Redtree Times

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.

Glowtime— At the West End Gallery

When the breath of twilight blows to flame the misty skies,
All its vaporous sapphire, violet glow, and silver gleam,
With their magic flood me through the gateway of the eyes;
I am one with the twilight’s dream.

–George William Russell, The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Many, many thanks to everyone who made their way to the West End Gallery for yesterday’s Gallery Talk. I think most everyone had a good time. If they didn’t, they certainly fooled me– not that that is saying much.

As for myself, I very much enjoyed my time with this group of folks. They made it easy for me with their openness and warmth. Hopefully, they felt that I reciprocated. Being open and welcoming is always a goal for one of these talks, along with trying not to say something stupid or insulting. I think I did okay on those counts, but you never know.

Again, much appreciation for those choosing to spend some time with me yesterday. Looking forward to the next one.

And an extra big thank you to Jesse, Linda, and John Gardner at the West End Gallery for making it all possible. I could go on and on about my debt to them for so many things, but I am going to leave you now with a song for this week’s Sunday Morning Music. It’s Seems Like a Long Time from the 1971 album Every Picture Tells a Story from Rod Stewart. It feels appropriate because there are times when it feels like I have been doing this art gig so long that everything before it seems like it happened a lifetime ago.

Thanks for reading. Have a good day.

TODAY!!!

GALLERY TALK

WEST END GALLERY

STARTS AT 11 AM

SATURDAY, AUGUST 10, 2024

FREE AND OPEN TO ALL

GOOD TALK, PRIZES, AND MORE!!!

Should not the giver be thankful that the receiver received? Is not giving a need? Is not receiving, mercy?

–Friedrich Nietzsche

One more day until tomorrow’s Gallery Talk at the West End Gallery. It begins at 11 AM or thereabouts and lasts about 14 hours so you might want to bring a cushion for your seat. That, of course, is a lie. It lasts about an hour and maybe a tiny bit more. So you won’t need a cushion.

Unless you really want to bring one. Your call on that.

I am pretty much ready though I still am undecided on how to start and what we’ll talk about initially. The beginning is always the most difficult part as it sets the tone and rhythm for the talk. I always figure that if I can get past the first ten minutes without my brain seizing up or flop sweat drenching my shirt or my head simply exploding, we’ll be okay. Usually after the start of the talk, the folks that are there take over and set the rhythm with their questions and observations. That allows me to react. I am much better at that than standing up there pontificating and droning on.

Of course, the highlight comes near the end when a drawing is held for the painting that I am giving away. For this talk, it is the piece shown at the top, on the bottom left. It is a pretty good-sized painting, 24″ by 20″ on canvas, that is titled Far Above It All. I wrote earlier this week about gratitude being my rationale for giving away such a relatively expensive painting. I could attach Nietzsche’s words above, that giving is a need, to that as well. And there are also the words of Kahlil Gibran:

All you have shall some day be given. Therefore, give now, that the season of giving may be yours and not your inheritors.

Someday, I won’t be around anymore and not knowing when that may be, it is my pleasure to give it to someone who might show me the mercy of accepting it now. I get to see and enjoy this moment rather than wondering what my remaining works fate will be after I am gone.

So, if you’re willing to accept a gift such as this, please feel free to come to the Gallery Talk tomorrow. It is free and open to all. I have said there is something in it for everyone and that is my promise.

As a bonus and in the spirit of the Olympic Games and of my grandfather, Shank Myers, who was champion pro wrestler in the early days of the 20th century, I will also wrestle one member of the audience.

If they can pin me, everyone in attendance gets a painting! Everyone!

DISCLAIMER: That, of course, is untrue. I am known to be an occasional liar. Please, for the love of god, don’t believe everything I say.

That being said, hope to see you at the West End Gallery tomrrow.

Breaking Joy–Now at West End Gallery

The drum of the realization of the promise is beating,
we are sweeping the road to the sky. Your joy is here today, what remains for tomorrow?
The armies of the day have chased the army of the night,
Heaven and earth are filled with purity and light.
Oh! joy for he who has escaped from this world of perfumes and color!
For beyond these colors and these perfumes, these are other colors in the heart and the soul.
Oh! joy for this soul and this heart who have escaped
the earth of water and clay,
Although this water and this clay contain the hearth of the
philosophical stone.

— The Drum of the Realization, Rumi

I hear words like joy and optimism more and more in social media and on the news in recent weeks. It’s a huge and welcome change from the doom and gloom that has plagued us for the past eight years or so. It creates a light that washes away much of the darkness and illuminates a more positive path into the future.

And that, in my opinion, is a good thing.

I never intend to inject a meaning into a painting at its onset. I prefer to simply let the painting come together in its own way then determine what I am seeing in it after it is done. This feels more organic than trying to force an interpretation into paint.

In the painting at the top, the word joy immediately came to mind as I finished it. Maybe it was in the light and brightness of the sky. Or maybe the triumphant stance of the Red Tree as it stands above the crowded congestion of the Red Roofs. Maybe it was simply in the geometry of its elements.

It’s hard to tell exactly why it seemed to exude joy for me. But it does. As a result, I titled it Breaking Joy.

And in light of the events of the past couple of weeks, I find even more symbolism in it. I see more clearly the two paths running to the future, one to the right and one to the left. The path to the left runs directly for the sun and the light. I can’t tell exactly where the path to the right leads but there is more darkness in the right side of the sky here.

In the lower part of the painting, where the path breaks into left and right, the group of Red Roofed buildings seems to point to the left, as though it was offering a subliminal suggestion that this was the path to follow.

Now that’s my reading. You might not see it that way at all and call my reading here hogwash. That’s okay. You’re entitled to your opinion.  As I am to mine. And whatever anyone else see in it, this piece makes me feel a bit of joy and hope.

And that is always a good thing…

Reminder:

Gallery Talk at the West End Gallery in two days!!

Saturday, August 10, beginning at 11 AM.

The talk is free and open to all. There is a painting to be given away and something for everyone so try to get there on Saturday. In honor of the Olympics currently taking place in Paris, I will be giving the talk while performing a routine on the Pommel Horse.

Or not. You’ll have to come to find out.