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Posts Tagged ‘Red Chair’

Inner Perception, Redux

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 19, 2025| 2 Comments »

Inner Perception (2011)– Coming to Principle Gallery

I have sat here for quite some time this morning trying to write about some of the new work I have been producing for my October West End Gallery show or some that is headed with me to the Principle Gallery for my Gallery Talk there next Saturday.

I know that I am more than little distracted and anxious by what is happening in this country as we descend into outright authoritarianism. It sometimes seems trivial and foolhardy to talk about art and thought when the house is burning down around you.

But I also know that part of what I do is to create work and write about things that deal with coping with life and all its travails. There is a need and a place for what this is in times like this.

I am time strapped now after sitting and ruminating here for so long. So, I am running an older post that deals a bit with an older piece, Inner Perception, shown above, that I am bringing next week to the Gallery Talk at the Principle Gallery. Every so often I like to break out and make available a vintage piece or two. This has been a personal favorite for a long time now and I felt it was time to let it find a place where it could be viewed with fresher eyes than mine.

Here the post from 2014:

This is a painting from a few years back that has toured around a bit and found its way back to me. Called Inner Perception, it has been one of my favorites right from the moment it came off my painting table. Maybe the inclusion of the the paint brush (even though it is a house painter’s brush) with red paint in the bristles makes it feel more biographical, more directly connected to my own self. Or maybe it was the self-referential Red Tree painting on the wall behind the Red Chair.

I don’t know for sure. But whatever the case, it is a piece that immediately makes me reflective, as though it is a shortcut to some sort of inner sanctum of contemplation.

Looking at it this morning, a question I was asked at a Gallery Talk I gave at the Principle Gallery a week or so ago re-emerged.

I was asked what advice I might give my fifth-grade self if I had the opportunity.

I had answered that I would tell myself to believe in my own unique voice, to believe in the validity of what I had to say to the world.

I do believe that, but I think I might add a bit to that answer, saying that I would tell my younger self to be patient and not worry about how the world perceives you. That if you believed that your work was reflecting something genuine from within, others would come to see it eventually.

I would also add to never put your work above the work of anyone else and, conversely, never put your work beneath that of anyone else. I would tell myself to always ask “Why not me?” instead of “Why me?”

This realization came to me a couple of years ago at my exhibit at the Fenimore Art Museum. When it first went up it was in a gallery next to one that held the work of the great American Impressionists along with a painting from Monet. I was greatly intimidated, worrying that my work would not stand the muster of being in such close proximity to those painters who I had so revered over the years. Surely the greatness of their work would show me to be a pretender.

But over the course of the exhibit, that feeling faded and the intimidation I had initially felt turned to a type of defiant determination. I began to ask myself that question: Why not me?

If my work was genuine, if it was true expression of my inner self and inner perceptions, was it any less valid than the work of these other painters? Did they have some greater insight of which I was not aware, something that made their work deeper and more connected to some common human theme? If, as I believe, everyone has something unique to share with the world, why would my expression of self not be able to stand along their own?

The answer to my question was in my own belief in the work and by the exhibit’s end I was no longer doubting my right to be there. So, to my fifth-grade self and to anyone who faces self-doubt about the path they have chosen, I say that if you know you have given it your all, shown your own unique self, then you must ask that question: Why not me?

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Still Can’t Let Go

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on September 11, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Imitatio (2021)

The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.

― Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

I am sharing what might seem like an odd triad this morning– a passage from Sigmund Freud on compulsion, a Red Chair painting of the aftermath of what looks to be a wild party and a song, Can’t Let Go, from the odd and wonderful pairing of Alison Krauss and Robert Plant.

I think there’s a connection in there somewhere. Just can’t be sure if anyone else will see it.

A compulsion to repeat ourselves is an underlying theme in my work. I sometimes think I know there is something more than meets the eye in these familiar forms and colors and lines and icons –the omnipresent Red Tree, for example– and that if I keep delving into them, they will at some point reveal their secrets to me.

Some tidbits of wisdom, any iota of truth that will make it all make sense.

That must be close to a definition of compulsion. Probably much in the same way that we– both individually and collectively– seem to constantly repeat ourselves, making the same missteps and covering the same ground as though we have some sort of short-term memory dysfunction that prohibits us from seeing the patterns we have followed all along, that keeps us from learning from our mistakes.

I am hoping there is some constructive effect in my own compulsion. I would hate to think that the decades of work that have come with it are a matter of me simply making the same mistake over and over again.

Not that that would surprise me. I often make the same mistake again and again, somehow thinking that this time will yield different results.

Maybe I should stop contemplating my navel this morning and get to work. Who knows? Maybe today will be the day I figure it all out, the day that bit of long sought wisdom is finally revealed.

Or not. Doesn’t matter. My compulsion would most likely blind me to it and keep me at it even if I find it now.

In the meantime, enjoy this Alison Krauss and Robert Plant version of Can’t Let Go, from their second album together, Raise the Roof. It’s a song famously covered by Lucinda Williams on her great 1998 album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

Good stuff.

This post is from several years back. I was going to comment on the many events taking place right now– the Kirk killing, the Russian drones probing NATO airspace, the Epstein revelations, the random abductions by ICE agents, the continued occupation by US troops within our cities, etc. Just thinking about it as a whole felt very much like what this post, especially Freud’s words. We repress the lessons of our past and continually repeat patterns of behavior, thinking that we can come up with different results than those from prior times.  

Like the title of the song, we just can’t let go.

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In Fond Memory

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on February 9, 2025| Leave a Comment »

In Fond Memory— Part of Little Gems at the West End Gallery

When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories, and that in this sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view.

–Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (1889)

I have talked a number of times about why I chose the Red Chair as a recurring icon in my work. It is a universal object, one that doesn’t need an explanation of what it is. It even carries with it its own meanings as a symbol. It can be a symbol of power– the seat of authority or throne.  It can represent having input or of being heard– having a seat at the table. It can represent a seat in the halls of justice– a seat on the jury or a seat on the witness stand. Or a seat of cross-examination, a seat where one gives information as they know, either willingly or through harsher coercion, to some figure of authority.

I could labor on with more examples and you might even have some that pop in your mind that I might miss. But the one symbol that stands out for the Red Chair is one of memory. For me I tend to mean all memory, but it also represents, more specifically, the memory of those who have died. That empty chair symbolizes the place they hold in our memories and our hearts. This symbolism of the chair in that way crosses many cultures around the world, an empty chair being placed at a dinner table for those recently past.

I saw this come into play as I attended a memorial service yesterday for a friend who recently passed away from brain cancer, a glioblastoma. She was a lovely person and it was obvious from the sizable crowd that she had touched many lives with her own that had ended much too soon.

She had been a teacher at a local school and when the fall semester rolled around, it was obvious to her that she would not be teaching or likely to ever return to it. She and her family started a project to make Red Chair ornaments, some in wood and some in origami, to give to her students to let them know how much they meant to her and to give them something by which they might remember her and the lessons of creativity and optimism she had passed on to them. Her family created a brochure explaining the severity of her illness and the meaning of the Red Chair as she saw it.

It was a lovely and touching gesture. They had a number of the Red Chairs there for those attending the service to take with them as reminder of her life. I have mine here in the studio now and will certainly have her memory in mind when I look at them.

For this Sunday Morning Music, here’s an all-time favorite of mine from Harry Nilsson. This is Don’t Forget Me.

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All Fall Down

Posted in History, Neat Stuff, Painting, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , on June 11, 2021| 7 Comments »

GC Myers- All Fall Down sm

Ring-a-round the rosie,
A pocket full of posies,
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down.

I was thinking of the old nursery rhyme when I named the painting above All Fall Down. It’s a small piece included at my current show hanging at the Principle Gallery.

I was thinking of it in terms of how most of us stumble at some point in our lives. We sometimes find ourselves face down on the ground– physically or emotionally or sometimes both.

The trick, of course, comes in getting up.

Maybe I shouldn’t say trick. Maybe triumph would be a better word because every time we drag ourselves to our feet is a victory of sorts. Some of us don’t make it up every time so there’s cause for some small celebration.

I used the old nursery rhyme above at the top without even thinking about its origins which come from the Black Death or Bubonic Plague that ravaged Europe from the 14th to 17th centuries.

The first line– ring-a-round the rosie — refers to the red rings or rash that would first show on the victim’s skin. These would later transform into black boils or buboes.

The second line– a pocket full of posies — refers to the belief then that the disease was transmitted through a bad smell. People would carry flowers and put them to their faces in public to protect themselves from the bad odors. The plague doctors wore an odd birdlike mask which was shaped so as to allow the beak to be filled with fragrant flowers to protect them.

The third line– Ashes! Ashes! — can be seen either as the sound of a cough or sneeze from the disease or the ashes and soot in the air from the mass burning of the many bodies of the deceased.

The last line– We all fall down — is pretty obvious. So many died that one’s own mortality was unavoidable. Probably why such a thing ended up as a nursery rhyme. No sense in trying to hide something from the kids when you’re walking by piles of folks on the street.

But at least they didn’t have to deal with being magnetized! While on the way to the studio this morning, I walked by my car and found myself stuck to the side of it, an unwitting victim of  my vaccination! It took me twenty minutes to pry myself free and be on my way. And even then it was with a garden rake firmly attached to my butt.

Of course, I kid. When you’re faced with craziness and ignorance sometimes the only response is to laugh. Or make up simple songs and nursery rhymes. A couple hundred years from now folks might well be singing ditties about Magnetic Mary or something like that.

Let’s just hope that this time, as in the past, that we are able to get back up after the fall.

GC Myers- All Fall Down in situ PG 2021

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Full Moon Fever

Posted in At the Movies, Event, Music, Painting, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 26, 2021| Leave a Comment »

GC Myers- Full Moon Fever smHere is another new piece from my solo show at the Principle Gallery that opens next week, on June 4th. This is another of the interior scenes showing a room in the aftermath of some sort of to-do.

Myself, I don’t know exactly what took place and can only imagine.

I think that’s the point of these paintings, to give an endpoint where the viewer has to use their own imagination as to what has occurred. A final paragraph for a short story that gives you the results but not how it got to this point. It can be as vibrant and wild as your imagination allows.

This painting, a 10″ by 20″ canvas, is titled Full Moon Fever. My own story for what has happened is that this is a cabin where Larry Talbot tried to hide from the moon, to no avail. Larry Talbot was the name of Lon Chaney’s character in the original 1941 werewolf movie, The Wolf Man.

Now, that’s my take. Your own story may not line up with this at all and that’s means you’re using your imagination. That is usually a good thing so long as you realize it’s your imagination and not reality. Wild imaginings that folks perceive as reality are not a good thing as we have all seen in way too many instances in recent times.

I borrowed the title of this painting from a Tom Petty album that bore the same name, Full Moon Fever. Here’s Free Fallin’ from that album to honor the memory of Larry Talbot’s howling freefall that came under every full moon.

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Show’s Over, Folks

Posted in Event, Favorite Things, Music, Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , , on May 3, 2021| Leave a Comment »

GC Myers- Show's Over, Folks

Everything is going to be fine in the end.
If it’s not fine it’s not the end.

― Oscar Wilde

My solo show, Between Here and There, which opens June 4th at the Principle Gallery, has a group of smaller paintings featuring Red Chairs in interior scenes are mostly scenes of the aftermath of prior proceedings. I’ve shown a few here already and thought I would share another today. The one above is titled Show’s Over, Folks.

Kind of like a cop at a crime scene saying, “Shows, Over, folks, Nothing more to see here. Move on.”

I enjoy these pieces in many ways. I like composing and painting them. I enjoy looking at them because while they often make me smile, they often make me think as well. There’s usually a fair amount of atmosphere in them to take in and interpret. Sometimes my take on a piece like this will change from view to view. Perhaps it’s dependent on my own mood at the time that I am looking.

Right now, this one makes me smile. The show might be over for the night and that might be sad but it ain’t the end. Like Wilde’s words at the top– if it’s not fine it’s not the end.

Here’s song that kind of goes with this piece. It’s an old Kinks favorite, Till the End of the Day. With lyrics like: Yeah, I get up/And I see the sun up/And I feel good, yeah/’Cause my life has begun how can things not be fine?

Now, off to work.

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Kick Off a Shoe (Stay a Little Longer)

Posted in Event, Favorite Things, In the Studio, Music, Painting, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 31, 2021| 1 Comment »

GC Myers- Take Off Your Shoe ( Stay a Little Longer)

Been working lately on a group of interior scenes that are part of my June show at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA. I showed one this past week called After Party and it set the tone for this group with the sloppy disheveled look of a room after the party is over.

There are many things I like about these pieces. One is the fact that they can seem humorous while still seming quietly mysterious and even pensive or somber. I like that dichotomy. Maybe that’s because I have often seen humor in some of the more serious moments of my life.

It’s often a short ride from crying to laughing.

Another of the things I like about painting these pieces is their rough edges and slightly askew perspectives. I paint these pieces with slightly larger brushes than needed which gives them the softly sloppy look that appeals to me.

Like much of my work, these pieces are not planned out. I just start in one spot and see what builds out from that first mark on the surface. I make a mark then reassess and add another then reassess again, weighing the balance of the composition as well as the balance of the colors and contrasts.

It’s like juggling where you are always readjusting with each toss of the ball and with each new additional ball thrown into the mix. Maybe that is what I should call myself–paint juggler.

This piece is a small 9′ by 12″ canvas and is called Kick Off a Shoe ( Stay a Little Longer) which is a tip of the hat, in a way, to the old Bob Wills Western swing classic, Stay All Night ( Stay a Little Longer). Below is a version of that song from Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel, who have for many decades kept the spirit of Bob Wills’ music alive with their own brand of Western swing. Always sure to get your toes tapping.

Give a listen and get up and dance a little. Maybe kick off a shoe and stay a little longer. What’s stopping you?

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After Party

Posted in Music, Painting, tagged , , , , , , on March 22, 2021| 4 Comments »

GC Myers- After PartyTurn out the lights, the party’s over
They say that, ‘All good things must end’
Let’s call it a night, the party’s over
And tomorrow starts the same old thing again

–Willie Nelson, The Party’s Over

 

This is a new small painting that is going to be part of my annual solo show at the Principle Gallery in  Alexandria, VA. This year’s show is called Between Here and There and opens Friday, June 4th.

This might be an odd choice to be the first piece shown from this year’s show. It’s called After Party and is one of those pieces I often do mainly for myself. Actually, most of the work I do is for myself first.

But this and others like it might be even more so. They just really satisfy some need inside of me, something that wants to come out.

Plus, they usually make me smile or sigh. I know that this one did both.

I am not going to get into what I see in this for myself. I would rather you have your own interpretation on this one.

I will say that I immediately thought of the old Willie Nelson song, The Party’s Over, that he wrote way back in the 1950’s. A lot of us remember Dandy Don Meredith wailing it during the early years of Monday Night Football ( with Howard Cosell) when the game’s results seemed inevitable. I have been listening to a remake of this old classic as done by the Atlanta-based group Manchester Orchestra. They employ the basic structure and chorus of the song but add a bit to the song. Some may not like the idea of toying with another’s song but I think it works well here and I kind of like it for this painting.

Give a listen, if you like.

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Looking at a Rest Stop

Posted in Favorite Things, Painting, Quote, tagged , , , , , on March 19, 2021| 2 Comments »

GC Myers- Rest Stop sm

“Rest Stop” – Currently at the West End Gallery

A man must find time for himself. Time is what we spend our lives with. If we are not careful we find others spending it for us. . . . It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, ‘Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?’ . . . If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one’s time—the stuff of life

― Carl Sandburg

This painting, Rest Stop, which is at the West End Gallery in Corning, is a favorite of mine. It might be in the colors or textures, those elements that often reach out to me, but it’s more likely because it’s message speaks clearly to me.

We all need to periodically stop the busyness of our lives, if only for a few moments. A short spell to pause everything and appreciate where we are in the present, to ponder how we came to be there, and to imagine where the future will take us.

An interlude to see how the past, present and future exist within us.

That’s the message I get from this painting. Now, doing such a thing is another animal altogether. For many of us, just stopping everything seems an impossibility. Or many may think such a thing is simple foolishness with no real purpose. Or some might feel that the prospect of actually thinking about anything, especially anything to do with their own life, is too tall a task.

But for some of us, these moments of ponderance are a necessity. They simply make life bearable. They create reason and meaning in a world that often seems to lack both. Those are the moments that define purpose at times when we need to know there is indeed purpose.

I get all of this with a glance at this painting. And I think that’s why I place so much stock in this piece– it speaks volumes with a so little effort. That’s the opposite of my writing or any form of expression with words.

Even this short re-examination of this painting is a form of pausing, of reflecting on what is now, what was then and what will will be. And maybe that’s the purpose of this piece and of art, in general.

Got to think about that…

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The Kinship

Posted in Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , on December 4, 2020| Leave a Comment »

 

 

“I rejoice in the knowledge of my biological uniqueness and my biological antiquity and my biological kinship with all other life forms. This knowledge roots me, allows me to feel at home in the natural world, to feel that I have my own sense of biological meaning, whatever my role in the cultural, human world.”

― Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness

This painting shown here, The Kinship, is headed out to the West End Gallery this weekend along with several new smaller pieces. I generally try to get some small work out there this time of year and I thought I’d include this piece .

This painting is a couple of years old and has been a favorite of mine since it was painted. It has wonderful quiet and harmony along with a visual pop that appeals to my eye. But more than that, it never fails to set my mind to wondering about things as I attempt to interpret the elements of this image.

Is it the kinship associated with family and ancestry? The family tree is obvious here. Maybe the Red Chair sees its familial connection to the past in the form of the Red Tree?

Or is it a molecular kinship with all things in this world and universe? The sort that finds us wondering if the atoms and molecules which make us up were once part of a star that once lit the night sky, a great tree that loomed in the ancient forests or a mighty river running from high in the mountains down to the sea. Or perhaps a simple pile of manure? Or were they once part of all these things and more?

Or is it a spiritual kinship with all living things? The kinship of survival and struggle. We all — animals, insects and plants–respond to our will to live. We all seek food and water and the warmth of another.

And light.

The interesting thing abut this piece for me is that I seldom see it in the same way. It depends on the day and my own state of mind at the moment. This morning it struck me with what I would call its primary interpretation, that of family and ancestry. The relationship between the wooden chair and the living tree sticks out this morning, makes me think of my own relationship with the trees in the forest around my home and studio.

I wonder if the comfort I have always felt in the woods stemmed from the relationship my ancestors had with the forests of their times? Many of my ancestors were loggers and lumbermen, spending most of their lives toiling in the woods of the Adirondacks or northern Pennsylvania. Some had died in those woods, killed by falling trees or in log flumes. I often think of those folks when I am walking through the woods so the idea of that sort of kinship makes sense.

Well, whatever the case, this piece has once more made me think this morning. And that’s all I can ask of it.

Think about your own connections, your own kinships today. And have a good day.

 

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