Redtree Times

Muse, 2009

There is also a third kind of madness, which is possession by the Muses, which enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric… But he, who, not being inspired and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art – he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.

–Plato, Phaedrus

The painting above is from 2009, painted on the insert panel of an old upright piano. The whole thing is about 18″ high by 60″ wide. Outside of a stint at the Fenimore Museum for my 2012 show there, it has never been out of my sight, hanging as it does on the wall of the studio’s main painting space. I can glimpse now and take it in. It’s one of those pieces that I don’t believe I could part with.

I call it Muse mainly for the Red Tree in the painting that has served as the muse and avatar for my time as a painter. It also refers to the piano aspects of the piece which represents for me the inspiration provided by music and other arts. Muse is, after all, right there in music.

As far as the passage above from Plato, he may have been right. There is at least a bit of madness–and maybe much more– that comes with the Muse’s inspiration. There are plenty of days when I consider the irrationality of what I do. It doesn’t make much sense on those days when the Muse seems to have turned her back on me.

But in short time, I let go of the stasis of rationality and there it is again. Like the panel on the wall, I am back in that landscape– in the temple of my Muse.

Where I am home and recognized. Where I belong…

I have always regarded manual labour as creative and looked with respect – and, yes, wonder – at people who work with their hands. It seems to me that their creativity is no less than that of a violinist or painter.

-Pablo Casals

I came across this shot of working hands and it made me think of how I’ve viewed hands through my life. I’ve always looked at people’s hands since I was a child. The liver spotted hands of my grandmother had thin ivory fingers that seemed like translucent china, for instance.

Growing up, the hands of our landlord Art, an old farmer [and a onetime bootlegger but that’s a story for another day], were thick and strong and missing at least one digit down to the knuckle on several of his fingers, the result of an ornery, impatient personality and dangerous farm machinery. Not a great match. It was not uncommon to see quite a few farmers with missing fingers and limbs back in the day.

Fat Jack, who I wrote about here a long time back, had hands whose nails were longer than you might expect and permanently rimmed with the black from the oil and grease of the machines and engines on which he was always working. They were similar to the photo above. His hands were round and plump, like Jack himself, but surprisingly soft and nimble, good for manipulating the small nuts and bolts of his world.

There was a manager when I was in the world of automobiles I worked under a manager who was a great guy and fantastic salesman. However, he had extremely soft and damp hands. It was like handling a dead fish when you shook hands.

A cool, mushy, damp, boneless fish.

As a kid and now, I have admired working hands. They reflect their use so perfectly, the scars and callouses serving as badges of honor and the thick muscularity of the fingers attesting to the time spent at labor. They seem honest with nothing to hide. They are often direct indicators of that person’s life and world.

My own hands have changed over the years. They were once more like working hands, calloused and thickening from many hours spent with a shovel. There are a number of small scars from screwdrivers that jumped from the screwhead and into the flesh time and time again. There’s another on the end of my middle finger from when I cut the very end of it off while trying to cut a leather strap with a hunting knife.

Not a great idea but, hey, I never claimed to be Einstein.

I always felt confident when my hands were harder and stronger. Now, I have lost some of that thickness of strength and the fingers are thinner and a bit softer from doing less manual labor. Plus, the passing years have provided a few more creases and age spots.

I look at them now and wonder how I would have judged them when I was younger, when I would normally measure someone by their hands. That’s something I don’t do now. I now know there are so many more and better ways to measure a life. That was made clear to me once I realized that the work of the mind was a possibility – something that seemed a million miles away then.

But, even now, when I come across working hands, strong and hard, I find myself admiring them still.

This post has ran a couple of times over the years, generally around Labor Day. I have always admired hard workers, people who didn’t swerve away from having to use their hands and backs to get something done. I have been a hard worker at times though in recent years I have spent as much time, maybe more, as a bone-idle slob.

I like myself a lot more when I am the hard worker.

Have a good Labor Day.

Time has slipped away this morning. I began looking for a piece of music to play on YouTube and got sucked into a vortex of watching reaction videos of people listening to songs for the first time. They have never heard these songs or, in many cases, even heard of the artists and react to the taped performances or just the audio.

I ended up watching a bunch of these video of different folks reacting to Janis Joplin songs. The awe her voice and authenticity inspires is palpable in these videos. Having grown up with this music, I find it hard to believe that someone has missed out on this but the genuine nature of their reactions more than make up for their lack of knowledge.

One performance that knocked most of these folks out was Janis’ landmark performance of Ball & Chain at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. It is an astounding performance and deserves the jaw drops it receives. One of my favorite parts of this video is the camera cutting away to Mama Cass who watches spellbound by Janis. In the reaction videos they had no idea that they were looking at Mama Cass and more than likely wouldn’t know who she was since they hadn’t heard of Janis at this point.

Seeing Mama Cass reminds me of the story of guitarist Mike Bloomfield who in the mid 60’s was a hot player in the world of rock and blues. He spoke about going to see Jimi Hendrix at the Cafe Wha ( I think that was the club he spoke of) in Greenwich Village. Knowing Bloomfield was in the audience, Jimi put on an incredible performance of his virtuosity, seemingly pushing it in Bloomfield’s face. Bloomfield left afterward a shaken man and claimed he had a hard time picking up his guitar for a long time. It felt hopeless to him after seeing Jimi.

He got over it, of course, as I am sure Mama Cass did as well. You find your own voice, your own authenticity, and you do what you can with it.

Anyway, here’s Janis and Ball & Chain from that Monterey Pop show. A performance for the ages…

A Pirate Looks at 40— GC Myers, 1994

Yes, I am a pirate, two hundred years too late
The cannons don’t thunder, there’s nothin’ to plunder
I’m an over-forty victim of fate
Arriving too late, arriving too late

— Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks At 40

I was surprised and saddened to hear that Jimmy Buffett died yesterday at the age of 76. Though I was never what you would call a Parrothead, the name applied to the enthusiastic and hard-partying fans who supported his vast Margaritaville empire, I had been a fan of his early work since his beginnings back in the early 1970s.

I listened to his 70’s albums then and for many years after. There was always something of value to find in the beautifully crafted and insightful songs. It says a lot that Bob Dylan listed him as a favorite songwriter. I drifted away after a while, after the Parrothead craze hit. But I still consider many of his songs as favorites of mine, including The Wino and I, Biloxi, Livingston’s Gone to Texas and several more, including the song whose lyrics are at the top the page, A Pirate Looks At 40.

Hearing of his passing made me dig through some old work to find the piece shown above. Also titled A Pirate Looks At 40, it was a very early experiment, done in the first months of 1994 when I first began painting after my accident. One hint to its age is the signature, which was just GMyers, not yet GC. I wasn’t aware that there were several artists named Gary Myers at that point. I never showed this piece but liked it enough to title it. I was most likely listening to that song around the time I painted it. Its theme of feeling as though you were living out of time, that you might be best suited for a different era and place, appealed to me.

I could relate to that then. Still do on most days.

Give a listen to the song. Good winds and currents to you, Jimmy. Thanks for the music and the inspiration.

Dissolve– 2011

“Summer has no day,’ she said. ‘We can’t possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name’s become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth…it has no day.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

Aah, the relief of being released from the grim grip of August…

I have long told of my extreme dislike of August on this blog. It has been with me as long as I can remember, extending back to my earliest memories. It’s like an inborn trait (or curse) written in my genes that has come through generations of ancestors who suffered the dog days of August in a similar way.

As a result, each first day of September feels like a day of liberation. This year, the universe even conspired to give us a lovely and brisk 49° morning to mark the occasion. I have noted this day most every year since I started writing this blog back in 2008. Yeah, it’s been that long. Hard to believe since it often feels like I ran out of things to say about 2009.

Every year on this day I share a version of the classic September Song. It has long been one of my favorite songs and becomes even more so with each passing year as it becomes more and more personally relevant.

Written by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, it was first sung, surprisingly, by Walter Huston in the stage production of Knickerbocker Holiday back in 1938.  Since then it has been covered by literally hundreds of musicians and singers throughout the world. I have listened to and played many of them here from a wide variety of artists. As it is with most great songs, most of them are wonderful renditions. It’s just that good a song.

It’s a bittersweet and slightly melancholy reflection on the passing of time, that inevitable march to old age symbolized in the turning of leaves and the shortening of the days. These precious days, as the song says.

I have played a favorite version from Willie Nelson a couple of times over the years. I love the spacing of the silences in his phrasing for the song. It really captures the feel and meaning of the song for me. This year’s version is from Willie playing along with his son’s band, Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real. Lukas covers the vocals and does a fine job in emulating his father’s version of the song.

FYI, Lukas and his band were the backing band for Neil Young for several years and also appeared as the band for the character portrayed by director/star Bradley Cooper in the 2018 A Star Is Born movie. Lukas also wrote most of the music for the film, collaborating on much of it with Lady Gaga.

It’s a fine version for this year’s September 1. I chose the painting at the top, Dissolve, because as I was listening to a version of September Song from Willie Nelson, I was looking at an image of it. Willie’s silences in the song and those in the image seemed to mesh together so well that it surprised me. Made me think that the reason that September Song resonates so strongly for me is the reason that this painting holds so much meaning for me. It was painted back in 2011 and after making the rounds of the galleries including a couple of years on display in a DC area design center, finally came back to me about 5 or 6 years back.

I think of it as my own September Song. See for yourself. Take a look at it while you listen to Willie and Son.

Silent Eye of Night– At Principle Gallery

What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

–Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

What is the meaning of life?

If you’ve read anything here in the past, you know I don’t have an answer to that question. Oh, I try to come up with answers. No doubt about that.  And I inevitably come up short.

Maybe there is no real answer.

Maybe we are left with just vague and fleeting hints of some sort of meaning behind the scenes of this ongoing production. Maybe it comes in small acts of love or compassion. Or in a simple word or glance from a stranger. Or in the recognition of your own emotions hidden in a piece of art.

Maybe it as simple as laughing when you’re happy and crying when you’re sad. Or laughing when you’re sad and crying when you’re happy. Either way, works, I guess.

Maybe it is just in feeling something.

Again, I don’t know. But we keep trying to find an answer. Hopefully, we can savor the small glints of light in the darkness…

In Radiance— Now at Just Looking Gallery, San Luis Obispo CA

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 (1897)

Things to do so I have to be short this morning. Recently sent a group of work, including In Radiance (shown above), out to the Just Looking Gallery in beautiful San Luis Obispo, CA. It’s a longtime, well-established gallery headed up by Ralph Gorton that has represented my work on the West Coast since 2012. They do a great job for me out there.

I thought the passage from Oscar Wilde from the letter, De Profundis, written during his incarceration in the Reading Gaol, served as a fine companion to In Radiance, a 24″ by 24″ canvas, as well as the song below, Beginning to See the Light, from the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed from 1969.

The Internal Landscape– 2012

Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.

― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

I recently came across the passage above from The Book of Disquiet, the “factless autobiography” of Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet/author, that was published after his death in 1935. Reading it made me look further into the book and I was surprised at how his description of his internal travels lined up with my own. He wrote of the landscapes he saw within while I paint mine.

There is another similar quote from Pessoa that is supposed to come from The Book of Disquiet as well:

The true landscapes are those that we ourselves create. I’ve crossed more seas than anyone. I’ve seen more mountains than there are on earth. The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.

I haven’t been able to find this specific passage in the book yet. I believe it has to do with the variance between the several translations of the book from the Portuguese. However, this one rings even more true for my work. That sentiment of traveling the internal landscape has been the driving force behind my work for my entire career. It manifested itself in the large painting from 2012 shown at the top, The Internal Landscape.

It’s an image that has been shown here a number of times over the years and remains what I would consider a signature piece, a truly representative image of my inner world.

It felt like it needed to be seen again this morning.

Have to run because there are new places to see and explore this morning. In parting, here’s a song that feels like it fits. This is Wide River to Cross from Mavis Staples and the late great Levon Helm.

See you somewhere down the road.

Symphony of Silence– At the West End Gallery

The great Overdog
That heavenly beast
With a star in one eye
Gives a leap in the east.
He dances upright
All the way to the west
And never once drops
On his forefeet to rest.
I’m a poor underdog,
But to-night I will bark
With the great Overdog
That romps through the dark

–Robert Frost, Canis Major (1949)

At last weekend’s West End Gallery Talk, I spoke a bit about the ‘I’ll show you’ factor. It was in reference to my experience showing my work for the first time in a gallery back in 1995. Though I had plenty of people stop and examine the work as well as compliment me on it, it was the people who walked by without a glimpse that affected me the most in that moment.

Their casual disregard felt dismissive, making me feel small and overlooked. I felt that my work was not being seen and the voice contained in it was not being heard. I felt a bit bruised in my feelings but at the same time was stirred and angered by the insult of it. I made a vow in that moment that sometime soon my work would make them stop and look, that my voice would be heard.

I know that this sounds small and petty, that I was taking it too personally. And maybe that’s right. But in that moment, the insult of their disregard felt like an existential challenge to my validity, not only as an artist but as a human being.

I was the overlooked underdog at that moment, but I would show them.

You would think almost three decades later that this I’ll show you factor would no longer have a place and would have faded away.

You’d be wrong.

For as much as I often feel seen and heard, there are many times when I still feel the overlooked underdog, both as an artist and a human. I believe this can be a great motivator, making one push beyond one’s perceived boundaries and limits, requiring them to exert maximum effort. It shoves you roughly out of that comfortable feeling of self-satisfaction in your work and yourself that sometimes becomes too much at home.

Again, it might sound small and petty and maybe not conducive to artistic creation. But I have always felt that artistic creation was a matter of showing other people how the world appears to you, what your voice and mind has to offer.

A way of being, as you know it.

And to do so, you sometimes, as an artist and a human, have to be willing to grab people by their collars and yell out your truth.

Maybe the Underdog’s Bark is much the same as Whitman’s Barbaric Yawp?

I think it might be…

Riding Rhythm– Now at the Principle Gallery, Alexandria VA

Adventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result—and have been since at least the time of Odysseus—of the fatal act of leaving one’s home, or trying to return to it again. All adventures happen in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one’s home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had: then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret.

–Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road (2007)

It’s one of those August mornings when I woke up feeling a bit unmoored, as though the rootedness I’ve described here recently had slipped away somehow. It’s a feeling of being both antsy and queasy, an uncomfortable one that has my eyes darting and my eyes straining for some undefinable and unknown thing. Something that most likely is not at hand.

Hard to describe, especially if whoever might be reading this has never felt that same sort of anxiety that make you feel as though you are lost in a storm at sea with no shoreline in sight and a sky that gives no clue to where you are or where you’re heading.

Fortunately, I have made it through multitudes of such mornings. To add to the Odysseus reference from the Michael Chabon passage above, it’s a matter of lashing yourself to the mast so that you don’t do something rash and just riding it out. Eventually the sea calms and the skies indicate direction.

Soon, home and all the rootedness it offers will be in sight.

To tell you the truth, just writing this short bit this morning has calmed the seas. Home is at hand.

Here’s this week’s Sunday Morning Music selection, a song that is right in line with this post. It’s a great cover from Bonnie Raitt in 1972 of the classic Steve Winwood song, Can’t Find My Way Home.