Redtree Times

Passing Through Blue— At West End Gallery

When whippoorwills call and evening is nigh
I hurry to my blue heaven
Just a turn to the right, you’ll find a little white light
Will lead you to my Blue Heaven

–Walter Donaldson, My Blue Heaven, 1924

Not going to say much this morning. Just basking in blue this morning. In a good way. Not in the I got the blues kind of way. More in the sense of other more positive ways attached to the color. Like its symbolism for a certain political party. Or true blue, which indicates loyalty and truthfulness. The color also represents the freedom of open spaces such as the sky and the sea and as well as intuition, imagination, expansiveness, inspiration, and sensitivity. There’s an interesting site, colorpsychology.org, that gives greater insight to the color blue, along with all the other colors of the spectrum.

I am showing a painting above, Passing Through Blue, that has the feel of blue in the more positive sense of the word. It’s part of my solo show, Persistent Rhythm, that is currently on display at the West End Gallery in Corning. Just a reminder that the show ends a week from today, on August 29, so time is fleeting if you want to see it.

Here’s a song that I have played here before that kind of sums up the better aspects of the color blue. It’s a version of My Blue Heaven from Norah Jones. The song was written by Walter Donaldson and originally performed as part of the Ziegfeld Follies of 1927. Most of us mainly remember the Fats Domino version which was a hit for him in the 1950’s.

Okay, give a listen if you so desire. Then look to your own blue heaven and stay blue.

Pondering Blue– At West End Gallery

If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

–Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

I came across this passage in The Book of Disquiet from Fernando Pessoa. I have written about Pessoa in the past here and this book sits on a stonewall in my studio where I can pick it up at any time to browse its always compelling contents.

This particular passage immediately struck a chord with me, from the standpoint of writing as well as from that of my painting.

Both often come about because of a need to release and express those welled-up emotions that come from an existence based mainly on feeling. A need to have my say, even though in both cases I understand that my feelings and my expressions of them are of little consequence.

I sometimes wonder if I feel too much, experience too much of an emotional response to too many things. But trying to repress my feeling only creates a dam where every feeling is deposited. The feeling is not reduced, just unreleased.

And the fever builds.

And the only way to reduce this fever of feeling, as Pessoa states, is to write. Or paint, in my other case. Maybe I am fortunate to have two ways to break this fever. Or maybe I simply need both in order to fully do so.

But I know, as Pessoa also points out, that my expressions mean little in the long run. Ultimately, I am just a little person filled with many– maybe too many– feelings.

And that begs the question: Can you have too many feelings?

I don’t know. I can only recognize what exists inside myself. That is all I know so it is a normal state of being for me. It’s like experiences in your childhood that seemed perfectly normal because that was all you knew but when you see that others had vastly different experiences, you begin to wonder.

And this morning I find myself wondering.

For the moment, the fever has come down a bit…

Waiting For the Fire, 2002

You can climb a mountain, you can swim the sea
You can jump into the fire but you’ll never be free
You can shake me up or I can break you down
Oh, oh
We can make each other happy
Oh, we can make each other happy
We can make each other happy
Oh, we can make each other happy

—Harry Nilsson, Jump Into the Fire

We can make each other happy…

I am running late but I have to mention that I am still vibing, if that can be used as a verb, off the first night of the convention in Chicago. Lots of passion and fire there. The genuine article that comes from real emotion and belief, not needing the staged theatrics of Hulk Hogan tearing his shirt off. 

It feels like a bonfire fully ablaze and roaring. A joyful and hopeful fire. Maybe that’s just me. I’ve been waiting for that passion and fire to come from reasonable, forward-looking American people for some time. We seem to sit on our hands all too often, thinking that somehow reason will prevail. But for too long, we have ceded passion and fire to unreasonable people, those who yell the loudest even when what they are yelling are nothing but lies and often downright crazy.

It’s time to reclaim the fire and the passion. To get excited, to get off our hands and let our voices be heard.

To stoke the fire even more.

So, what are you going to do?

Me? I’m going to jump into the fire.

Here’s a longtime favorite from the late Harry Nilsson that says just that– Jump into the Fire— and very much sets the tone for what I am seeing. All passion and fire. We can make each other happy…

Red Sun Dance— At West End Gallery

This is the true joy in life: the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap, the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

-George Bernard Shaw

I was going through some older posts this morning and came across one that pointed out the grim joylessness that overwhelmed us during the trump years– that short but seemingly never-ending era doesn’t deserve capital letters. There was never a single unifying moment in those years nor even a half-assed attempt to try to bring us together as a nation. Even during the covid outbreak, at a time when we should have been brought together, there was division sowed as he pitted blue states against red states in doling out federal resources.

Negativity reigned in that dark time. It was an administration of greed, grievance, and retribution. I can’t recall a single moment when a positive unifying vision was presented to the country. He declared American Carnage in his weird and creepy inauguration speech and, unfortunately for us all, delivered just that to the American people.

I think that is why the Harris/ Walz campaign’s embrace of joy and inclusion has been so effective thus far. Its positivity stands in stark contrast to the constant griping and whining coming from the other side. It’s like one side goes onto the dance floor to express their feelings of joy out in the spotlight while the other side sulks angrily in a dark corner, bitching that nobody asked them to dance.

The dance of joy is infectious. It grows and glows. The glumness and anger of that other guy is just an infection– sore and red and eating away at everything it touches.

That being said, I thought I would use another earlier post that talks about the joy found in purpose. I adapted it a bit to fit the painting at the top.

Joy was the word that first came to mind when I finished this smaller new piece, Red Sun Dance, now showing at the West End Gallery as part of my Persistent Rhythm exhibit that hangs there until August 29. There was just a feeling of realized joy and happiness throughout it, the kind that Shaw described above in his play Man and Superman.

It’s a feeling of finding the joy contained within that dances with positivity, sweeping away anger and grievance.

I think the feeling he describes must be one of the greatest joy in this world: to find a purpose into which you can fully throw your whole being for all of your time on this planet.

A purpose that gives you a place to stand and rise above the selfishness and pettiness of those, including yourself, who would drag you down.

A purpose that allows you to tap into some greater force in order to gain energy for your toils.

A purpose that lets you deny the cynicism that sometimes shows up in abundance in this world.

A purpose that serves you endless joy in what seem to be empty moments.

A purpose that even finds the joy in tears.

I think there is a purpose for each of us. Finding it is not always a simple matter and some of us will never find the one purpose that is truly our own. We may not be willing to give enough of ourselves to something that is beyond our own needs and desires. We might still find some joy in our life but it will no doubt be short lived.

For me, it has been painting. At first, I found this surprising because I often viewed it as being selfish in nature. My perspectives. My emotions. It was even called self-expression. But the purpose came from having others find comfort and happiness in their reactions to my expression. Their joy fed my joy.

But there are days when I still find myself losing sight of this purpose, when it is a struggle both in the studio and in the outer world and I feel drawn back down to less positive feelings. But I will be somehow reminded of that purpose and that joyful feeling returns.

That happened the other day. A gallery owner called and told me of a person who had bought a painting of mine that they had desired for quite a long time. In fact, this person had come into the gallery for this painting and it was gone, having been returned to me. I sent the piece back to the gallery and when the person returned to get it, they started crying in joy. I can’t even express how this makes me feel outside of saying again that their joy fed my joy, their tears became my tears.

Those moments make my time alone in the studio seem more special and filled with purpose. They make me that joyous one, if only for a while.

And that is good enough for me…

Exiles: The Writing’s on the Wall, 1995

Memento mori—remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die—what makes this any different from a half hour?

–Leo Tolstoy, Path of Life (1909)

There are days when I get up in the morning and the normal aches and pains of my middle age seem a bit different. A little more pronounced and in spots that didn’t seem to hurt this way before.

At these moments, a phrase always comes to mind.

Memento mori…

Remember that you are mortal…

The thought doesn’t frighten me but only serves as a reminder that I have a finite amount of time here to learn what I need to learn, to see what I need to see and to say what I need to say. A limited amount of time to leave a reminder that I have existed in this world.

A short time to create what I feel needs to be created…

So, I get up in the dark most mornings and trudge, sometimes achingly, to my studio and feel reinvigorated because today I live. Today I work. Today I leave a mark on this world.

And that is a good thing…

Memento mori.

For this week’s Sunday Morning Music, trying to stay with this memento mori theme, I am going with the old Creedence Clearwater Revival song, Long As I Can See the Light. Below is a fine version from the late Ted Hawkins, a name most likely unknown to most of us. He was one of those incredibly gifted artists who was always just short of meeting Lady Luck. Oh, he came across her a few times, but it was just in passing.

As she often does, Lady Luck only gave him a flirting glance before moving on.

Here in the States, he was primarily a street performer who was “found” a number of times by record producers who could never quite put it all together for him here. An album of songs he had recorded years before, Watch Your Step, was released in 1982. It garnered critical acclaim (5 stars from Rolling Stone) but was a commercial flop.

He headed to Europe, gaining much more recognition headlining shows in clubs there.  He ended up in the UK but was deported, on what are believed to be drug charges, back to the USA, reverting to being a street busker. He finally achieved a bit of a breakthrough when Geffen Records signed him and produced what might have been his breakthrough record in late 1994, The Next Hundred Years. I say might have been because Hawkins died from a stroke at the age of 58 in 1995, only months after the release of the album.

Lady Luck is a fickle flirt, indeed.

But here’s his powerful version of the CCR classic. Enjoy.

The post above is mashup of two previous posts, one from 2009 and the other from 2019. They just seemed to come together well this morning just before daylight breaks, as I listen to the rain and wind make their presence known on the trees outside the studio. Memento mori…

Still, The Earth Moves— At West End Gallery, Corning, NY

Most sweet it is with unuplifted eyes
To pace the ground, if path be there or none,
While a fair region round the traveller lies
Which he forbears again to look upon;
Pleased rather with some soft ideal scene,
The work of Fancy, or some happy tone
Of meditation, slipping in between
The beauty coming and the beauty gone.
If Thought and Love desert us, from that day
Let us break off all commerce with the Muse:
With Thought and Love companions of our way,
Whate’er the senses take or may refuse,
The Mind’s internal heaven shall shed her dews
Of inspiration on the humblest lay.

-William Wordsworth, Most Sweet It Is, 1835

Some time ago, while searching for something to accompany the new painting above, I came across this line from a William Wordworth poem:

Of meditation, slipping in between
The beauty coming and the beauty gone.

Those two lines seemed to align well with what I was seeing in this piece. But finding and reading the rest of the verse, I found that the whole of it also echoed my thoughts on the painting. I read it to mean that clearing one’s mind of thought and all that we know sometimes leads to inspirations and revelations that spring from within– The Mind’s internal heaven, as Wordsworth phrased it.

The title of this painting, Still, The Earth Moves is from my own slightly longer phrase:

Yet while I am still, the earth moves. 

Looking at this piece made me think of hopefully possessing the ability to quiet my thoughts, to shed away all worries and concerns, to the point I might reach a sense of stillness where I could almost feel the earth as it moved, with me on it, under the sky above.

That sort of deep meditative stillness has always fascinated me though it often seems to evade me or, in those few moments when it does come to me, be quickly fleeting. I suppose that finding bits of it in my painting will have to serve as some sort of surrogate.

In the end, that is not a small thing.

Here’s the great Carole King and I Feel the Earth Move from her classic 1971 album, Tapestry. I think a lot of people have forgotten what a huge album it was at the time. Actually, at any time. It has sold over 30 million copies, making it a 14X Platinum record and one of the bestselling records of all time. This song was a big reason for me at the time. It might have fed my own fascination with a stillness that allows one to feel the earth move.

This post is edited from one that ran in late 2022.

Further On Up the Road– At West End Gallery

Let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you will be most useful so.

–Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Amiel’s Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel

At Saturday’s Gallery Talk at the West End Gallery, I called myself a childless cat person at one point. Can’t remember in what context it was said but it got a pretty good laugh. It was, of course, in reference to the absurd comments from the GOP vice-presidential candidate who said that childless cat women were bad people, even going so far as calling them sociopaths. He said that because they were childless, they had no stake in the future. No skin in the game.

He has also stated in various interviews that such people deserve to be punished with higher taxation and penalties and that, in the future he desires and is working toward, women would be required to procreate.

It is as though he and his ilk read The Handmaid’s Tale and thought that the dystopian hellscape portrayed in it would make a pretty cool template to build on.

His comments were aimed at women in a manner that revealed his misogyny, selfishness, cynicism, and disregard for others. In other words, the current GOP’s platform.

It also revealed that he and his kind were incapable of caring for the plight of anyone or anything that didn’t affect them directly.

To me, that is disqualifying, making them incapable of governing all the people of this country. It is an attitude that may well leads to atrocity. How far is the jump from this attitude to one that sees the severely mentally or physically challenged as having no stake in the future? Will it then see them as a drag on our resources and economy, something to be eradicated?

It is not that big a jump from his current thinking to that horrific potential and many others.

As to whether a childless cat person such as myself has any skin in the game for the future, let me just say that I have a niece and nephews, grand-nephews, the children and grandchildren of friends as well as many younger friends for whom I have great love and affection. I care very much about the future, about the freedoms, potentials, and the environment in which they will live.

I feel like I have skin in the game, not only in a personal way through family and friends, but also through my work. I may not have my own progeny going forward in time but hopefully my actions now and my work that has found its way around the world will continue to have even a small effect on a future generation or two.

I can’t say that it will, but I can rest easy knowing that I tried. And that’s the best anyone can do for the future.

Just try.

Here’s a song I play every so often here. It fits well. This is To Leave Something Behind from Sean Rowe.

A Matter of Perspective— At the West End Gallery

Truth—not the full truth, which may not really exist— but even that bit of truth we can attain immediately seals our lips, binds our hands, and leads us on toward ‘nothingness.’ Then there’s only one way for an individual to remain upright, not to fall to pieces, not to sink into the mire of self-oblivion … or self-contempt. That’s calmly to turn away from everything, to say, ‘‘Enough!”’ and, folding one’s useless arms across one’s empty breast, to retain the ultimate, the sole attainable virtue, the virtue of recognizing one’s own insignificance—the virtue at which Pascal hints when, calling a human being a thinking reed, he says that if the whole universe crushed it, it, that reed, would still be superior to the universe, because it’d know the universe was crushing it, whereas the universe wouldn’t know that. A meager virtue!

— Ivan Turgenev, Enough: A Fragment of a Note-Book of a Dead Artist, 1883

The painting at the top is A Matter of Perspective, a 12″ by 36″ canvas that is included in my current show at the West End Gallery. It’s a piece that appeals to me, one that affirms my feelings about our relative insignificance in the grand scheme of things.

Perhaps the French mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal was right, that we are but thinking reeds that are aware of our own smallness in an unimaginably enormous and uncaring universe. Having such consciousness is, indeed, small consolation but it is something in which we can find some sort of comfort or rationale for continuing onward. It allows us to find what little meaning there might be in our relative insignificance.

I guess that is where art in its many flavors enters the picture– to make sense of the insensible. 

Here’s a slideshow of some of the Lewis Hine photos of child laborers in the early 20th century. A time with kids working in dangerous jobs, robber barons amassing obscene wealth, women and people of color without voting rights– or many other rights for that matter. That is one of the times to which the GOP, in its current form, wants to return, along with pre-civil rights 1964 and pre-Civil War 1860. It is set to the Gary Jules version of the Tears For Fears song, Mad World.

The Moon Resonates– At West End Gallery

The final mystery is oneself.  When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself.  Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

–Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Running very late this morning. Overslept for the first time in ages. Still thinking about a name for the TreeGnome that now lives in the studio. For the moment, I just yell “Hey, you!!” when he’s making too much noise on his shelf and I need to have some quiet.

I thought I would share the quote above from Oscar Wilde to accompany this painting from my solo show, Persistent Rhythm, now hanging at the West End Gallery. The painting is titled The Moon Resonates and is 30″ by 15″ on canvas. It’s a piece that deserves much more written about it, but I think Wilde’s words very much describe what I am seeing in it.

And maybe this depicts that moment of reflection and self-recognition that precedes one’s barbaric yawp.

Let’s throw in some music to go along with this. This is a section of De Profundis from composer Arvo Part. At the talk the other day, I spoke of finding myself always writing about wide open spaces as a young man. When I later began translating that feeling into visual forms, it was Part’s Tabula Rasa that greatly inspired me. This is a choral piece that has the depth I feel in this painting.

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things

And His Name is???

At Saturday’s Gallery Talk at the West End Gallery, I was given a gift by my young friend, Ebba. Fresh from the kiln that morning, it was a small gnome complete with a painter’s palette and brush with red paint on it. Atop its gnomish self was a floppy hat with a Red Tree painting on it.

I was entranced immediately by this little guy and set about thinking about a name that would suit him. Yesterday, I set him ina place of honor in the niche in my studio’s kitchen that serves as shrine of sorts for some of my favorite things.

Most are small things, many handmade, that have been given to me by friends over the years. The ashes of my recently passed studio cat, Hobie, is there in a little carved wooden box. There are several items from my friend, Tom, from Northern Ireland, who has been my pen pal for forty-plus years, a relationship that began when I sold Springsteen t-shirts of my own design in the back of rock magazines for a short time. That was ages ago when magazines still thrived and an overseas transaction required weeks of postage each way. Patience was a necessary virtue, indeed, in those times before cyber communications.

Each of these items feels precious to me and it is really grounding for me to stand in front of this makeshift shrine.

So, after placing the gnome at the front of the niche, I set about thinking about a fitting name for him. I had been looking at him for a while when it suddenly dawned on me that he is me.

I mean, c’mon! The hat with the Red Tree on it. The brush and palette. He is short and round. That nose. He even has a white moustache and goatee!

For the briefest of seconds, I thought about being insulted but its caricature of me actually made me love it even more.

Maybe I am wrong. Perhaps Ebba’s gnome is just a gnome and my resemblance to a gnome is mere coincidence.

Either way, I love the little guy. But I am now conflicted on a name for him. I already have a studio cat named Gary so calling him Gary would be confusing and weird. We’ll leave confusing and weird to those other people, thank you. You know the ones I am talking about.

Feel free to give me a suggestion for a name for my new gnomish friend. He’s making a ruckus out in the kitchen right now and I need a name to yell out. Maybe if your name for him fits, I will send you a little something.

Or maybe not. I told you before I was sometimes a liar.