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Imagination or Headache?

March 12, 2025 by redtreetimes

Sea of the Six Moons– At West End Gallery

A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache.

–Catherine the Great (1762-1796), Letter to Baron Friedrich von Grimm (29 Apr 1775)

Doing a quick search this morning, I couldn’t find the entirety of the letter from Catherine the Great that contained the quote above, so I don’t know the exact context. I don’t know what was that wind to which she referred. It might have been the stirrings of the American Revolution or, more likely, the spread of the progressive ideas of the Enlightenment that she was trying to introduce to the Russian people.

Whatever the case, when the great winds of change come, one can choose to see the new possibilities that lay beyond and navigate toward this new horizon of opportunity. That’s the imagination part, I dare say.

Or one can just see one’s resistance to the winds be pummeled into acceptance. To finally let the wind blow you wherever it wants to take you and do whatever it will regardless of one’s desires. Hopeless and powerless, to end up as flotsam on the never-ending waves.

I would venture that this might be the headache. It sounds like a headache to me.

That’s all I am going to say this morning. Just liked that quote from the Empress Cathy and thought it might fit with the painting at the top. Or maybe not. Does it matter?

The painting by the way, Sea of the Six Moons, is currently hanging at the West End Gallery as part of their annual Little Gems exhibit. The show ends tomorrow, Thursday, March 13, so if you want to catch this always wonderful show, please get in today or tomorrow.

Here’s a song that may or may not fit alongside today’s painting and quote. I played it here four years back and it just hit a chord with me this morning. It’s The Dolphins from Fred Neil, who was best known for writing Everybody’s Talkin’ that was made popular by Harry Nilsson and its prominent connection to the film, Midnight Cowboy. I was going to play one of the covers of it that have been made, such as those by Linda Ronstadt, Tim Buckley, or Harry Belafonte, but I find that Neil’s original suits me best.

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Know your history. Know your mind. Speak up. Be loud.

March 11, 2025 by redtreetimes

And then they stole our solace
(I can’t cry no more)
And then they stole our peace
(I can’t cry no more)
With countless acts of malice
(I can’t cry no more)
And hatred without cease
(I can’t cry no more)

—Cry No More, Rhiannon Giddens

I have been painting intently for my annual June solo show at the Principle Gallery. The title for this year’s show, which opens June 13, is Entanglement. I am not ready to start sharing the details or work from this show yet except to say that it is providing the excitement I need to get me through the current state of this country and the world in general. I can’t completely turn off the sound and fury of the outer world nor my reactions to it. With what is taking place, to not have a reaction is unnatural.

I am not going to list or go into details of the atrocities that make me want to scream. There are too many in the firehose of horror with which we are being soaked. Just one or two of these would have people up in arms in normal times.

But these are not normal times. And unusual times require unusual effort.

I wanted to share a video and song that speaks to it in a way.

It is from one of my favorites, the talented Rhiannon Giddens, who studied opera at the Oberlin Conservatory and has become a force in Folk/ Americana/ World Music. The song, Cry No More, was written by Giddens in the aftermath of the 2015 Charleston, SC church shooting in which 9 church members were murdered. It’s probably hard to remember. There have been so many mass shootings in the years since that we barely notice anymore, to our great shame, when only 3 or 4 or 5 people are killed let alone a shooting from ten years back. 

The words at the top appear in a frame at the end of the video. These words and the lyrics of the song serve as a powerful reminder that we get what we put up with and that to be silent is to accept this status quo. 

All the tears in the world accomplish nothing unless they are followed with a powerful and unified voice.

So, cry no more.

Know your history. Know your mind. Speak up. Be loud.

I am sharing two versions of the song. The first is the original, shot in a Greensboro, NC church. It is spare and powerful with only her hand drum– an Irish bodhran— as accompaniment. The second is a zoom session from the pandemic year of 2020. More accompaniment and layered but maintaining its full power.

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Miró Blues, Again

March 10, 2025 by redtreetimes

Blue II– Joan Miró

*****************

The picture should be fecund. It must bring a world to birth.

-Joan Miró

****************

The thought behind these words from Joan Miró is one that I often keep in mind. Art succeeds when it creates its own reality, when it brings a world to birth in the mind of those who behold it. The artist’s own belief in the reality of that new world is a large determinant in whether this birth takes place.

For myself, I almost always feel like I am taken to a different world, one as real as the world I inhabit in my human skin, by whatever is on the surface before me.

That is, when it works. Sometimes it is difficult to climb into that new world and that new reality that wants to be born on the surface is nothing more than a lifeless mishmash of paint blotches and lines. That is frustrating, to say the least.

But when it works, it is an easy glide into that new world with its own atmosphere and landscape, so familiar yet new and fresh in the nose and to the eye. It’s a thrill just to be in there for that time when taking on its lifeform.

Joan Miró (1893-1983) did such a thing with such ease. I am showing his Blue triptych from 1961 today. I find it interesting how intimate and alive they feel as single images on a screen where their scale fades away. These could easily be small paintings. But when you see them as they are in the two photos below, you can see their size and how it magnifies their lifeforce.

They are a world unto themselves.

Take a look for yourself. I have also included a video of Dave Brubeck’s Bluette at the very bottom of the page that is played over a slideshow of Miró’s work. As Brubeck fans know, he sometimes employed Miró’s work in his own as well as on his album covers. All in all, just plain good stuff…

Didn’t feel like writing this morning and wanted to start out the week with something not troubling my mind. Something that is more about art, something that perhaps inspires or at least eases the mind. Something to make me feel fecund, to use Miró’s term. This post is from five years ago and felt good this morning, especially with the Dave Brubeck accompaniment to Miró’s paintings.

 

Blue I- Joan Miró

Blue III- Joan Miró

 

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Look What They Done to My Song, Ma

March 9, 2025 by redtreetimes

White in the Moon— At West End Gallery

I have always fought for ideas — until I learned that it isn’t ideas but grief, struggle, and flashes of vision which enlighten.

–Margaret Caroline Anderson, The Strange Necessity: The Autobiography (1969)

There’s a lot of anger, shocked disbelief, and trepidation here and abroad at the systematic disassembling of our government currently taking place.

As there should be.

Because no matter how they try to package and sell it to the rubes, the whole of it makes little sense to anyone willing to look past the sales pitch and really examine what they are doing with their attack on our nation’s institutions. Looking at the totality of the stupidity, cruelty, corruption, and treachery that drives it, one would be hard-pressed to not respond with some mixture of anger, shock, and fear.

But perhaps the most overlooked response is one of grief. I know that it is a big part of my personal reaction. 

Why wouldn’t one grieve for the loss of something one loved and held so highly? I am talking about the idea of America as the symbol of the promise of freedom, opportunity, justice, and hope for both its citizens and others around the world that it has been for past century or so. Even when it wasn’t living up to that promise, as was sometimes the case, it usually rightfully adjusted its course, putting us back on a path that moved us once more toward that more perfect union as outlined in our Constitution. 

But if we cannot soon stem this destructive tide, it feels that we will have little chance of ever returning to that path. The dream of America, the one with a conscience that showed us as a compassionate, welcoming, and generous nation, will be lost. Nearly two hundred and fifty years of slow but steady progress will be crushed and reduced to ash.

And once the dream is crushed, it will not be soon revived. It’s hard to rebuild with ashes.

The grief for a crushed and lost dream lingers and aches. 

I sit here this morning as stewpot of anger and grief. The thought of what might have been, of what heights we could have achieved, haunt me. I feel like the figure in the painting at the top of the page who is looking back at what once was but forever remains distant, never to be revisited.

Here’s a song for this Sunday Morning Music that captures that feeling.  At least for me, it does. It’s from Melanie, who died this past year, and her Look What They Done to My Song, Ma from 1971. The overall tone of it and this verse really sums it up best for me:

Look what they’ve done to my song, ma
It was the only thing I could do half right
Turning out all wrong, ma
Look what they’ve done to my song

Good intentions turning out all wrong… 

FYI-– The quote at the top is from Margaret Anderson (1886-1973) who was the founder and publisher of the art and literary magazine The Little Review in the first half of the last century. She was responsible for introducing Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and many others to the American public. A very interesting life.

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The Demon’s Mirror

March 8, 2025 by redtreetimes

The Demon’s Mirror– illustration Arieh Zeldich

Now we are about to begin, and you must attend; and when we get to the end of the story, you will know more than you do now about a very wicked hobgoblin. He was one of the worst kind; in fact, he was a real demon.

One day he was in a rare good humor because he had invented a very special mirror with this peculiarity, that everything good and beautiful reflected in it shrank away to almost nothing. On the other hand, every bad and good-for-nothing thing was magnified a thousand times and looked its ugliest. The most beautiful landscapes reflected in it looked like boiled spinach, and the best people became hideous, or else they were upside down and had no bodies. Their faces were distorted beyond recognition, and if they had even one freckle it appeared to spread all over the nose and mouth.

The demon thought this immensely amusing. Anytime a good or gentle thought passed through any one’s mind, it turned to a grin in the mirror, and this caused the demon to roar with laughter.

All the trolls in the demon’s school, for he kept a school, reported that a miracle had taken place: now for the first time it had become possible to see what the world and mankind were really like.

The trolls ran about all over with the mirror, till at last there was not a country or a person which had not been seen in this distorting mirror. They then decided to fly up to heaven with it to mock the angels and Our Lord Himself.

Trolls Carrying Mirror to Heaven- illus Boris Diodorov

The higher they flew, nearer and nearer to the Angel and God, the more violently the mirror grinned. It grinned so hard so much so that they could hardly hold it, and at last, the mirror quivered with frightful laughter and slipped out of their hands. It fell to the earth and shivered into hundreds of millions and billions of bits.

But even broken apart, it did more harm and caused more misery than ever. Some of these bits were not as big as a grain of sand, and these whirled about all over the world, blowing into people’s eyes and getting stuck there. And to these unlucky people, everything seemed warped and twisted. They could only see the ugly side of things since each tiny grain of glass kept the same power as that possessed by the whole mirror. Some people even got a bit of the glass into their hearts, and that was terrible, for the heart became like a lump of ice.

Some of the fragments were so big that they were used for windowpanes, but it was not advisable to look at one’s friends through these panes.

Other bits were made into eyeglasses. But woe betide to those who made use of those eyeglasses! Their vision became warped and their judgement distorted.

The bad demon was so tickled at the mischief he had done that he laughed till he split his sides. And still some of these bits of glassed were still left floating about the world…

–Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen (1845)

This is the opening chapter to The Snow Queen from Hans Christian Andersen. You can take it as a mere fairy tale, if you would like. But as is the case with all myths, legends, and fairy tales, it is the underlying truths and lessons contained within them that makes them forever relevant.

This particular tale feels as though it could not be more relevant. It has evil demons and Trolls– yes, it has trolls! It has ugliness magnified a thousand times and goodness and beauty shrinking to nothingness then being mocked. Then there is the perception of reality and the judgement of those affected by the specks of glass becoming warped and distorted. 

Sometimes seeing similarities to our own lives and times that exist in myths and fairytales gives us clarity, putting things into an order that our brains have been seemingly trained to understand through the ages.

However, you may not see the same parallels, if any at all. Maybe you even have a speck of glass in your eye or, heaven forbid, your heart. I doubt that is the case because you would have stopped reading this blog long ago. 

Just laying this out there on a cold Saturday morning. I didn’t go into the rest of Andersen’s fairytale, but the setting here at the moment seems perfect for the evil Snow Queen with large whirling snowflakes. Hope she’s not around…

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Heading to the Clouds

March 7, 2025 by redtreetimes

Cloud Flyer— At West End Gallery

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are, if indeed you cannot get it above them, than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

–Henry David Thoreau, Letter to Harrison Blake, April 1853

This morning, I spent a few minutes looking intently at the image of the painting above. It’s a small piece that is part of the Little Gems exhibit now hanging at the West End Gallery. Something in it captured my attention this morning. Not one thing that I can spell out in words. Just a brief flash of feeling that for that moment held me happily spellbound.

Maybe it was just a quick escape from things in this world that have been harassing my mind as of late. I don’t know and, for that matter, I don’t care. We all need to climb into the clouds for dreaming and introspection every so often so that, like Thoreau wrote in a letter to an old friend above, we know where we truly are. We can sometime be deceived or misled, by others and ourselves, so that we don’t clearly see our placement in this world clearly.

We might think too much or too little of ourselves. We might respect the opinions of others while ignoring our own. We might place too much trust in the wisdom of others and too little in our own.

We sometimes need to get up above it all, to place ourselves in and above the clouds. Oh, we can’t stay there, much as we might like, but the clarifying effects of a short sojourn there are mighty.

It centers one’s soul.

The paragraph from Thoreau’s letter from which the passage above was taken also makes the point about that if we trust and respect ourselves, we have the ability to elevate our lot in life and live a fulfilled existence:

It is worth the while to live respectably unto ourselves. We can possibly get along with a neighbor, even with a bedfellow, whom we respect but very little; but as soon as it comes to this, that we do not respect ourselves, then we do not get along at all, no matter how much money we are paid for halting. There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life. It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are, if indeed you cannot get it above them, than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

That was very much in the same spirit of what I saw in that brief flash I felt while looking at the image at the top this morning. Feet-on-the-ground-head-in-the-clouds kind of satisfaction. Or should I say, Hand-on-the rudder-head-in-the-clouds?

Not sure on that one.

Here’s Joni Mitchell and her classic song, Both Sides Now. This is a favorite version of mine from her 2000 album, Both Sides Now. It is different in tone and sound to her original. Deeper and more world-weary. As you would expect. I read that it was as though the 24-year-old Mitchell wrote this song specifically for her 57-year-old self to sing.

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Demigods: The Dream Eater

March 6, 2025 by redtreetimes

The Dream Eater

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.

–Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags (1942)

King of the Night Forest 

I had two pieces in this year’s Little Gems show at the West End Gallery that were a bit different than my typical work. The liberty to experiment and show work that is a little out of your normal lane is one of the things I love about this particular show, which ends a week from today.

These two distinct outliers, King of the Night Forest and Eye of the Trickster, were featured here. They were representations of beings or demigods from a not fully formed mythology that only existed in my mind. I am not sure this mythological world will ever be more defined than it is in these paintings.

Eye of the Trickster

And maybe that’s as it should be. Maybe they should exist only to serve as a jumping off point for someone who might stumble across them someday in the future when they are deciding what should be saved and what should go in the dumpster. Maybe they will inspire that person’s imagination, playing to their fears and dreams.

Maybe. Maybe not, Who knows for sure?

After doing these first two Demigods— I decided just now that is what I am calling them– I felt I wasn’t through. I wanted to explore and expand this world a little more. I did three more pieces, all 14″ by 18″. a bit larger than the first two from the Little Gems show. The last of these three, The Dream Eater, is shown at the top.

The Dream Eater is a being that does just that– takes away and devours your dreams. Greedy and cruel, he is never satisfied. Even when all the dreams and hopes are sapped from his victims and they have been pulled down into his hellish pit in the netherworld, he is already hungering for his next target. 

That sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Perhaps that’s why I felt the need to paint this creature. I don’t know for sure. When I start these things, I have no idea where they will go or what I will see in them when they are complete. They obviously represent some other thing that is rolling around in my mind as I work.

I doubt these last three Demigod pieces will ever see the wall of any gallery and I imagine the first two will join me soon after the end of the Little Gems show. I’m fine with that. In fact, these pieces and those from other years that share this same sort of difference give me a special sort of pleasure when I experience them here in the studio.

Maybe it’s because I know they are those parts of me that I’ve wanted to, but have failed to, withhold from eyes other than my own. There’s something freeing sometimes in letting the outside world get a peek at your inner world. 

I’ll show the other two Demigods sometime soon. But for now, I am just going to try to keep this thing from feasting on my dreams while I listen to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road from Elton John. It’s a song about the loss of dreams, one that loomed large in my youth and somehow got lost in the hubbub of the intervening years. I can’t remember the last time I pulled out the album or consciously listened to it in any other way. Probably decades. But I recently watched a reaction video of the song and was instantly reminded of all it was and is. Felt a bit foolish for taking it for granted for all these years.

We sometimes do that with great things, don’t we?

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Hello in There

March 5, 2025 by redtreetimes

Summerdream (1995)– At West End Gallery

The creative action is not voluntary at all, but automatic; we can only put the mind into the proper attitude, and wait for the wind, that blows where it listeth, to breathe over it. Thus the true state of creative genius is allied to reverie, or dreaming.

–Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

Many of us walk a fine line between remaining engaged with the outer world with all its chaotic madness and escaping into the dreamlike quietude of our inner world. I think we need to keep the two somewhat in balance, to never reside fully in one.

For as much as the inner world nourishes our souls and dreams, we can’t reside in that place entirely. And try as we may, we can never fully retreat from intrusive reality of the outer world. It is always lurking nearby and must be dealt with.

But we need to maintain that inner world, that place to dream and expand. A place where we can float on a warm breeze, unburdened by the weightiness and gravity of the real world.

I am not sure what brought this on this morning. Maybe I felt the need to avert my eyes from the outer world for a moment? Nobody could be blamed for that in this strange moment. We all need to visit that inner world for at least a short time every now and then, if only to be reminded of what we are looking for in the outer world.

The question is: Can the dreams of our inner world ever come to reality in the outer world?

That’s a big philosophical jumping off point that I am not willing to leap from just this minute. Like most people, I have outer world needs to which I need to attend. But in doing so, I will bring my inner world along with me.

Maybe I’ll ponder that question at some point while I am floating on a breeze. Maybe not.

Here’s a song from the late John Prine that I’ve loved for a long, long time. It still gets to me after hearing it countless times. It’s a live performance of Hello in There from 2001. It’s a song about aged folks who live in an outer world that has passed them by and now ignores and they have retreated into their inner world which is filled with more memories and images from the past and fewer dreams for the future. But in those remaining dreams, they might sometimes be floating on a summer breeze. And this line from the song’s chorus surely might be echoing there as well:

Ya’ know that old trees just grow stronger
And old rivers grow wilder ev’ry day

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Art’s Refuge

March 4, 2025 by redtreetimes

Island Getaway– At West End Gallery

The power of the good has taken refuge in the nature of the beautiful; for measure and proportion are everywhere identified with beauty and virtue.

— Plato, Philebus (ca. 350 BC)

Philebus is a fictional work presenting a conversation between Socrates and two young Athenians on the value of pleasure in relation to the highest level of Good. The two younger men see pleasure as being this Absolute Good.

As might be expected, Socrates, disagrees. He points out that there are different forms of pleasure. Some are of little value and some, such as pleasure for pleasure’s sake, are harmful to man and which should be avoided.

Just before the line at shown here at the top. Socrates points out the harm in such pleasure:

That any compound, however made, which lacks measure and proportion, must necessarily destroy its components and first of all itself; for it is in truth no compound, but an uncompounded jumble, and is always a misfortune to those who possess it.

This passage sure feels like it was written around 2500 years ago for such a moment such as we are experiencing here in this country. It seems to be an uncompounded jumble that is set on destroying itself and all of which it is comprised. It without measure, proportion, and reason. It has become a land governed by beings that appear to be soulless and artless, devoid of any measure of Beauty or Absolute Good.

When I read this, it made me think of the value and necessity of art as a refuge from this world. As Socrates pointed out, there is goodness and virtue in those things by which we define beauty. We are on the brink of an artless and ugly world. Engaging with art or creating art in times such as these serves a valuable purpose. It reminds us that these is and will always be goodness and virtue in that which appears beautiful to the human spirit.

Art is our refuge.

It comes in the literature and poetry we read. In the music we play and in the movement of our dances. In the films we watch, and in the statues and paintings that we experience.

As difficult as times may be in the near future, we must remember that Art is a both a refuge and a repository for Good, as well as a link, a path, to the world and future we desire.

Take refuge in your art.

Here’s song I last shared about four years ago. It fittingly titled Shelter and is from Lone Justice from back in the mid 1980’s. Led by vocalist Maria McKee, they were very hot for a few years but they couldn’t hold together long enough to reach the potential that so many saw in them. They disbanded in 1987 and Maria McKee went on to a solo career. I thought their two albums were very good and they were regulars on my turntable back in the day. The chorus from this song pops into my head every now and then. It was produced and cowritten with McKee by the multi-talented Steve Van Zandt, who was the subject recently of a wonderful documentary, Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple, that centered around his efforts that were instrumental in using his art to cast light on apartheid and end it.

Such is the power and refuge of art.

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The Strangeness of Things…

March 3, 2025 by redtreetimes

 

Land of Seven Moons— At West End Gallery

The first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe.

–Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (1951)

I live a pretty isolated existence so I can’t speak for everyone, but it seems like a lot of people are feeling alienated by the jumbled strangeness that is taking place. It’s an overwhelming sense that the landscape around you as well as the people within it and their customs are foreign to you, that you somehow don’t fit in. 

It’s a sense of feeling like a stranger in a strange land, to use that term that descended to us from Moses in the book of Exodus and its later use as the title for the sci-fi classic from Robert Heinlein. It’s a term I’ve employed a number of times through the years to describe the sense of alienation with which I have sometimes struggled.

I have to admit that this feeling is in air around me in recent times. However, this sense that many others may well be experiencing that same sense of estrangement from an existence that once felt naturally homelike makes me believe, like the words at the top from Camus, that there is a progressive step, a way forward from this, at least for us as a group.

Though it overwhelms our minds now, we have to understand that the reality that we observe in this moment does not have to last forever. And because there are so many of us feeling this new sense of strangeness, it will not. 

That’s just my feeling this morning. There may not be anything instructive in it. But it perhaps it can provide some comfort, as strangers in this strange land, knowing that beyond the now alien emptiness around us there are others who are looking up at those same seven moons, wondering as I do how they came to be and if they will always be there. 

Here’s song that sprang to mind just now. Actually, the lines from the chorus:

Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Strange days indeed
Most peculiar, mama

It’s Nobody Told Me from John Lennon, recorded near the end of his life and released several years after his murder. 

Strange days indeed…

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