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I Remember Everything

June 18, 2020 by redtreetimes

“In the Year 2020”- Now at the Principle Gallery

 

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I still am pretty busy working on my next show that opens in July at the West End Gallery. Little time, much to do, and lethargy to overcome. So, this morning I am just going to share a song and the painting above, In the Year 2020, that’s still at the Principle Gallery as part of my current show there. I just like looking at this piece. Brings me comfort in some way.

The song is the last song John Prine recorded before he died from the covid-19 virus. It’s called I Remember Everything. It’s classic Prine and a fitting final song.

Have a good and decent day.

Posted in Event, Music, Painting | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

Further On Up the Road

June 17, 2020 by redtreetimes

“Elbow Room” – Now at the Principle Gallery

 

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“The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.”

― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

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I am a bit distracted this morning so I will make this short. Lots of moving parts this morning with much to do and lots of thoughts running through my mind. Some are small and trivial and some more momentous. Kind of like the difference between a road and a path. The path is the smaller, more familiar one, the comfortable one we walk each day as part of our everyday world. The road, on the other hand, denotes greater distance and further destinations.

My thoughts are of both paths and roads this morning. But none of it is really anything I wish to share now.

Maybe some other time. Maybe. Maybe not.

Instead, I am just going to share a song. It’s one of Johnny Cash‘s late recordings, this one made in the final months of his life. I have commented here before that I believe the work from late in his life was as raw and powerfully deep as anything in his long and illustrious career. This is his cover of a Bruce Springsteen song, Further On Up the Road.

Fits the morning.

Have a good day.

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Posted in Music | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Age, Art, and Life

June 16, 2020 by redtreetimes

Black Fish- Georges Braque

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With age, art and life become one.

—Georges Braque

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I have been very busy working on my upcoming annual West End Gallery show, From a Distance, that opens next month on July 15. Yesterday, in emails with the gallery, while we were going over some details for how the show would safely go on given the current situation with the covid-19 pandemic still in progress, I was reminded this was my 25th year showing with the gallery.

Of course, I knew this as a fact. But just reading it yesterday really brought  the point home for me.

Twenty five years. A quarter of a century.

While I was very pleased to have been with them for so long, it made me feel kind of old, to tell the truth.

While I understand that I am now one of the elder statesmen in the galleries that show my work, I still feel like a young painter most days, both for better and worse. I am often as excited by the work that emerges as I was 25 years back, still am in wonder at times that these paintings that sometimes seem far beyond my own meager understanding are products of my imagination.

And I am also as uncertain and doubtful of my abilities as I was all those years ago. Actually, maybe more doubtful than I was then. Hardly a day goes by now where I don’t say to myself in frustration, “You stink!”

And some days I find myself going from one extreme to the other, from the abyss of pure self-doubt to wondering how something so alive and vibrant came from my hands and mind. Sometimes in just an hour or two. Yesterday was one of those days.

Makes me think that Braque is right, that with age, art and life become one.  If my age, my twenty five years of doing this, has taught me anything, it’s that this time spent creating art has been the best and the worst all wrapped in one big messy, sometimes beautiful, and almost always imperfect package.

Just like life.

 

Posted in Biographical, Event, Quote | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

The People, Yes

June 15, 2020 by redtreetimes

 

“Approaching Storm”- Now at the Principle Gallery


Lately, I have been reading bits and pieces from a book of Carl Sandburg poems called The People, Yes. Published in 1936, it is an deep reflection on the American people at that time, in the midst of the upheaval of  the Great Depression. It is a broad work that attempts to span the multitudes, much like Whitman and his Leaves of Grass.

As I say, I have been reading it piecemeal, picking it up at loose moments. Each time I am struck how relative it is to this time even though it is nearly 85 years old. For all the technological and societal changes that have occurred, for all the progress and sophistication we assume took place, we are still pretty much the same and pretty much in the same place. Still maintaining many of the same conceptions and misconceptions, still as biased and still as vulnerable to being manipulated.

One verse from this book that I keep coming back to is shown above, at least its beginning, #102.

It begins with bits from President Lincoln’s July 4, 1961 speech to Congress, one in which he justified his actions in the aftermath of the Confederate’s attack on Fort Sumter. In it, he outlined how the leaders of the Southern rebellion stoked the enthusiasm for conflict among the people living there through the dispersal of misinformation and fallacies. Some things never change, eh?

Reading Sandburg’s take on this is a bit scary. It seems to reflect what has happened here so well. The public has been barraged with lies and hateful, divisive rhetoric for the last three or so years to the point that we are without moorings. And now, in this unsteady state, we are experiencing the convergence of events that have been precipitated by these actions.

We are reaping the whirlwind.

And, unfortunately, the man and his accomplices who have done this, who have unleashed this awful power, can no longer control its direction or the scope and range of its destructive power.

As Sandburg put it:

 Is there a time to repeat,
“The living passions of millions can rise
into a whirlwind: the storm once loose
who can ride it? You? Or you? Or you?
        only history, only tomorrow, knows
        for every revolution breaks
as a child of its own convulsive hour
shooting patterns never told of beforehand”?

As I say, some things never change. There will always be those who try to benefit from inciting chaos and division upon the people. But, as it has always been, these devious people have never been able to reliably predict or control the whirlwind they let loose.

The public mind generally has the final word in such matters.

And it is speaking now.

 

Posted in Current Events | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments »

Diamonds and Rust

June 14, 2020 by redtreetimes

Been sitting here for well over an hour and a half, just listening to different music, looking at paintings and thinking on a wide range of subjects and memories, many from the distant past. There’s no nostalgia in it. Not even much wistfulness. Just tracing lines back and forth, trying to see how things come and go, how things change, how we both grow and erode with time.

And after all of that I think I am just going to play a song this morning.

Maybe it has something to do with the time spent this morning. Maybe not. I am not going to talk about it here except to say this a beautifully written and performed song. It’s from Joan Baez from back in the mid 1970’s and references her relationship with Bob Dylan in the the 1960’s with ten years perspective.

It struck a chord with me then and still does, after all these years. Here’s Diamonds and Rust.

Have a good day.
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Posted in Music | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments »

Bacon’s Nervous System

June 13, 2020 by redtreetimes

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Painting is the pattern of one’s own nervous system being projected on canvas.

–Francis Bacon

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Ain’t it the truth?

The words of the late painter Francis Bacon certainly holds true for me, at least in certain times. There were several such days during this past week, if you need an example.

On these days I spent hour after twaddling in paint that directly reflected my own flatness of spirit, my own frustration and confusion. My reaction to the work I was producing was a dull mix of despair and anger. I sensed that it, the work and my reaction, was just a mirroring of my own reaction to the world as I was currently seeing it.

My own nervous system.

I hoped that recognizing this despair and anger would somehow provide a spark of its own. A reaction to my reaction, if you will.

But it was like throwing new colors into the mix with the result being an even more gross and ugly shade of brown and gray. No clarity or sharpness, neither in color nor in thought. The frustration grew even more.

These days reflected the pattern of my own floundering nervous system. I just wished I didn’t bother to project them on canvas.

I sit here this morning and still have the same feelings sparking dully through my synapses, making me both dread and welcome the hours ahead of me here in the studio. The dread is that these feelings will remain and show fully in the paint. The welcoming aspect comes in the hope and possibility that something in the paint– a color, a tone, a contrast– will create new sparks that will push out the dullness and flatness.

Something that will express itself in a new pattern being formed in my nervous system.

It’s this hope and possibility that comes with the beginning of every new day of painting that makes life more than tolerable. It makes it worth living because even on the worst days there is the hope that comes in the next.

I am moving on to to my next day now, filled with hope and possibility.

Hope yours is the same.

Posted in Biographical, Motivation, Painting, Quote | Tagged , , | 4 Comments »

With Machete in Hand

June 12, 2020 by redtreetimes

“And Dusk Dissolves”- Now at the Principle Gallery

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Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain’t no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction — you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.

–Ursula K. Le Guin

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I felt compelled to put up a piece of new work from my current Principle Gallery show along with a piece of advice for aspiring artists from writer Ursula LeGuin. Make your own road, baby.  Do the heavy lifting and don’t depend on any one person to guide you through. There are no shortcuts– no hitchhiking as she puts it. You’re on your own so learn to hear what you have to say to yourself.

Show who and what you really are then stand tall. Own your road.

That’s it. I’m going to be concise because it’s a busy day for me. While my show at the Principle Galley is ongoing, I am working hard on new work for my next show which opens in July at the West End Gallery. Plus this morning I am leaving the safe bubble of my studio and home to accompany my dad on his first radiation treatment for a cancerous growth on his temple.

It’s the first time in 13 weeks that I am seeing him as the nursing facility where he resides is under lockdown from the covid-19 virus. I am both looking forward to and dreading seeing him. The dread comes from anticipating what changes may have taken place in this past quarter of a year from the dementia and skin cancer that plague him. Perhaps his awareness and power of recollection has eroded even more? Will he even recognize me now, especially with the mask I will be wearing?

I guess I’ll soon find out.

Odd days, indeed. Have a good one, folks.

Posted in Advice, Biographical, Quote | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments »

Where Can I Feel at Home?

June 11, 2020 by redtreetimes

“The Exile’s Wilderness”- Now at the Principle Gallery

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“From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes ‘responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.’ It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, ‘the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?”

― Albert Camus, The Rebel

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I came across the excerpt above from The Rebel from Albert Camus while searching for something to accompany the painting at the top, The Exile’s Wilderness, which is part of my current exhibit hanging at the Principle Gallery.

This short paragraph stopped me in my tracks and I found myself reading the words and phrasing of it over and over again this morning. It summed up so well the feeling that I take from this painting and that sense of exile, of separateness, that I have often experienced.

The search for justification, the sometimes pointless nostalgia of memory, the feeling of being responsible for everything alive and for setting things in some sort of order– they all feel too familiar.

But it’s that final question that stirred me most: Where can I feel at home?

It is a heartbreaking question. I believe most of us take for granted that feeling of comfort and of being at home. But for the Exile it is an elusive thing, perhaps even an impossibility. In the absence of the real comfort of home they settle for the security found in hiding or in blending in, hiding in plain sight with large and faceless crowds.

That’s the wilderness to which I refer in this painting– a place for the Exile to hide and find security in a world where they may never feel truly at home.

And odd as this may sound, there is great comfort in this. Just having a place where one feels safe and secure is a desirable state of being for most of us because in such an environment we can create and define our own sense of home.

If you think about many of the problems facing us today, most come down to conflicts between people rightly seeking that sense of home, of safety and security, for themselves and those who would deny them that right.

There’s a lot to read into this painting, more than it lets on at first glance. Much like the Exile walking unseen and unnoticed among the crowd.

Posted in Biographical, Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Undoing of Ourselves

June 10, 2020 by redtreetimes

“She Glides Through the Fractured Night” Now at the Principle Gallery

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Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.

― Horace Mann

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I am just going to let the words of Horace Mann hang out there this morning.

Most of us are probably unaware of Horace Mann outside of it being in the names of many public schools all around the nation– there is most likely one somewhere in your region. But Mann, an educator and politician, was a leading advocate for universal public education and for standing up for the rights and betterment of others. In fact, the words on his statue at Antioch College, where he served as its first president until his death in 1859, read:

Be Ashamed to Die Until You Have Won Some Victory for Humanity

I think he probably died without shame.

Let’s hope we all can do the same.

Here’s a favorite song of mine from Mavis Staples. It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly 10 years since I last played it here.

Time do fly, do it not?

Have a good day.

Posted in Motivation, Music | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments »

Matisse/Not Like Everybody Else

June 9, 2020 by redtreetimes

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It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.

–Henri Matisse

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Well, Mr. Matisse certainly did not paint like everybody else and I, for one, am glad of it.

But I believe I know what he is saying. As an artist, you’re always torn between poles of confidence.

When it is at its highest point, you believe so strongly in what you are doing that it doesn’t matter what everybody else’s work is like.

But at the low points, you lose confidence in the credibility of your own voice and vision. At these low points it seems like it would be easier to have the comfort of being able to judge your own work against others who do the same type of work so that you could gauge whether your creations were worthy of notice.

I certainly have swung wildly between these two poles and have at points wished that I painted more like other artists, as though I would somehow benefit from their credibility. I know that this sort of thinking is misplaced and the result of low self-esteem in that moment, but it happens. And on a more regular basis than one might think.

But the work itself is usually the voice of reason, the thing that brings me around once more. Just getting lost in the creation of a piece and sitting in front of it in the aftermath, still fully immersed in the life force it then exudes, washes away that need to be like everybody else.

But even in that moment, I know that nagging feeling, that desire to be like everybody else, will still be there waiting for me when I inevitably swing back to that other pole.

So, Mr. Matisse, thank you for not being like everybody else. I know how hard it sometimes must have felt but we appreciate you staying true to your own voice.

Here are a few more of his interiors, a group of his work that I really love.

Posted in Advice, Favorite Things, Influences, Painting, Quote | Tagged , | 3 Comments »

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