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 Gemsexhibit. 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 Dolphinsfrom 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.
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 Gemsexhibit 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.
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.
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
–William Faulkner, Paris Review interview (1958)
Faulkner perfectly captures something I have been writing about here for years, the urge to leave something behind as evidence of your onetime existence in this world. It’s the driving force behind creation of all sorts, from human procreation to multiple forms of artistic expression, from the caves of Lascaux to the Sistine Chapel to the simplistic image of Kilroy left all over the world by American soldiers in WW II. Graffiti, which might be the purest form of saying I was here, has been around as long as mankind.
For the artist, it is an act of faith that your work will somehow survive into the future. You can never know with any degree of certainty. Oh, it may well make its way into museums or collections that span generations. It might well exist.
But will it be truly seen? Will it stay relevant, will its voice clearly speak in the future? Will it still maintain its movement, its life?
This idea of relevance– or rather irrelevance– is not a concern that only applies to the future for the artist. As an artist, after decades of creating work, I often question the relevance of my work at any given moment. Is it alive in this present, let alone the future?
I don’t know that you can fully know the answer to that question for anyone but yourself. Your relevance, now or a hundred years in the future, is not something you have a lot of say in.
The best you can do is to focus only on creating something that feels alive now. If it captures the motion, the feeling, the voice, and the humanity of our existence, it might well escape oblivion and might make its presence known in the future.
If it does, great. If not, you at least created something for this moment in time. And that’s great in its own right.
I chose the painting at the top, The Resistance— currently part of the West End Gallery’s Little Gems show– not only because of the obvious motion of it but because so much of what we do as humans is comprised of acts of resistance, of fighting to be heard or not relegated to some form of oblivion, one where we have no control over who and what we are.
I guess that could be applied to creating unique work, as well. Here’s a performance that I shared here several years ago. It is Ukrainian guitarist Nadia Kossinskaja performing an Asor Piazzolla composition, Oblivion. Felt like it went well this painting this morning.
It is the artist’s business to create sunshine when the sun fails.
–Romain Rolland, Jean-Christophe, (1904)
I am generally a fan of winter weather. I like colder weather and snow and the quiet it brings. Even so, I have to admit that I am getting tired of it this year. Tired of slipping and sliding on ice, probably because I am still working off a slight concussion from a fall this past weekend that had me stumbling around like a middleweight boxer who had just been hit flush with a haymaker and is forced to take a standing eight count to regain his bearings. Tired of the oppressiveness of the sky’s constant grayness which matches my mood or that of the country a little too much. Tired of wearing layers and layers of clothing and having to put on crampons (ice cleats) just to walk to the studio.
Even the beauty of the snow is compromised at the moment. Here in the woods, it has no fluffiness or moisture now. The thought of going out and perhaps laying in the snow to make snow angels is gone as the thin layer of snow is hard surfaced with sharp icy edges.
Just want some sunshine. Want some brightness. Something to burn away the grayness of the sky and my spirit. Want to feel its warmth on my skin again. That has been such a rare occurrence this winter.
There is some consolation in that I do, at the very least, have my work. I have the luxury of being able to go into it and make my own sunshine, much like passage above which the Nobel Prize-winning French author Romain Rolland wrote in his best-known work, Jean-Christophe.
It does help to have some capacity to create one’s own sunshine. But it only goes so far. It’s not a self-sustaining perpetual motion kind of thing. It needs some input, some help, some influx of outside energy every so often.
It needs to see and feel the real sun occasionally, even if to simply be reminded that it is still there. With it, the bitterness of cold, the trudge of snow, and the skeletal trees of winter are tolerable.
Okay, enough. The gray light of morning is coming through the studio windows. Barely. I have to go make some sunshine.
Here’s an old song from Donovan about a guy I could use right about now, Sunshine Superman.
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.
Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.
–Epictetus
Epictetus probably personally knew a thing or two about building a fortress out of contentment. He was a Greek Stoic philosopherborn into slavery in the middle of the first century AD. In Rome, he served as a slave to a powerful and wealthy man who was secretary to Emperor Nero. His owner recognized that Epictetus, who also had a disability caused in his childhood which required him to use a crutch, possessed a passion for philosophy and allowed him to study under a Stoic master.
Eventually the owner released Epictetus from servitude, and he began teaching philosophy in Rome. Around 93 AD, Emperor Domitian banished all philosophers from Rome and Epictetus left for Greece where he established his school of philosophy which became well known and revered.
Having survived slavery, disability, and banishment, Epictetus was someone who knew hardship and loss. Even so, it seems as though he was able to find his own fortress of contentment that was beyond the reach– the influence, opinion, and injury– of the outside world.
I think that idea applies to the new painting from the Little Gems show (opening today at the West End Gallery) shown at the top, Heart’s Fortress. I know that it is just an idealized condition, that no one can fully isolate from the world. But we all need a place of our own, even if it exists only for short periods of time in our inner landscape, where we can be free from the world. A safe island of quiet where we can examine all that we are and find some degree of satisfaction in that.
I try.
Occasionally, I succeed.
And sometimes the world comes in the form of tidal waves that crash on the cliffs of my fortress, shaking away much of my contentment.
Still, my fortress remains. Perhaps a little disheveled and in need of some maintenance. But it stands.
And in that alone, there is some satisfaction, some contentment.
Heart’s Fortress is a small painting, 3″ by 4″ on paper that is now at the West End Gallery in Corning as part of the annual Little Gems show. There is an opening reception for the show today from 5-7 PM. Hope you can make it.
Here’s a lovely song that, while it may not be about the specific island of my heart’s fortress, is about the love of an island. This is Island in the Sun from the late great Harry Belafonte.
“All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can only be refuted by science: Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot ensure our own prosperity except by ensuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.”
— Bertrand Russell, The Science to Save Us from Science, NY Times (19 March 1950)
The final sentence above from Bertrand Russell from 75 years ago seems almost quaint in the selfish and cynical times in which we find ourselves. The idea of making others happy as a measure of our success or our satisfaction with our lives is not particularly popular these days.
It raises many questions for me.
How does anyone define success? Or happiness?
Can anyone be successful and happy while denying the same to others?
That would be the old climb-to-the-top-and pull-up-the-ladder-behind-you trick that’s so popular these days. We have sadly come to believe that our own success and happiness is somehow diminished or devalued by the success and happiness of others. Many see it as some sort of reality show competition and not only pull the ladder up behind them but roll boulders down at those attempting to climb a bit higher.
This all came from thinking about what I was seeing in this new small painting, Height of Achievement, that is part of the Little Gems show now hanging at the West End Gallery. I see it as being about defining your success and happiness on your own terms, about claiming your own small pinnacle and laying a path that gives others the opportunity to climb as well. I see the Red Tree here as not a ruler over a domain but as an explorer or guide showing the way.
I also saw a slightly different interpretation, one where the Red Tree has climbed to the top, achieving the success it sought, and found it a lonely place. And happiness was in short supply, as well, since it was forever preoccupied about keeping its place up there. It never was able to enjoy the view or share it with others.
I guess both translations say much the same– strive for yourself but for others, as well.
That works for me this morning.
Here’s a song that is well-worn, both in airplay and on multiple film soundtracks, for good reason. Just a great song. This is the 1967 hit, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, written by Ashford & Simpson and performed by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, who both died tragically young. Diana Ross did a great version of the song as well in 1970 but I thought I’d go with this one.
And even if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses—would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention thither. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past; your personality will grow more firm, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.
–Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Little time this morning as I have some maintenance issues around here that demand immediate attention. Before I get to those issues, I thought I would share a triad of image, word, and song to serve as a reminder that the annual Little Gems exhibit of small works is now hanging at the West End Gallery and that the opening reception takes place this Friday, February 7, from 5-7 PM.
Above is a new painting, Twilight Time, 6″ by 12″ on canvas, that is included in the show. The words at the top are from the always relevant Letters to a Young Poet from Rainer Maria Rilke. This passage is from a letter where he was instructing a struggling young poet to stop trying to satisfy the critics or publishers and focus on creating an inner world where his work can grow and prosper. It then takes on its own life based on the poet’s unique self, instead of an imagined criteria set by other people. It then takes on a reality that others will recognize.
For the music, I am selecting the obvious song, Twilight Time. I probably should share the old beautiful Platters hit that most will recognize but I am going with a version from Willie Nelson. I enjoy his takes on the American songbook of standards. It always gives the work a somewhat different dimension, an easiness that is comforting to my ears.
Okay, got to run. There are things to do that cannot wait.
What if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity?
–Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times
This is another new small painting (only 2″ by 4″!) that is included in the Little Gems show now hanging at the West End Gallery. It’s called On the Lake Road. The first thing that came to mind for me was that it reminded me of the feel of the some of the roads that run around the edges of the lakes here in the Finger Lakes region of NY, especially in the summer when the roads are filled with summer residents and vacationers all seeking a pastoral break from their regular lives. There’s an almost palpable feeling of ease as you drive on those roads with the lake right there with you amid the quaint summer cottages.
I saw that feeling in this piece and named it accordingly.
While looking for a literary bit to pair with it, I came across this quote from Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and it stopped me in my tracks. It made me wonder if our natural instinct as a species was one of barbarity and if art was one of the few things that kept from fully following that instinct.
Were all forms of art just a means to stifle our barbaric impulse? Is it meant to remind us that we have another option beyond our inborn tendency toward cruelty, selfishness, and tribalism? Does it exist to let us know that, though it is naturally within us, we have ability to reject that instinct and instead choose compassionate kindness?
I don’t know. I am sure there all sorts of examples and differing definitions of art that contradict this but sitting in the dark in the computer screens glow at 5 AM, it sounds plausible. After all, so much great art in all forms has come from times when we were battling our own barbarity, often offering us another vision of what might be. And I believe we might find that the barbarians among us, those who are without empathy and compassion, also have no room in their life for art.
I might expand the old saying musichas charms to sooth the savage breast (which, by the way, goes back to the first line from the 1697 play The Mourning Bride by William Congreve) to include all forms of art.
Can even a small painting like On the Lake Roadserve as a levee against our potential floods of barbarity?
Maybe. I would like to think so.
Here’s a song I’ve loved for many years now from the legendary bluegrass duo of Flatt & Scruggs. This is their cover of a Bob Dylan song, Down in the Flood.
Redtree Times 