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Holding Fast

Posted in Uncategorized on November 14, 2024| 5 Comments »

 

GC Myers- Pondering Blue, 2024

Pondering Blue– At West End Gallery

 

Hold fast to dreams,   

For if dreams die    

Life is a broken-winged bird,     

That cannot fly.    

       ― Langston Hughes

 

The past week has seen many of us dealing with a wide range of emotions– grief, disbelief, confusion, despair, anger, fear, and resignation. I am sure that doesn’t even scratch the surface. Our response to what is taking place hits each of us in all sorts of ways, and not a single one of these emotions pleases us. 

In short, it’s been a hard week. It would be easy to throw up your hands and say, “I give up.”

I have had that impulse more than once during this past week. The future felt dark and dismal. Hope seemed to be a pale light that was quickly fading over a distant horizon.  I am getting older now and it felt like we were facing a struggle that might well extend far beyond the end of my life.

Why not give up?

Well, for one thing, that is exactly what those who seek to dominate the future want from us. They want us feeling defeated and hopeless. And that goes against my contrarian nature. I don’t like being told what to do or not do and I sure as hell don’t like people making assumptions about me submitting to their will.

I think that’s a very American trait. It sometimes makes us hard to understand and difficult to govern. In the long run, it might be the common bond that sustains us.

But even more than that, this past week has reminded me of the work of Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor whose transcendent book Man’s Search For Meaning has sustained me through many dark periods in my life. In his book, Frankl recounts his time in the Auschwitz death camp. He observed that those who were able to survive the horror of that place were those who somehow were able to hold on to a purpose for their life, who saw a future that they needed to strive for, even as the present moment felt hopeless. This purpose, even a modest one, often gave them the drive needed for survival, creating a path forward for them.

It is that need to have a future and purpose on which to hold.  This is allowing me to slowly set aside my grief and hopelessness so that I might get to work on fulfilling that purpose. 

I hold fast to my dreams. And I will not allow anyone to shake them from my grip.

Anyone…

Here’s a more upbeat song that you might expect, the classic Don’t Rain on My Parade, from Barbra Streisand and the film Funny Girl. It’s a song that is about holding onto whatever dream you have despite everything and everyone that tells you to give it up.

Time to get stirred up, folks.

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We Don’t Need Another Hero

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 13, 2024| Leave a Comment »

GC Myers-The Uplifted Heart sm

The Uplifted Heart– At West End Gallery

There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell!

–J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937)

These were the final words of Thorin Oakenshield, the Dwarf King, to Bilbo Baggins as he lay dying after the Battle of the Five Armies, which was the conclusive battle between the forces of good and evil in The Hobbit. Thorin realizes in that moment that greed, much like his own dwarfish thirst for gold, was the cause of all the ills of the world, responsible for all the destructive wars of conquest. He understands that if the inhabitants of Middle Earth were all like Bilbo, leading simple, cheerful lives centered on the goodness of life, that evil would cease to exist.

Heroism, by extension, would no longer be necessary.

Tolkien wrote this in the mid 1930’s, during the rise of Fascism and Naziism in Europe, and the storyline mirrors that time.

That the world would be a better place without the overriding greediness for power and wealth that grips this planet might be a simplistic and unrealistic idea.  It probably is.

But it is also an obvious truth and should remain fixed in our minds so that we might better recognize that type of thirst for domination when it raises its ugly head. Without it we are destined to never-ending repeats of the Battle of the Five Armies, where it will be us simple Hobbits who will have to screw up our courage and pay the price to once more quell those darker forces the face us.

It would be nice to not have to do this time and time again, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to focus on the simpler joys of this world? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to not need a hero except for those who pull kids out of burning buildings or cure disease?

I have no answers here, of course. Yeah, it would be great to not need heroes but the lust for power and wealth seems to be part of our DNA. Wish it weren’t so but we’re probably going to need more heroes in the near future. Most likely we’ll find that hero among those Hobbits forced at last to leave the comfort of their Hobbit holes. We surely won’t find that hero in Sauron’s Tower.

But it’s nice to think of a time when heroes are not needed. Sigh.

Here’s Tina Turner and her We Don’t Need Another Hero. You knew there was going to be a song, didn’t you?

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The Misanthrope?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 12, 2024| 3 Comments »

GC Myers- Island Getaway sm

Island Getaway— At West End Gallery

If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.

…

If we define a misanthrope as ‘someone who does not suffer fools and likes to see fools suffer,’ we have described a person with something to look forward to.

—Florence King, With Charity Toward None (1992)

Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope.

—Irving Layton, The Whole Bloody Bird

I have to admit that I am not too fond of humans in recent days. I used to kid around, saying that I was a misanthrope, but I never really believed it. I felt that there was some redeeming quality, some goodness, in everyone, and that when push comes to shove that they would ultimately do the right thing.

I should have known better. To do so meant ignoring everything I had read about the history of mankind. It’s a virtual laundry list of atrocity and cruelty.

So, maybe I was only kidding myself. Maybe I was–and am–a misanthrope. Or, like the quote above points out, is it even misanthropy when the horrible behavior of humans fails to even live up to your lowest expectations?

Honestly, while I am not thrilled with people in general at the moment, I still hold out hope for them.

Don’t know why.

This reminds me of a post from several years back, Misanthropy in the Morning. I thought it was worth another look this morning:

I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I liked the way it walks;
I wish I liked the way it talks;
And when I’m introduced to one,
I wish I thought “What Jolly Fun!

― Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

On a morning when I am feeling more than a bit misanthropic, I thought I’d express it in the lightest manner I could muster. I guess the verse above from English poet Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh (1861-1922) might do the trick.

I don’t know much about this particular Raleigh and, feeling as I do this morning, don’t really care. Don’t know if he was descended from the more famous Walter Raleigh, the one I best knew from seeing his face on my one aunt’s cigarette packs as a kid. I would imagine so but what does it really matter?

For those of you more interested, this particular Walter Raleigh was a professor of literature at Oxford and that bit of light verse was titled Wishes of an Elderly Man, Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914.

It might be titled Wishes of a Near Elderly Man, Wished in an Art Studio, August 2021. [or November, 2024]

I thought of going with a different piece of verse this morning, like this short bit from Ape and Essence, the lesser-known dystopian novel from Aldous Huxley:

The leech’s kiss, the squid’s embrace,
The prurient ape’s defiling touch:
And do you like the human race?
No, not much.

Or I guess I could have gone with this simple quote from the great German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840):

You call me a misanthrope because I avoid society. You err; I love society. Yet in order not to hate people, I must avoid their company.

It’s not verse but maybe it gets closer to the bone. Perhaps even closer is this passage from Sinclair Lewis, as laid out it in his It Can’t Happen Here:

… he loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons…

That might best describe my misanthropic urge this morning. And every other morning.

I like and love people individually but, on the whole, very much dislike persons in the collective sense.

I am not talking about you guys. No, you’re okay.

Really.

I hope you will excuse my curmudgeonly behavior this morning. Now get out of here.

And stay off my lawn…

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Wild is the Wind/ Nina

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 11, 2024| 2 Comments »

GC Myers- Offered to the Wind 2022

Offered to the Wind— At West End Gallery

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents.
Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.

–Jay Griffiths, Savage Grace: A Journey in Wildness

I had a procedure at a doctor’s office this past week. As I sat there waiting for him to come in, there was music playing. It was modern country music. There wasn’t much to focus on, so I listened more intently than I might have done otherwise. The doctor was running behind schedule and I ended up listening to four songs. I am not saying it was bad or anything like that. It was just nothing. The sound was pleasing but bland. Unmemorable. The lyrics said little if anything. The first two I heard could have been the same song in many ways. It all reminded me of some awful AI concoction.

I was still a bit prickly from the events of last week and the music began to grind on my nerves. I could feel my blood pressure rising. After the fourth song, his assistant came in to let me know he was behind schedule and asked if I wanted to listen to something different.

I said that I did. When she asked what, I said immediately Nina Simone. She instructed the Alexa there to play Nina Simone and when the first notes from her piano slowly began asked if that was right. I assured that it was correct and she left me alone to listen.

The song was Wild is the Wind. I couldn’t have asked for a better song in that moment in that sterile doctor’s office at the end of a perfectly awful week. It captured my mood perfectly. I could feel an easing within me as I sat there. A heavy sigh came forth.

The contrast between that song and the stuff I had heard before was stark. This song had a rawness of emotion and a uniqueness and human touch that the other songs seemed to be lacking. As I said, the others felt to me as though they were created by AI.

Contrasted against the dullness of their conformity, Nina’s song felt like a rebellion of the spirit. Though it is not upbeat and has a sense of loss to it, it did feel wild and free in that moment. The other music, on the other hand, felt boxed in and constrained. No wildness, no freedom.

There seemed to be an analogy there to what I sensed has been happening here in this country. The sense of loss is for that wildness of spirit that seems to be leaking away, being rejected and replaced by uniformity of belief, thought, and action.

Maybe there is no analogy to be had. But for a moment I felt inspired at a moment that was uninspiring in every other way.

Maybe that is the purpose of art — if there is any at all.

Something to think about this morning. Here’s Nina Simone and her version of Wild is the Wind.

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Everything is Broken—-

Posted in Uncategorized on November 10, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Everything is broken

For this week’s Sunday Morning Music, I want to share a longtime favorite song that seems appropriate for many folks in this place at this moment. It’s a version of the Bob Dylan song Everything is Broken performed by Sheryl Crow and Jason Isbell.

It was written and released by Dylan back in 1989. Things felt broken then and now. Things have always felt broken throughout history. People in every period of history and in every place have declared their society and civilization as being near its end. You can look at the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and injust about every time and place. For the most part, they were wrong. Things often work out.

However, there have been more than enough examples of them being right that you can’t discount the thought as a whole. I don’t know where we stand on that spectrum that ranges from needless worrying to dire existential danger for society as a whole. It feels like the latter at the moment but who knows what the near future will bring?

Which way things fall will depend on our actions. If everything is broken, I guess it’s up to us to do what we can to somehow piece it back together. Hopefully, we can set aside our fears and do what needs to be done.

Now, here’s that song.

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That’s Where It’s At

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on November 9, 2024| 2 Comments »

Winnie the Pooh and Piglet sketch EH Shepherd 1958

“Piglet?” said Pooh.

“Yes, Pooh?” said Piglet.

“Do you ever have days when everything feels… Not Very Okay At All? And sometimes you don’t even know why you feel Not Very Okay At All, you just know that you do.”

Piglet nodded his head sagely. “Oh yes,” said Piglet. “I definitely have those days.”

“Really?” said Pooh in surprise. “I would never have thought that. You always seem so happy and like you have got everything in life all sorted out.”

“Ah,” said Piglet. “Well here’s the thing. There are two things that you need to know, Pooh. The first thing is that even those pigs, and bears, and people, who seem to have got everything in life all sorted out… they probably haven’t. Actually, everyone has days when they feel Not Very Okay At All. Some people are just better at hiding it than others.

And the second thing you need to know… is that it’s okay to feel Not Very Okay At All. It can be quite normal, in fact. And all you need to do, on those days when you feel Not Very Okay At All, is come and find me, and tell me.

Don’t ever feel like you have to hide the fact you’re feeling Not Very Okay At All. Always come and tell me.

Because I will always be there.”

—A.A. Milne, 1926

Lots of folks out there feeling Not Very Okay At All. We all could use a little tenderness, a little kindness, right about now. A moment to unclench. Let’s continue that mood with a powerful tune from the great Sam Cooke. This is That’s Where It’s At.

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The Day of Great Confusion

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on November 8, 2024| 5 Comments »

1995-V1 The Day of Great Confusion sm

The Day of Great Confusion–1995, At West End Gallery

It was a murky confusion — here and there blotted with a color like the color of the smoke from damp fuel — of flying clouds tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened.

–Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

I was looking at some older work for the West End Gallery, pieces that had been with me for decades and had never been shown for a variety of reasons. Some just were never meant to be shared with the public, work not complete in one way or another. Some were drab and dull.

And some just didn’t completely click with me at the time. They didn’t hit whatever mark I had established for my work at the time they were painted. I don’t know if the criteria on which I was basing my judgement was that much different from what it is now or if it has shifted subtly over time due to time and circumstance. Whatever the reason, my appreciation for some of these unshown early pieces grew over the intervening years. 

Such is the case for the painting at the top of this page. It was painted in 1995 and, for reasons I can’t determine now, never made a journey outside my studio. Maybe it was that its colors were a bit different than my normal range of color in that time. Maybe I felt that the spew lines from where the watercolors broke free from the body of painting were too sloppy and distracting. Maybe it was the title I had jotted at the bottom of the sheet on which it was painted back in 1995, The Day of Great Confusion. Trying to determine why I applied that title always taxes my memory. 

I still don’t know why it didn’t quite hit the mark for me in 1995. 

However, looking at it at various times over the years, this painting greatly grew on me, showing me qualities I hadn’t recognized earlier. Those things I thought might have caused me to withhold now seemed like strengths. And in the past decade the title took on great significance as our country undertook an unnerving political transformation that still causes confusion and bewilderment within me.

Maybe that was the reason? I don’t know for sure, but I think there are other factors at play, as well. I think, even though it slightly differs from other pieces of that time, that it is a fine example of my early work in most every way. It’s one of those pieces that made me always pause in appreciation when coming across it in past years.

You might not see it that way and that’s okay. I just felt that if there was ever a time for a painting with that title to be shared, this was that time. It has put in its time with me and deserves to be seen.

Here’s song that kind of sums up the moment. Well, at least for me. It’s I Don’t Get It from the Cowboy Junkies. It’s from their fine 1988 album, The Trinity Session. It has bluesy vibe and lyrics that bite into the here and now.

 

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Deep In the Woods

Posted in Uncategorized on November 7, 2024| Leave a Comment »

GC Myers- I Was Lost 1997

GC Myers- I Was Lost, 1997

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

—Henry David Thoreau

I think I’m beginning to understand…

The painting above has been on my mind lately. I was going through some older work and stopped, as I always do, when I came across this painting from 1997. It’s titled I Was Lost and was an experimental piece. I don’t think it ever showed in a gallery but don’t hold me to that.

It’s been with me for all these years and never fails to make me stop and think when I come across it. I can’t say exactly what it is in it that speaks to me, even after 27 years. And that might be part of its appeal.

One thing about it that I do recognize is that it speaks to my own feelings of sometimes feeling lost. The way forward seems blocked and present seemingly endless challenges.

Had that feeling of standing before these trees too many times before. And now. I imagine there are many of us who feel like the forest is too deep and foreboding to pass through at the moment/

But me and many others have made it through. We may seem lost but so long as we understand who we are and hold on to that, not becoming something that we are not, we will pass through somehow. That is all we can do. Persist as we are.

To put it another way, as in the lines from Christopher Fry’s 1949 verse play, The Lady’s Not for Burning:

The best
Thing we can do is to make wherever we’re lost in
Look as much like home as we can.

Know and hold on to who you are and keep moving forward.

I am letting go of I Was Lost, taking it to the West End Gallery later today. I am trying to get better at letting certain pieces go and figured this was the right time for this painting. It has served me well and maybe it can help someone else in the same way.

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Who We Are Now

Posted in Uncategorized on November 6, 2024| 4 Comments »

20241106_061131

And then it was over.

I went out this morning and stood in the driveway of my studio. The sun was just putting light over the horizon through the trees. The sky was filled with colors, both beautiful and ominous. The first thing that came to mind was the sky in Gone With the Wind.

And that seemed about right.

I stood there taking it in and a thought kept running through my mind: This is who we are now.

It was a statement. There was no question in it.

This is who we are now.

It’s going to take time to wrestle with this, to find a rationale that makes any sense, one that allows me to feel any sense of communion with this new definition of who we are. Maybe this who we always were, and I am at fault for not recognizing it.

For now, I stand in the semi-darkness with that sentence running through my mind. This is who we are now.

And I feel like a stranger in a strange land…

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Wishin’ and Hopin’/ Election Day Edition

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 5, 2024| Leave a Comment »

GC Myers- A Prayer For Light

A Prayer For Light— Exiles series

“Of course, there must be lots of Magic in the world,” he said wisely one day, “but people don’t know what it is like or how to make it. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen. I am going to try and experiment.”

–Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden, 1911

…until you make them happen.

A lot of us wish and hope for better things and a change from those parts of our lives that disappoint us. But until we act on those wishes and hopes, nothing usually happens.

Things stay the way they are. Or go in ways we never wanted to go.

Of course, wishing and hoping can be viewed as the primary stages of making a plan of action or setting a course and goal for the future. And that’s important.

Action without a goal can be as fruitless as wishing and hoping without action.

But the two– the wish and the action– put together can produce a sort of Magic, much as Colin the bedridden boy discovered in The Secret Garden. It’s a Magic that is within our grasp once we realize this fact.

I am going to give a really basic example. Many years ago, when I was in the early stages of my art life, I wished and hoped for a solo exhibit. I had only been showing my work publicly for a very short time, less than two years, so I didn’t have a reputation or name to pave the way. I didn’t expect anything and it would have been easy to shrug it off and do nothing.

But I decided to try and experiment, to act on my wish.

I had been working on my Exiles series, work that was very personal. It was done during the battle my mom faced with cancer, ultimately losing her life to it in November of 1995. I put together a proposal for show of these paintings and introduced myself to the director of the Gmeiner Art Center in Wellsboro, PA, about an hour from my home. She was impressed by the work and the presentation and gave me a solo show that winter featuring the Exiles paintings.

One thing that struck me about this was when a couple of other artists approached me at a local gallery opening around the time the show at the Gmeiner ran. Both were established artists who had been working much longer than I and had actual bodies of work. They seemed kind of envious that I was having this show and asked how I got this show.

My answer was simple.

“I asked for it.”

I could see on their faces that this was a revelation, that this simple action was something they had never thought to do.

You can’t wait for your hopes and wishes to come to you. Sometimes, you have to take the step towards them, to put things in motion and to make Magic happen.

Unfortunately, a lot of us don’t ever get the connection between wishes and actions. And that’s a shame.

Make something happen today. Make some Magic.

Of course, if you read this blog regularly, you probably know that this is all just a setup for playing a song. I thought that today’s words and image would match up nicely with a hit song, Wishin’ and Hopin’, from Burt Bacharach, who died this past week [February, 2023]. This is the 1964 hit version from Dusty Springfield. Though it seems a little dated and she seems a little needy in this song about getting a guy, the premise that it takes action to achieve wishes and hopes is correct: You won’t get him/ Thinkin’ and a-prayin’, wishin’ and a-hopin’

You got to put wishes and hopes into action…

This post ran early last year. As I walked through the woods to the studio in the dark this morning, the chorus from the song Wishin’ and Hopin’ kept rolling through my mind. It seemed like a great song for the nervous anticipation that has been building for this Election Day. The post seemed to match up well with the day as well. Today is the day to put our wishes and hopes into action. It is a day of great privilege and responsibility, one where your vote is equal to the vote of any billionaire. In some places with tight races, it might be worth more.

Today, put your wishes and hopes into action. Make some magic.

Vote.

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