Redtree Times

I spent way too much time this morning trying to figure out this blog entry.  I started writing several things going in several different directions and they all ended up in the dumper. Got to the point that I wasn’t going t post anything.

Now that’s no big deal for anybody out there. Big deal, right? But it’s part of my routine now, an idiosyncrasy that I cling to. So, I had to do something or it would nag at me all day. I was listening to some music and thought maybe I should listen to something pure, something that seemed at the beginning of something, something that seemed unique.

How about some Little Richard, I thought. Unique and definitely at the forefront, the beginning, of rock and roll. Might even be the match that lit the whole stick of dynamite. I don’t think he ever got the credit due to him for his incredible performances that became part of the DNA of future artists.

It made me think about artists of all sorts, not just musicians. We are all a synthesis of our influences and favorites. We take what we see or hear or feel and mix them into a stew that sometimes seems so unique that it doesn’t fully display all the ingredients that went into its making. That’s the goal.

Some of us will always show our influences and that’s okay. Hard not to. But some becomes something new altogether. I think that’s how it was for Little Richard. I am sure he was influenced by Louis Jordan and Wynonie Harris and so many of the other jump blues artists of the 1940’s. But he took it and kicked it up a notch, added an uninhibited wildness that most artists can’t reach. Most simply don’t have it in them. I certainly wish I had it.

Little Richard stood out and 65 years later his stuff still stirs something wild inside the listener. He did what an artist is supposed to do. He created and moved people.

Okay, enough. I got to get to my own work now. Here’s the great late Little Richard who passed away this past year, in that awful 2020. at the age of 87. Same age as my old man when he died this past year. I think he appreciated Little Richard, recognized that same wildness even if he displayed it in different ways.

Here’s Keep a Knockin’.

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Here’s a replay of an entry discussing an essay written by Robert Frost on creating poetry from several years back that is among my more popular blog posts. His words apply to any artistic endeavor and I thought it would be appropriate as I am in the midst of a pretty good groove at the moment. Much of what he lays out feels on the button at this time.

And that’s a good thing. That’s the goal.

Take a look.

The poet Robert Frost wrote a wonderful preface to the 1939 edition of his collected poems. It was titled The Figure a Poem Makes and it described how he viewed his process of unveiling the true nature of his work. Reading it, I was struck by the similarities between his work as a poet and how I view my work as painter.

For example, the following paragraph-I have highlighted individual lines that jumped out at me. I probably could have highlighted them all:

It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life–not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood-and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad-the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.

A painting often begin in delight. A certain tone of color, the way a line bends, the manner in which a brushstroke reveals the paint or in how the contrast of light and dark excites the eye.  The delights pull you in and keep you engaged and it is not until you have finished that you are able to understand the sum of these elements, to detect the wisdom, the meaning, behind it all. It is only then that you know what you have uncovered and how it should be named.

The work itself, if left to its own means, knows what it is and will tell you.

Then there is this gem of a paragraph:

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing. The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time when taken, and the conclusion is come to that like giants we are always hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future with against the day when we may want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere. The line will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight. We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick.

I have often spoke of the need to be have my emotions near the surface when I work, to always need to feel excited and surprised by what I am working on. To recognize things I never knew as being part of me. If I am not moved by the thing I am working on at any given time, how can I expect others to be moved by it? This paragraph speaks clearly to my experience as an artist.

Then there is the final sentences of the essay:

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

My translation of this, as a painter, is that the work must be free to move and grow of its own volition. It tells you where it wants to go and, if you don’t constrain it and try to push it to a place to which it was not intended, will reveal its truth to you. If you can do that, it remain always fresh, always in the present and always filled the excitement and surprise that it contained in that burst when it was created.

And that, to feel always fresh and in the present, is the goal of all art, be it painting, poetry, music, or dance.

I don’t want to bore you too much. It’s a great essay and is a valuable read for anyone who makes art in any form. You can see ( and download) the whole book, The Collected Poems of Robert Frost, with this essay in full by clicking here.

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I am in a bit of a rush this morning but wanted to play a bit of music. I came across this piece a number of years ago and it popped up again on my site yesterday. It was Pawky from the late jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby, who is considered one of the most unjustly under loved jazz greats of the 1950’s. Probably a little anti-harp bias. The harp just doesn’t have the built in cool factor of a sax or a trumpet.

I went to YouTube and began playing the 1959 album, Hip Harp,  that it was from and went to do some little chores around the studio this morning.

I really enjoyed having it on. There was something easy in it, something where it would one moment move into the background or hold your rapt attention without losing anything in the listening.

I am not sure I am explaining this  in the way I think I am but that’s going to have to suffice. The word pawky is a British word that means shrewd, tricky or slyly humorous and this piece fits the meaning. This song has a kind of 50’s jazzy, witchy feeling, like it should have been in the soundtrack of the movie Bell, Book and Candle, the 1958 film about modern day witches in Greenwich Village, starring Jimmy Stewart, Kim Novak and Jack Lemmon. But it was not in the film though I think the title theme poaches elements from this song a bit.

Give a listen. Great music to work to.

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I want to reach the state of condensation of sensations which constitutes a picture. Perhaps I might be satisfied momentarily with a work finished at one sitting, but I would soon get bored looking at it; therefore, I prefer to continue working on it so that later I may recognize it as a work of my mind…Nowadays, I try to infuse some calm into my pictures and I keep working at them until I have succeeded in doing so.

–-Henri Matisse, 1908

It seems like every artist has a different answer for the question of when a painting is done. Whistler and several others said it was when all traces of its creation have been concealed on the surface. Some say it is when the artist achieves their aim, what they envisioned in their mind’s eye. Edward Munch (The Scream) said that a piece is done after it has had time to mature, weathered a few showers and endured the elements, including nail scratches.

Others say they are never finished. 

I tend to go with the never finished group although Munch’s definition appeals to my love of weathering and patina and Matisse’s infusion of calm is something I also aspire to in my work. Ultimately, my goal is to have the paintings complete enough that they can exist on their own, to be alive in the outer world.

In that respect, because they are human creations, I view them very much as I view other humans– never quite complete and always imperfect. That’s just how we are and I am certainly no different.

I am a collage of imperfections that is still a work-in-progress. If I saw myself hanging on the wall I might want to take a brush and soften an edge here or there and add color in certain parts of my composition. But I probably would not do it because those imperfections actually become part of the composition, create the contrasts that give us, as a painting, life. And that , even with the flaws and weathering exposed, pleases me.

None of us is perfectly painted. Nor should we be.

Very busy this morning and wasn’t willing to distract from the attention needed. But here’s a post from several years ago that I like. Hope you do as well.

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I thought since I was running some old posts I would go back a little further, this one from early 2010. The painting in this post still excites my senses and makes me eager to be at work. It’s just what I need right now. Take a look .

I came across this painting from seven or eight years back, an 18″ by 26″ piece from 2003 titled Call of Freedom. It was quite a different look for my work at the time with its simple design of two two blocks of colors playing off one another. It may not visible in this photo of the piece, but there was a hint of purple through the bottom block of color that really enhanced the piece for me.

The tree was put in at the last moment. After I had completed the two blocks, I sat this aside for quite awhile, looking at it in the studio, trying to determine if it held together just as it was. Was there enough there — color, texture, contrast– to hold my interest, to make me want to continue looking?

This was a tough one for me. It met all my criteria. It held my eye. It had meaning for me. But I still wasn’t sure it would hold the attention and meaning of others. So, I hesitatingly put the blowing Red Tree in place, almost as a compromise.

The tree changed the dynamic, bringing the picture plane closer to the viewer, from vastness to intimacy. But it still allowed the blocks to dominate, to tell their part of story, so to speak. Adding the Red Tree worked without altering my first impression of what I saw in the piece and created an introduction into the painting for others.

This might be considered a compromise.

I don’t know.  

For me, it’s about coming across that space between the painting and the viewer and connecting in some way, communicating something I might not be able to define. So long as it doesn’t alter the feeling or the message I get from the painting, it’s not a compromise but an opportunity for more engagement.  

As a result, I often think of this piece as where I want my work to be in the long run.

Is it compromise? I don’t know. And so long as the work is transmitting my message, I don’t care.

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Today, I am posting an older image from several years back. It’s called Portrait of Calm and I am trying to pull some of that sense of calm from it for myself.

I wrote another post, long and profanity laced, that I don’t think I can post without a cooling off period. I am tired this morning, having only slept a few hours last night after a day of wrath. But I am also tired of the sheer evil awfulness of Donald Trump.

That is a given. But I am even more tired of those people who enable him, who try to rationalize away his awful deeds, who turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to his lies, all 30,000+ of them, so long as they somehow benefit from his ill-considered actions. Those same people who act shocked when what took place yesterday comes to be when it was obvious for years that it would eventually come to this. I have been expecting this for years.  

These are same people who shrug off the 350,000+ deaths from a pandemic and a tragically bungled response. Nearly 4,000 died yesterday while the first coup attempt took place.

They are the same people who probably think that this is all over now, that the worst is past. 

It isn’t. Not even close to being over.

Yesterday’s insurrectionists aren’t going to fold up their tents and simply go back home. They are emboldened by the ease with which they broke through the lax defenses of the Capitol. No, they are just getting started. Four died yesterday and no doubt more will die in the coming days. Maybe in the Capitol, maybe in a statehouse or a local courthouse. 

But it won’t be over until these treasonous traitors face real consequences.

And for what? Ridiculous conspiracies perpetrated by political wolves who know the reality of it but are willing to spin webs of falsehoods and disinformation in order to further their own ambitions? To die for a man who loves nothing but himself? What do they really think they are gaining?

These brainwashed fools are in a death cult that has them thinking they are dying for America when in fact they are dying only for Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is not worth dying for. 

He is not in any way worthy of that.

He is only deserving of our scorn and our hatred.

He, along with his enablers and apologists, certainly has mine.

I am going to just look at the painting before I say something better left unsaid.

Be careful out there.

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Jasper Johns- “Flag”

America

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

–Walt Whitman

I am on the road for the first time in many months, taking some paintings out to my good friends at the Kada Gallery in Erie. It’s such a familiar thing, something I’ve done for close to 25 years, but it feels a bit strange and disjointed in this oddest of odd years. But yesterday provided a bit of balm in the form of the clarity and assuredness finally provided in our national election.

It will certainly make for a much better ride this morning knowing that the voices of America– closing in on 80 million– rose up against a president*** who aligned himself and his party with the uglier aspects of this country–white supremacy, the belittling of science and knowledge, an outright hatred towards the others of this world, a burning need for retribution, Machiavellian evangelism, and an unrivaled sense of selfishness. The party, as he led it, transformed itself into one of outright racism, voter suppression and an anti-democratic vision for the future.

There was never an attempt to appeal to the better qualities that we have always felt exemplified us– our openness, our generosity, our protective sense of others, our desire to do and be better, and so many other positive attributes. These are things that we have long sought as a nation and have often come up short. But, even so, they have always remained the goal. 

Until this administration. It only responded to our darker side and turned a deaf ear towards the voices of the many.

Yesterday confirmed the strength and number of those voices and it appears that his failed term will soon come to an end.  The words Uncle Walt wrote above so many years ago seem possible once more.

A dark chapter may finally close. But it ain’t over ’til it’s over so keep your ears and eyes open.

Gotta go. Have a good day and be careful out there– I’m on the road.

Here’s some Simon and Garfunkel just for the appropriate atmosphere.

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