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Posts Tagged ‘GC Myers’

The Moment– and a Mayfly

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on March 18, 2025| Leave a Comment »

A Matter of Perspective— At the West End Gallery

The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

–Margaret Atwood

It’s hard to watch the Billionaire Boys Club pillaging day after day, discarding people at will while staking claims and planting their flags on everything in sight. Brazenly displaying the power of their ownership.

I take some solace in putting things into perspective.

For example, the top of Mount Everest is comprised of limestone, sedimentary rock that contains marine fossils. It was formed more than 450 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, at the bottom of a large body of water before shifting tectonic plates and volcanic forces pushed it upward toward the sky, to the rooftop of the world. 

The land surface of the Earth is approximately 29% with the other 71% under water. Our knowledge of the Earth’s history is known primarily from limited examination over a very short period of time of a very small amount of the 29% that is currently above water. We know little, if anything, of what rests beneath the bottom of the other 71%. We know nothing of any other creatures or civilizations might have lived and prospered during their time on this Earth, before all evidence of their existence was plunged into the depths of the seas. 

I can’t say for sure, but it seems plausible that during those intervening 450 million years some being existed who dominated and ruled over the other beings in their region, claiming all the Earth that they could see and reach as their own. 

At the other end of the spectrum, the mayfly emerges from the water each year and lives for but a day. A mere 24 hours.

That lifespan seems ludicrously short and insignificant to us humans. But to the mayfly that timespan is all they will ever know, representing everything within their purpose. For that time period the world they know belongs to them.

Their ownership of their time and space is no different than our own. No less significant or insignificant than our own. When you compare the lifetime of the mayfly with that of the human within the Earth’s timeline, the difference between them is negligible. In the eyes of the Earth’s history, we are little different than the mere mayfly.

When our civilization is long gone and buried at the bottom of some future ocean, what importance will there be in the ownership and power possessed now? For that matter, in just a few years when age or violence has claimed the lives of the tyrants and oligarchs who revel in their power now, what good will the hoarded wealth, be to them?

The real estate and all the things on this Earth they claimed as their own never really belonged to them. As the poem says in its final verse:

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

In the end we own nothing here. We are but momentary visitors on the great timeline of this Earth.

You might ask how that gives me solace? After all, isn’t it simply evidence of my own insignificance? 

Well, yes, it is.

It shows us to all be little more than mayflies. And when the mayfly’s 24 hours are up, does the life of one mayfly matter anymore than that of another?  

Just thinking out loud this morning. Take it for what it worth– the ramblings of a mayfly…

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Pretzel Logic

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 16, 2025| 1 Comment »

Too Many Moons — At Principle Gallery

Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.

–Carl Jung, Liber Novus

An attempt to impose something comprehensible on life…

That sounds like a pretty tall task, given the sheer lack of logic and reason it so often displays. It also sounds like the way artists and writers often describe what they are trying to find in their work– an understanding of what is and isn’t. A revealing of the possibility of that which we cannot see and a new perspective on that which we can.

And in doing so, make their own rules while discarding others. Whatever it takes to make sense of the insensible. Using the illogical to find some sort of logic.

That makes sense in a world that seldom moves in a straight line.

Where that takes us, I don’t know. As an artist– if that is what I am– following that twisting and turning line to some sort of end is the mystery and the thrill of it.

Pretzel logic.

And like a pretzel, following its line always brings us back to where we began. Do we know any more at that point?

Who knows?

Maybe that’s the whole point, to let us know that we can’t know what we can’t know. That we must embrace the mystery.

Sounds good. But, of course, that is the result of some pretzel logic.

Okay, that was a long way around the pretzel to get to this week’s Sunday Morning Music. Here is Steely Dan and Pretzel Logic.

But, of course, you knew that, right? Can’t fool you guys…

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Imagination or Headache?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 12, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Sea of the Six Moons– At West End Gallery

A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache.

–Catherine the Great (1762-1796), Letter to Baron Friedrich von Grimm (29 Apr 1775)

Doing a quick search this morning, I couldn’t find the entirety of the letter from Catherine the Great that contained the quote above, so I don’t know the exact context. I don’t know what was that wind to which she referred. It might have been the stirrings of the American Revolution or, more likely, the spread of the progressive ideas of the Enlightenment that she was trying to introduce to the Russian people.

Whatever the case, when the great winds of change come, one can choose to see the new possibilities that lay beyond and navigate toward this new horizon of opportunity. That’s the imagination part, I dare say.

Or one can just see one’s resistance to the winds be pummeled into acceptance. To finally let the wind blow you wherever it wants to take you and do whatever it will regardless of one’s desires. Hopeless and powerless, to end up as flotsam on the never-ending waves.

I would venture that this might be the headache. It sounds like a headache to me.

That’s all I am going to say this morning. Just liked that quote from the Empress Cathy and thought it might fit with the painting at the top. Or maybe not. Does it matter?

The painting by the way, Sea of the Six Moons, is currently hanging at the West End Gallery as part of their annual Little Gems exhibit. The show ends tomorrow, Thursday, March 13, so if you want to catch this always wonderful show, please get in today or tomorrow.

Here’s a song that may or may not fit alongside today’s painting and quote. I played it here four years back and it just hit a chord with me this morning. It’s The Dolphins from Fred Neil, who was best known for writing Everybody’s Talkin’ that was made popular by Harry Nilsson and its prominent connection to the film, Midnight Cowboy. I was going to play one of the covers of it that have been made, such as those by Linda Ronstadt, Tim Buckley, or Harry Belafonte, but I find that Neil’s original suits me best.

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Miró Blues, Again

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 10, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Blue II– Joan Miró

*****************

The picture should be fecund. It must bring a world to birth.

-Joan Miró

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The thought behind these words from Joan Miró is one that I often keep in mind. Art succeeds when it creates its own reality, when it brings a world to birth in the mind of those who behold it. The artist’s own belief in the reality of that new world is a large determinant in whether this birth takes place.

For myself, I almost always feel like I am taken to a different world, one as real as the world I inhabit in my human skin, by whatever is on the surface before me.

That is, when it works. Sometimes it is difficult to climb into that new world and that new reality that wants to be born on the surface is nothing more than a lifeless mishmash of paint blotches and lines. That is frustrating, to say the least.

But when it works, it is an easy glide into that new world with its own atmosphere and landscape, so familiar yet new and fresh in the nose and to the eye. It’s a thrill just to be in there for that time when taking on its lifeform.

Joan Miró (1893-1983) did such a thing with such ease. I am showing his Blue triptych from 1961 today. I find it interesting how intimate and alive they feel as single images on a screen where their scale fades away. These could easily be small paintings. But when you see them as they are in the two photos below, you can see their size and how it magnifies their lifeforce.

They are a world unto themselves.

Take a look for yourself. I have also included a video of Dave Brubeck’s Bluette at the very bottom of the page that is played over a slideshow of Miró’s work. As Brubeck fans know, he sometimes employed Miró’s work in his own as well as on his album covers. All in all, just plain good stuff…

Didn’t feel like writing this morning and wanted to start out the week with something not troubling my mind. Something that is more about art, something that perhaps inspires or at least eases the mind. Something to make me feel fecund, to use Miró’s term. This post is from five years ago and felt good this morning, especially with the Dave Brubeck accompaniment to Miró’s paintings.

 

Blue I- Joan Miró

Blue III- Joan Miró

 

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Look What They Done to My Song, Ma

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 9, 2025| 2 Comments »

White in the Moon— At West End Gallery

I have always fought for ideas — until I learned that it isn’t ideas but grief, struggle, and flashes of vision which enlighten.

–Margaret Caroline Anderson, The Strange Necessity: The Autobiography (1969)

There’s a lot of anger, shocked disbelief, and trepidation here and abroad at the systematic disassembling of our government currently taking place.

As there should be.

Because no matter how they try to package and sell it to the rubes, the whole of it makes little sense to anyone willing to look past the sales pitch and really examine what they are doing with their attack on our nation’s institutions. Looking at the totality of the stupidity, cruelty, corruption, and treachery that drives it, one would be hard-pressed to not respond with some mixture of anger, shock, and fear.

But perhaps the most overlooked response is one of grief. I know that it is a big part of my personal reaction. 

Why wouldn’t one grieve for the loss of something one loved and held so highly? I am talking about the idea of America as the symbol of the promise of freedom, opportunity, justice, and hope for both its citizens and others around the world that it has been for past century or so. Even when it wasn’t living up to that promise, as was sometimes the case, it usually rightfully adjusted its course, putting us back on a path that moved us once more toward that more perfect union as outlined in our Constitution. 

But if we cannot soon stem this destructive tide, it feels that we will have little chance of ever returning to that path. The dream of America, the one with a conscience that showed us as a compassionate, welcoming, and generous nation, will be lost. Nearly two hundred and fifty years of slow but steady progress will be crushed and reduced to ash.

And once the dream is crushed, it will not be soon revived. It’s hard to rebuild with ashes.

The grief for a crushed and lost dream lingers and aches. 

I sit here this morning as stewpot of anger and grief. The thought of what might have been, of what heights we could have achieved, haunt me. I feel like the figure in the painting at the top of the page who is looking back at what once was but forever remains distant, never to be revisited.

Here’s a song for this Sunday Morning Music that captures that feeling.  At least for me, it does. It’s from Melanie, who died this past year, and her Look What They Done to My Song, Ma from 1971. The overall tone of it and this verse really sums it up best for me:

Look what they’ve done to my song, ma
It was the only thing I could do half right
Turning out all wrong, ma
Look what they’ve done to my song

Good intentions turning out all wrong… 

FYI-– The quote at the top is from Margaret Anderson (1886-1973) who was the founder and publisher of the art and literary magazine The Little Review in the first half of the last century. She was responsible for introducing Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and many others to the American public. A very interesting life.

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Heading to the Clouds

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 7, 2025| 5 Comments »

Cloud Flyer— At West End Gallery

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are, if indeed you cannot get it above them, than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

–Henry David Thoreau, Letter to Harrison Blake, April 1853

This morning, I spent a few minutes looking intently at the image of the painting above. It’s a small piece that is part of the Little Gems exhibit now hanging at the West End Gallery. Something in it captured my attention this morning. Not one thing that I can spell out in words. Just a brief flash of feeling that for that moment held me happily spellbound.

Maybe it was just a quick escape from things in this world that have been harassing my mind as of late. I don’t know and, for that matter, I don’t care. We all need to climb into the clouds for dreaming and introspection every so often so that, like Thoreau wrote in a letter to an old friend above, we know where we truly are. We can sometime be deceived or misled, by others and ourselves, so that we don’t clearly see our placement in this world clearly.

We might think too much or too little of ourselves. We might respect the opinions of others while ignoring our own. We might place too much trust in the wisdom of others and too little in our own.

We sometimes need to get up above it all, to place ourselves in and above the clouds. Oh, we can’t stay there, much as we might like, but the clarifying effects of a short sojourn there are mighty.

It centers one’s soul.

The paragraph from Thoreau’s letter from which the passage above was taken also makes the point about that if we trust and respect ourselves, we have the ability to elevate our lot in life and live a fulfilled existence:

It is worth the while to live respectably unto ourselves. We can possibly get along with a neighbor, even with a bedfellow, whom we respect but very little; but as soon as it comes to this, that we do not respect ourselves, then we do not get along at all, no matter how much money we are paid for halting. There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life. It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are, if indeed you cannot get it above them, than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

That was very much in the same spirit of what I saw in that brief flash I felt while looking at the image at the top this morning. Feet-on-the-ground-head-in-the-clouds kind of satisfaction. Or should I say, Hand-on-the rudder-head-in-the-clouds?

Not sure on that one.

Here’s Joni Mitchell and her classic song, Both Sides Now. This is a favorite version of mine from her 2000 album, Both Sides Now. It is different in tone and sound to her original. Deeper and more world-weary. As you would expect. I read that it was as though the 24-year-old Mitchell wrote this song specifically for her 57-year-old self to sing.

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Demigods: The Dream Eater

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 6, 2025| Leave a Comment »

The Dream Eater

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.

–Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags (1942)

King of the Night Forest 

I had two pieces in this year’s Little Gems show at the West End Gallery that were a bit different than my typical work. The liberty to experiment and show work that is a little out of your normal lane is one of the things I love about this particular show, which ends a week from today.

These two distinct outliers, King of the Night Forest and Eye of the Trickster, were featured here. They were representations of beings or demigods from a not fully formed mythology that only existed in my mind. I am not sure this mythological world will ever be more defined than it is in these paintings.

Eye of the Trickster

And maybe that’s as it should be. Maybe they should exist only to serve as a jumping off point for someone who might stumble across them someday in the future when they are deciding what should be saved and what should go in the dumpster. Maybe they will inspire that person’s imagination, playing to their fears and dreams.

Maybe. Maybe not, Who knows for sure?

After doing these first two Demigods— I decided just now that is what I am calling them– I felt I wasn’t through. I wanted to explore and expand this world a little more. I did three more pieces, all 14″ by 18″. a bit larger than the first two from the Little Gems show. The last of these three, The Dream Eater, is shown at the top.

The Dream Eater is a being that does just that– takes away and devours your dreams. Greedy and cruel, he is never satisfied. Even when all the dreams and hopes are sapped from his victims and they have been pulled down into his hellish pit in the netherworld, he is already hungering for his next target. 

That sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Perhaps that’s why I felt the need to paint this creature. I don’t know for sure. When I start these things, I have no idea where they will go or what I will see in them when they are complete. They obviously represent some other thing that is rolling around in my mind as I work.

I doubt these last three Demigod pieces will ever see the wall of any gallery and I imagine the first two will join me soon after the end of the Little Gems show. I’m fine with that. In fact, these pieces and those from other years that share this same sort of difference give me a special sort of pleasure when I experience them here in the studio.

Maybe it’s because I know they are those parts of me that I’ve wanted to, but have failed to, withhold from eyes other than my own. There’s something freeing sometimes in letting the outside world get a peek at your inner world. 

I’ll show the other two Demigods sometime soon. But for now, I am just going to try to keep this thing from feasting on my dreams while I listen to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road from Elton John. It’s a song about the loss of dreams, one that loomed large in my youth and somehow got lost in the hubbub of the intervening years. I can’t remember the last time I pulled out the album or consciously listened to it in any other way. Probably decades. But I recently watched a reaction video of the song and was instantly reminded of all it was and is. Felt a bit foolish for taking it for granted for all these years.

We sometimes do that with great things, don’t we?

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Hello in There

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 5, 2025| 2 Comments »

Summerdream (1995)– At West End Gallery

The creative action is not voluntary at all, but automatic; we can only put the mind into the proper attitude, and wait for the wind, that blows where it listeth, to breathe over it. Thus the true state of creative genius is allied to reverie, or dreaming.

–Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

Many of us walk a fine line between remaining engaged with the outer world with all its chaotic madness and escaping into the dreamlike quietude of our inner world. I think we need to keep the two somewhat in balance, to never reside fully in one.

For as much as the inner world nourishes our souls and dreams, we can’t reside in that place entirely. And try as we may, we can never fully retreat from intrusive reality of the outer world. It is always lurking nearby and must be dealt with.

But we need to maintain that inner world, that place to dream and expand. A place where we can float on a warm breeze, unburdened by the weightiness and gravity of the real world.

I am not sure what brought this on this morning. Maybe I felt the need to avert my eyes from the outer world for a moment? Nobody could be blamed for that in this strange moment. We all need to visit that inner world for at least a short time every now and then, if only to be reminded of what we are looking for in the outer world.

The question is: Can the dreams of our inner world ever come to reality in the outer world?

That’s a big philosophical jumping off point that I am not willing to leap from just this minute. Like most people, I have outer world needs to which I need to attend. But in doing so, I will bring my inner world along with me.

Maybe I’ll ponder that question at some point while I am floating on a breeze. Maybe not.

Here’s a song from the late John Prine that I’ve loved for a long, long time. It still gets to me after hearing it countless times. It’s a live performance of Hello in There from 2001. It’s a song about aged folks who live in an outer world that has passed them by and now ignores and they have retreated into their inner world which is filled with more memories and images from the past and fewer dreams for the future. But in those remaining dreams, they might sometimes be floating on a summer breeze. And this line from the song’s chorus surely might be echoing there as well:

Ya’ know that old trees just grow stronger
And old rivers grow wilder ev’ry day

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Art’s Refuge

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on March 4, 2025| 2 Comments »

Island Getaway– At West End Gallery

The power of the good has taken refuge in the nature of the beautiful; for measure and proportion are everywhere identified with beauty and virtue.

— Plato, Philebus (ca. 350 BC)

Philebus is a fictional work presenting a conversation between Socrates and two young Athenians on the value of pleasure in relation to the highest level of Good. The two younger men see pleasure as being this Absolute Good.

As might be expected, Socrates, disagrees. He points out that there are different forms of pleasure. Some are of little value and some, such as pleasure for pleasure’s sake, are harmful to man and which should be avoided.

Just before the line at shown here at the top. Socrates points out the harm in such pleasure:

That any compound, however made, which lacks measure and proportion, must necessarily destroy its components and first of all itself; for it is in truth no compound, but an uncompounded jumble, and is always a misfortune to those who possess it.

This passage sure feels like it was written around 2500 years ago for such a moment such as we are experiencing here in this country. It seems to be an uncompounded jumble that is set on destroying itself and all of which it is comprised. It without measure, proportion, and reason. It has become a land governed by beings that appear to be soulless and artless, devoid of any measure of Beauty or Absolute Good.

When I read this, it made me think of the value and necessity of art as a refuge from this world. As Socrates pointed out, there is goodness and virtue in those things by which we define beauty. We are on the brink of an artless and ugly world. Engaging with art or creating art in times such as these serves a valuable purpose. It reminds us that these is and will always be goodness and virtue in that which appears beautiful to the human spirit.

Art is our refuge.

It comes in the literature and poetry we read. In the music we play and in the movement of our dances. In the films we watch, and in the statues and paintings that we experience.

As difficult as times may be in the near future, we must remember that Art is a both a refuge and a repository for Good, as well as a link, a path, to the world and future we desire.

Take refuge in your art.

Here’s song I last shared about four years ago. It fittingly titled Shelter and is from Lone Justice from back in the mid 1980’s. Led by vocalist Maria McKee, they were very hot for a few years but they couldn’t hold together long enough to reach the potential that so many saw in them. They disbanded in 1987 and Maria McKee went on to a solo career. I thought their two albums were very good and they were regulars on my turntable back in the day. The chorus from this song pops into my head every now and then. It was produced and cowritten with McKee by the multi-talented Steve Van Zandt, who was the subject recently of a wonderful documentary, Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple, that centered around his efforts that were instrumental in using his art to cast light on apartheid and end it.

Such is the power and refuge of art.

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The Strangeness of Things…

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 3, 2025| 6 Comments »

 

Land of Seven Moons— At West End Gallery

The first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe.

–Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (1951)

I live a pretty isolated existence so I can’t speak for everyone, but it seems like a lot of people are feeling alienated by the jumbled strangeness that is taking place. It’s an overwhelming sense that the landscape around you as well as the people within it and their customs are foreign to you, that you somehow don’t fit in. 

It’s a sense of feeling like a stranger in a strange land, to use that term that descended to us from Moses in the book of Exodus and its later use as the title for the sci-fi classic from Robert Heinlein. It’s a term I’ve employed a number of times through the years to describe the sense of alienation with which I have sometimes struggled.

I have to admit that this feeling is in air around me in recent times. However, this sense that many others may well be experiencing that same sense of estrangement from an existence that once felt naturally homelike makes me believe, like the words at the top from Camus, that there is a progressive step, a way forward from this, at least for us as a group.

Though it overwhelms our minds now, we have to understand that the reality that we observe in this moment does not have to last forever. And because there are so many of us feeling this new sense of strangeness, it will not. 

That’s just my feeling this morning. There may not be anything instructive in it. But it perhaps it can provide some comfort, as strangers in this strange land, knowing that beyond the now alien emptiness around us there are others who are looking up at those same seven moons, wondering as I do how they came to be and if they will always be there. 

Here’s song that sprang to mind just now. Actually, the lines from the chorus:

Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Strange days indeed
Most peculiar, mama

It’s Nobody Told Me from John Lennon, recorded near the end of his life and released several years after his murder. 

Strange days indeed…

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