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Archive for the ‘Painting’ Category

Far Above It All

Posted in Painting, Poetry, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , , on November 3, 2014| 4 Comments »

GC Myers- Far Above It All smThis is a new painting, a 20″ by 24″ canvas , that is called Above It All, part of the show opening December 5th at the Kada Gallery.  I felt from the time this painting was complete that with its intertwining tree set apart from the village below that it was about some form of love.  But what sort of love and how to describe it in words?
It seemed like a from of eternal love, one bound together through time, much like that in the myth of Baucis and Philemon that I have described here on  several occasions.  But I thought I would look to the words of someone else to perhaps give a new perspective on what I was seeing in this.

That brought me to the poems of Rupert Brooke, the British poet who was just in his ascension as a major poetic voice when he died at the age of 27 in 1915.  He was in the British naval forces of WW I on the way to Gallipoli  when he developed sepsis from an infected mosquito bite.   He was buried in an olive grove on the Greek island of Skyros.   An odd casualty of the war but still a casualty that deprived the world of what might have come from his hand.

The poem of Brooke’s that hit me the most fitting for this piece was one titled The Call, written when he was only about 20 years old.  It has the intensity of youthful love, like a flaming torch held high.  And that’s what I see in this painting.  So, if you can tolerate poetry, and I know some can’t, give a read to the verses below from Rupert Brooke.  It’s powerful and straightforward. And fitting, or so I think.

                      The Call

Out of the nothingness of sleep,
The slow dreams of Eternity,
There was a thunder on the deep:
I came, because you called to me.

I broke the Night’s primeval bars,
I dared the old abysmal curse,
And flashed through ranks of frightened stars
Suddenly on the universe!

The eternal silences were broken;
Hell became Heaven as I passed. —
What shall I give you as a token,
A sign that we have met, at last?

I’ll break and forge the stars anew,
Shatter the heavens with a song;
Immortal in my love for you,
Because I love you, very strong.

Your mouth shall mock the old and wise,
Your laugh shall fill the world with flame,
I’ll write upon the shrinking skies
The scarlet splendour of your name,

Till Heaven cracks, and Hell thereunder
Dies in her ultimate mad fire,
And darkness falls, with scornful thunder,
On dreams of men and men’s desire.

Then only in the empty spaces,
Death, walking very silently,
Shall fear the glory of our faces
Through all the dark infinity.

So, clothed about with perfect love,
   The eternal end shall find us one,
Alone above the Night, above
   The dust of the dead gods, alone.

            -Rupert Brooke

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Many Ways to Wander

Posted in Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , , , on October 23, 2014| 4 Comments »

GC Myers- Many Ways to Wander smWandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.

-Anatole France

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On Monday,  I showed  a work-in-progress at an early stage of a painting that is bound for my December show at the Kada Gallery in Erie, PA.  Above is the resulting painting,  a 24″ by 48″ canvas that I am calling Many Ways to Wander.

For me, the title connects with the many paths that show themselves to the eye, from the fragmented white roads going in what seem to be several directions among the rolling foothills to the observatory’s relationship with the sun and space.  There is also the Red Tree’s posture which represents a spiritual questioning of the universe.  I also see it in the depth created by the distant hills and valleys, which create a sort of visual portal, representing for me an inner wandering.

There is a lot going on in this painting, with direction, color and shape.  But despite this it remains a quiet contemplative piece, with a sun that oversees all and acknowledges our need to search with a cool and non-judgmental eye, knowing that each will find their own path to follow in their own way.  And that is as it should be.

I’m enjoying this piece in the studio over the past few days.  There always seems to be a new angle to see it from, something new to glean from the details and forms, and that seems to pull m eye to it on a regular basis.  I find myself wandering in it throughout the day and I am calmed by it.  And that is all I can ask of it…

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Walk On By/ WIP

Posted in Music, Painting, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, Video, Work In Progress, tagged , , , , , on October 19, 2014| 6 Comments »

GC Myers WIP 2014 smOnce in a great while I show my works in progress here on the blog.  I ‘m never too excited about it because  in many of the stages that are shown the work still lacks that thing, that completeness, that gives it life.  But there is a point earlier in the process where it does attain a certain sense of completion.  It’s right after the initial blocking in of the painting with red oxide paint and after the the first layers of color have given the beginnings of light to the sky.  It has a mood of its own at this juncture, a direction and a sense of the life it will have.

Outside of the final moments near the completion of the moment, this is by far my favorite stage of the process.  After this, as more layers of color are added, it devolves for a while, becoming flat and dull on the surface.  It loses any brightness.  Without this early glimpse of what it might be, these later stages might be discouraging.

This early stage is one where I sometimes find myself wanting to stop, to go no further and just let it be as it is.  But I always seem to push past this and move on to the fuller version that has more color and a bit more polish.   I may show a few more stages along the way until the final version emerges.  By the way, this a 24″ by 48″ canvas.

Being Sunday morning, it’s time for a little music.  I have had an old Burt Bacharach song in my head for a few days, one from his heyday with Hal David where they churned out an amazing string of hits for Dionne Warwick in the early 60’s.  His music always has a distinctive sound and feel.  There is a coolness  and lightness in the sound of  much of his music that I can’t fully describe and Warwick’s strong but delicate phrasing fits it like a glove in these songs.  I guess that’s why it sticks in my mind so well.  Here’s Walk On By from Dionne Warwick.  A little coolness for what I hope will be a great Sunday for you.

 

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As Clouds Roll By/ Redux

Posted in Biographical, Painting, Technique/History, tagged , , on October 17, 2014| 2 Comments »

Earlier in the week at the dinner at which I was speaking  I was asked why there were no windows or doors in my houses.  I answered that I wanted them to be somewhat anonymous and that leaving the windows and doors out allowed the eye to glide easily over them to the focal point of the painting.  I didn’t mention that I have painted houses and building with windows and doors, usually when the structure is a central figure in the composition.  I wrote a blog entry several years ago about one such painting.  In this essay I also mention how I came to paint clouds in the manner that I do, answering another question that I was recently asked.  Even though the painting shown is long in the hands of that collector, here’s what I had to say:

GC Myers- As Clouds Roll By 2010This  is a new painting that I’ve just finished, tentatively called As Clouds Roll By.  It’s a 14″ by 18″ image painted on ragboard.  It’s a composition that I have visited on a number of occasions, this time at the request of a collector in Pennsylvania, and one that I always get great pleasure from painting, savoring the subtle variations that make each piece unique .

Even though this is a very simple composition with few elements, the great satisfaction I feel after finishing a piece such as this is something I can’t fully explain.  Perhaps it’s the recognition of the things in this piece that fully jibe with what I hope to achieve in my paintings.  The simplicity of design. The quietude of vast open space.  The depth into the picture, even though it is a very simple composition.  The inviting warmth of the house and tree.  The languorous fashion in which the clouds roll by, in a way representing the slow and inevitable march of time.

It clicks a lot of my own buttons.

The clouds in this piece always take me back to the first time I painted clouds in that looked like these.  I was not yet a full-time painter and had obtained a large commisiion that would prove to be very important to me.  I was on a short deadline and was still painting in the dining area of our home at the time with large sheets of paper spread over folding tables.  I was working on a large triptych and was nearly finished when our late cat, Tinker, decided to explore the tables.  Bounding up, she stepped first in a damp part of my palette and ran across the three sheets, leaving perfect little paw prints in a watery blue tint in her wake.  As the echoes of my bellow faded, my mind raced as I looked at my now very unfinished work.

Start over?  No time.  Try to blend them in to the background?  Not with this particular style of painting.  I sat and looked, concentrating.  Wait a minute.  The prints only ran across the sky portion of all the sheets.  And they ran in lovely diagonal manner.

Quickly, I was at it with paint and within several minutes I had blocked in clouds where once there were paw prints.  It worked.  Tinker’s run across the sky fit the rhythm of the piece and the clouds actually gave a fullness to the composition that it had lacked.  It was actually quite an improvement.

So when I see clouds such as these, I always flash back to my initial panic and the subsequent discovery of good fortune in this happy accident.  Since that day, when what seems to be a disastrous event happens with one of my paintings I step back with a much calmer mind and eye with the knowledge that perhaps this is just a new opportunity to see things a new way.

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Here There Everywhere

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , , on October 15, 2014| 5 Comments »

GC Myers- Here There Everywhere smI’ve done several paintings through the years using textured surface that has bands or strings that twist and turn throughout.  It’s an extreme texture, more pronounced on than my typical surfaces, and, as a result, takes center stage in these pieces.  They become the driving force in the painting.

These bands that run through these paintings always spur something in me, some sense of wonder at the great unknowns of our world and universe.  The new painting shown here, Here There Everywhere, certainly does this for me.  Looking at it, I am filled with questions about the world or worlds that lie just past our perceptions.  Are there other dimensions, other pasts and futures swirling around us at any moment?  And if so, are we connected in some way to this web of chaotic energy or are we merely physical beings, unwitting bystanders in the great dance of the universe?

In this painting, the Red Tree serves as the questioner, living in the moment but recognizing the forces that permeate everything and give that moment a discernible depth and meaning beyond the simple beauty it can physically observe.  I know that I have had that feeling.  I might be out driving and see a certain curve of a field, a bend of a tree or the filtering light from the sun and suddenly feel an intense emotional response that seems to have no basis of origin in my past , one so strong that I find myself asking why and where it came from.

Perhaps this indefinable emotional is a brush with these other worlds, these energy forces?

I certainly don’t know.  Part of me wishes it to be so but part of me simply wants to savor that moment and emotion without questioning it.  Something to ponder on a gray autumn morning.

This painting, Here There Everywhere, is a 24″ by 30″ canvas and is part of my show, Into the Common Ground, at the Kada Gallery in Erie, PA which opens in early December.

 

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Ever Reaching

Posted in Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged , , , , on October 13, 2014| Leave a Comment »

GC Myers Ever ReachingThree Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

–Albert Einstein

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This Einstein is a pretty smart guy.

 Simplification, harmony and opportunity could be  ingredients for any recipe to success in any field but I think they apply particularly well to art.  I know that I can easily apply these three rules to my own work.

For me, its strength lies in its ability to transmit through simplification and harmony.  The forms are often simplified versions of reality, shedding details that don’t factor into what it is trying to express.

There is often an underlying texture in the work that is chaotic and discordant.  The harmonies in color and form painted over these create a tension, a feeling of wholeness in the work.  A feeling of finding a pattern in the chaos that makes it all seem sensible.

And the final rule–opportunity lying in the midst of difficulty– is perhaps the easiest to apply.  The best work always seems to rise from the greatest depths, those times when the mind has to move from its normal trench of thought.  Times when it has to find new ways to move the message ahead.   The difficulties of life are often great but there is almost always an opportunity or lesson to be found within them if only we are able to take a deep breath and see them.  These lesson always find their way into the work in some way.

Thanks for the thought, Mr. Einstein.

The painting above is called Ever Reaching, a new 16″ by 20″ canvas that is part of my upcoming show at the Kada Gallery in early December.

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Winding Through

Posted in Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , on October 10, 2014| 1 Comment »

GC Myers- Winding Through smJourneys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

-Lawrence Durrell

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This new painting, Winding Through, is making its own journey, heading out to the Just Looking Gallery in San Luis Obispo, CA along with a group of other new work.  The idea of journeying, inwardly and outwardly, is very much the theme of this  36″ by 24″ canvas and the above quote from Lawrence Durrell fits well with this theme.

We can set a course for a destination and make all sorts of plans toward arriving at that endpoint.  But plans seldom account for the obstacles encountered along the way and the way in which we react to and are changed by them.  These reactions and changes mold us, create a new version of ourselves.  And despite our best intentions to remain true to the course we set earlier, we may find our new selves on a completely different path headed to a very different endpoint, sometimes much better or worse than that originally intended.

But occasionally, we wind our way through the obstacles and changes and find ourselves at a place where we had hoped to be right from the start.  We are much different than we began as a result of the journey and how we see that endpoint may be slightly different than we first imagined.  In fact, it may only seem like our original endpoint because as we adapted to the bumps of the road our endpoint adjusted as well, moving to coincide with the lessons we were learning along the way.

We become what we are to become.

This is only a quick, early morning reading of what I see here.  Off hand, I can think of hundreds, maybe thousands, of exceptions and additions to the paragraphs above.  I may not even agree with it by the end of the day.

But that, too, is part of the journey…

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Oh, The Places You’ll Go!: Kuwait Edition

Posted in Biographical, Painting, tagged , , , , , , , on September 24, 2014| 3 Comments »

GC Myers- The Way of the Master smMy paintings lead  much more interesting lives than I do, many having made their way to every corner of this country and around the world, to all the continents save Antarctica.  They have traveled from Kathmandhu to Kampala and many points in between and beyond.  Well, yesterday brought the news that another painting has just began a new journey abroad.  The new American Ambassador to Kuwait, Douglas Silliman,  has chosen The Way of the Master , seen above, to hang in the American Embassy in Kuwait City.

This marks the third time that my work has been chosen by an Ambassador to hang in an embassy and it is always an honor.  There is always a feeling of representing the United States, even if it is only in a small way, to those visitors who might come across the painting in the embassy as well as representing some form of home and comfort to the Ambassador.  And in the region of the world where this painting is headed, that could serve a valuable purpose.

It’s a purpose that I think fits this painting very well.  In a post I wrote about this painting back in May, I spoke of this representing the end of a journey, one that has culminated in a higher sense of being as a result of immense effort and dedication to the journey.  And those are both things that will be needed to reach some sort of peaceful future for the region.

I would like to thank Ambassador Silliman for having chose this painting.  It is an honor that I greatly appreciate and I hope that it serves him well in what may be the difficult days ahead.  I wish him the best and hope that he does his best in this assignment in such a critical area of the world.

As I quoted from Confucius in that earlier post:

“There is one single thread binding my way together…the way of the Master consists in doing one’s best…that is all.”

 

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Inner Perceptions

Posted in Biographical, Painting, Personal Mythology, tagged , , , , , , on September 22, 2014| 1 Comment »

GC Myers- Inner Perception smallThis is a painting from a few years back that has toured around a bit and found its way back to me. Called Inner Perception, it has been one of my favorites right from the moment it came off my painting table.  Maybe the inclusion of the the paint brush (even though it is a house painter’s brush) with red paint in the bristles makes it feel more biographical, more directly connected to my own self.   Or maybe it was the self-referential Red Tree painting on the wall behind the Red Chair.

I don’t know for sure.  But whatever the case, it is a piece that immediately makes me reflective, as though it is a shortcut to some sort of inner thought.  Looking at it this morning, the question I was asked at the Principle Gallery talk a week or so ago re-emerged, the one that asked what advice I might give my fifth-grade self if I had the opportunity.  I had answered that I would tell myself to believe in my own unique voice, to believe in the validity of what I had to say to the world.

I do believe that but I think I might add a bit to that answer, saying that I would tell my younger self to be patient and not worry about how the world perceives you.  That if you believed that your work was reflecting something genuine from within, others would come to see it eventually.

I would also add to never put your work above the work of anyone else and, conversely, never put your work beneath that of anyone else.  I would tell myself to always ask , “Why not me?”

This realization came to me a couple of years ago at my exhibit at the Fenimore Art Museum.  When it first went up it was in a gallery next to one that held the work of the great American Impressionists along with a Monet.  I was initially intimidated, worrying that my work would not stand the muster of being in such close proximity to those painters who I had so revered over the years.

But over the course of the exhibit, I began to ask myself that question: Why not me?

If my work was genuine, if it was true expression of my inner self and inner perceptions, was it any less valid than the work of these other painters?  Did they have some greater insight of which I was not aware, something that made their work deeper and more connected to some common human theme?  If, as I believe, everyone has something unique to share with the world, why would my expression of self not be able to stand along their own?

The answer to my question was in my own belief in the work and by the exhibit’s end I was no longer doubting my right to be there.  So to my fifth-grade self and to anyone who faces self-doubt about the path they have chosen, I say that if you know you have given it your all, shown your own unique self,  then you must ask that question: Why not me?

 

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Reinvention/ Redux

Posted in Music, Painting, Video, tagged , , , , , , , on September 18, 2014| 1 Comment »

GC Myers- Larger Than Life

GC Myers- Larger Than Life

I’ve often write about change, lately in the form of fighting against my own selfishness through acts of generosity, somehow hoping that this reinvention of the self makes me a better person and affects change in others.  I spent a few hours yesterday with John and Ron, a couple currently from Iowa and Illinois, each side of the Mississippi, who ad come to the West End Gallery specifically to see my work.   I had a great time getting to know them a little better and learning more about their lives.  Listening to them over lunch,  I found that their own lives were stories of reinvention, of finding new identities.

It really struck a chord with me, making me appreciate how creative and adaptive we are as people.  Sometimes it’s a practical matter, out of the need to meet the demands of our basic needs, and sometimes it is a matter of changing behaviors that we realize are negatively affecting our lives.  Either way, the result is a new self of some sort, hopefully one that brings us more happiness and satisfaction with ourselves.

It reminded me of a post from several years ago, in 2009, where I wrote a short bit about reinvention, using Loretta Lynn as my subject.

Thanks to John and Ron for the inspiration for this morning.  It was great meeting you and I hope the rest  your trip goes smoothly.

Here’s what I wrote back in 2009:

Reinvention.

What I was is not what I am and what I am is not necessarily what I will be.

We’re fortunate to have such an opportunity, to be able to change and evolve over our lives.  To be able to show the world other and new facets in our prisms.  The only question is why do some people take this opportunity to reinvent themselves and other do not?

I thought about this the other day when I was in the studio, prepping work for my next show. I was listening to Van Lear Rose, an album from a couple of years back from Loretta Lynn, the Queen of Country Music.   It’s a great album with Jack White of  White Stripes fame  producing and playing.  The songs have Loretta’s unmistakeable signature voice and songwriting but have a new feel.  A little more edge and a little less twang.  A new side to Loretta.  She took the opportunity, when it presented itself,  to step forward and change.

But what about those who don’t?  Why don’t they continue to evolve?   Are they simply satisfied with where they are?  In music this is pretty common, guys playing the Oldies circuit, performing the same songs that they made popular when they were 18 years old.  Perhaps the opportunity to change never showed up.  Maybe they felt safe in staying in their tried and true routine of rehashing the past.   No risk there.

Who know?  I surely don’t but I do know that this chance to change our skin, chameleon-like, is an opportunity  that the truly creative should not simply push aside because for them to remain static is death.  Take the risk.

Here’s  a little Loretta from Van Lear Rose:

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