Redtree Times

Comes a Stranger— Soon at Principle Gallery

A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

I have a lot to do this morning as I prep some work that will be coming with me for my Gallery Talk on Saturday down in Alexandria at the Principle Gallery. In addition to framing and all the other tasks that go along with it, I am also trying to mentally prepare for the talk itself.

I go over the possibilities of how it could go, different paths I could follow as far as theme and tone. Anything that will keep me from standing up there like a wooden statue, unable to reach out and connect with the audience in any way.

Maybe the theme will focus on that feeling of being the Stranger who is forever trying to find home, that place where they belong. That is the theme for the blog today as well as for the new small painting at the top, Comes a Stranger. This 8″ by 8″ canvas is included in the group I will be bringing.

Though I have no idea if it will happen, using the Stranger as a theme makes sense in some ways. It’s something on which I can speak easily, having often felt the part. It also plays an important element in my work as I sometimes see my created landscapes as being the homeland I seek as the Stranger.

But that’s just one possibility out of many. The folks who are sitting there will have a major influence on what the talk consists of and where it goes. I won’t know with any degree of certainty until Saturday, right around 1 PM. Then all bets are off.

Here’s a song to complete the triad for today’s theme. It’s a very good cover of the old Kinks song, Strangers, from the Black Pumas. Good stuff.

REMINDER

What:  GALLERY TALK

Who:   With GC MYERS

Where: PRINCIPLE GALLERY, Alexandria VA

When: SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, Beginning at 1 PM

Why:  It’s free and open to all, fun, informative, and there will be a free drawing for the painting below, On the Rise–and maybe even another one!

All this and more!

On the Rise– You Could Win This Painting!

Hope’s Fire– Coming to Principle Gallery

Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind…

–Aldo Leopold, The River of the Mother of God

The new painting, Hope’s Fire, above is coming with me for this coming Saturday’s Gallery Talk at the Principle Gallery. It’s a smaller piece, coming in at 9″ by 12″ on canvas.

The title came from the contrast of the Red Tree set against the somewhat washed-out blues and greens around it. The paleness of the background immediately felt to me to be symbolic of a fading of hope for the future. The kind that becomes ingrained and normalized after years of struggle, causing people to lose their enthusiasm and become less involved in shaping their own future. The passion to resist and persist wanes.

The fire within goes low.

The disinterested then becomes overcautious, trying to preserve what one has with as little struggle as possible. But as conservationist Aldo Leopold so aptly points out, prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind.

Changing the future is an act of passion and desire, achieved by those willing to stand up and risk failing.

That is all rhetorical on paper. Hard to transfer the idea of passion and fire to reality. But I personally hold out optimism in the current generation of youths that I see taking a larger politically active stance. They see that the future is where they will live and that they should have a larger part in how it will be shaped. They shouldn’t leave it to the older generations who have plundered the past and forsaken the future.

I’ve held this hope for decades that the youth of the world would finally see the future as theirs to form and make their voices heard at the voting booth. My boomer generation never fully reached the promise they once held in this manner nor did the following generations.

We never burned fully. always fizzling out before we forged the future we wanted.

But his new one seems to better understand what is at stake, that they have real political leverage to exert. That their power of the vote can yet overcome the power of extreme wealth. That is, no doubt, why one party is working so hard to disenfranchise their vote.

I see in this new generation a kindled and building fire. It’s the hope I see in the Red Tree in this painting.

I hope I am right and that they can make their fire reach its promise.

Here’s a song in that vein for this week’s Sunday Morning Music. It’s the song from the New Radicals that made them a one-hit wonder in the late 1990’s, You Get What You Give. The band disbanded after one album but reunited to perform this song for the Biden Inauguration in 2021 after they found out that the song was a favorite with the Bidens while they were going through son Beau Biden’s bout with cancer.

Give a good listen and try to kindle your own fire.

And if you can’t do that, fire up someone else. The future depends on it.

REMINDER

What:  GALLERY TALK

Who:   With GC MYERS

Where: PRINCIPLE GALLERY, Alexandria VA

When: SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, Beginning at 1 PM

Why:  It’s free, fun, informative, and there will be a free drawing for the painting below, On the Rise.

And more!

On the Rise– You Could Win This Painting!

Fortune’s Smile— Soon at Principle Gallery, Alexandria VA

Fortune, good night, smile once more; turn thy wheel!

–William Shakespeare, King Lear

It is now just week to the return of my annual Gallery Talk at the Principle Gallery after a four year pandemic-related hiatus. It takes place next Saturday, September 30, beginning at 1 PM at the Alexandria gallery.

While I try to make it a good time for the audience by passing on a few bits of information and having a few laughs along the way, I have a nagging suspicion that the bigger attraction for these talks is the drawing that is held at the end for one of my paintings.

And that’s okay. It’s always an exciting and fun moment when good fortune smiles on some lucky person. I only wish I could give away a painting to every person there. Of course, that can’t be done but I do try to make it so that nobody leaves feeling empty-handed.

This year’s painting to be given away is On the Rise, a 12″ by 36″ painting on canvas, shown below.  

I also bring a small group of new pieces for the gallery. One new piece is the one shown at the top. I chose to show this blog entry since we are dealing with a theme of good fortune here today. It’ is quite fittingly titled Fortune’s Smile.

Hopefully, Fortune will smile on you if you can make it to the Principle Gallery for the Gallery Talk next Saturday. Hope to see you there. Good luck to you!

On that note, here’s a song from Mary Chapin Carpenter from a few years back. Well, 31 years to be precise. I guess that’s a bit more than a few years but who cares? It’s a fun song called I Feel Lucky with a real early 90’s style video. Enjoy!

On the Rise– You Could Win This Painting!

For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.

― Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye

The painting shown here, Mirrors and Windows, hangs here in the studio and I pass it several times a day–it’s on the way to the bathroom. But even though it’s been in this spot for several years now, it usually draws my attention. It’s been that way, remaining a favorite of mine since it was painted back in 2013.

As I wrote back then:

I found myself looking at this piece quite often in the studio, trying to ascertain what it was that was pulling me in. As I looked, I began to be more aware of the road running through which signified to me our life’s journey. We spend our lives looking in mirrors and out windows, living in reflections and images of ourselves and the outer world.

There must be some perfect balance in this. Somewhere, somehow, we hopefully reach a point where we know who and what we are and turn away from mirrors and begin to look for windows in which we can expand our vision of the outer world and gain greater wisdom.

Years later and it has carried the meaning well that I gleaned from it back then, which is that real art serves as both a window and a mirror, giving the viewer insights and views into the world and reflecting their place within it.

Just this morning, I stood in front of it and wondered if I was looking at it as a mirror or a window.

I came to the conclusion that it might be both.

This entry ran a couple of years ago about this 2013 painting that still is pondered in my studio. Thought I’d rerun it and add a song. This is the Velvet Underground song, I’ll Be Your Mirror, performed in 1972 by Lou Reed, John Cale and Nico.

All of Time– At Principle Gallery

It was the month of May, the month when the foliage of herbs and trees is most freshly green, when buds ripened and blossoms appear in their fragrance and loveliness. And the month when lovers, subject to the same force which reawakens the plants, feel their hearts open again, recall past trysts and past vows, and moments of tenderness, and yearn for a renewal of the magical awareness which is love.

–Thomas Malory, Le morte d’Arthur

I am in the midst of getting prepped for my Gallery Talk next Saturday, September 30, at the Principle Gallery. This includes prepping some new pieces as well as gathering my thoughts and trying to formulate what I might actually say.

What I am looking for in my planning is a new perspective to give to the audience there. A bit of information that might cause them to see the work in a different way or add depth to how they see it now. Sometimes, it comes down to sharing a personal detail– a recollection or memory or emotional trigger– behind the work.

It can sometimes feel confessional on my part, as though I am sharing something deeply private. I often joke that these talks serve as a form of therapy for me. There’s something to that, in reality. I often feel unburdened after these talks, as though I have gotten some things off my mind.

Those confessional moments often define these talks. It gives them a sense of intimacy and authenticity that extends beyond merely talking about what brush or color I employ on a certain painting.

The thing is, as much as I plan ahead, those moments can’t be planned. They usually come from me talking off the top of my head, which can sometimes feel like walking a highwire without a net. You feel your way forward but there is a constant sense that you could plunge to the depths.

The only safety net here, I guess, is to try to carry a few thoughts into the talk with me that won’t instantly evaporate as I stand in front of an audience. These gathered thoughts end up serving as a jumping off point from which I can then talk off the top of my head and use whatever ability I have to react and respond.

And that is usually when the best moments of these talks occur.

That seems like that was a lot of words to say so little. Let’s end it here by filling out today’s triad. Here’s a recently released demo version of her 1974 hit Help Me from the Joni Mitchell Archives. It is just Joni and her guitar without the backing band, orchestrations, or backup singers. Itis less polished but no less powerful, really showing off her vocal qualities. Good stuff.

REMINDER

What:  GALLERY TALK

Who:   With GC MYERS

Where: PRINCIPLE GALLERY, Alexandria VA

When: SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, Beginning at 1 PM

Why:  It’s free, fun, informative, and there will be a free drawing for the painting below, On the Rise.

And more!

On the Rise– You Could Win This Painting!

Private Song, 2006

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.

–Richard Wright, American Hunger (1977)

The other day, we talked about how a book, painting, or other work of art is often a kiss or a hand reaching out from its creator. It is an effort to create a link to others in order to validate the existences of both the creator and the recipient.

Today, we get a passage from Richard Wright equating it to yelling into the dark abyss then waiting for an echo. And that makes sense to me because this act of creating art often feels like that. You put work out into the world and wait to hear an echo from where it has landed. A faint trace of its recognition.

This brings to mind yet another analogy from the past. Creating art is often like tossing a tiny pebble into a large lake. It plunks in then sends out a small wave in all directions with the hope that it will intersect with other waves in the lake. Sometimes it is a wave that glides into nothingness. Other times, it runs into other waves that send it into others and others, becoming more than it seemed when it first plunked into the water.

You just never know what might happen when you bellow into the abyss or toss your pebble into the lake. Or offer your hand or kiss into the darkness.

I wasn’t planning on writing any of this as I first sat down. It was just going to be a typical triad of image, word and music with some sort of loose connection. The theme for today was either darkness or the abyss.

I can’t decide which, if either, fits. You might take in all three and come away with a different take on the theme.

One never knows. That’s the beauty of art.

Here’s the song to complete today’s triad. I played an excellent version of this song from Robert Plant a couple of years back but felt that the original deserved to be heard. Written by Jesse Colin Young, this is him and The Youngbloods performing Darkness, Darkness from 1969.

White in the Moon— At the Principle Gallery

The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.

–André Malraux, La condition humaine [Man’s Fate] (1933)

I have things to do this morning but still wanted to share a small triad of image, word, and song. I think these chosen three work well together. I’ll leave it to you for your own judgment.

The song is one you might not know. It’s from Odyssey. Though there was also a better-known disco trio from NYC with the same name, this particular Odyssey was a short-lived California based band that recorded on Mo-West Records which was Motown‘s West Coast division in the 1970’s. This song from 1972 is titled Our Lives Are Shaped By What We Love. Nice feel and sound.

To bring back a phrase from the era: Can you dig it?

From Lawrence Durrell Interview, 1960

I came across this snip above from the Durrell Society, a group dedicated to the work of author Lawrence Durrell. I believe it was from a Paris Review interview in 1960 but I couldn’t verify that. That doesn’t really matter, I guess.

There’s a lot to unpack in that brief paragraph. I often equate writing or making music to painting so I often see equivalencies in things written by writers and musicians. For example, where Durrell says that he doesn’t read much of the work of his contemporaries, I understand. I don’t spend a lot of time studying the work of my colleagues nor do I spend much time examining paintings from earlier artists that are considered masterpieces unless they spark something within me. Unless the work reaches out and meshes with me on some personal level, I just don’t want to spend the time on it. It’s much like Durrell stating that he never reads anything that bores him or doesn’t feel was written for him.

And that brings us to the line– Books are like love letters; they are destined for a particular person— that really hooked me. That and: Every book is a kiss.

Substituting the word painting for book, these two statements aptly sum up my feelings on the interaction that often takes place between a piece of art and the viewer. Some paintings reach out to certain people on a very personal level, seeming as though they might be speaking to only to that person in intimate terms.

As though it was painted for them alone.

That you know it and it knows you.

I know that feeling. It might be one of the reasons I ended up as a painter, having felt that feeling– that kiss as Durrell put it– from the work of others.

I wanted others to feel the kiss of my work, to feel that they were known and seen in it.

I have been fortunate to see this bonding occur between my work and the viewer a number of times over the years. It’s something that can’t be predicted. Some pieces that personally feel like a big buss on the lips to me never find another person in which it produces that same effect.

But when it happens, when I see someone experience a deep emotional connection with a painting of mine, it is beyond gratifying. There is a sense of completion, as though a circle is somehow being made whole.

As though someone has received my love letter.

I can’t explain that any more than I can explain why the connection with the viewer happens in the first place or why people love or experience life in the ways they do.

Therein lies the mystery and beauty of art.

Luna Twist– Soon at the Principle Gallery, Alexandria VA

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.

—Rabindranath Tagore, The Gardener (1915)

There’s a song that pops up on a regular basis on a Pandora channel that I often have on when I write for the blog each morning. It’s infectious sound always makes me stop and look to see what and who it is.

It’s a song called Lillies of the Vallery from Japanese composer Jun Miyake. It was used in the 2011 film, Pina, from German filmmaker Wim Wenders, best known for his Wings of Desire and Buena Vista Social Club. Miyake has worked with Wenders on a number of his films. The film Pina is a documentary about the life and work of dancer/choreographer Pina Bausch.

I thought it would be a good song for this week’s Sunday Morning Music since I also wanted to show the new smaller painting at the top that will be accompanying me, along with a small group of new work, to the Principle Gallery for my Gallery Talk there on Saturday, September 30.

The painting, a 9″ by 12″ canvas, is called Luna Twist. It’s a piece that has attracted my attention quite a bit in the past few weeks. Maybe it’s the attraction of the twisting dancer to the moon set against the vast space that separates them. Or maybe it’s the dancer’s relationship to the Red Tree in the distance, whose stance seems to be mirrored in the dancer. Or maybe it is the mirroring between the moon and the lit area on which the dancer twists that attracts me?

Or maybe it is my own desire to dance freely set against the awkwardness and self-consciousness that keeps me from doing so?

I don’t know and it really doesn’t matter. Maybe we try too hard sometimes to know the reason behind our attraction to certain things rather than just savoring our pleasure in them. Perhaps we over analyze things and don’t just revel in the moment.

Maybe that is what this piece about.

Have to think about that.

Hmm, that seems the opposite of what I should be doing based on what I just wrote, doesn’t it? So, for right now, I am going to savor what I feel in this painting and the music.

Here’s the clip from Wim Wenders’ Pina featuring Lillies of the Valley from Jun Miyake.

Now get out of here– gotta dance…

On the Rise– You Could Win This Painting!

I will be giving a Gallery Talk at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria two weeks from today, Saturday, September 30, beginning at 1 PM. I had done a Gallery Talk at the Principle Gallery annually up until the pandemic. This will be the first since 2019.

For those who have attended in the past, you will recall that a highlight of these talks was the drawing where one attendee would be awarded one of my paintings that I had chosen for the occasion.

Well, nothing has changed.

There will be a drawing once again, along with some other surprises. The main prize this year is the painting above, titled On the Rise. It is 12″ by 36″ on canvas and will be given away to someone in attendance at the end of the Talk.

The Gallery Talk begins at 1 PM. Plan on getting there a little early to register for the drawing and to secure a seat and maybe chat for a few minutes.

Hope you can make it to the Gallery Talk!