Been working on some new pieces, some with simple imagery with an added layer of random transparent forms making up a large block of the painting. Here it creates an undertexture in the background which forms the sky on this untitled painting, a 12″ by 12″ canvas. It has the same sort of chaotic feeling that I often try to create with my preliminary layers of gesso in prepping the panel on which I paint. This canvas does have those layers of gesso giving it a mild texture but the transparent organic shapes painted over it have an overriding effect that carries and defines the sky here.
It’s still an experiment in progress but so far I like the effect and the feeling it creates here. Now I am trying to envision how it might incorporate itself in the wider body of my work, to see if it adds something tangible to the work. I have to just give it a little time and study it a bit before it becomes a regular part of my work.
All men whilst they are awake are in one common world: but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own.
~Plutarch
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The other night I fell asleep early then awoke and after a bit tried to go back to sleep. I flopped around trying to be comfortable but the wheels of my mind started turning and for a while I just lay there. But there came a time when I slipped briefly into dreams even though I still felt awake.
It’s a strange feeling but it felt good at the same time because in those moments of lucid dreaming I saw a color and a surface that was new to me, one that I saw being used in my work. It was multi-colored with blues and greens within it and a certain level of depth within the color that gave it a gorgeous glow. Plus it was arranged in transparent plates that overlapped so that the combined colors deepened even more.
It’s hard to describe now because even in the time soon after waking I struggled to fully recall it in my memory. It was there completely but in a vague sort of way. It was not a color that I had worked with or had even seen though I can’t be sure of that.
I wanted to see it and tried to recreate it within my own range of color and technique. I stumbled a bit at it for most of the day yesterday and finally realized that it would require something new, something different either in media or process to get the color and surface and depth that was still in there somewhere.
But the piece at the top did pop out during the day’s attempts and while it disappointed me because it didn’t fulfill my dream, it has an interesting feel that pleases me on another level. Maybe this will take me a step closer to what I am seeing in my dream or maybe it will evolve into something different on its own, something I can’t yet envision.
It has shown itself in my dream so maybe it can come forward now if I keep looking for it with my waking mind. Who knows? You can never tell how things will turn out when you’re trying to take something from that inner world and move it out into the waking world.
All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.
—Federico Fellini
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I love this quote from legendary Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini and the image of us all having a pearl inside ourselves, just waiting to be revealed to the outer world. It’s a pearl that is formed from the experiences and observations that make up our lives.
It fits well with the theme for the Gallery Talk that takes place Saturday at the West End Gallery in Corning. I plan on talking about how art has transformed my life and how that transformation has made its way into my work. In short, how my own simple pearl was formed and brought to light.
An example of that might be in the painting at the top, a very new work that will be shown for the first time on Saturday called Transmitters which is 10″ by 20″ on canvas. I see it as being about the need to communicate, about how we seek and reach out to like-minded people throughout our lives. For me this has been one of the biggest needs that painting has fulfilled for me. It has provided a platform for me to express thoughts and emotions that I would struggle to express in any other way. In doing so it has created a path forward to reaching others who share similar thoughts and emotions.
So here the pearl is the Red Tree and it reaches across space to others who feel they have their own Red Tree within. Hopefully, knowing that allows them to open their own shells and share it with the world.
Well, that might be part of what I’ll be talking about on Saturday. Who knows what might come up?
This quote from the contemporary Indian Yogi Jaggi Vasudev rang very true for me when I first came across it and it seems to fit this painting, Living in All Dimensions, which is another piece from the Home+Land show hanging at the West End Gallery.
It is a painting that appears to be outward in all aspects. It is no shrinking violet. In fact, the violet color of the sky and the other deep colors seem to want to lift off of the deeply textured surface and reach out of the picture to the viewer. There is outward distance in the moon appearing on the horizon and the Red Tree itself seems to be radiating outward.
But for me, this is completely inward in nature. It is about finding a center of calmness and timelessness. It’s about transcending the here and now and discovering that inward dimension that binds us to all other dimensions. A spiritual Oneness.
Well, that’s my take anyway, for what it’s worth. It’s the kind of piece that will no doubt come across differently to many different people, both in a positive and a negative way.
The painting shown above, Release the Past, is a 20″ by 24″ canvas that is part of my current show at the West End Gallery. I was recently thinking about it, trying to discern exactly what it was that I was seeing in this piece, when I pulled up an earlier blogpost that featured the Huxley quote above. It very much was in line with how I aligned this painting, with the figure in the mid-ground seemingly lost in thoughts of the past, with my own experience.
Here’s what I wrote:
I like this quote from Huxley. I have often felt that all of our personal lives fit into some sort of mythic template on which all literature is based and that we often fail to see the connections between the tales of our own lives and those stories which have come down through history in the form of myth and legend. We all live lives that are often filled with tragedy , comedy and drama. Heroic, even. But we seldom perceive them as such, instead thinking of our personal memories as being merely mundane.
And that’s probably as it should be. Life is spent, for the most part, moving forward in small, day-to-day steps with little time left to see the larger pattern of our lives. Who has the time to reflect backwards, to see how our lives fit into the templates of eternity? Very few of us, to be sure. But what if we could take that time to look back fully and see the patterns set in history and to see that our lives own patterns mesh into that pattern, that we are all indeed connected to and part of the same fabric?
Would it make a bit of difference? Would it make us appreciate the fragility and rareness of each individual’s place in this world. make us understand that our own history is the history of all and that our memory binds us to the fabric of history?
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.
Georgia O’Keeffe
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My show, Home+Land, opens tonight at the West End Gallery with an opening reception that runs from 5-7:30 PM. The West End was the first place to give me an opportunity to display my work, over twenty years ago, and has served as a home base for my painting in the years since. I’ve written here in the past how different my life might be without that first opportunity.
As a result, I attach special significance to my shows here. Maybe that played a part in my choice of Home+Land as the title for this year’s show.
I’m not sure.
But I do know that, no matter how widely traveled my work is beyond this area, it personally means a lot for me to have my paintings strike a chord with and be appreciated by my friends and neighbors locally– people who often know me in other ways than my being an artist.
And I hope that happens with this particular show. It is a show that I feel explores the idea of home and place in many colors, textures and forms. It is a show that I feel represents my work fully to this point in time and speaks for me in ways that words never could, much in the way Georgia O’Keeffe said her work did in the quote at the top.
It would be easy to sit here and write umpteen words about the two pieces from the show shown here, In the Land of Many Colors at the top and Lake Tranquil below, but they effortlessly say more than I could ever say with all my struggling words. As they should.
So, if you’re in the Corning area tonight, stop in at the West End Gallery for a bit. Have a glass of wine, stroll around the gallery and see the show. I’ll be there to answer any questions you might have and would love to hear your comments.
Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.
–Omar Khayyam
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This is another painting from the Home+Land show that opens this coming Friday, July 17, at the West End Gallery. Titled Melding to the Moment, it is a 24″ by 36″ canvas that, for me, pretty much holds the same message as the words above from Omar Khayyam. I see it as about being totally in the moment, in a sort of harmony with all things.
Using This moment is your life… as a rule, it is in finding those moments of contentment and happiness that can define your view of your life. To be able to stop and block out regrets of the past or worries for the future allows one to enjoy the pleasures of the present, that slice of life immediately before you– that small wonder that might be lost when we are immersed in thoughts of what we have done or what we will do.
The song of a bird. The smell of the grass. The way the light comes from behind a cloud or the feel of a warm breeze on your skin. All small things, small moments. But all moments that create the textures of life if we allow ourselves to simply pause and meld to the moment.
At least that’s how I see this piece. It was one that was a long time coming, growing in small fits and starts. I would work on it for a while and would see it going in a direction that didn’t quite suit me in that moment so I would put it aside. Several weeks, perhaps even a couple of months, passed and I would pull it back out and do a bit more and where I thought it was headed was not at all where it was going.
So I waited a bit longer. Finally, a few weeks back I went back and it transformed into the painting that you now see. It is nothing like I originally envisioned it in its earliest stages. It went beyond where I thought it would be and that is always a pleasant surprise.
I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
—Robert A. Heinlein
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Freedom is a word that gets thrown around a lot by politicians and pundits. It is the basis for untold numbers of credos, adages, maxims and bumper stickers. But for all its use, I don’t think many of us give even a single thought to what the word means for ourselves.
I’m not here to try to define the word. I think it has personal meaning for each of us that can’t be easily contained in one single definition. My idea of freedom may not match yours and your freedom may not seem like freedom at all to me. And maybe that’s the main thing in freedom– we are free to define our freedom as we wish.
The only constant is the moral responsibility that we take for our actions, as famed sci-fi author Robert Heinlein lays out so well in the quote above. We can never be free from the responsibility we must take for our actions nor from the repercussions from others in response to our actions. That is one freedom to which we will never be entitled.
The painting at the top is a new painting, a 24″ by 24″ canvas, that is part of my Home+land show that opens this Friday at the West End Gallery. Titled In the Air of Freedom, it represents for me the freedom that I have found in the last twenty years of painting. Painting has given me a means of free expression, a voice to send out into the world, a contentment and purpose that I struggled and failed to find to find in the years before I came to it. It has come to define my own freedom. I see the Red Tree representing that free expression and the fields behind it representing for me the labor and responsibility that accompany it.
As I said, freedom seems like it should be something we can easily put into words but it it turns out to be a much more complex creature. Take a minute and really think about it. How do you define your own freedom? What makes you feel free?
This is another new painting from the Home+Landshow that opens this coming Friday at the West End Gallery. It’s 16″ by 20″ on panel and is titled Seeker of Light. It’s a painting that drew my attention on a daily basis in the days before it left the studio, the blue tones in it satisfying a personal desire for that color that often comes over me.
There’s something in that blue that, for me, creates a sort of color intoxication. At the end of a day when I have been working up close, only inches away, I find myself smitten with the color, wanting to just keep painting endlessly with that color. I’ve talked with people in the past about this, trying to describe how I actually have to consciously pull myself away from the color or it would engulf my entire body of work. It’s pull for me is that strong.
And even though the whitish light of the moon seems to be the center of attraction here, I think it is pull from the blues that is the strength of this piece. At first glance, it’s a scene that should feel wintry and cool but the blue tones here have a deceptive warmth, supported by the underlying reds and violets, that belies the natural coolness of the color. It gives it a welcoming feel, inviting you in to follow the lines running in toward the light.
There’s so much more I could say about this painting but I won’t as it no doubt says it best for itself in the eyes of the viewer.
But that does lead us to this week’s Sunday morning music which has a reference to that color blue. This song is from Van Morrison when he was starting his career with the Irish band, Them, back in the musical British Invasion of the mid-60’s. Though they had a short life as a band, only about two years, Them produced some of the most enduring music from that era including the classic Gloria andHere Comes the Night along with this cover of It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue written by Bob Dylan. This song, with its haunting lead in, certainly doesn’t feel its age, almost 50 years old, to me.
Been working on some new pieces, some with simple imagery with an added layer of random transparent forms making up a large block of the painting. Here it creates an undertexture in the background which forms the sky on this untitled painting, a 12″ by 12″ canvas. It has the same sort of chaotic feeling that I often try to create with my preliminary layers of gesso in prepping the panel on which I paint. This canvas does have those layers of gesso giving it a mild texture but the transparent organic shapes painted over it have an overriding effect that carries and defines the sky here.
Redtree Times 