric of that time with that now swirling around the Obama presidency.  Dingell has been a congressman (Democrat serving from Michigan) since 1955– 55 years- and has seen much come and go politically over that time.

He spoke of the harsh tone of the opposition against JFK in the weeks before his assassination in Dallas in 1963, which included an infamous handbill that circulated in the Dallas area in the form of  a wanted poster, portraying JFK as a criminal wanted for treason for imagined crimes against the American people.  Reading the charges on the poster, I am reminded of the current rhetoric and the way it makes baseless claims in a nonspecific manner, using catchwords to incite the willing mind.  It also brought to mind the hate-filled caricatures of Obama that are pushed forward by the right-wing media of the president as a fascist or Muslim socialist.

This constant incitement by a willing, partisan media was one of the differences that Dingell cited between then and now.  Polarized cheerleaders openly pushing there adherents further and further along on a 24 hour newscycle ,  all the time demonizing the opposing side, were not as visible then.  No Fox News nor MSNBC.  No Glenn Beck or Limbaugh .  No Olbermann.  Well, there’s no Olbermann now either since he announced that last night’s show was to be his last.

The point here is that we have become so ignorant of our recent history that we fail to see the patterns and cycles of history that occur, forcing us to possibly relive history over and over like someone with short-term memory loss repeating the same mistake again and again, thinking that this time the results will be different.  We are at a time of change, much as JFK’s term was a time of change for this nation, and there will always be great fear and opposition to even the most needed change.  However, if we look to history we can see that we will endure and emerge better if only we do not succumb to these fears and embrace change.

John Dingell is a bit of living history for us.  Heed his words and learn from his experience, which is our own history.

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Who’s Next?

Posted in Current Events, Opinion, tagged on January 9, 2011| 1 Comment »

When I heard of the Arizona shooting of 18 people, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, that left 6 dead, I was shocked.  Shocked, but not surprised.  If anything, I was surprised that this next shoe had not fallen sooner.

Maybe Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik at the site of the shooting  has it right when he says, “When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous.  And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

How can anyone be surprised that people with an unbalanced mind respond violently especially given the manner in which demonization of our political opponents has taken place in the past few years.  I mean, you’ve got Sarah Palin literally targeting Giffords in an ad for the 2010 election, placing her district in her gunsight.  You’ve got entire news networks devoted to destroying one agenda while propping up another, endlessly spitting out hatred without a moment’s rest. 

 Hyperbole rules the day.  There is no nuance, no gray area in our political discourse.  Compromise has become a word to be avoided, a sign of weakness rather than the virtue it once was with politicians of the past.  Think of  Henry Clay who was  called admiringly The Great Compromiser.  That is a thing of the past.  Now, if you’re not with me, you’re against me.  I am trying to save America, you are trying to destroy it.

Is anyone truly surprised that a person, especially one with an unhinging in his mind, who feels as though his voice is lost in the ever more shrill universe he knows ultimately picks up his gun and does the unthinkable?  One who believes every bit of  rhetoric and every caricature of their supposed enemies put forth? 

Are you really surprised?

You will hear a lot of politicos over the next few days and weeks trying to lay aside any responsibility that their words or actions may have contributed to this atmosphere.  They will try to lay the blame solely on this one individual’s unstable mind and try to gloss over the environment they have fostered.  And maybe this is simply a senseless, horrible act of violence with no connection to anything political.  Maybe.  But I doubt it and the least they should take from this is that this may not be the last such scene. 

And that is a sad thing for our country.

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New Year’s Day

Posted in Opinion, Recent Paintings on January 1, 2011| Leave a Comment »

It’s a new year, only a few hours fresh with no creases or dents or foul smells emanating.

 Yet.

Yeah, they’ll come soon enough but for the moment we can revel in the prospect of a new year and a new decade, clean and open to all potentialities.  Tabula rasa.  Clean slate.

It’s a time for resolutions, promises to ourselves that we will head down the exemplary path from this moment onward.  I’ve never been big on resolutions, never felt that one can make wholesale changes to one’s behaviors or attitudes at one chosen moment in time.  If you can change now, you can change anytime.  Or so it seems.  The real matter is not the timing but whether there is the capacity for change.  And in my case, and in the cases of many others, I suspect, this capacity may be lacking.

I’ve come to a point in my life where I realize there are behaviors I possess that I would like to do away with or at least change.  But coming this far, I know I probably won’t do either.  These irritations of the character have become part of who I am and something in me conspires to keep them intact, much to my dismay as a younger man.  I hadn’t yet learned what I was and wasn’t in this world and was still saddened to learn that I often wasn’t what I thought I was.

But I have learned and set aside dismay for the most part.  I am as I am now.  For better or worse.

No resolutions will change that.

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The piece at the top is titled Stratus Historum and is a small 3″ by 5″ canvas.  A little slice of time…

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Living in the Future

Posted in Current Events, Opinion, tagged , on December 30, 2010| 4 Comments »

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These lines above are from the chorus of John Prine’s song Living in the Future, written well over 20 years ago.  I think of this chorus wheneverI hear people expounding on how wonderful or horrible things will be in the future.  It seems that the future seldom reaches the levels of our fears or hopes.

I’m thinking of this today because we’re nearing the official end of the first decade of this new millenium tomorrow night.  I guess we can drop the new part at that point.  The new car smell has definitely faded.  When I was a kid the idea of living in the 21st century seemed distant and alluring, with the prospect of jet packs whooshing us all over the world and teleportation flights to the amusement park on the moon being an everyday thing.  We’d all be wearing those space outfits that resembled shiny coveralls that we saw in the sci-fi flicks of the 50’s and our meals would be prepared with the touch of a button.  Disease had been eradicated and peace ruled the earth.

Okay, maybe I took it too far.  But it has been interesting living in this time that has long served as a far point in time for literature of the last century.  We have lived past the 1984 that George Orwell wrote of and the year 2000 fizzled like a wet firecracker despite the doomsayers who claimed an apocalypse was imminent at the time.  We haven’t quite seen the rise of Big Brother although it seems like we have taken strides in that direction at times.  We aren’t zipping about in rocket ships or teleporting across the universe but we are connected globally via the web in a way that I don’t think we fully saw thirty years ago.   Maybe we’re not talking with our minds, as John Prine predicted in his song, but we are talking more than ever with cell phones glued to faces and bluetooth headsets permanently jammed into ears.

 Meals are not cooked with the touch of a button.  In fact, we have went the other way.  We now celebrate the time and care of food preparation with television networks devoted to the act of cooking. 

Disease certainly hasn’t been eradicated but if you step back and really examine the strides made in medicine over the past thirty years, it is breathtaking.  Of course,  not all the breakthrough care is available to all of us but that’s a different story for a different time.

Of course, they were right about our garb.  I’m wearing my shiny silver space coveralls even as I write this.  I want to be ready when the future catches up with us.  It’s gaining…

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The Need for Expression

Posted in Neat Stuff, Opinion, Painting, tagged , , on December 29, 2010| 2 Comments »

I am always fascinated with the need for self expression displayed by many folk or outsider artists.  There is a great purity in it,  a direct line to the artist’s inner drive and self that can’t be replicated with all the craftmanship available to the most trained of artists.  It’s just real.

I was reminded of this when I came across the painting shown here for sale on the Candler Arts website.  It’s a wonderful  nativity scene painted by the late Jimmy Lee Sudduth, a self-taught artist from rural Alabama who died in 2007 at the age of 97.  His drive to express himself started at an early age and, despite having few if any resources, was able to create paintings with pigments with the red and grey muds of his home soil.  In later years he used house paints and finally acrylic paints as his fame (he was fortunate enough to have his work discovered by the larger outside world) peaked.  But his lack of supplies or training provided no obstacles for his need to create. 

Probably a lesson there for us all.

I was immediately struck by this painting.  There’s a real sense of rightness about it that really resonates with me.  I don’t know if this is a mud painting or whether he was using house paints here but it doesn’t matter.  It’s simply a raw and real expession, something I wish that more us could capture with our own works.  To put aside craft and technique, or at least make them secondary to the expression of something deeper pulled from within.

Then we might be on to something truly special.  Like Jimmy Lee Sudduth.

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Exceptionalism

Posted in Biographical, Opinion on December 11, 2010| 4 Comments »

I woke up much too early this morning.  Deep darkness and quiet but my mind racing.  Oddly enough I found myself thinking of a person I had come across in my explorations in my personal genealogy.  It was a cousin  several generations back, someone who lived in the late 1800’s in rural northern Pennsylvania.  The name was one of those you often come across in genealogy, one with few hints as to the life they led.  Few traces of their existence at all. 

 At the time, it piqued my curiosity for some reason I couldn’t identify.  He was simply a son of  the brother of one of my great-great grandparents.  As I said, you run across these people by the droves in genealogy, people who show up then disappear in the mist of history, many dying at a young age.  But this one had something that made me want to look further.  I could find nothing but a mention in an early census record then nothing.  No family of any sort.  No military service.  No land or property.  No listings in the cemeteries around where he lived.  I searched all the local records available to me and finally came across one lone record.  One mention of this name at the right time in the right place, a decade or so from when I lost sight of them.

It was a census record and this person was now in their late 30’s.  It was one line with no other family members, one of many in a long list that stretched over two pages.  I had seen this before.  Maybe this was a jail or a prison.  I had other family members in my tree who, when the census rolled around, were incarcerated and showed up for those years as prisoners.  So I went to the beginning of the list and there was my answer.

It wasn’t a prison.  Well, not in name.  It was the County Home.  This person was either insane or mentally or physically handicapped and was living out their life in a home when they could or would no longer be cared for by family.  It struck me at the time that this was someone who lived and experienced as we all do and who has probably not been thought of in many, many decades.  If ever.

This all came back to me in a flash as I laid there in the dark this morning.  I began to think of what I do and, as is often the case when I find myself wide awake  in the dark at 3:30 AM, began to question why I do it and what purpose it serves in this world.  Is there any value other than pretty pictures to hang on a wall?  How does my work pertain to someone like my relative who lived and died in obscurity? 

In my work, the red tree is the most prominent symbol used.   I see myself as the red tree when I look at these paintings and see it as a way of calling attention to the simple fact that I exist in this world.  I think that may be what others see as well– a symbol of their own existence and uniqueness in the world. 

If I am a red tree, isn’t everyone a red tree in some way?  Isn’t my distant cousin living in a rural county home, alone and apart from family, a red tree as well?  What was his uniqueness, his exceptionalism?  He had something, I’m sure.  We all do.

And it came to me then, as I laid in the blackness.  Maybe the red tree isn’t about my own uniqueness.  Maybe it was about recognizing the uniqueness of others and seeing ourselves in them, recognizing that we all have special qualities to celebrate.  Maybe that is the real purpose in what I do.  Perhaps this realization that everyone has an exceptionalism that deserves recognition and celebration is why I find it so hard to shake the red tree from my vocabulary of imagery. 

 Don’t we all deserve to be a red tree, in someone’s eyes?

There was more in the spinning gears this morning but I want to leave it at that for now.  It’s 5:30 AM and the day awaits…

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Some Things Just Keep Coming Back

Posted in Current Events, Opinion, tagged on December 6, 2010| 5 Comments »

Saw an article yesterday that stated that incidents of book burning are on the rise here and abroad, in part due to the effective networking online by the moral storm troopers whose sworn duty is to protect us from our own wayward thoughts.   I felt very queasy after reading this, a deflated sort of feeling. Like, here we go again.

Book burnings  and thought supression have never been a sign of good things to come, have always been the tools of dictators and fascists.  One of the most famous was the burning of books in Berlin in 1933 at the Bebelplatz, a public square where Nazi brownshirts destroyed over 25000 volumes that they felt were antithetical to the German and Nazi causes.  That was a dark omen of things to comes.  On that site there is now a memorial to that event with the words of German poet Heinrich Heine inscribed on a marker.  The books of Heine were among those destroyed and he ominously foretold of the results of the event with his words written over a hundred years before:

“the burning was just a prologue: where they burn books, they ultimately burn people.”

So understand my unease at the news that book burners are back and ready to go into action. 

 It seems so ridiculous and so counterproductive to the movements who stage these events.  Book burning is a trait of the weak and fearful.   Burning a book says that you are afraid of the whatever is in that book and don’t feel confident enough in your own beliefs and morals, or those of your children,  to simply counter the claims with tolerance and logic.  Demonstrate your moral superiority and the strength of your own character by publicly pointing out the flaws and mistruths of the literature in an open forum rather than simply yelling that it is obscene and setting it ablaze.  If you can’t counter the books with logic and truth then perhaps you must look at your own thoughts and motives with a bit more care.

Just put down the goddamn gasoline and matches.

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A Day of Purpose

Posted in Opinion, tagged on November 25, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Another Thanksgiving. 

It’s often a difficult thing for many of us to say what we’re thankful for on this day, or on any other for that matter.  To put into plain words those things that give our life purpose, that give us hope and the need to forge onward.  It is easy to forget those things, to brush them to the back of our minds when faced with the grind of day-to-day life and all the worries and concerns it presents us on a steady basis.  We become so preoccupied with simply surviving and moving ahead  that we forget the very reasons we want to do so.

I think that’s why the idea of Thanksgiving appeals so much to me.  It’s a time to put aside reasons for sorrow and bitterness and a time to reveal reasons for  love and hope.  Our purposes for livings.  I’ve tried to adapt that concept into my everyday life, to take an optimistic tone and to find something positive in the darkest of times. 

It’s not always easy to do.  We all are destined to go through dark periods in our lives, when the natural course of life presents us with the inevitabilities such as illness, death and sorrow.   In those times, it is difficult to find  a reason for thanks in the moment and so easy to fall back into sorrow or anger.  But even in those darkest moments, I find a purpose if only a confirmation that we are indeed human and have the capacity to be moved, to feel the hurt of life. 

As in painting, the darkness serves to make the light brighter.

So today, I put aside reasons for sorrow and focus on reasons for thanks for those things which bring purpose to my life.  I hope you can do the same.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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The American Four Seasons

Posted in Favorite Things, Opinion, Video, tagged , , , , on November 13, 2010| 4 Comments »

In the town that I call home there is the local theatre and center for the performing arts, the Clemens Center, that underwent a remarkable renovation a few years back and emerged as a spectacular and beautiful showcase.  It has real presence as you sit and take in the restored mural above the stage or admire the intricate carvings that form a frame  around stage opening.

Just a beautiful facility.  A gem.

Unfortunately, it is not always as well attended as one might hope, especially for events that are quite remarkable.   Seeing so few people come out makes me wonder if we deserve such a beautiful theatre or if our area will soon lose the ability to attract world-class musicians.

Last night, there was a performance by world-renowned and Grammy nominated violinist Robert McDuffie accompanied by the Venice Baroque Orchestra.  They were performing The Seasons Project which featured, in the first half of the show, Vivaldi’s  Four Seasons and, in the second half, modern composer Phillip Glass’ composition The American Four Seasons.  This new piece was written specifically for McDuffie and is inspirationally derived from Vivaldi’s seminal work. 

Let me point out that I know little of classical music and cannot speak with any degree of specificity about any piece of music.  I can only tell you what I like.  Like art, all you need to know is your reaction to it.

The Vivaldi was wonderful.  The sound of McDuffie and the 18 musicians of the Venice Baroque Orchestra played the well known work with passion and grace.  There is something quite amazing in the power of an acoustic orchestra and I found myself wondering what it must feel like to be one of those violinists when they are fully immersed in such a piece, with the sound of the other instruments all around them in unison.  Or how this piece  must have stunned audiences in 1725. Truly powerful.

I really didn’t know what to expect for the second half.  I had heard Glass’s work before and had found it always interesting, though not always pleasing to my ear.  I can’t fully describe the piece but I will say that as it grew I began to realize I was witnessing something quite remarkable, both in the compostion and in McDuffie’s performance.  His emotional rendering propelled the piece forward and as it climaxed all the pieces of the composition seemed to suddenly come together as a whole, giving the whole thing an impact that I hadn’t seen coming.  I know that is  hardly descriptive in musical terms but I can do no better.

It was breathtaking to see an original piece played with such passion. 

And for a theatre that was perhaps filled to one third its capacity. 

The elation of the show was tempered for me by the size of the crowd and thr realization that soon such shows would no longer be brought to our area for lack of an audience.  As I looked over the audience last night, I saw a tremendous amount of gray and white  hair.  I was among the younger set there and I am no longer young.  We, as an area, do not have a large number of young professionals that might take in such a show in larger metropolitan areas.  Over the years, we have lost many of our brightest and best to larger cities due the limited prospects caused by the financial hardship that seems to have a permanent home in this area.  The recession that swept the country over the last few years has been in these parts for about thirty years.

I guess that’s just the way things go.  For now, I am pleased to have witnessed something special and will put aside the fact that it may not be a possibility here soon.  If McDuffie is coming to a city near you with this tour, take advantage of the opportunity.

Here’s a small taste of the music…

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Good Reviews

Posted in Opinion, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged , on November 12, 2010| 4 Comments »

I received a very favorable review yesterday in the Erie newspaper for my show at the Kada Gallery in Erie.  I debated over writing about mentioning it at all this morning.  There seemed to be something just a bit too self-congratulatory in saying, “Hey, look! They wrote nice things about me!”  But unfortunately, that’s part of the business, this sometimes shameless self-promotion.

I’ve written about this before here.  One of the things an artist must do to succeed is to get their work and their name in front of as many people as possible.  An artist seldom succeeds in making a decent living without stepping forward and drawing some attention to their work and themselves, which is usually a very difficult thing for many artists, given that many artists tend to be observers rather than instigators of action.  Myself, I would certainly rather stay in my studio and paint  than have to go out and promote my work.

But it is part of the package, part of the job.  So I will mention this lovely review in the Erie Times-News from writer Karen Rene Merkle.  Visual art does not get a lot of press these days and unless your show is in a major metropolitan area reviews of any sort are rare.  Just getting press coverage beyond printing the details contained in press releases from the galleries is becoming more and more difficult, given the dwindling status of the print media.  So, as an artist, you can imagine my surprise and delight when I found that someone had taken the time to spend real time looking at the work and to write substantively on it.  And in an effective and well written manner, to boot.  Ms. Merkle, who I have not met, is a very fine writer and gives the fortunate people of the Erie area a much deeper examination into her subjects than most would expect from a newspaper of that size.

To you, Ms. Merkle, I extend my thanks for taking the time to look at my work and give your opinion.  It is most appreciated.

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