Redtree Times

Paul Klee, Blossoms in the Night

I was asked yesterday if I talked to my paintings.

Interesting question.

I talk to myself. I talk to animals. I talk to the trees and plants in the surrounding forest. I talk to my car. I talk to my studio, which actually has a name. I talk to ghosts, present or not. Whether any of these things or creatures listen is another matter.

But talk to my paintings?

It immediately brought to mind a section of a famous lecture that I had been reading recently and had really resonated with me. It was On Modern Art, delivered in the 1920’s by Swiss artist and a personal favorite of mine Paul Klee:

Paul Klee, Small Picture of Fir Tree, 1922

May I use a simile, the simile of the tree? The artist has studied this world of variety and has, we may suppose, unobtrusively found his way in it. His sense of direction has brought order into the passing stream of image and experience. This sense of direction in nature and life, this branching and spreading array, I shall compare with the root of the tree.

From the root the sap flows to the artist, flows through him, flows to his eye. Thus he stands as the trunk of the tree. Battered and stirred by the strength of the flow, he guides the vision on into his work. As, in full view of the world, the crown of the tree unfolds and spreads in time and space, so with his work.

Nobody would affirm that the tree grows its crown in the image of its root. Between above and below can be no mirrored reflection. It is obvious that different functions expanding in different elements must produce divergences. But it is just the artist who at times is denied those departures from nature which his art demands. He has even been charged with incompetence and deliberate distortion.

And yet, standing at his appointed place, the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him from the depths. He neither serves nor rules–he transmits. His position is humble. And the beauty at the crown is not his own. He is merely a channel.

This very much sums up how I’ve always felt about art, especially my place as an artist– a mere channel or transmitter.  And when I look at my paintings, the crown of my tree, it is not in the form of a conversation so much as listening to what the paintings have to tell me. I paint because I question and, at best, the paintings provide some answers and insight that I might not find or see otherwise.

So, do I talk to my paintings? Not so much. But do they talk to me? Yes. And I do my best to listen…

This post originally ran in 2010 but I like Klee’s thoughts and run it back out every four or five years. I’m adding some music this time around. The song is I Talk to the Trees from the musical Paint Your Wagon. My choices came down to the movie version from Clint Eastwood or an instrumental version from Chet Baker and Bill Evans. Not a hard decision to make. Here’s Chet and Bill.

Struggle and Will– At the West End Gallery

I don’t care about the rules. In fact, if I don’t break the rules at least 10 times in every song then I’m not doing my job properly. Emotion is much more important than making mistakes, so be prepared to look like a chump. If you become too guarded and too processed, the music loses its spontaneity and gut feeling.

–Jeff Beck

Jeff Beck died yesterday at the age of 78 after contracting bacterial meningitis. Been a fan of his music almost all my life. He was always at the leading edge of rock music, creating new fields with his forays into jazz fusion. One comment about his career was that it was self-definable, a unique one that played to its own tune, unconcerned with how other viewed it. I liked that description.

I was equally impressed whenever I read excerpts from interviews with Beck. Said a lot of things that I could relate to as a person and an artist. Like the statement above about having little concern for the rules of his art. Substitute the word painting in for music and it matches the attitude I carried with me from my earliest attempts at painting.

Then there’s:

I cherish my privacy, and woe betide anyone who tries to interfere with that.

Or:

If you were to plot my success or failure, it goes, it very seldom stays on a high plateau.

Or:

I like an element of chaos in music. That feeling is the best thing ever, as long as you don’t have too much of it.

That really hits close to the bone.

The world lost an original.

Here’s one of his better-known compositions, Beck’s Bolero. It’s a take on the famed Ravel piece and really pushed the boundaries of the rock genre when it was recorded in 1966.

Max Beckmann- Still Life with Three Skulls, 1945

All important things in art since Ur of the Chaldea’s, since Tel Halaf and Crete, have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being. Self-realization is the urge of all objective spirits. It is this Ego for which I am searching in my life and in my art. Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement, for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our Ego that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make.

–Max Beckmann, On My Painting, 1938

Max Beckmann- Beginning

Everything intellectual and transcendent is joined together in painting by the uninterrupted labour of the eyes. Each shade of a flower, a face, a tree, a fruit, a sea, a mountain, is noted eagerly by the intensity of the senses to which is added, in a way of which we are not conscious, the work of the mind, and in the end the strength or weakness of the soul… It is the strength of soul which forces the mind to constant exercise to widen its conception of space. Something of this is perhaps contained in my pictures.

–Max Beckmann, On My Painting, 1938

Max Beckmann- Synagogue

Learn by heart the forms to be found in nature, so that you can use them like the notes in a musical composition. That is what these forms are for. Nature is a marvelous chaos, and it is our job and our duty to bring order into that chaos and – to perfect it.

–Max Beckmann, Three Letters to a Woman-Painter, 1948

Max Beckmann- Departure, 1935

A human face, a hand, a woman’s breast or a manly body, an expression of conflicting joy and pain, the infinite ocean, savage crags, the melancholy speech of black trees against the snow, the fierce power of spring blossoms and the heavy lethargy of a hot summer noon when our old friend Pan is asleep and the ghost of noon are murmuring – all this is enough to make us forget the sorrows of the world, or to give them form. In any case the determination to give form to things brings with it part of the solution for which you are seeking. The path is hard and the goal can never be reached – but it is a path.

–Max Beckmann, Three Letters to a Woman-Painter, 1948

Max Beckmann- Blind Man’s Bluff, 1945

What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality. I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality. It may sound paradoxical, but it is in fact reality which forms the mystery of our existence.

–Max Beckmann, The Actors, 1942

Max Beckmann, The Actors, 1942

Wasn’t going to write anything, just let Beckmann’s words and images stand by themselves. But I came across a video with the proper Germanic feel for Beckmann’s images and thought it was worth inclusion. It’s a version of Mack the Knife (Mackie Messer) from Swedish jazz musician/multi-instrumentalist/dancer Gunhild Carling. Exuberant.

The Sky Is Always the Sky, 1995

Growth is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing and regrouping.

–Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879)

I have been working in the studio the past week or so, trying to reorganize and clean my workspace. I have a relatively large space here but somehow it has filled and become craped over the 15 years I have been in here. A lot of stuff that I thought might be usable has found its way to the trash and a few things that have been either forgotten or thought lost have emerged from the piles.

It feels good to get things back in order and to rid myself of things that cluttered my life without much purpose.

While reorganizing things, I inevitably end up going through old work here in the studio. I do this most years around this time. I feel like it’s a valuable part of my process, this doubling back. It helps me measure what I perceive is growth in my work. Well, at least what I hope is growth in my work.

The work has changed in many ways and stayed the same in others. The years have changed me as a person in many ways and that is reflected in the newer work. Parts of my skillset– and personality– have grown, some have declined, some have been lost altogether.

Looking back at the earlier work allows me to see where these gains and losses have taken place. In some cases, there are things I want to recapture. I should say try to recapture. Some things are, as I said, lost forever. Technique and materials evolve. The way I perceive things has changed. Eyesight fades a bit, my hand is a bit less steady, and some things are born of emotional moments that can’t be recreated organically.

Things change and there is work that I can’t fully recreate. That makes me a bit sorrowful. It’s like looking at a photo of yourself when you were younger, with more and darker hair and skin that didn’t have quite so many wrinkles or sags. You see yourself as the same but know that that time is past. You can try to go back but the miles are on the odometer and the engine. It will never be quite the same.

I use the word sorrowful, but I am not truly saddened by it. I am actually glad in seeing these pieces from that time, remembering the spirit in which they were created. That spirit is the thing that can be revisited, rediscovered.

It is energy-giving. And that’s a big deal this stage of the game.

Take the piece at the top. It’s called The Sky Is Always the Sky from the middle of 1995. I stumbled across it the other day and it thrilled me, much as it did when I first painted almost 28 years ago. I see things in it that I would struggle in recreating. The colors, the sedimentation of the pigments, and even the organic feel of the linework would be much different.

For some reason, I don’t think this piece ever showed in a gallery. Maybe I knew that its purpose would be in reminding me of that time and emotional feeling some years later. If so, its purpose has been fulfilled.

All I could ask of it.

FYI: The quote at the top, which rings especially true for me, is from Julia Cameron, the great 19th century British photographer. I wrote about some of her photos several times here years ago. Her photos have a freshness and composition that seem distinct and apart from the wok of her contemporaries. They sometimes seem out of their time for me.

Here’s a song about looking back. It’s Reflections on My Life from The Marmalade.

Vita et Lux– At Principle Gallery

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.

–Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)

Could it be that mere being, with all the darkness it entails, is the meaning and purpose of life? Maybe we have no purpose other than to experience being alive, to be little sparks of light that creates an arc that runs from our birth to our death, cutting through the darkness.

Maybe that arc itself is the light of meaning?

I don’t know if that is the case or if I can believe that. It’s a little too hedonistic to my way of thinking, too limited to self-indulgence and lacking concern for the welfare of others.

But it’s only 6 AM on a Monday morning. Maybe in the light of day I will see things differently.

Or maybe not. Who knows?

Since light seems to be the subject of the day, here’s a song dealing with that subject. Kind of. This is Springsteen and his Blinded By the Light performed in the mid-2000’s with the band from his Seeger Sessions album. That album performed many Pete Seeger folk songs with a hybrid folk-Big Band sound. I wasn’t particularly fond of that album at the time but over the years it has grown on me and I think this folk-Big Band sound works really well with this tune. You be the judge.

Riding Rhythm– At the West End Gallery

I have studied many times
The marble which was chiseled for me–
A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor.
In truth it pictures not my destination
But my life.
For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;
Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;
Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances.
Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.
And now I know that we must lift the sail
And catch the winds of destiny
Wherever they drive the boat.
To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire–
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

–Edgar Lee Masters, George Gray, Spoon River Anthology, 1915

Ah, those last four lines…

I’m not going to say any more this morning. It’s Sunday and we all deserve a break. If there is a common thread here, it’s for you to find if you so choose.

For this Sunday’s song, here’s a longtime favorite from the late Leonard Cohen, Night Comes On.

Navigating Chaos– Now at the Principle Gallery

Let chaos storm!
Let cloud shapes swarm!
I wait for form.

–Robert Frost, Pertinax, 1936

There is often what appears to be chaos in this world. That’s a scary thing.

It represents tumult and uncertainty. Change. Destruction.

Creation.

That’s probably the most important aspect of chaos: Creation comes from chaos.

We can fear it. We can fight it. But regardless of our efforts, chaos is always with us. Perhaps we should embrace it with the understanding that life and art and all other creation rises from chaos.

Hmm. Not what I thought I’d write this morning but let’s let it be as it is.

Here’s a favorite song from Willie Nelson, Darkness on the Face of the Earth. It’s the 1998 remake of his 1962 song which was far more traditional country in style. This version is less restrained and much freer in its movement. I thought it fit today’s subject as it’s about a guy trying to find form after his world is shattered.

Creation from chaos.

Hmm…

By the way, pertinax comes from the Latin and means obstinate and persevering. The quality you need to find form beyond chaos.

It Was the Oddest Sky, 1994

Tell him to be alone often and get at himself
and above all tell himself no lies about himself
whatever the white lies and protective fronts
he may use amongst other people.
Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong
and the final decisions are made in silent rooms.
Tell him to be different from other people
if it comes natural and easy being different.
Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives.
Let him seek deep for where he is a born natural.
      Then he may understand Shakespeare
      and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov,
      Michael Faraday and free imaginations
bringing changes into a world resenting change.
      He will be lonely enough
      to have time for the work
      he knows as his own.

–Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes

I wasn’t sure how this was all going to tie together today. Didn’t seem to have a common chord at first and thought it might be a stretch trying to stand my stuff up alongside Amercian icons like Carl Sandburg and Woody Guthrie. But then I thought that it was their idea of individuality, of going your own way, that drove my work. Especially the early work when I was trying to differentiate myself from the art that I knew.

Much like Sandburg’s verse, I seemed to heed the advice given by a father in it. I knew I wanted to be somehow different, to not be constantly compared to the work and words of others. I didn’t want to compete with anyone, just wanted to be left alone with the time to do what I felt I needed to do.

The piece at the top, It Was the Oddest Sky from 1994, represents one of the first efforts where I felt that I could find something in the work that I could call my own. Even as the work has changed, grown, and evolved, the idea of it standing alone as my own has always been the driving force behind it.

Whether it is good or not, I cannot say. It’s just what I do now and when I am gone, what I did in my own way and with my own voice. It might not be the best voice or the sweetest. But like Woody wrote: There ain’t nobody that can sing like me

Here’s the song that that line is from, Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key. It was from a group of unrecorded lyrics that Billy Bragg and Wilco set to music at the behest of the Guthrie family. The result were the Mermaid Avenue albums. I think they’re great works and this song is among my favorites from them.

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.

–Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time (1967)

Eric Hoffer died in 1983, before some of the current GOP members in our House of Representatives were even born. But he knew of them already. He knew the type, those people who refuse all compromises and accept only absolutism and control. Those people who would rather burn down the whole shooting match unless all their demands are met.

Those kinds of folks are in every time and place.

Freaking Nihilists.

Fortunately, they seldom coalesce and gain power. And when they do, their reign seldom lasts long unless they transfer their power to a system that totally discards all democratic norms to become an authoritarian regime. In a democratic system, once the Freaking Nihilists take control, they can no longer hide their total lack of knowledge, ideas, policies, or the will to govern. In fact, those are all things for which they hold nothing but total disdain.

Oh, if they somehow take power, they will hold on for a short while, subsisting on a diet of grievance and contrived cultural battles. But after a while people want the boring stability that even an imperfect true democracy offers in its governance.

They want their government to assist them when they have problems, to provide necessary services, to make sure laws and regulations are upheld and that the benefits due to them arrive. They just want the government to work for them. That includes their elected officials, something the Freaking Nihilists oppose on principle.

At that point, when their true aims and lack of expertise become evident, they usually get voted out, leaving nothing but damage behind for the next administration to clean up.

I bet Eric Hoffer, the Longshoreman Philosopher, would be having a field day taking potshots at the current crop of Freaking Nihilists. I have been a fan of his for some time now, having featured him here a few times in blogposts over the years. Hoffer (1902-1983) was a self-taught philosopher/ social commentator/ activist/ thinker with a knack for seeing the tides and patterns that swirl beneath the surface of history. He was a total working-class guy with a natural distrust of bosses and those who wield power over others. My kind of guy.

Like I said, he would have recognized those weasels among us, those Freaking Nihilists. Their corrupted weakness has been around forever. You can’t negotiate with people who believe in nothing but chaos and destruction of norms. And once you allow them into your midst, as the Republican Party did, thinking that you can somehow use and control them, you are forever tied to them. You can’t get rid of them because in doing so they will turn their fire on you. We are seeing that now as the 10% of that party who are Freaking Nihilists wreak havoc in the battle for the Speaker of the House.

I have little doubt that the leaders of the party will give in to their demands. Their own quest for power makes that a likelihood. It might well result in a nightmare for this country and the world because one of the main things these Freaking Nihilists want is to prevent the raising of our debt ceiling and allowing a default on our national debt. This would be beyond terrible, crippling the world economy in a way that would make the worldwide economic problems caused by Covid in 2020 look like the Good Old Days.

It could create pure chaos.

And that is all they desire.

Buckle up, folks. The next couple of years could be a very bumpy ride…

Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.  Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance and suspicion are the fruits of weakness.

–Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Courage, 1963

This image and the image at the top is, of course, of the German Nihilists from The Big Lebowski. Nihilist #2 was played by Flea, the bassist from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I am not going to play any RHCP today. Instead, let’s go with something from The Big Lebowski. Here’s Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) from Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. I think the song and video kind of fits this post pretty well.

But what do I know?

Pablo Picasso- The Old Guitarist, 1903

Art is the best possible introduction to the culture of the world. I love it for the buried hopes, the garnered memories, the tender feelings it can summon at a touch. It washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

–Pablo Picasso

I chose the song below because I thought Glenn Hansard sort of looked like the old guitarist from the Pablo Picasso painting from his early Blue Period shown above. Maybe the biggest difference is that Glenn’s guitar has a lot more evident wear and tear than the one in the painting.

I hadn’t heard the song and, after listening, realized it was a pretty good fit for today’s triad of words, image, and song. The song is Paying My Way. Maybe it can wash away the dust of everyday life from your soul this morning. Mine is feeling much less dusty after a couple of listens.