Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘New Painting’

Never Alone

Posted in Painting, Poetry, Recent Paintings, tagged , , on March 21, 2018| 1 Comment »

I Am Not Alone

The night, it is deserted
from the mountains to the sea.
But I, the one who rocks you,
I am not alone!

The sky, it is deserted
for the moon falls to the sea.
But I, the one who holds you,
I am not alone !

The world, it is deserted.
All flesh is sad you see.
But I, the one who hugs you,
I am not alone!

–Gabriela Mistral

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Another new piece that just came off the easel, this one a 24″ by 24″ canvas. I think I am going to call this painting Never Alone.

I’ve written about the focused, almost mesmerized, feeling that comes over me when I have been at work on this recent work and this painting was no different. It just pulled me in from the beginning and held me captive. Even when I would stop working on it, I was constantly looking back at it, trying to absorb it as though it were some sort of balm.

And maybe that is just what it is for myself. A soothing balm.

I came across the poem above a number of years ago from the great Chilean poetess and Nobel Prize winner, Gabriela Mistral, and shared it on the blog back in 2010. I wrote then that I felt this poem perfectly paired with a painting I had done at that time. I think the same holds true here.

As I wrote in 2010:  The sense of being alone yet not lonely is an important element in the way I look at my work and one that I sometimes struggle with for fear that it may alienate some who see being alone as only loneliness and not solitude. An important distinction and one that is often misunderstood. 

But we who relish our solitary time understand.

Well, I have some solitary time right now to further absorb my balm.

 

Read Full Post »

Nocturne/ Starmap

Posted in Music, Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged , , , , , , on March 18, 2018| 7 Comments »

+++++++++++++

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

—Alan Watts

++++++++++++++++

I wasn’t planning on showing this newer painting for a while. But I came across this lovely piece of music and this painting seemed to pair perfectly with it, at least to my eyes and ears.

The painting is an 18″ by 36′ canvas that I call Starmap and is part of my annual show at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria which opens June 1.

I have been working on a series of paintings like this, with blocks of color making up the sky and stars as points of light showing at the intersections of these blocks. I love working on these pieces. They require an emptying of the mind with a focus solely on what is before you. There’s this interesting sense of constant problem solving that bounces from making each form correctly and balancing that form within the whole composition. I continually go back and forth from tight focus to wide focus.

I probably can’t properly explain it but for me, it is an exhilarating process as each added form and layer of color, each poke of light from the stars, subtly transforms the piece into something more than I was expecting. It feels more complete and full than the first thoughts and brushstrokes that initiated the painting, leaving me with a giddy kind of satisfaction. I know that this has been the case thus far with each of the paintings in this series.

Now for this Sunday morning music, I thought this wonderful piece, Nocturne, from young Hungarian guitarist Zsófia Boros paired up beautifully with the feeling that this piece creates for myself. I’ve listened to it several times this morning and it just seems right.

Give a listen and have a great Sunday.

++++++++++

Read Full Post »

A Place of Sanctuary

Posted in Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , on March 12, 2018| 3 Comments »

“The whole value of solitude depends upon oneself; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it.” 

― John Lubbock, Peace and Happiness

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

I had never heard of John Lubbock before coming across the short quote above. He was one of those interesting 19th century British characters,  a titled member of a wealthy banking family who made great contributions to liberal causes and to the advancement of the sciences and math. For example, it was John Lubbock who coined the terms Paleolithic and Neolithic in describing the Old and New Stone Ages, as well as helping to make archaeology a recognized scientific discipline. He was obviously a man who used his position and access to higher knowledge to add to both his own intellect and that of our our collective body.

That being said, his words this morning gave me pause. I have generally viewed solitude as a sanctuary, even in the troubled times of my life. It was a place to calm myself, to gather my thoughts and clearly examine what was before me.

I never really gave much thought to the idea that for some this same solitude could seem like a hell or a prison. What differentiates one’s perception of such a basic thing as the solitude in being alone? How could my place of sanctuary be someone else’s chamber of horrors?

If you’re expecting me to answer, you’re going to be disappointed because I can’t really say.  I would say it might have to do with insecurity but I have as much, if not more, uncertainty and insecurity than most people. We all have unique psychological makeups and every situation, including that of solitude, is seen from a unique perspective.

This is also the basis for all art. What else could explain how one person can look at a painting and see an idyllic scene while another can feel uneasy or even offended by the same scene?

Now, the painting at the top, a new piece titled A Place of Sanctuary intended for my June show at the Principle Gallery, is a piece that very much reflects this sense of finding haven in solitude. For me, it is calming and centering, a place and time that appeals to my need for sanctuary.

Someone else might see it otherwise. They might see something remote, alien and unsettling in it.

I may not understand it but that’s okay, too. So long as they feel something…

 

Read Full Post »

One Last Look

Posted in Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , , , , on January 31, 2018| Leave a Comment »

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

― Marcel Proust

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

A few days back I featured a new small painting that is headed to the West End Gallery for next week’s opening of their annual Little Gems show. That piece, and never looked back…, was a stark image in tones of black and gray that was about the idea of being forced from your home, never to return. It’s a depiction of that moment of leaving and the sense of loss and abandonment that remains.

The new painting above, also headed to the Little Gems show, is another take on the idea of abandoning one’s home. This piece, One Last Look, speaks to the nostalgia that appears after time, as memories of bad times and the accompanying anxieties have faded and singular moments of happiness have grown to fill all the moments of that time.  Time has smoothed away the rough edges and we begin to think that that time, that place, was much more idyllic than it ever was in actuality.

To me, this painting speaks to that nostalgia and its idealized sense of home and youth. With nostalgia, the past seems more vivid and vibrant.

The grass was greener then, I guess.

I am reminded of a post I wrote back in 2009 where a large poll taken at that time throughout Russia named Joseph Stalin as the third greatest Russian of all time. I wrote: Despite the many millions, yes, millions of Russian citizens who were put to death by Stalin, despite the political purges and gulags and Soviet policies that caused a type of artificial famine that killed far more citizens than any natural famine more than once, the current populace said that this Man of Steel was their guy.

Some of those polled had lived through the Stalin era but time, and a little more food and comfort now, had eroded the memory of the hardship, the famines and the purges. In fact, Putin had began extolling the virtues of Stalin about that time and many of these people felt the country needed that type of autocratic leader again. In Putin, they– and, unfortunately, we as well– may have found him.

We all often fall prey to this sort of nostalgia, our memories holding onto a few events of happy triumph here and there through time and discarding the much more numerous days and weeks and months of chaos or drudgery that many of us live through.

Nostalgia is like a beautiful double-edged sword– both wonderful and terrible. Such things should be handled with care.

 

Read Full Post »

The Palace of My Memory

Posted in Biographical, Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , , , on November 24, 2017| Leave a Comment »

But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland.

— Anselm Kiefer

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

I came across this quote from artist Anselm Kiefer and it immediately struck a chord with me.

There is always a nagging question running through my mind about the purpose of my painting, at least for myself. The why behind the what. And this brief quote seemed to capture some of what I have been thinking about that.

While I am attached to the area in which I live, a place that my family has been in for about two hundred years now, I have come to feel that the landscape in my paintings is my real homeland. It is a construct built from memories and imaginings, a place that feels real but allows for exaggeration and embellishment.

When I visit real places from my childhood, I only see them briefly as they really are in the present. Then they revert to the image drawn in my memory–my real and only homeland. The body of my work is in a way a palace of that memory, a residence for what I am, was or will ever be.

I call the painting shown here, The Palace of My Memory, of course. It is 12″ by 6″ on panel and is part of my show, Sensing the Unseen, that opens in Erie’s Kada Gallery next Friday, December 1. I am excited by this show and am looking forward to seeing it all together on the walls of the gallery. Hope you can make it.

Read Full Post »

A Small Serenity

Posted in Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , , , , on November 21, 2017| 4 Comments »

GC Myers- A Small SerenityWe are not going to change the whole world, but we can change ourselves and feel free as birds. We can be serene even in the midst of calamities and, by our serenity, make others more tranquil. Serenity is contagious. If we smile at someone, he or she will smile back. And a smile costs nothing. We should plague everyone with joy. If we are to die in a minute, why not die happily, laughing? 

― Swami Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras

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

I call this new painting, A Small Serenity. It is a tidy 6″ by 12″ canvas that is part of my show, Sensing the Unseen, at the Kada Gallery which opens next Friday, December 1.

It’s a small and simple piece but it has a lovely feeling of tranquility in it, one that far exceeds its humble size. If anything, its dimensions enhance its sense of serene quietness.

And perhaps that is how a contagion of serenity begins, as a small seed within ourselves. A tiny feeling of peaceful tranquility that grows then bursts from us, radiating outward to infect those around us and hopefully through them to others.

And on and on and on.

The cynical part of me knows that such a plague of joy is improbable but looking at this little painting for a moment gives me the serenity to hope and ask,“Why not?” What harm could be done in being kind and calm or in wearing a smile? As the late Swami Satchidananda says above, a smile costs nothing.

So, let’s start this plague today. Shouldn’t we all feel free as birds?

 

Read Full Post »

The Lantern Is Lit

Posted in Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , on November 15, 2017| 1 Comment »

“No one lights a lamp in order to hide it behind the door: the purpose of light is to create more light, to open people’s eyes, to reveal the marvels around.”

-Paolo Coelho, The Witch of Portobello

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

This is a new painting that is headed to the Kada Gallery in a couple of weeks for my show there, opening December 1. I call it The Lantern Is Lit and it is an 18″ by 24″ canvas.

Light is a big part of being a visual artist. You deal with the nature of light, using light and dark to create images. Color itself is light. There is also the symbology of light with the contrast of light and dark representing many things– good and evil, beginnings and  endings, life and death, etc.

Light in this painting is very much a symbol, one of a revealing of wonders. It symbolizes an awakening from a darkness in which we have spent much of our time sleepwalking, just following others and bumping along without much consideration of our own will and desire. We simply take what is directly in front of us in the darkness.

The lantern here is a rising sun that reveals an expanding world beyond our own closed-off one that exists in shadow. Those field rows we have mindlessly worked for so long finally move out to a far horizon with distant hills and fields that have yet to be worked, have yet to be shaped. To a place that allows for expansive thinking, a place to remake ourselves, a place to see the wonders of the world in a bright and direct light.

That’s what I see in this painting– a revealing of light that pulls us from out of shadow.

Read Full Post »

Sensing the Unseen

Posted in Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , , on November 7, 2017| 1 Comment »

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince
*****************************

This is a new painting, 18″ by 24″ on panel, that is the title piece for my upcoming show, Sensing the Unseen, at the Kada Gallery that opens December 1. I think it’s a fitting painting to share it’s name with the show.

I have long held the belief that art is about revelation, about making the invisible visible.

Creating the intangibles such as hope and wonder. Or awe or a sense of belonging or of self-empowerment or so many other feelings and emotions. Revealing these unseen intangibles is what art can and should do.

It’s a lofty and often evasive goal. The harder one tries specifically to do just that, to create these intangibles, the further one moves from that goal.

In my experience, it only happens when you can release yourself into the work, letting your mind focus on each element in each moment. Finding the rhythm and voice, one individual moment at a time. One stroke, one line, leads to the next and if you allow yourself to follow the guidance being given by what is in front of you, slowly the gap between the visible and the invisible closes, that gap suddenly filled with an emotion, a feeling that gives voice to the work.

This particular painting fits into that idea for me, filling me with the wonder I get from a full moon’s light on a snow covered landscape. The way the light is cast on the reflective snow creates a sense of something new in the familiar. The scene you’ve witnessed day after day takes on a different feel, filled with a paradoxical sense of mystery and revelation that comes from new shadows and new light.

You can almost sense the quiet as all sound is hushed and absorbed by the snow. It’s a quiet that reminds you of the stillness that you imagine your ancestors knew well in earlier times when there were fewer people and machines. And from that quiet a feeling of peacefulness and security arises to accompany that initial sense of wonder.

And suddenly the simple arrangement of paint and lines and shapes becomes something more. Complete and a thing unto itself. The intangible made tangible.

And that in itself becomes a wonder to me…

 

 

Read Full Post »

The Ferryman’s Prayer

Posted in Painting, Poetry, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , on October 30, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Guide me through this pathless water,

Give me a moon to cut the endless dark,

Protect me from the coming storm

Carry me to that distant shore

Where I can stand in Your light on solid ground once more.

— The Ferryman’s Prayer

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

There have been a lot of dark clouds in my most recent work, such as the 8′ by 24″ painting above that I call The Ferryman’s Prayer. I surmise that this work is a result of my own observations and feelings about the state of affairs in this country. I’ve said before that my work usually reflects how view things around me on an emotional level and these times certainly have had an effect on my psyche.

At first glimpse, these pieces seem ominous and foreboding but I see them as hopeful. There is usually a source of light that breaks the darkness and creates a sense that there is a way forward, that the storm will eventually pass. Bad things and dark days visit us all but it is the hope that it will soon pass us by that gives us the strength to persevere.

And I think that perseverance is the thing that drives these dark-skied paintings and that might be the most human of all our qualities.

I don’t know if there is an actual prayer for ferrymen but the one at the top is how I imagine it might sound if there was one.

Read Full Post »

Mystery of the Unseen

Posted in Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , , on October 19, 2017| 5 Comments »

“How fathomless the mystery of the Unseen is! We cannot plumb its depths with our feeble senses – with eyes which cannot see the infinitely small or the infinitely great, nor anything too close or too distant, such as the beings who live on a star or the creatures which live in a drop of water… with ears that deceive us by converting vibrations of the air into tones that we can hear, for they are sprites which miraculously change movement into sound, a metamorphosis which gives birth to harmonies which turn the silent agitation of nature into song… with our sense of smell, which is poorer than any dog’s… with our sense of taste, which is barely capable of detecting the age of a wine!

Ah! If we had other senses which would work other miracles for us, how many more things would we not discover around us!”

― Guy de Maupassant, The Horla

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

Yesterday I finished the painting above, a 12″ square canvas that is scheduled to head to the Kada Gallery in Erie for my show, Sensing the Unseen, that opens there on December 1. It’s a piece that feels faithful to the theme of the Kada show– that there are energies and forces swirling around us that are imperceptible to our senses. I’ve often felt that one of the purposes of art is to give these forces shape and form.

To make the unseen visible.

And I think this painting is a good example of that thought. Its simple forms, lack of detail and sparse narrative elements might seem an unlikely setting for the unveiling of  hidden forces.

Or maybe these things make it the perfect setting for doing such a thing. Distraction is stripped away. The whiteness of the moon at the horizon becomes a central point of focus. The lightness of the landscape (is that snow?) and the path push the eye further inward, past the windowless houses that seem to act as boundary markers between the known and the unknown. There is a created sense of depth and space that belies the tight dimensions of the picture plane. It all makes you feel as though there is something ponderous, something that begs to be known in that space.

Even the color creates a mysterious paradox. It feels cold with the whiteness of the snow and the moon (or is it a sun?) yet the underlying magenta makes it feel warm. It seems perilous and cold yet still feels warm and inviting. It pushes away and pulls in.

Or it’s just a simple little snowy landscape.

I chose its title, Mystery of the Unseen, from the paragraph at the top taken from a short story, The Horla, from the French master of the short story, Guy de Maupassant. It’s a horror story describing how an unseen alien force– an extraterrestrial– inhabits a man, controlling his mind with the intent of conquering humanity. It was the last story he wrote before being committed to a sanitarium, where he died.

I guess that’s the dark side of the unseen.

Hardly the feeling I experience in this painting.

 

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »