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Posts Tagged ‘Anais Nin’

Paint Toward the Light

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on June 20, 2025| 4 Comments »

The Passing Parade— Now at the Principle Gallery

It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone. It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There’s plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

–Raymond Carver, A Storyteller’s Shoptalk,  New York Times (1981)

I am in the midst of a deep funk, a depressive event that comes on the heels of every show or gallery talk. Every show or talk–good, bad, or indifferent. It’s just the way it is. I think it’s a blend of several things.

One is simply being worn down with the effort of both creation and promotion. The promoting part– this blog, for example– becomes difficult and depleting just before and after each event.

Another is in creating unrealistic expectations for the event. This is especially true when I have stronger than normal feelings about the work.

Some of it comes in questioning my own efforts. Did I do enough? Did I break new ground? Or the simple but deadly– Am I good enough? 

Some of it comes from second-guessing my interactions with people. In her diary, author Anaïs Nin described very much what I go through after any event:

I have never described, even in the diary, the act of self-murder which takes place after my being with people. A sense of shame for the most trivial defect, lack, slip, error, for every statement made, or for my silence, for being too gay or too serious, for not being earthy enough, or for being too passionate, for not being free, or being too impulsive, for not being myself or being too much so.

You add in the deadline for the show being met which means that an endpoint, a destination, has been reached. It seems as though it should be a time to feel free but for a short time after each event, I feel unmoored, without direction, until a new destination is put in place.

These post-show depressions usually find me questioning what I do and the choices I have made. The questions that usually satisfies and begins to put me back on course comes by asking myself if I am painting the paintings I want or need to see. Am I doing work that is mine alone?

For the answer to those questions, I am going to continue here with a blog entry that has ran a couple of times here, the last time being in early 2020. The painting at the top of the original post  has been switched out for one, The Passing Parade, from my current Entanglement exhibit at the Principle Gallery— still promoting!— which satisfies now what I wrote then. I have also added the passage at the top from the late Raymond Carver. It’s another one of those quotes about writing where one can easily substitute artist for writer. It very much ties into the idea of painting the paintings you want to see for me. Or to create the world in which you wish to live, to put it another way.

Here’s that earlier blog post:

This painting really captivates me on a personal level and reminds me of a thought that once drove me forward as a younger painter. It’s a thought that I often pass along as a bit of advice to aspiring artists:

Paint the paintings you want to see.

Sounds too simple to be of any help, doesn’t it? But that simplicity is the beauty and strength of it.

For me, I wasn’t seeing the paintings out there that satisfied an inner desire I had to see certain deep colors that were being used in a manner that was both abstract and representative. If I had seen something that fulfilled these desires, I most likely would not have went ahead as a painter. I wouldn’t have felt the need to keep pushing.

It was this simple thought that marked the change in my evolution as a painter. Before it, I was still trying to paint the paintings that I was seeing in the outer world, attempting to emulate those pieces and styles that already existed as created by other artists. But it was unsatisfying, still echoing the work of others, forever judged in comparison to these others.

But after the realization that I should simply paint what I wanted to see, my work changed, and I went from a bondage to that which existed to the freedom of what could be found in creating something new. For me, that meant finding certain colors such as the deep reds and oranges tinged with dark edges that mark this piece. It meant trying to simplify the forms of world I was portraying so that the colors and shapes collectively took on the same meditative quality that I was seeing in each of them.

In my case this seems to be the advice I needed. But I think it’s advice that works for nearly anything you might attempt.

Paint the paintings you want to see.

Write the book you want to read. Toni Morrison said this very thing at one point.

Play the music you want to hear. Make the film you want to see. Cook the food you want to eat. Make the clothes you want to wear.

Make the world in which you want to live.

Simple.

Now go do it.

It was good advice then and it still is now. Time for me to claw my way out of this hole. Paint toward the light…

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Song of the Heliotropes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on June 4, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Song of the Heliotropes– At Principle Gallery, June 13

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.

–Anaïs Nin, Children of the Albatross (1947)

I was searching for something to begin this post and came across the passage above from Anaïs Nin. It gave me pause for a moment as it so well described the cycle that I seem to repeat time and time again in preparing for my shows, such as my Entanglement exhibit that opens next week at the Principle Gallery.

The work is created from dreams and solitude, as she points out. As the works gather and come together there is a building excitement and joy within me as I ponder sharing the work with the world outside my den of solitude. But, as Nin observes, this building excitement brings with it an increased sense of anxiety, one built on a fear of failure or of having become irrelevant as an artist. This, along with the grinding effort that takes place in finishing all the tasks required to make the work presentable, produces a deep weariness. It is both a physical and mental exhaustion. 

Then the show opens and inevitably there comes afterward, with even the most successful shows, a great letdown–the discouragement that Nin mentions. I find myself second-guessing my choices for the show, completely overlooking the successes and high points, instead focusing on things that I could have or should have done. There is seldom, if ever, a period of what you might call basking in any sort of glory.

But as miserable as that sounds, I am soon back to my dreams and solitude– my opium den of remembrance– high on the possibility that comes with a new show.

It’s a cycle that’s been repeated for well over 25 years and around 70 shows. Outside of my marriage and the knowledge that the sun will rise and fall each day, it’s the most dependable thing in my life. 

I am at the bone-weary state right now but the excitement from the work and its creation remains. Take the painting at the top, Song of the Heliotropes, for example. It’s a piece that feels like music to me, one that brings me a lot of joy. It’s the kind of joy that makes the harder aspects of the cycle tolerable.

The Red Trees remind me of flowers being pulled upward by the energy and light of the sun and sky. For my botanical friends out there, I do realize they are not actually the flowers called Heliotropes. I am instead referring to heliotropism, the act of growing toward the sun that takes place in many plants and flowers. I tend to think we all experience heliotropism of some sort, always moving towards some sort of light.

Perhaps in a way we are all Heliotropes. For this painting, I am saying that is the case. 

There’s more that I could say about Song of the Heliotropes, an 18″ by 24″ painting on canvas, but if you want to hear it, you’ll have to ask me about it at the Opening Reception on Friday, June 13 at the Principle Gallery which runs from 6-8:30 PM. This painting and all the other work for this show will be delivered to the gallery on Sunday and will be available for previews, though the show will not be hung until later in the week.

The day after the show’s opening, on Saturday, June 14, I will also be giving a Painting Demonstration at the gallery. The demo, my first there, should run from 11 AM until 1 PM or thereabouts.

Here’s a well-known classical piece that immediately comes to mind when I look at this piece. It’s from composer Léo Delibes from his 1883 tragic opera, Lakmé. This is the Flower Duet. This performance is from soprano Sabine Devieilhe  and mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa. Most of you will recognize this about a minute or so into this video. That is certainly the part of the song that comes to mind with this painting. Just lovely.

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Why Do It?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on February 11, 2025| 3 Comments »

Little Gems Now at West End Gallery

Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art. The artist is the only one who knows the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it, he hopes to impose this particular vision and share it with others. When the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues, nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.

We also write to heighten our own awareness of life, we write to lure and enchant and console others, we write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth, we write to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write. Because our culture has no use for any of that. When I don’t write I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire, my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave. I call it breathing.

― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin

Why do it?

Even after nearly 30 years of doing what I do–which is paint, if you were still wondering– I still often find myself asking why I do this. There are certainly easier and more lucrative ways to make a living but they normally don’t offer the autonomy, solitude, and non-financial rewards that this life offers.

However, I don’t think it’s as simple as putting everything on a spreadsheet and comparing columns of pros and cons, of which there are plenty of both. I don’t think any single line item on such a spreadsheet would justify doing or not doing what I do. 

No, I think it’s something beyond quantification or even justification. It’s something that I know is there, and have known for some time, from a point in my life where I was yet to fully live this life. It’s something I often struggle to put into words. That’s probably why I often find a rationalization for what I do from writers who struggle with that same question. Though they are writing about the act of writing, their observations carry cross all creative disciplines. 

I have recently read two wonderful books that deal with this question. One, Art & Fear from David Bayles and Ted Orland, touches on it while dealing broadly with art and creativity while the other The Writing Life from Annie Dillard, gives deep insight into the essential part of the writing impulse which moves, as I said above, across the creative spectrum. Annie Dillard’s book, by the way, was a gift from the Great Veiled Bear this past Christmas and ranks as one of my favorite gifts and reads in a long, long time.

It scratched my itch. 

Reading it right after Art & Fear came at a time when I was truly struggling. The two books clarified a lot of issues that had been plaguing me. As a result, I felt that I was less alone in my struggles, that my questions and issues were much the same as other people in the creative fields, even those who appear to be at the top their fields. 

I came across the passage at the top from The Diary of Anaïs Nin which neatly sums up much of what I had pulled from these two books. It also lined up well with my view of the need to create one’s own inner world or inner vision, a setting is built on your own beliefs and truths. Perhaps new and inhabitable planet? 

Whatever the case, this Passage from Anaïs Nin struck a chord with me and I will be filing it along Annie Dillard’s book, Art & Fear, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, so that I can pick it up at any time when I need an answer to that question.

Here’s a favorite song that I have only shared a couple of times over the many years I have done this blog. It seems to make sense with this post and for those of us who are struggling with the time we are now experiencing. This the great Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy with an acoustic version of You’re Not Alone.

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Illumination

Posted in Motivation, Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , on March 22, 2019| Leave a Comment »

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There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

–-Anais Nin, Journals of Anais Nin, Vol 3

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I see in the new painting above, Illumination, a moment when all the fragments of that mosaic, as mentioned in the words of Anais Nin, come together. That moment when we are no longer seeing only individuals pieces of the mosaic, those bits and pieces of acquired information and observations we gather over a lifetime. That moment when we suddenly see those gathered bits as a complete image of a greater truth in all its wholeness.

That moment which reveals the why of the universe after a lifetime of showing us only the whats.

Does such a moment ever come to us, do we ever receive true illumination?

I certainly don’t have that answer.

I am still in the process of gathering bits of the mosaic as I see it. Some days, the various pieces I’ve put together seem to show a glimpse of a pattern of the image of a greater whole. Those are inspiring and hopeful days.

But often, I can’t find that same pattern on the next day. Those days have less hope and have me questioning whether all these mosaic pieces ever come together to create a fuller image. Is there a purpose to this all?

Again, I can’t say. But I’ve got too many mosaic pieces before me now to not want to keep moving forward. Too many to not keep trying to assemble them in the hopes of receiving some sort of illumination that gives me the peace that comes with understanding.

And that may be the purpose of art– gathered bits of a mosaic that allows us to see a greater whole and gain some vestige of understanding.

Hmmm. Sounds good right now. Ask me in 15 minutes and I may see it in a different light. But for this moment, I feel hopeful in simply looking at this painting.

[The title of this painting was later changed to Solitude’s Rapture]

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