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Posts Tagged ‘Ghosts’

Ghost Ship

Posted in Favorite Things, Painting, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , on March 1, 2019| 5 Comments »

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“The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.”

― Stephen King, Bag of Bones

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Finished this piece up a week or so back. The final product was never imagined beforehand. It was intended to be a canvas filled with faces but somewhere along the line something changed. Maybe, like the Stephen King words above, it was the uninvited act of a ghostly muse that caused this painting to form.

Who knows?

I do know that when I stepped back feeling that I was done, the whole of it surprised me very much. Mainly because it very much attracted me and raised so many questions, both about what the painting was and where it fit in my body of work.

I could even say it perplexed me. Part of me felt that it wasn’t even my painting, that it belonged to someone else’s mind. It was so unlike my other work that I wondered if this simply a one off event, something that pops up, maybe with the help of some vaporous muse, and never comes around again, or if it was a new direction that had pushed its way into my consciousness.

I can’t say but it sure keeps me looking its way.

It has some size at 24″ high by 30″ wide which gives it even more oomph in the room. I know that in a studio that is filled with new work, it dominates my eye every time I turn its way. There is a confectionary quality to it that passes on a delight of sorts to myself as I look at it. But it also has an ominous feel that makes me wonder where this ship is going and from where it came.

It feels as though there is a lot of mystery here, questions that will never be answered.

It’s been a struggle trying to pin down a title for this piece. I am leaning towards Ghost Ship. Thinking of a boat floating aimlessly on the sea that is empty but for the host of spirits of past travelers that hang on, their stories waiting to be told. Sounds right to me at the moment.

All in all, it pleases and perplexes. I am glad to have it with me for the next few months so that I can better consider its meaning for myself. It might be one of those pieces that is meant only for me.

Who knows?

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Heaven and Earth

Posted in Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , on March 16, 2012| 3 Comments »

And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

—Hamlet, Act I, Scene V

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I call this new painting Heaven and Earth.  It’s about 7″ wide by 35″ tall on paper and is very much in the same vein as the very  large painting that I recently completed and featured here, The Internal Landscape.  This piece features a nocturnal scene however with a deep blue sky punctured by the light of stars.

The title might refer, in a way, to the lines above from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where Horatio and Marcellus barge in on Hamlet’s conversation with the ghost of his father.  Horatio is a rationalist, philosophically, and to him  the idea of ghosts seems absurd so that when Hamlet asks him to swear to not  speak of what he has seenl he is mystified.  Hamlet then utters the lines — There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

I suppose this painting is saying much the same thing, that we live both in the world that we know and in a world of which we are unaware.  The stars above are, and have been, always with us but we know little of them, really.  The river  runs but we often know little of its journey and the roads travel to places we shall never see.  And around us at all times are radiowaves carrying voices and images from every corner of the globe, unseen and unheard.  And perhaps among all this  are the ghosts like Hamlet’s father, moving unnoticed by our eyes focused on that which we know and see.  Or, at least, are trying to know.

I guess the takeaway here is that there is often more than meets the eye, even when the scene before you might seem enough.

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