Redtree Times

Between the Sea and the Sun— Now at West End Gallery

Grandfather, Great Spirit, you have been always, and before you no one has been. There is no other one to pray to but you. You yourself, everything that you see, everything has been made by you. The star nations all over the universe you have finished. The four quarters of the earth you have finished. The day, and in that day, everything you have finished. Grandfather, Great Spirit, lean close to the earth that you may hear the voice I send. You towards where the sun goes down, behold me; Thunder Beings, behold me! You where the White Giant lives in power, behold me! You where the sun shines continually, whence come the day-break star and the day, behold me! You where the summer lives, behold me! You in the depths of the heavens, an eagle of power, behold! And you, Mother Earth, the only Mother, you who have shown mercy to your children!

Hear me, four quarters of the world–a relative I am! Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is! Give me the eyes to see and the strength to understand, that I may be like you. With your power only can I face the winds.

Great Spirit, Great Spirit, my Grandfather, all over the earth the faces of living things are all alike. With tenderness have these come up out of the ground. Look upon these faces of children without number and with children in their arms, that they may face the winds and walk the good road to the day of quiet.

This is my prayer; hear me! The voice I have sent is weak, yet with earnestness I have sent it. Hear me!

–Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks, The Offering of the Pipe

I was looking for something to begin this post on this new painting, Between the Sea and the Sun, which is part of my show of new work that opens Friday at the West End Gallery. when I came across the words above. I had featured a passage from Black Elk in a post a few months ago, describing him then as “the Oglala Lakota medicine man who died in 1950 after a most interesting life that saw him taking part in some of the important events in the history of the Native American people. As a youth, Black Elk fought at Little Big Horn then later survived the Indian Wars that took place in the aftermath of Little Big Horn as well as the Wounded Knee Massacre, in which he was wounded. He also performed with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, traveling to Europe to perform for Queen Victoria. After his time with Buffalo Bill, he later converted to Roman Catholicism though he still embraced his Native American beliefs and the visions that made him a medicine man. He was able to rectify the seeming differences between the two in such a way that a case for his beatification (sainthood) has been opened by the Catholic Church in recent years.“

This passage was from the beginning of the book Black Elk Speaks when he offers a sacrificial offering in the form of a pipe to the Spirit of the World before starting to tell the narrative of his life. He does this so that his words shall truthfully describe his life. 

In reading it, I began to see that this painting represented a form of invocation or prayer for me. We live our lives in this vast yet tiny space between the great waters of the world and the immensity of the heavens above. We often feel that it is not enough. We long for more than this world offers us. However, if we could tamp down our impetuous desires for more and more, we would see that the world is as it should be.

It has given us all we will ever need. This narrow strip of soil, of life, trapped between the sea and the sun is perhaps the only heaven we will ever know. Or need, for that matter. It is of us and we are of it.

Yet we often don’t view it that way. We often act like ungrateful, selfish children who don’t see all that Mother Earth– Mother Earth, the only Mother, you who have shown mercy to your children— has provided for us.

Hear me, four quarters of the world–a relative I am! Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is! —I can see these words from Black Elk in this painting. I see it now as an invocation not unlike that of Black Elk’s.

And I like it that way…

Between the Sea and the Sun is 40″ by 30″ on canvas and is part of my annual solo exhibit, Persistent Rhythm, now hanging at the West End Gallery in Corning, NY. The exhibit officially opens this coming Friday, July 19, with an opening reception that runs from 5-7 PM.

As I noted yesterday, a Gallery Talk for this show will take place at the gallery on Saturday, August 10, from 11- noon. As has been the case in the past, the talk will include serious questions and sometimes serious answers along with some laughs, some surprises, and some goodies. Maybe a painting is awarded to some lucky person? Who knows? Stay tuned…

Anywhere Everywhere— Now at the West End Gallery

I am restless. I am athirst for faraway things. My soul goes out in a longing to touch the skirt of the dim distance. O Great Beyond, O the keen call of thy flute! I forget, I ever forget, that I have no wings to fly, that I am bound in this spot evermore.

—Rabindranath Tagore, The Gardener (1915)

The title of the new painting shown above is Anywhere Everywhere. It is a larger piece coming in at 20″ high by 40″ wide on canvas. The title refers to the fact that the roads and waters of the world will take you anywhere and everywhere.

For me, it speaks of the desire to be engaged in the world, to know far flung places and things. The sun here serves as a compass showing all the many directions in which the traveler can go. The purple hills in the distance take on an exotic quality, something unknown to us yet familiar. There is a lot of what I would call dynamism in this painting. It feels like it is brimming with potent energy underneath yet it maintains a tranquil stillness. 

As though it is saying one can find contentment here or there. Anywhere and everywhere.

The compass-like appearance of the sun was not intentional when I first began employing this motif in some of my paintings. It started simply as a compositional element, something that added visual interest within the mosaic-ish blocks that make up the sky. At first, I began to see it as representing the invisible energy of the sunlight breaking through darkness into our awareness in a visible manner. It transformed over the years to appearing more as a sort of stylized compass.

However, I still often see it as the sun’s beams breaking through. And sometimes, I think it is neither that nor the compass. It sometimes feels more like something that I can’t quite identify or put a name to.

Maybe it just is what it is. 

And I guess, for most things that is just as it should be– content in being as one is, here or there, anywhere and everywhere…

Anywhere Everywhere is hanging now in my Persistent Rhythm show at the West End Gallery in Corning, NY. The exhibit officially opens next Friday, July 19, with an opening reception that runs from 5-7 PM. A Gallery Talk for this show will take place at the gallery on Saturday, August 10, from 11- noon. There will be more details forthcoming on this because there are always details, aren’t there?

Passing Through Blue– Now at West End Gallery

May the countryside and the gliding valley streams content me. Lost to fame, let me love river and woodland.

–Virgil, Georgics (29 BCE)

As the events of yesterday proved, we are going through a tense and dangerous time in this country. All is uncertainty. I know it and you know it. So, I am not going to dwell on it this morning. We all need a break, something to transport us away from this aspect of our reality if only for a short while.

For me, that transport comes in the form of art and music or in the forest surrounding my home and studio. Like sandpaper on wood, it smooths the edges that have been roughened up by the darker realities of this world. 

Or to use another metaphor, it clears the stream ahead for me so that I might flow easily once more.

In the new painting at the top, Passing Through Blue, I am not sure if I see myself as the Red Tree or as the river. Maybe both? Perhaps there is a force between natural beings and things that binds them as one.

Hmm. I don’t know, of course, but the thought is distracting while the feel of the painting soothes me. 

Transports me.

And that’s all I can ask on this Sunday morning, to be moved to a place filled with color and solitude as the stream flows easily by. Or is it me flowing easily by?

I forget.

Let’s move on to this Sunday Morning Music, this is a little-known cover I just came across of a favorite Beatles song that has been shared here several times in the past. This is the late bluesman Junior Parker from 1971 (not long before his death in November of that year) performing the transcendent Tomorrow Never Knows. Junior Parker is best known for writing and performing the original version of Mystery Train, a song which Elvis later popularized. His rendition here is smooth and austere– like a river flowing easily through.

 Passing Through Blue is a 24″ by 24″ painting on canvas included in Persistent Rhythm show at the West End Gallery in Corning, NY. The exhibit officially opens next Friday, July 19, with an opening reception that runs from 5-7 PM. Flow on in if you’re so inclined and we’ll talk. Or not. Your call.

Treasure Moon– At West End Gallery

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

–Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I was breezing through some older posts this morning and came across the one below that is just a couple of years old. I decided to use it to accompany the image here on the right, Treasure Moon, that is part of my upcoming exhibit, Persistent Rhythm, at the West End Gallery. This is my 23rd solo show at the Corning gallery since I started showing there back in 1995. I figure that my relationship with the West End, this show and this painting represent the living actualization of a castle I built in the air nearly 50 years ago. Foundations have been built.

This is a well-known quote from Walden. Maybe the most well-known. It basically states, in my opinion, that we are meant to dream, to imagine better things and circumstances for ourselves. But there comes a time when we have to put the work in to make these dreams a reality.

Pretty sound stuff. The value of work and dreams is not lost on me. My life as it is, as simple and humble as it might seem from the outside, was once a castle in the air. I was leafing through an old journal from when I was 16 or 17 years old and came across a list of goals for my future.

I was surprised at how closely it matched the life I now live. I was pleased at first for it validated this idea that you somehow eventually reach destinations for which you set a course. Then I began to wonder what might have happened had I built my castles even further up in the sky.

Were the goals of an unexceptional and naive 16-year-old too restrained and self-limiting? Or did that 16-year-old know itself better than I currently think it did, that it already recognized its own core strengths and deficiencies?

I don’t know the answer to that question. But I can say that I don’t regret placing the foundation under the castle that I first built in the air when I was young. It suits me.

My one wish is to have time enough to put other foundations under a few other castles that float in the air above me. We shall see.

As it is with most f the quotes I use here, I like to seek out the context in which they appear in their original form. I felt that the paragraphs that end with these words from Thoreau should be shared in full.

There’s still a lot of meat on this old bone:

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Treasure Moon and the rest of the Persistent Rhythm show is now hanging in the West End Gallery in Corning, NY. The exhibit officially opens next Friday, July 19, with an opening reception that runs from 5-7 PM.

Under the Compass– Now at West End Gallery

Inward is not a direction.  Inward is a dimension.

-Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev

This is a new piece from my show, Persistent Rhythm, that opens a week from today at the West End Gallery. The painting is one of the smaller pieces from the exhibit, 10″ by 10″, on wood panel and is titled Under the Compass.

The words above from contemporary Indian Yogi Jaggi Vasudev came to mind when I was looking at this painting in the studio because as much as the perceived compass in the sky suggests an outward journey, I saw it more as being about an inward one, about aligning the who and what and why that defines us individually with the direction and energy of a greater universal power.

We can search and expand outwardly all we want but until we truly know our way around our inner selves, that search will prove fruitless. We will be the same dissatisfied beings, just in a different setting.

I am seeing the Red Tree here in a moment of this realization that the inward journey has a dimension all its own. And that dimension has rhythms and movements that can take one in all the directions of the known compass.

And then some.

Can I explain that further right now?

No. I could try but I would probably just muddy the waters even more. Sometimes you get caught between these inward and outward dimensions and you appear a bit confused to others. Words can’t describe nor keep up with the ribbons of thoughts and sensations that whirl around that vast inward landscape.

See? Muddier.

I suggest we just be quiet for bit and look at the painting without thinking. Here’s a composition, Floe, from Philip Glass off of his 1982 Glassworks album that seems to capture the rhythm and movement of those inner sensations, at least to my ears. You might hear and see it altogether differently.

This painting and the rest of my Persistent Rhythm show is now hanging in the West End Gallery in Corning, NY. The exhibit officially opens next Friday, July 19, with an opening reception that runs from 5-7 PM. If you can make it there, look for me– the confused looking guy.

Further On Up the Road– At West End Gallery

Now I been out in the desert, just doin’ my time
Searchin’ through the dust, lookin’ for a sign
If there’s a light up ahead, well brother I don’t know
But I got this fever burnin’ in my soul
So let’s take the good times as they go
And I’ll meet you further on up the road

—Further On Up the Road, Bruce Springsteen

Well, the work for Persistent Rhythm, this year’s edition of my annual solo show at the West End Gallery, has been delivered and will be going up on the gallery walls today. It might have been noted here in the past that there is often a bittersweet feeling when the work leaves the studio. There is, of course, a great feeling of relief– and a little pride– in having met the demands of the task. There’s something satisfying in seeing the work at last in the gallery, even on the floor.

There’s also a gnawing anxiety in the gut attached to this time, between when the work leaves my hands and the time people start seeing it. I worry that I have been deluded by my own work, that I am seeing things in it that aren’t visible to others. I worry about conditions that might affect turnout for the show, things I can’t control– the weather, the economy, Martian invasions, etc. Then there’s a worry that I might let others down in some way, that I haven’t done enough.

But along with the relief and the worry there is a bittersweet feeling of seeing something you have created, something that is part and parcel of who you are, leave the space it has occupied with you for the past months. They become almost like companions in the studio. They inspire. They reassure. They calm. They come to feel like living, breathing beings occupying real space rather than two dimensional images created by the placement of colors on a flat surface.

It sounds crazy I know but it sometimes feels like a friend leaving you behind to go on their own new adventures with new people in different surroundings. Their absence leaves a coolness, an emptiness, in the studio. The only way to move on is to get back to work with them now ensconced in memory.

Maybe someday they will come back. Some do. When it does happen, it’s like those videos of dogs seeing their owners after a long absence. They run and jump to them in their joyful excitement. Except in this scenario, I am the dog and the painting is the owner who has returned to look after me. I am often giddy in getting a painting back. That sounds silly and certainly doesn’t help me make a living but that’s the way it is.

Just glad to have an old friend back in my world for a while.

That might not be the exact meaning I glean from the new painting at the top from the show but it is in the ballpark. I see it as being about moving on in whatever direction you are called and leaving others behind with only the hope that one day you will again see them.

The future offers new adventures but the past, with all its connections and memories, still lingers.

I call this piece, a 15″ by 30″ canvas, Further On Up the Road. Its title is taken from the title of a Bruce Springsteen song from his 2002 album, The Rising. I have shared a wonderful version from Johnny Cash in the recordings before his death here in the past. I thought today I would couple this painting with a version from Springsteen when he a folk-based tour with the Sessions Band. This version is different from the original but is highly enjoyable.

Opening Reception, Friday, July 19, 2024 from 5-7 PM

I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool ya
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

—Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

In the final throes of finishing up the work for my upcoming show at the West End Gallery before delivery in the next day or so. This show and the one preceding it at the Principle Gallery have been tough. Very strenuous and draining. More so than in past years since I decided to take on the task of building the frames for many of the paintings in these shows.

But it’s nearing the finish line and I am feeling a built-up hallelujah rising in me. Made me think of the iconic Leonard Cohen song, especially the verse above that seems to fit the moment for me. Well, maybe not standing before the Lord of Song. Maybe the Lord of Paint? Anyway, it reminded me of this post from back in 2016 that focuses on a unique performance of the song. 

Like I wrote back in 2016, not a bad way to kick off a Tuesday morning.

Just came across a really nice video that was filmed in late June [2016]. It was part of the Luminato Festival in Toronto, which has become one of the largest arts festivals in North America since beginning 10 years ago.

The film shows an event organized by Choir!Choir!Choir! which is a Toronto based open choir.  It requires no commitment and meets twice a week in the back of a local pub. Over the years it has performed publicly in many venues with an expanded choirs made up of folks who just want to get out and sing in a communal kind of way.

The song shown here is Hallelujah from Leonard Cohen, a magnificent song that has been interpreted by many artists–I think that the late Jeff Buckley’s version is extraordinary. This particular version is filmed in a decommissioned power plant with an assembled choir of 1500 people with Rufus Wainwright singing the lead.

Just a lovely version of the song and not a bad way to kick off a Tuesday morning.

Infinity’s Call– Coming to West End Gallery

Let man reawake and consider what he is compared with the reality of things; regard himself lost in this remote corner of Nature; and from the tiny cell where he lodges, to wit the Universe, weigh at their true worth earth, kingdoms, towns, himself. What is a man face to face with infinity?

–Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670)

The painting at the top is one of the first pieces I am sharing from my upcoming show, Persistent Rhythm, which opens Friday, July 19 at the West End Gallery. This painting, a large one that is 20″ by 60″ on canvas, is titled Infinity’s Call.

The theme for this show at the West End Gallery is about trying to capture the rhythm and movement of the perceived landscape which, in my mind, is a physical representation of the rhythm and flow of the infinite.

You know what? It’s 5:30 in the morning and I am not even going to try to explain that last sentence.

You figure it out, okay? And if you do, let me know. I am always looking for an answer or explanation. But please show your work. No guessing.

Pascal might have hit it on the nose with the passage at the top from his Pensees.

We are small potatoes in a vast garden. Even so, we wish to be acknowledged as even a tiny part of the bigger picture.

To have our barbaric yawp go out into the universe…

Wassily Kandinsky- Blue (1927)

The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural. The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.

–Wassily Kandinsky

I am still in the final stages of finishing the work for my annual show at the West End Gallery. It’s been a labor intensive and time-consuming process so I don’t have a lot of time (or energy) to spare for the blog. Actually, I haven’t had a lot to say. There comes a point when I get sick of hearing my own voice. Just want to sit and let it all just be.

Fade into blue…

But I feel obligated to still share some Sunday Morning Music. I was surprised to find that I had never shared this song here before. It’s the Beatles and their ethereal classic, Let It Be.

Fade into blue…