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’.

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.