Redtree Times

Georgia O’Keeffe- Sky Above Clouds IV, 1965

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I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgia O’Keeffe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O’Keeffe ‘Sky Above Clouds’ canvases floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. “Who drew it,” she whispered after a while. I told her. “I need to talk to her,” she said finally.

My daughter was making, that day in Chicago, an entirely unconscious but quite basic assumption about people and
the work they do. She was assuming that the glory she saw in the work reflected a glory in its maker, that the painting was the painter as the poem is the poet, that every choice one made alone– every word chosen or rejected, every brush stroke laid down or not laid down– betrayed one’s character. Style is character.

— Joan Didion, Georgia O’Keeffe

This anecdote opens the essay Georgia O’Keeffe that is included in author Joan Didion‘s 1979 book of essays, The White Album. I can only imagine the awe and wonder in the eyes of her daughter along with the many questions it inspired, on seeing O’Keeffe’s huge painting– it’s 8 feet high by 24 feet wide!– in a large open space.

It raises an interesting question: Is style character?

That’s a tough question. I am not positive it holds true for all artists across the spectrum of artistic disciplines but, for the most part, I would like to believe this is true if the style of the artist is genuine and true to their self.

Determining what is genuine and what is contrivance is another question.

I think the reaction of Didion’s daughter is one reliable indicator of authenticity. There is something about the reaction of a child to art that I trust implicitly. Their perception is still unclouded and intuitive and they usually don’t yet feel the need to categorize or rate everything that they come across. They have an ability to see things clearly that I sometimes think we lose in adulthood.

They just react on a gut level, quickly and decisively, to some inner intuitive cues.

In my experience, I generally am most pleased with my own work when it catches the eye or mind of a child. It’s perhaps the purest form of validation, letting me know that the work speaks on a visceral, emotional level.

But is this, the style that speaks to that child, character?

I can’t say for sure. I know a number of artists for which this holds true and I believe it is true in my own case.

Or at least I want to believe that. A person can’t attest to their own authenticity without some form of bias. That puts it out of my hands.

But I hope so. My intention for my work has always been to be transparent and open, for it to be an expression of my character, for better or worse. It is work that is meant to communicate. Or so I hope.

I don’t know that an artist’s work can ever fully mask the strengths or deficiencies contained in their character. Nor should they.

For myself, I am okay with that. I am willing to be judged because I know that few will be as critical of my work and my character as myself.

As Georgia O’Keeffe said:

To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.

And don’t we all aspire to have courage?

Running a little behind this morning and something led me to this post from just a couple of years back. Felt right this morning. I’ve added a Dan Fogelberg song, Bones in the Sky, which is about O’Keeffe and her work. It includes plenty images of her paintings as well as many photos of her taken by her husband, the influential photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

Offered to the Wind— Now at West End Gallery

Boychick, wake up! Be something! Make your life something good. For the love of an old man who sees in your young days his new life, for such love take the world in your two hands and make it like new. Go out and fight so life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills.

–Clifford Odets, Awake and Sing! (1935)

Starting every morning here in the studio is pretty much the same. And not.

I walked into the studio around 5 AM this morning. About my regular time, I guess.  It was chilly, about 34°, as I trudged across the path between the house and my studio with leaves crunching under my feet. The three feral cats met me about halfway across, all wanting their heads rubbed first. We proceeded as a group into the garage for First Breakfast and more rubs and purring. The cold makes it more comfortable for both them and me as it means that the sometimes-intrusive raccoons are not as active. All as usual for this time of the year.

Then I left them to head into the studio to give Hobo, my studio cat, another onetime feral who we figure is about 18 years old now, her medications and feed her. She greets me with her usual purrs and meows. All as usual.

Coffee and tea– I drink both first thing in the morning– are prepared and I head into the painting area. I usually flip on some music or watch the news as I begin to figure out what I am going to write. This is sometimes where things bog down.

But flipping on the TV, I notice that TCM is playing Shake! Otis at Monterey which is a film of his legendary 1967 performance at Monterey Pop Festival. I turned it over to it and am greeted with his opening number, Shake!

Wow.

I’ve seen this performance many times before but at 5:30 AM in the dark stillness of my studio, its frenetic pace felt like a shot of adrenaline directly into my heart. Made me giddy and eager to start the day. To get something done. To shake off the cobwebs and make something of the day. Get out of the little dull rut I’ve been feeling in recent days and push myself. Jump on this rocking rhythm and ride it, maybe start a new and bigger project.

Just move.

Wake it up and shake it up.

Thanks, Otis. I needed that.

Take a couple of minutes to watch Otis then get out of here. Go wake and shake on your own time. You’re stifling me.

And stay off my lawn…

Penelope— Now at the West End Gallery

–Loreena McKennitt, Penelope’s Song

I have employed Penelope, from Homer’s Odyssey, as the subject of several paintings over the years, including the one here at the top. It is a smaller piece, 6″ by 12″ on canvas, now at the West End Gallery.

As a refresher, Penelope was the queen and wife of Odysseus, king of Ithaca. In the tale, Penelope waited for ten years for Odysseus to return from the Trojan War, the span of time, of course, that was the period that comprises the tale of the Odyssey.

Penelope waited constantly during this time, forever looking out over the sea and scanning the horizon for Odysseus’ ship. During this time, she was urged by more than hundred suitors to select a new husband. She would put them off by saying she would not do so until she finished weaving the burial shroud for Odysseus’ elderly father, Laertes. Cunningly, she would weave each day then unravel her day’s work each night so that the shroud never seemed to progress.

There’s more to the story than this, of course. But it is the image of the aching Penelope looking out from Ithaca that has always stuck with me. I often see it in pieces such as this. Maybe having that story engraved in my mind makes that so. Not sure. but it can’t hurt.

Here’s a song from singer/songwriter Loreena McKennitt about just this subject. This is Penelope’s Song.

GC Myers- The Questioning

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question

–E.E. CUMMINGS, 1938, Introduction to Collected Poems

I had a conversation yesterday about the nature of questions. Things like: Why do we ask questions? Can we expect answers? And is the answer– if there is one— ultimately as important as the question itself? Or does simply asking a question create the possibility for an answer? Or more questions?

I often ask questions without having any answers so this line of questioning intrigued me greatly.

Predictably, I had no concrete answers. In fact, it spurned more questions in me. I went seeking early this morning for something that might help organize that conversation in my mind and came across the line above from the late poet E.E. Cummings. It felt like a bit of an epiphany:

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question

Could it be that perhaps we ourselves are the answer to our questions?

My stock response to that is: I don’t know.

And I’m okay with that. The fact that I am asking questions means that I still care enough to live and seek. And in the end, that is all that matters, the engine that drives us.

That line was the final line in an introduction that Cummings wrote for his 1938 Collected Works. I read the rest of the essay and found it as equally compelling as that final line, though that line was the perfect bow to put on the package.

So much of it spoke to that conversation yesterday as well as to my own personal seeking. There was a short paragraph that felt as though it was written for me about those things that concern me:

Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being; somebody who said to those near him, when his fingers would not hold a brush “tie it to my hand”

I have shared Cummings’ introduction below. I found it a fascinating read. It might not be so for mostpeople but for ourselves, we understand, don’t we?

How could I not end on a question?

I N T R O D U C T I O N  

The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople– it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs. Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to mostpeople? Catastrophe unmitigated. Socialrevolution. The cultured aristocrat yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultravoluptuous superpalazzo,and dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming with every conceivable species of undesirable organism. Mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness. If mostpeople were to be born twice they’d improbably call it dying–

you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery, the mystery of growing: which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life, for eternal us, is now’and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything, catastrophic included.

Life, for mostpeople, simply isn’t. Take the socalled standardofliving. What do mostpeople mean by “living”? They don’t mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science, in its finite but unbounded wisdom, has succeeded in selling their wives. If science could fail, a mountain’s a mammal. Mostpeople’s wives could spot a genuine delusion of embryonic omnipotence immediately and will accept no substitutes.

-luckily for us,a mountain is a mammal. The plusorminus movie to end moving, the strictly scientific parlourgame of real unreality,the tyranny conceived in misconception and dedicated to the proposition that every man is a woman and any woman is a king, hasn’t a wheel to stand on. What their synthetic not to mention transparent majesty, mrsandmr collective foetus, would improbably call a ghost is walking. He isn’t a undream of anaesthetized impersons, or a cosmic comfortstation,or a transcedentally sterilized lookiesoundiefeelietastiesmellie. He is a healthily complex, a naturally homogenous,citizen of immorality. The now of his each pitying free imperfect gesture, his any birth of breathing, insults perfected inframortally milleniums of slavishness. He is a little more than everything, he is democracy; he is alive: he is ourselves.

Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being; somebody who said to those near him, when his fingers would not hold a brush “tie it to my hand”–

nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false, nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary, nothing emptied or filled, real or unreal; nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening, innocent spontaneaous, true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden, but actually flowers which breasts are among the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted; brain over heart, surface: nowhere hating or to fear; shadow, mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making; only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely opening; only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno, impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong; never to gain or pause, never the soft adventure of undoom, greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence; never to rest and never to have; only to grow.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question

E.E. CUMMINGS, 1938, Collected Poems

At last, small witches, goblins, hags,
And pirates armed with paper bags
Their costumes hinged on safety pins,
Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins.

–John Updike, October, A Child’s Calendar (1965)

Careful out there tonight, kids. It’s Halloween and you never know what you might come across.

Now, get moving and stay off my lawn…

Ivan Albright- And Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida

A painting is life and a painting is death . . . the picture is our own legacy left by tomorrow’s dead for tomorrow’s living.

–Ivan Albright

As we near Halloween, I thought I’d share a revised post from many years back about the artist Ivan Albright (1897-1983) whose work sometimes feels like the stuff of nightmares. It often possesses a dark feel that wouldn’t be out of place for All Hallows’ Eve. Take a look for yourself…

The painting at the top, And Into The World  There Came a Soul Called Ida, is the work of the late Ivan Albright. Not a household name by any means, but if you’ve seen his work, you’ll definitely remember it.

Ivan Albright- Self Portrait, 1982

I saw a large retrospective of his work a number of years ago at the Met and was fascinated– and a little uncomfortable and creeped out, to be honest– by his subjects and the darkness and tone of the work. But it was the incredible textures of the paintings that I found amazing. They were very sculptural on the surface, with deep and deep moonscapes of color, layer after layer of paint that seemed to be shoved and mashed on to the surface. It was unlike anything I had seen. It was obviously the product of a huge amount of labor but it wasn’t labored. It felt organic and there was something very beautiful there that transcended the unflattering depictions of the paintings.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1943

Albright was best known for the painting, shown here on the right. It was produced as the title object for The Picture of Dorian Gray, the 1945 film version of Oscar Wilde’s famous novel of a corrupt young man who defies the ravages of time while his portrait reflects the true result of his debauched life. It was the horrifying image revealed to the ever-young Dorian Gray at the end of the film.

I’m still fascinated by his work even though I have to admit I get a queasy feeling when I really take in the whole of his characters, like seeing a car wreck and not being to turn away. They are horrible and beautiful at once. I now also really appreciate the epic efforts that must’ve went into creating these pieces, the hundreds of hours that must have been spent. The patience it must have taken to maintain that vision.

So, check out the work of Ivan Albright. He had great titles, as well. You don’t have to like his work but you should be aware of it…

Ivan Albright- The Farmer’s Kitchen, 1934

Ivan Albright- Hail to the Pure, 1976

Ivan Albright The Wild Bunch (Or Hole In The Wall Gang) 1950-1951

Ivan Albright- Poor Room, 1957-1963

Ivan Albright- The Rustlers, 1962

Ivan Albright- Flesh, 1928

Ivan Albright- And Man Created God in His Own Image, 1930

Harlequin– GC Myers, ca 1996

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

–Thomas Carlyle, The Opera (1852)

Not much to say this morning. Just going to share a simple triad of word, image and song. For this week’s selection for Sunday Morning Music, wanted to share a new song, Angel, from the Black Pumas, which is an Austin, TX-based band described as being psychedelic soul.

I don’t know about that, but I’ve liked most everything I’ve heard from them and played their songs here a couple of times before this. The sound and mood of this tune, along with Eric Burton‘s soaring vocals, have a haunting quality. And maybe that is appealing as we trudge towards Halloween. Or maybe because it also brings us near to the infinite, as Carlyle observed above.

I don’t know.

GC Myers- The Incantation, ca 1994

Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind/Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,/Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,/Above, beneath, betwixt, between

—Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

When I was kid, we lived in a big old farmhouse house in the country. It was kind of a spooky place with a small old cemetery across the road at the edge of the woods. Some of the people buried there were the family of a coach driver killed in an Indian attack in the late 1700’s. The stacked stone chimney of their home still stands across the road from what was our home. I used to play around it quite often by myself back then.

The house had a creepy attic that inspired many nightmares for me. Opening the door to it was like a reverse Wizard of Oz effect. Instead of going from sepia to color as in the film, there you went from color to sepia, everything brown and dusty. There was a bunch of old wooden furniture belonging to our landlord and a ladder that went to the locked Widow’s Watch. Never made it up top there.

There was also a fairly large window that often caught my eye when playing ball in the yard below. Something would catch my eye and I would begin to believe that the silhouette of someone had briefly appeared in that window. I always found myself checking that window when I was out there.

For the last few years we lived there, I was the only one sleeping upstairs after my siblings had left. There was plenty there to keep a12-year old spooked. I would lay in bed and the whole spectrum of kid monsters would run through my head– Frankenstein, Dracula, the Werewolf, the Mummy, zombies and so on.

Oddly enough, I was afraid of ghosts. And I was never really too scared of Frankenstein or the Mummy. I figured I could outrun those guys. I mean, come on! Same with the zombies. Zombies hadn’t evolved in our imaginations yet and were still portrayed as slowly shuffling creatures in search of brains.

The Werewolf and Dracula were a different story. The Wolfman could run so I might be safe in my second story bedroom. But Dracula could transform into a bat and fly. He was what I perceived as my biggest threat at that time.

Little did I know then.

I was still naive enough to not yet understand the monstrous side of man which made my childhood fears based on monsters and the supernatural seem tame in comparison to the horrors we now witness on what seems to be every day.

Oh, the human horror show was still there then. Make no mistake about that. But it was easier to be shielded from it in a world of limited and slower access to information. But if I could, I would gladly trade for the nightmares inspired by monsters and the undead of my youth for the night terrors born of man.

Since we’re nearing Halloween, which is hopefully still a holiday of only kid monsters, here’s a spooky tune from the late great Nina Simone. It’s her version of I Put a Spell on You, written and performed originally by Screaming Jay Hawkins.

Jackson Pollock– Convergence, 1952

Painting is a state of being…Painting is self discovery.  Every good painter paints what he is.

–Jackson Pollock

In an article in The Guardian yesterday, there was a review of a current exhibit [July, 2015] at the Tate Liverpool of Jackson Pollock paintings. Writer Jonathan Jones describes Pollock’s work around 1950, in the period when he was briefly liberated from his chronic alcoholism, as being the pinnacle of his career. As he put it: Pollock was painting at this moment like his contemporary Charlie Parker played sax, in curling arabesques of liberating improvisation that magically end up making beautiful sense.

That sentence really lit me up, as did the words of Pollock at the top of the page.

In Pollock’s work I see that beautiful sense of which Jones writes. I see order and rhythm, a logic forming from the seemingly chaotic and incomprehensible.

The textures that make up the surfaces of my own paintings (shown here on the right) are often formed with Pollock’s paintings in mind, curling arabesques in many layers. In fact, one of the themes of my work echoes that same sense of finding order from chaos.

Or that the grace and beauty of the mark belies the chaos that you perceive. Often, that which we perceive as chaos is really part of a rhythm or pattern that we haven’t quite caught up with yet.

To some observers, however, Pollock’s work represented the very chaos that plagued the world then and now. But true to his words, Pollock’s work was indeed a reflection of what he was– a man seeking grace and sense in a chaotic world.

Painting is, as Pollock says, self-discovery and indeed every painter ultimately paints what they are. I know that in the work of painters I personally know I clearly see characteristics of their personality, sometimes of their totality. At least, to the extent that I know them.

I believe that my work also reveals me in this way. It shows everything– strengths and weaknesses, hopes and fears. You might think that a painter would be clever enough to show only those positive attributes of his character, like the answers people give when asked to describe their own personality. Nobody ever openly claims to being not too intelligent or paranoid or easily fooled. There are artists that try present themselves other than as they really are but more often than not it comes off as contrivance.

Real painting, real art, is in total revelation, in showing all the complexities and hidden rhythms of our true self and hoping that others see the order and beauty within it.

This is a blogpost that originally ran in 2015 and again in 2020. It is updated here with a few examples of the underlying textures of my own work. I apologize for including them in a post featuring the work of another artist, but I wanted to show how influence sometimes shows itself.

I’ve also included a video at the bottom that shows the Top 20 Pollock paintings as perceived by whoever assembled this video. Wasn’t sure about the inclusion of the Goo Goo Dolls song in it but it seems to work okay.

Shel Silverstein, Masks

A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it.

–Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Wanting to post something seasonal in the rundown to Halloween, I settled on masks as the subject matter. It’s the time of the year when many of us choose what mask they want to wear. It might be a monster or superhero or cartoon character or some other fantasy-based mask.

But the reality is that many of us wear masks most every day. We wear the mask of our jobs, the mask of our religion, our political party, etc. We must be careful of the mask we choose because we become identified with the mask we wear. As Oscar Wilde said: Those who want a mask have to wear it.

It could also be more than one mask. Some wear multiple masks at different times. I have worn many masks in my life, some more comfortably fitting than others. Some just didn’t fit and were tortuous to wear.

Maybe that’s the truth of the matter, that we try on many masks and if we are fortunate, we come at last across a mask that perfectly fits who we are. Or people that allow you to take down the mask and just be exactly who and what you are.

It’s a simple thought but sometimes these things are seemingly so self-evident that they get overlooked. Then we forget that we can choose the mask we wear, if we choose to wear one at all.

This was obviously a guise to share one of my favorite Shel Silverstein poems at the top. Short and sweet. Or not so sweet, actually.

Here’s a video that plays out the story in this short poem. It’s a 2014 video from a high school drama club, the Washington Drama Club. I have no idea where they are from. Maybe somewhere in Iowa? The title page states that the film won an award at the Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival in 2015. Not sure.

But it’s a lovely playing out of Shel’s verse. Worth a few minutes.