Redtree Times

Guenther Hears the Boogaloo Softly, 1994

Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move.

–Ossie Davis, Quoted in Jeanne Noble’s Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters

I came across this little piece that I had painted long ago, in 1994, before I ever showed my work to anyone. It’s a tiny little thing, barely 2″ by 3″ in size, but it’s a painting that I consider one of my favorites. It’s not because of anything in the painting itself, although I do like the way it works visually with its simple forms and tones. Actually, it’s because I see an entire narrative in this piece and it always comes back as soon as I see it, even after many years.

I call this Guenther Hears the Boogaloo Softly. The story I see here is a German soldier on patrol in the second World War, in a wintry forest, perhaps in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge. He is separated from his group and as he is wandering alone in the forest, he suddenly hears a sound from deep in the woods, echoing softly through the frozen trees. It is a piano and it is like nothing he has heard before. It has a loping bassline that churns and pops and over it is a tap dance of notes that bounce and roll on the rhythm.

It’s American boogie woogie. Somewhere unseen in the forest a piano is rolling out that boogie woogie beat.

Guenther is transfixed and holds his breath to better hear the music that enchants him. A siren’s song. He loses all thought of his mission and his duty. He is engrossed by the music.

I don’t go any further with this scenario in my mind. There are obvious directions the story could take. Guenther might allow the music to transfix him to the point he doesn’t hear the American patrol coming upon him. Or he might throw down his weapon and flee. But most likely, he would return to his patrol and if he were lucky enough to survive the war, the memory of that music would haunt him for years, sending him on a search to recapture the sound of that moment in the forest.

I see it simply as a being about the transformative power of music and art, about how they unify humans despite our differences. When we hear or see something, we don’t do so as a German or an American, as a democrat or a republican, as a Christian or a Muslim. We react as a human to our individual perceptions. Sometimes we cannot shake these other labels we carry with us but there are moments when our reaction is pure. Which is what I see in this little bit of paint and paper, in Guenther’s reaction to the piano.

Such a little bit of paint yet such a lot to say. And it says it clearly to me even after all these years.

Afternote: There is a certain irony that the boogie woogie sound is largely kept alive by Europeans now with people such as Axel Zwingenberger and Silvan Zingg, a pianist known as the Ambassador of Boogie Woogie  who hosts a boogie woogie festival in his native Switzerland each year. But here’s a little taste of boogie woogie from Amos Wilburn from the 1954 syndicated TV show Showtime at the Apollo. This is his Down the Road a Piece— maybe that’s where Guenther first heard that boogaloo.

Later Afternote: I ran this piece a couple of times, most recently in 2017. Just added the Ossie Davis quote and the Amos Milburn song for this post.

Pull of the Moon— At West End Gallery

Let me sleep
In the slumber of the morning
There’s nowhere I need to be
And my dreams are still calling

–Damien Jurado, Silver Joy

Working on a large piece which is nearing completion so I want to be brief this morning. Wasn’t going to write at all but I have a song stuck in my head this morning.

The song is Silver Joy and is from singer/songwriter Damien Jurado. from his 2014 album, Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son. It was originally featured, along with several other Jurado songs, in the 2015 film, Tumbledown. More recently, it has garnered attention for its inclusion in a newer film The Holdovers. It stars Paul Giamatti as a gruff longtime teacher at a New England prep school in the early 70’s who is forced to stay at the school through the Christmas holidays to oversee a small group of students who are unable to return to their homes for the vacation period.

Saw the film recently and found it to be charmingly bittersweet. If you like charmingly bittersweet films, you’ll probably enjoy it. The song fits the film’s tone well as it is also charmingly bittersweet.

Okay, got things to do. Listen and leave, okay?

Ventura– At Principle Gallery

And there is the headlight, shining far down the track, glinting off the steel rails that, like all parallel lines, will meet in infinity, which is after all where this train is going.

–Bruce Catton, Waiting for the Morning Train

The beginning of the new year. It’s the best and the worst, at least for me.

At its best, it is a time filled with potential in many ways. Potential growth as a human and an artist, for example. Growth that allows me to get a bit closer to that intangible destination that lingers in my imagination. The potential for the excitement that comes in the breakthrough of new creation.

At its worst, there’s also the potential for failure and disappointment that comes in seeing how limited you are as a human and an artist. The potential for feeling a sense of being static or blocked as an artist.

It’s something I struggle with each year at this time, feeling both giddy excitement and stomach-turning anxiety for what might be ahead in the new year, knowing that I am at a point where action is required. A time for setting aside excuses and getting the creative train back on track.

The passage at the top from the late historian/author Bruce Catton really stood out for me this morning. Much of my work deals with lines and forms receding into infinity, like the parallel lines of train tracks into the distant horizon. Whether one ever reaches that point of infinity is the question and this time of year makes the question seem even more stark.

So, this new year begins at the edge of the tracks, excited and apprehensive at the same time, with the hope that I can climb aboard and ride them into that distant horizon, to something beyond the here and now.

Infinity?

I don’t know. Only time will tell.

Here’s yet another favorite tune from the great bluesman Big Bill Broonzy. This is This Train (Is Bound For Glory). Hope he’s right…

Here’s to 1942, here’s to a year of toil—a year of struggle and peril, and a long step forward towards victory. May we all come through safe and with honour.

– Winston S Churchill, 1 January 1942. On a train from Ottawa to Washington, D.C., Churchill made this New Year’s toast to staff and reporters after summoning them to the dining car.

Substitute the year 2024 for 1942 and Churchill’s wartime toast fits this time as well. 2024 looks be a momentous year filled with struggle and peril, as Churchill warned for 1942.

May we be up to the task.

Maybe we simply need some toddlers riding on bats to come to our aid. Here are some vintage New Year’s Day cards to just let us know that our times may not be any more screwed up than those of previous generations.

Happy New Year.

Time Passage— At Principle Gallery

Predictions can be very difficult—especially about the future.

–Niels Bohr

On the last day of this year, I wanted to write about what might be ahead for us in 2024.

Decided against it even after spending too much time putting together a weird word salad filled with half-assed predictions that made me feel and sound crazy. Who needs that kind of anxiety on the last quiet Sunday morning of 2023?

However, I did come across the quote above from the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr that made me laugh. It felt a lot like it could have come from Yogi Berra, who also famously said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

Actually, the quote is attributed to both Bohr and Berra, which sounds like the name of a very odd vaudeville act. It is said by people familiar with both men that though there is no direct evidence of either actually saying the phrase, it sounds like something both might have said.

I guess it’s better to have a laugh on the last day of the year than wring our hands over what 2024 might deal us.

So. let’s end 2023 on a lighter note. I felt like sharing some Joni Mitchell for this last Sunday Morning Music of the year and her Raised on Robbery has a light touch. Always makes me smile. Maybe it will do the same for you.

Now get out of here. See you in the New Year– maybe. No predictions here today.

In Stillness and Rhythm-At Principle Gallery, Alexandria

The world is hard and cruel. We are here none knows why, and we go none knows whither. We must be very humble. We must see the beauty of quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us. And let us seek the love of simple, ignorant people. Their ignorance is better than all our knowledge. Let us be silent, content in our little corner, meek and gentle like them. That is the wisdom of life.

–W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

As we near the end of the year, let’s focus on blocking out the noise this morning. There was much noise this last year and there will no doubt be even noise next year. Let’s just have a few moments of quietude while we have the opportunity.

Beautiful quiet…

Here’s a favorite from Astrud Gilberto, Corcovado, also known as Quiet Night of Quiet Stars. It doesn’t get much cooler or quiet than that.

First View, 1994

His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.

–Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

[From 2016]

I am at a low ebb right now in my energy, a bit tired and unfocused with some extraneous things pulling my attention away from the work that keeps me on an even keel. It’s not an unusual feeling for this time of the year for me. It just seems more pronounced, more worrying, this year. But, as in the past, I take some measure of comfort in knowing that I am always only one short moment from putting all that behind me.

An acceptable uncertainty. It’s the nature of what I do.

Sometimes when I am trying to break out of this cycle of funk, I look back and today I came across a blog entry from around this time a few years back. It features a small, very early painting that possibly means more to me than anything I have painted over the past 20-some years. I see this modest little piece now as a sort of roadmap that set my course those many years ago. I thought this might be a good day to rerun that post.

[From 2013]

It’s that time of the year when I get to take a deep breath and begin to look forward into the next year, trying to determine where my path will lead next. It’s never an easy time doing this, trying to see change of some sort in the work especially after so many years of being what I am and painting as I do. It always comes down to the same question:

What do I want to see in my paintings?

That seems like a simple question. I think that any degree of success I may have achieved is due to my ability to do just that, to paint work that I want to see myself, work that excites me first. I have been doing just that for most of my career, painting pictures in colors and forms that I want, or shall I say, need to see. But there is another layer to the question:

What am I am not seeing in my work that I would like to see?

That’s a harder question. How can you quantify that thing that you don’t know, might not even have imagined yet?

It might be a case of knowing it when you see it. I know that my first real breakthrough was like that.

I was a beginning painter simply fumbling along. Even then I knew I would never be a great craftsman following in the long tradition of fine art painters and I had little interest in representing the world or people in any sort of exactitude.

I saw it then and now as way of painting the unseen. But I wasn’t able to visualize in any way what that unseen might be at that point. I found myself looking for something that nagged at the edge of my mind, something that called out to me from just out of reach. I wasn’t sure what it would look like, had not a concrete idea of what it might be. It was just there in a gaseous form that I couldn’t quite grasp.

But when that thing finally stepped forward into view on my painting table and revealed itself in a tangible form– which is the painting at the top here, First View, from 1994– I instantly knew what it was that I had stumbled on and that it was something that held something very important to me.

It might not look like much to the casual viewer now but in an instant I could see in this little painting the completeness of what I had been sensing in that gaseous, hazy form that hovered at the edges of my mind. I could see a full realization of all of the potential in it, in the present and shooting forward into the future. It was as though I had been in the dark and suddenly found myself holding a flashlight that lit up everything before me. Even now, after years of evolving from it, I can see how it connects to everything in my work, even those things I had could not yet see when I painted it.

And that’s where I find myself at the moment.  There’s something out there (or in there, I probably should say) that I want to see, might even need to see.

But I don’t know what it is yet. But I will know it when I see it.

And, trust me, I do plan on seeing it.

[From 2023, Now!]

— This is a bit of an oddity a replay of replay of a blog entry. I wanted to rerun the original post from 2013 but liked the intro from a replay in 2016 and decided to keep it, adding only the Victor Hugo passage. It seems that my creative year is very much like Groundhog Day as I seem to go through the same cycle of frustration, reflection, and breakthrough at the same time year after year. So, this old blog entry fits perfectly because as it was then, it remains the same now.

Absorbed– At West End Gallery

What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the
moon of the jagged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked
long and long at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts
that living men have honoured in bronze.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold,
whatever manliness or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never
been loyal.
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved,
somehow-the central heart that deals not
in words, traffics not with dreams, and is
untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at
sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about
yourself, authentic and surprising news of
yourself.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the
hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you
with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

—Jorge Luis Borges, Two English Poems, Verse II, 1934

Wasn’t going to write anything this morning, again. So, I didn’t write this morning. Haven’t felt much like writing lately. Just a little worn down, I guess.

But later in the morning, I came across a draft of a blog entry that I had never shared containing the second verse of a Jorge Luis Borges poem, Two English Poems. It sent me thinking and writing. It is basically about finding and losing love in the first part, followed in the second part by weighing out what the narrator has to offer in order to regain love.

I focused on the second verse of the poem. Its first line– What can I hold you with?— is a thought that often goes through my mind when I stand before a blank canvas. In my conversation with some unidentifiable and indistinct viewer that I imagine being present in the studio, it is often phrased in a slightly different way– What part of myself can I give to you?

The meaning is much the same though. When I paint, I am making an offer of myself to the viewer.

But what has the greatest impact for me was the final part of the second verse, highlighted in red above. It reminds me of the thoughts I sometimes have when trying to describe what I hope others see in my work, those things I have to offer with the hope that it will entrance and hold the viewer.

The artist hopes that what they have to offer, while being their own memories and feelings, opens up new avenues of perception for the viewer of themselves. As Borges put it:

I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about
yourself, authentic and surprising news of
yourself.

I have struggled to say just that for a long time. It is just what I want from my work.

And that final line just crushed me:

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the
hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you
with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

I felt like it was describing much of what I have to offer in my work. You hope that your work represents the totality of you, all the many facets that make up your humanity, with the hope that others see their own similar feelings in it. That includes the deepest of feelings. These are sometimes a bit darker and more somber than feelings of joy and happiness but they are as much a part of who we are as the brightest of our feelings.

As I said, Borges’ poem is very much a poem about what one has to offer in order to gain one’s love. In a way, sharing one’s art is often very much the same thing– a love offering of the deepest and most intimate parts of yourself. It may not be real love but when you connect with art in a deep way, you often feel as though you are connected with the artist and know and understand them.

I don’t know that I can fully explain what I mean here. It may even sound a bit off the wall to you. That’s okay. I am used to that. Just felt like I wanted to share this poem today.

Here’s a reading from Tom O’Bedlam of the whole poem from Borges.

Monde Parfait— At West End Gallery

Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.

–Thomas De Quincey, De Quincey’s Writings: Miscellaneous Essays, 1851

I’ve always contended that perfection is an unnatural state of being except in the case of nature. And even nature is never quite perfect as it is forever undergoing continuous adjustments to find its state of equilibrium.

That balancing of imperfections is in its own way a form of perfection, which might well affirm the statement above from Thomas De Quincey, the English essayist best known for his Confessions of an Opium-Eater.

As it is with most things I encounter, I equated his words with creating art. I never hesitate in pointing out that I do not seek perfection in my work– probably because I know it is beyond my meager talents, discipline, and patience.

You will not find perfect lines or forms in my work nor will the surface ever be glass smooth. You might find paintbrush bristles, cat hair or my hair or thumbprints in the paint. I once came across a tiny spider who found its final resting place in one finished piece. You will never suspect that it has been created by an algorithm or artificial intelligence of any sort.

It is meant to show the hand of the artist, to show the adjustments and efforts that are made to create equilibrium and bring it to my desired end for it which is a sense of rightness.

My ideal state of imperfection.

I guess in my own small way I am trying to replicate the way of the nature, trying to find an ideal state of being while dealing with unending imperfection.

I probably have said all this before on this blog. And someone else has said it in some other place before that, maybe a hundred or a thousand years ago. Or last week. Who knows? This not knowing and repetition are parts of my imperfection.

Just felt like saying what came to mind. Another part of my imperfection.

Actually, I just wanted to share the painting at the top that is now at the West End Gallery. It is titled Monde Parfait, which translates as Perfect World. The title reflects pretty much what I’ve been saying here which is probably why this piece remains a favorite of mine.

I was going to play a song called Perfect Day. There are several but none really capture what I was looking for. So, here’s a song with perfect in the title that better captures what I am trying to say. It’s Perfect Day from Lou Reed, another favorite that has played here before. It’s not about the world being perfect or even the day. More about finding that sense of rightness and satisfaction in the moment or place– or painting.

Something I am about to do…

The Christmas Stick, 2023

The Christmas Tree

Put out the lights now!
Look at the Tree, the rough tree dazzled
In oriole plumes of flame,
Tinselled with twinkling frost fire,
Tasseled with stars and moons – the same
That yesterday hid in the spinney and had no fame
Till we put out the lights now.

Hard are the nights now:
The fields at moonrise turn to agate
Shadows as cold as jet; in dyke and furrow
In copse and faggot
The frost’s tooth is set;
And stars are the sparks whirled out by the north wind’s fret
On the flinty nights now.

So feast your eyes now,
on mimic star and moon-cold bauble;
Worlds may wither unseen,
But the Christmas tree is a tree of fable,
A phoenix in evergreen,
And the world cannot change or chill what its mysteries mean
To your heart and eyes now.

The vision dies now: candle by candle
The tree that embraced it
Returns to its own kind,
To be earthed again and weather as best it
May the frost and the wind.
Children – it too had its hour; you will not mind
If it lives or dies now.

–Cecil Day Lewis

The poem above is from the late Cecil Day Lewis, who was Britain’s Poet Laureate at the time of death in 1972, as well as the father of Daniel Day Lewis.

Below is Cecil Day Lewis reciting his poem. It begins with a very short description of the themes that marked much of his work which I found very interesting. His recitation of the poem itself is lovely and gives it an emotional shape that I found comforting.

Wishing all a peaceful day.